A spokesperson for the City Controller’s office confirmed to the Local on Monday that an audit of the Germantown Special Services District that began in 2019 has been “referred to federal law enforcement.”

The audit for the organization, which was created to clean the streets and featured a board composed of people appointed by Philadelphia City Councilmember Cindy Bass, who represents the neighborhood, was initially conducted “in response to a request from concerned residents,” said Genevieve Greene, a spokesperson for the City Controller’s office. 

The “concerned” residents included a group of commercial property owners who were paying taxes to the district and were upset that streets were not being cleaned. They have since organized to end the district and it has not been operational since 2020. The Germantown United Community Development Corporation is now picking up the trash. 

“Anybody with two eyes could see there wasn’t street cleaning service happening,” said Ken Weinstein, who owns commercial property in Germantown.

Fellow district commercial property owner Yvonne Haskins echoed Weinstein’s sentiment.

“Trash started to build up really badly in 2018 on Chelten and Germantown Avenues,” she said.

As trash piled up, Haskins, Weinstein and other property owners wondered exactly how tax dollars were being used. The logical method of finding the answer to this question would be to check the district’s state-mandated annual audits. But as City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart noted in a 2019 interview with The Inquirer, the GSSD hadn’t been filing the required documents.

“We got some calls of concern into our office about how the money has been spent from the improvement district, so we reached out to the state to get their financials and were told that they haven’t filed in many years,” she said at the time. “The tips involved questioning the spending and where the money went.”

Weinstein said the lack of these financial reports were “the first clue that something was wrong.”

“If there’s one smoking gun, it’s that one,” he continued. “We can argue whether they were paying their bills, but the bottom line is they didn’t do any audits.”

According to the same Inquirer article, the district’s budget in 2018 was $230,000.

Stakeholders in the district were also frustrated by the fact that most of the GSSD’s board member seats “were not held by property owners who paid the tab,” Haskins said. Typically, special service districts such as this one have boards that include some of the business owners who are paying for it, she said. 

The GSSD was marked by high turnover. At one point toward the end of its existence, the GSSD had gone through five executive directors in five years. 

As is the case with all special service districts, the district councilmember, in this case Bass, was responsible for appointing the district’s board.

According to Haskins and Weinstein, who had begun attending board meetings to uncover any possible problems, they got Bass to agree to appoint new board members and formed a committee that came up with a list of 10 candidates.  But at the next meeting, Haskins said, Bass told attendees that they wouldn’t be appointed.

“After she did that,” Haskins said, “I remember standing up and saying how could you do this when all these people were expecting you [to appoint] at least most of the candidates.”

Weinstein said that was “the last straw.”

“We put a lot of time in, and found some really good potential members,” he said. “We came up with 15 people who were interested and whittled the list down.”

Bass would not comment specifically on the referral of the controller’s audit to law enforcement when the Local requested. But Bass has defended the GSSD in the past.

“The Germantown Special Services District was really effective for quite some time. Then it hit a speed bump and these folks decided they just wanted to kill it,” Bass told WHYY in 2019. “Those who fought so hard against something that was working up until a minute ago should be held accountable for whatever repercussions happen for ending the special services district.”

And kill it they did. In order for a special services district  not to be reauthorized - state law requires authorization every five years - at least one third of the district’s property owners had to vote against it. In the summer of 2019, Haskins and Weinstein successfully led a small group of residents to lobby property owners against reauthorizing the GSSD.

Opposition to the special services district was unusual. In other parts of the city, similar districts like the Penn Treaty Special Services District in Fishtown and nearby neighborhoods, and the Sports Complex Special Services District in South Philly are popular. 

“They were already not cleaning the streets and canceled the contract with their street cleaner,” Weinstein said. “They were still collecting money from commercial property owners. They decided to not be democratic and none of the people who were on the board at that point were commercial property owners paying into the GSSD. At that point we had enough and we needed to oppose the renewal of GSSD.”

Requests for comment from Ready, Willing & Able, the street cleaning company Weinstein said GSSD had the contract with, went unanswered.