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On Jan. 7, City Controller Alan Butkovitz released an audit of the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation Department’s advisory council and its bank accounts. And the results were not good. After the approval of a drawn-out request process, the controller’s office was allowed to audit the financial records of three out of the 126 Rec Centers across Philadelphia: Fox Chase and Vogt Rec. Centers in Northeast Philadelphia, and Vare Rec. Center, 2600 Morris St., in Grays Ferry.
The Controller’s office had initially requested the right to audit 14 rec centers, which was met with initial resistance, and that was enough of a hint that there was suspicious behavior afoot. Pushing forward, Butkovitz’s office audited three and, with these results, a slew of audits are sure to follow in the coming years.
Brian Dries handles communications at the Controller’s office. He broke down the rather complex structure of governance for Philadelphia’s rec centers.
“The Philadelphia Recreation Advisory Council (PRAC) oversees all of the individual advisory councils at each rec center. Each rec center has its own advisory council, and the PRAC oversees all 126 of them,” he explained.
The Parks & Recreation Department created an Advisory Council Manual and “that includes all the guidelines of how the advisory council at each rec center is supposed to be spending the money.”
And the money is where things are most messed up. To be clear, rec centers operate on a mix of public funds used to build and staff them, but private, often in the form of donations are the bulk of any rec center’s operating budget. However, these facilities are public-owned lands and buildings. It was this mirky financial terrain that initially empowered rec center leaders to resist the controller’s audit.
“No one was cooperating. No one wanted to hand over records,” Dries said. “And when you do that with auditors, that immediately sends up red flags. Their main fight with all of this is that the funds that each one of the advisory councils raises, none of it’s city money. That’s why they feel like the controller had no authority to go in and look at this money.”
But at Fox Chase, for example, the advisory council could not provide any accounting records and the former treasurer never maintained a ledger for the council’s finances and, when she left, took the records with her. Over a six-month period, the center’s balance went from $187,400 to $117,500 with canceled checks sent to the treasurer’s home and checks written payable to her. The alarming audit results have been passed along to the District Attorney’s office.
“We have already referred our finding regarding the former treasurer at Fox Chase to the District Attorney’s office for further investigation,” Butkovitz said in a released statement.
Things weren’t much better at Vare and Vogt, which had 49 and 52 cancelled checks, respectively, without two signatures (a requirement set forth by the Advisory Council Manual).
“The Controller, of course, checks the bookkeeping for all the city departments to see that everyone’s doing their jobs, and the rec centers are interesting because the PRACs are not city departments,” Butkovitz elaborated. “They had never been audited. I don’t think you want to be in the position of trying to hide your books.”
The concern is that this kind of fraudulent and dishonest behavior is going unchecked all over South Philadelphia and that money raised with great effort, mostly for the benefit of young children, is being pilfered by trusted, thieving rec center staffers. But Deputy Mayor for Environmental and Community Resources Michael DiBerardinis, speaking on behalf of Parks & Recreation, made it clear that those are the bad seeds and not representative of the good men and women who volunteer their time and energies to keep rec centers lively, safe havens for communities.
“We didn’t like [the results]. We’re very unhappy and upset. So we’re asking our leaders to do more,” DiBerardinis said.
Referring to Fox Chase, he added “That, to me, is an aberration. I’m not apologizing for anybody who may have stolen money, but these are good citizens that work really hard to support their neighborhood and their kids and the system, and that’s the overwhelming majority of volunteers in our organization.”
Parks & Recreation will now be making a bigger effort to train advisory councils on fiscal management, something DiBerardinis is almost fearful of asking from volunteers who already give so much of their time.
“To have them be fiscal managers, we’re asking a lot of them, and we’re going to have to ask them to do it. But we feel like we have some responsibility to pay attention to this and make sure normal standards are followed,” he said.
Dries said that, in section three of the manual, it states that “no advisory council member or staff member shall participate in any decision where his or her family has an immediate family interest.” It also requires that all checks are signed twice, something that was missing at all three audited rec centers.
“There should be proper training for people who are going to keep the books, to know the correct way of doing it,’ Dries added.
Butkovitz himself noted that there are good people doing good work within the PRAC system.
“Generally, I’m very appreciative of the work that the PRACs do. The City is not able to do what it should do to maintain these rec centers,” he said. “The City has been counting on volunteers for a long time to fix the roofs and line the fields and get uniforms for the kids.”
Perhaps the Fox Chase audit results are good, in the long run, even if the former treasurer may have gotten off with almost $6,000. Because going forward, the honest and checked bookkeeping will eradicate any fear of wrongdoing in our communties’ rec centers.
“We’re trying to differentiate that there are hundreds of thousands of good people that volunteer their time every week in support of this department and the young people in their neighborhood, and they do that with honesty and good will and a deep commitment,” DiBerardinis said. “I would stand by 98 or 99 percent of the volunteers in this system.”
If any of the one percent are in South Philly, rest assured, they won’t be in hiding long. Butktovitz said “we will probably, for the next few years, be going back in and looking at a sample of Recreation Advisory Councils.”
Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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