Keep a closer eye on faith-based spending

“Do you want to be born again?”

It was Tim Thurston’s last day as a participant in the Firm… “Do you want to be born again?”

It was Tim Thurston’s last day as a participant in the Firm Foundation’s vocational training program when the officer from the Elmira, N.Y., police department posed the question to each of the Bradford County inmates.

Thurston said no. The rest said yes. They prayed aloud that their partner would find a place for God in his heart. Pressured to join in their circle, Thurston quit.

Working under the supervision of executive director Wayne Blow, the inmates performed demolition work for the Greater Valley Assembly of God and restored a condemned building that once housed a meth lab. In exchange for their labor, they were told they would receive vocational training and mentoring services.

This is the story told by Clark Moeller and his assistant Laura Blain in a 32-page document entitled “Performance of the Firm Foundation of Bradford County.”

Moeller, 68, is the former president of the Executive Committee of the Pennsylvania Alliance for Democracy, as well as a member of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He has written and lectured extensively on the subject of church-state separation.

The report charges that the program not only violated separation of church and state, but that it had not been properly monitored by state and local agencies. After Thurston was released, the ACLU and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined with Moeller and filed suit against the county.

In the summary of the document, Moeller writes, “The overwhelming evidence presented in this report demonstrates that the Firm Foundation of Bradford County, a faith-based organization, has spent $200,000 of the public’s monies with at least a cavalier, careless neglect and has not accomplished what it was being paid to do. People received money from the Firm Foundation, but the documentation does not say who they are, what they did or why they were being paid.”

Moeller continues, “Firm Foundation did not produce records showing how much time these inmates spent in training, whether the few inmates in the program learned anything or to what degree their skills improved.”

The report cites $4,772 spent on “construction supplies” as a “clear violation of allowable use of DCSI funds” and notes that $1,600 was drawn in late December of 2002 for “personnel” with no explanation. An examination of Firm’s 990 reveals that $2,000 was allocated to Blow for “reimbursement.”

Blow dodged questions regarding his fiduciary role with Firm Foundation, focusing instead on the positive results of its community outreach efforts.

“I think it’s very important that people know that this program has changed many lives. It’s changing our community,” he said. “We rebuilt a house that was scheduled for demolition. We took something very ugly and made it very beautiful, put it back on the tax rolls. We haven’t wasted taxpayers money, we’re building a tax base.”

But David Lynch, a former associate of Blow’s, offers a contrasting view.

“It was absolutely a mess,” he said. “Very disorganized, no budget. The concept was good, but what Wayne was proposing was completely pie in the sky and not based in reality at all.”

Lynch is right to be alarmed. In December 2002, President George W. Bush signed an executive order that removed restrictions preventing government funding of religious institutions and faith-based groups, making more than $8 billion available to them. These organizations are permitted to discriminate religiously in their hiring practices and do not have to provide an audit to the government if the county receives federal grants totaling less than $500,000.

All organizations, whether faith-based or not, should be subject to the same evaluative criteria. The Firm Foundation of Bradford County may well represent a microcosm for what is occurring in local jurisdictions across the country, in which faith-based organizations are allocated funds without submitting so much as a budget.

Firm’s intentions may be honest and admirable, but honest intentions do not legitimize heedless spending. It should be the responsibility of local administrators to ensure that business is conducted sensibly, objectives are routinely met and that secular alternatives are made available to inmates with few other options, so that people like Tim Thurston will never have to risk alienation for giving a simple answer to a loaded question.

Visit www.bc-alliance.org to read the rest of Moeller and Blain’s report. Send feedback to mdarling82@yahoo.com.