Save Richmond

But we did it. Via a FOIA request to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, we have something no one’s been able to wrangle out of the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation yet.

A bank statement. (Download a 675 KB PDF of VAPAF’s one here, and a 500K PDF of the Carpenter Center’s one here.)

As is par for the course with the very weird and frequently inept nature of VAPAF, the first page is missing. But there’s enough here to raise some serious questions about the group that our august city council allowed to rip our downtown a new one.

Here are the highlights of the statement:

• VAPAF lists two accounts, a First Market Bank one that holds $759,333 and a BB&T Scott & Stringfellow account in the name of the Carpenter Center that holds $717,575, for a total of $1,476,908. We happen to think that’s laughably small for a group that:
  • Is proposing a $98 million project (that will probably cost a lot more)
  • Claims to have raised $68.8 million
  • Has spent $21 million without a single brick being laid.
• In VAPAF’s account, $100,000 and $250,ooo were deposited on June 27 and 29, 2005, respectively. Without those deposits, VAPAF would have had $409,000. The Carpenter Center account was similarly bolstered by a transfer of 6300 shares of BB&T Corp (worth $252,000)—on June 28.
• This statement was submitted so VAPAF could start to claim some of the $8.5 million in matching funds awarded it by the Commonwealth in the last General Assembly session. Curiously, VAPAF asks the Commonwealth to match only $311,127 of the Scott & Stringfellow account. While we can only speculate on the foundation’s reasoning, there are at least two possible reasons for this:
  • NYSE rules stipulate that the funds aren’t good for three days after a trade (they also have a couple CDs in the account that they couldn’t match since they aren’t cash)
  • This stock came from the Leonora Carpenter Foundation and may be restricted in its uses.
• VAPAF has a twice-monthly payroll of $38,688.50. Of that, CEO Brad Armstrong receives $11,691.50 EVERY TWO WEEKS (excuse me while I weep on my desk). His salary, which comes to $280,000/year before benefits, accounts for 30% of VAPAF’s payroll. This is especially interesting since Brad has claimed in the past that “not a penny” of his salary was paid by public money. Seeing as the VAPAF has only one account to pay for both construction and staff, and it’s taken in tens of millions of dollars in public money so far, we can only speculate that VAPAF Chairman of the Board Jim Ukrop instructed the dollar bills in the foundation’s account to separate themselves from one another by provenance, in an orderly fashion. The funds are commingled, the balance is this low, and still we’re supposed to believe Brad’s outrageous compensation isn’t coming from we, the Richmond taxpayers? Puh-leeze.

So what’s this stinkin’ sea of numbers mean? A couple things (and by the way, thanks for reading this far).

• Our repeated warnings that council was mistaken to allow a group with no cash to rip a hole in the most visible part of the city went unheeded. Now VAPAF depends on fancy accounting and “value engineering” in its bank accounts to stay afloat.
• The Carpenter Center’s endowment, which VAPAF’s most recent 990 valued at $3 million, has been blown through with nothing done to renovate the theater (though obviously, some architectural planning has been done). If VAPAF goes under, we not only have the aforementioned hole in the ground, we have a flat-busted Carpenter Center, the only arts institution to survive downtown in the first place.
• Finally, and this is most important: Have a look at VAPAF’s application for the matching funds (by downloading a 1.86MB copy of it here). An interesting point is raised by DHR’s Linda Arrington in an email exchange (which, of course, you can download here). VAPAF, by the admission of its Development Associate Abbi Geer, did not comply with the Virginia Procurement Act when choosing contractors such as its architect, acoustician, etc.

  This means that legally, VAPAF cannot use any money it gets from the state to pay any entity other than Gilbane, its general contractor, which it hired legally.

  And we think that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to VAPAF’s arrogance, wastefulness and ineptitude. Yeah, it would be great to have an arts center downtown. But as we asked before, why on earth are regular Richmond folks paying VAPAF to make such a mess of this dream?

Finally, for the truly obsessed, please enjoy this PDF of a DHR employee’s notes from a conversation with a VAPAF official asking “how [DHR] could tell” whether VAPAF was being up and up about its accounts. Just curious, we’re so sure! Just like we reckon it’s a coincidence that VAPAF’s banker at First Market is one Gary Armstrong, brother to…you guessed it!

In the article referred to below, consultant Steven Wolff, well, let’s let Will Jones tell it:

In an interview last week, Wolff said he considers the change from the theater to the music hall a modest one. He also said the project’s financial assumptions remain conservative and are supported by recent projections of operating revenues and expenses.

I’m traveling this week and can’t post some examples of Wolff’s fiscal conservatism, but we have a bunch of copies of his bills to the VAPAF that we acquired through a FOIA request to the city, and we’ll get them up here as soon as I’m home. Let’s just say the man is a connoisseur.

Please drop us a line if you’re still having trouble.

Some thoughts since we’ve been silent.

It’s been sickening to watch the gleeful gutting of Joel Katz by VAPAF and the T-D, especially since not a single one of his criticisms has been answered. The Virginia Performing Arts Foundation is still secretive, still inept at fund-raising, still cronyistic and bizarre. The foundation’s answer? Ad hominem attacks. If this is the kind of tone we can expect of a body that hopes to take a hand in educating Richmond public students, well, I guess the missus and I are gonna take a second look at Catholic school for the boy.

Further, I’ve been amused by the advances in mathematics over at the T-D. A $250,000 gift to VAPAF was doubled by headline writers, and the revelation the other day that VAPAF has less than $1.1 million in cash was somehow spun as less than a calimity; the same article helpfully noted that the foundation’s “raised” $70.2 million, so I guess we don’t need to worry.

Except that $250,000 gift from Bank of America—less than one year’s salary for VAPAF CEO Brad Armstrong—is doubled only if VAPAF raises matching funds. And we still don’t know whether that $1.1 million in cash is net bills. Our FOIA request to the city turned up a lot of unpaid bills (and let me tell you, VAPAF’s consultants don’t travel cheaply).

Then again, this is the same paper that trumpeted a poll that definitively showed public support for the performing arts center—with a poll that surveyed all of 97 residents of the City of Richmond.

Finally, I’m baffled that Scott Bass’ devastating story about the VAPAF hasn’t been more widely acknowledged outside the small world of Richmond blogs. Still, I’m somewhat encouraged that blogs such as this one were consistently underestimated by the poo-bahs at VAPAF, and just look what we’ve reduced them to: Hiring a pricey spokesman to try to keep Brad from stinking up the microphones further, engaging in character assassination and hammering “talking points” that we raised two years ago.

Okay, here we are, Save Richmond 2.0. Very few, if any, of the links will be working for a while. We’ll be slowly getting the site back to its original robustness, barbecues and swimming parties notwithstanding.