38 Quarters
By Mitch Berg
That’s how long it’s been since the Highland Park District Council filed its payroll taxes with the IRS or the State of Minnesota. 496 weeks, give or take a few. Nine and a half years.
Ten years.
That’s how long it’s been since the Highland District Council has been audited.
$33,000 to $37,000.
That’s how much the Council may owe to the IRS and the state of Minnesota in unpaid payroll tax withholding and penalties.
I attended the Highland Park Community Council meeting last night. It was an information-only meeting, intended primarily to announce the extent (as far as is known) of the Highland Community Council’s financial problems.
For those of you who don’t live in Saint Paul – the District (or Neighborhood) councils are non-profit organizations that coordinate and administer community improvement plans, among other things. They act as a de facto level of government; depending on the people and the neighborhoods involved, as a combination of project administrator, ward-heeler support group, chamber of commerce, complaint clearinghouse, influence mart and cash conduit. They are the outlet for idealists, career non-profiteers, busybodies, and concerned citizens.
The Highland Park Council has been the subject of much caterwauling among Saint Paul’s political establishment since neighborhood Republicans organized themselves enough to get two local GOP activists, Bill Poulos and Georgia Dietz, elected President and Vice President last month.
After Poulos called the meeting to order, the first – and really only – order of business was the treasurer’s report. The bad news took a solid 45 minutes; there really wasn’t any good news. The council – as in, the treasurer and volunteers from the board – are still trying to sort out the mess left by a full-time paid “organizer” who apparently wasn’t much for “organizing” paperwork. The treasurer commented that all of the Council’s financial records were piled into boxes and scattered over hell and half an acre.
The board – twenty members (President, veep, secretary and treasurer, two at-large members, twelve “grid” representatives and one each from the city’s Housing Resource Administration and the West End Business Association) – asked a whole lot of questions about the status and process of the “investigation”, the path forward, and – most interestingly…:
- Why the process was being “politicized” (even though no party affiliations had been mentioned)
- Who “leaked” the story to the Pioneer Press?
I thought it was interesting; a semi-public organization comes up way in the hole, and one of the first instincts is to blame the newcomers’ politics, and to wonder why secrecy was breached? “What happens in the Highland District Council stays in the Highland District Council?”
I asked. The rep who asked about the “leak” insisted she was concerned about privacy and fairness. The other – well, I don’t think he ever really did explain why the political party of the new members was an issue to my satisfaction.
Not only do we need to follow this – but in fact we Saint Paul Republicans need to follow the examples of the Republicans in the Highland Council, and start getting involved in this level of government.
By the way – the whole story broke (and was so credited at the meeting) on a blog about which I was theretofore unaware (because it’s like a month old), SaintPaulicy, to my knowledge the first non-media Saint Paul political blog. It’s well-written, has a high signal-to-noise ratio, and could well be the capitol city’s version of “MN Democrats Exposed”.
Excellent job!
May 24th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Mitch, thanks for coming. This story needs to stay on the front burner. I did see Kevin Driscoll from the Highland Villager/Avenues, local newspapers for St. Paul. I did not see an article in the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune. Just what I thought, the story would go un-reported or under reported by the local major newspapers.
I wonder if SaintPaulicy was there?
May 24th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I agree with your take on local involvement.
Minneapolis is split into smaller neighborhood divisions which don’t have the clout of the St. Paul District Councils. Still, they have budgets and make some important local decisions. I recently ran for my neighborhood council and was not only elected to the board, but also to the office of secretary.
Not only did a Republican get elected, but garnered the 2nd highest vote total out of 9 candidates, 5 of which were incumbants. It’s very do-able. I strongly encourage others to run for neighborhood councils, school boards, etc. and at the very least attend the meetings. It’s a lot of fun, I’m helping my neighborhood, meeting great people, and I’m learning a great deal about local politics and the alphabet soup of city organization acronyms.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
FF – outside what has already run in the Press, what more to the “story” was added last night? This is a big problem facing the Higland DC, but I fail to see how the meeting last night was newsworthy in anyway – it only seems to have fleshed out in detail the extent of the malfeasance.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
The rule I use when reading the paper or watching the news is “how would this be reported if it were a Republican”. Would this of made the news if a local government body had trouble like this and there were Republicans at the helm?
Ask yourself every day …………
“would this be reported on differently if it were a Democrat? (or Republican).
Try it out. Read the Star Trib tomorrow and ask that question on EVERY story.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Looks like St Paul isn’t the only place with this non-profit problem
http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1205681.html
May 25th, 2007 at 6:00 am
So they’re tax resisters. Thought you wingnuts liked that kind of thing.
May 25th, 2007 at 7:22 am
AC, anti-tax conservatives obey the law as they work to change the law.
Not paying taxes in this case is just incompetence.
May 25th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Chuck
Liberal/socialist non-profits have a profound sense of entitlement that often allows them to overlook inconvenient laws and regulations in their quest for social justice (or whatever is blowing up their skirts at the moment). When they do get caught they go weeping to their big money donors (Dayton, Cowells, etc) for a bailout. They’re really good at stiffing the hapless small business individual that extends them any credit – I learned the hard way: Always get paid up front.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
kel, so true. I’m on the board of directors for a non-profit historical group. All fundraising is down via members and product sales, no handouts. We go out of our way to make sure we are in full compliance of all state and federal laws, including state sales tax. We are very solid financially (treasurer is a Republican CPA, not that it matters).
It’s interesting looking at groups like the Sierra Club and others that get huge handouts from the wealthy, or those that get gov’t money. I’ll take my medium sized self-funded group any day.
May 25th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Chuch gave kel a rhetorical hummer: “kel, so true. I’m on the board of directors for a non-profit historical group.”
Pro-Confederacy or Holocaust denial, Chuck?
May 25th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
No AC, it’s the Tracking of Fool Greasepainters Society. They probably have a framed portrait of you in full regalia holding a dog balloon in one hand and a bottle of seltzer water in the other.
May 25th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
That ain’t no dog balloon.
Or selzer water…
October 25th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
[…] Part of it’s for today; the councils’ current plans are bone-chillingly stupid. And the means by which they secure these plans would make Rod Blagojevich blanche. Some of the councils are mere potemkin shell organizations for small cliques of community organizers and activists who do all the actual decision making. Others might as well be DFL front organizations, as the small group of Republican activists who won the Highland Park community council found in 2006 (along with all the incompetence they uncovered). […]