Where’s the Money, Joe?

Nonprofit organizations up and down CD 15 are asking Buscaino to ‘Make it make sense’

Scores of nonprofit organizations applied for the “Buscaino Grants,” writing proposals, presenting proposed budgets, asking their supporters for their votes by submitting their information in the councilman’s information portal. Those who ostensibly received the most votes showed up for Joe’s dog and pony show for pictures as they say, “Thanks Joe.” Only to be told afterwards when the cameras stopped rolling, “it’s going to take a few weeks to receive their money.” Worse still, many were told they would only be reimbursed for half the money spent ― meaning they’d have to do additional fundraising from donors who’d just been given the false impression their needs had already been met. To top it all off, these are grants whose very existence Buscaino had opposed.

According to organizations in Watts (they requested I maintain their anonymity for fear of retribution by Buscaino’s office), the winners of which were announced a couple of weeks earlier than everyone else still have not received their monies. None in the Harbor City and Harbor Gateway have received theirs and zero in San Pedro.

This alone would not be so problematic if it weren’t for the reports I’ve been hearing that Buscaino’s office has been trying to change the rules after the fact. Winners were being told that in order to receive what they had won, they must have “a contract” with the city or form a contract with an entity that does, but at a cost. One nonprofit executive called it an exquisite form of extortion and racketeering.

Can you just imagine how many nonprofits who don’t have contracts with the city who have been doing the real hard work for years without a city contract?

These organizations did what was asked of them, got their supporters to vote, win, take pictures with Joey with the photo op checks, only to have the city council’s field deputies tell them afterwards they won’t be getting this money unless they fulfill some extra requirements.

In Watts, one nonprofit leader, one of the scores that won a grant, said there’s a lot of frustration in his community and that it feels like Buscaino had just pulled a “poverty pimping-move.”

Accustomed to applying for grants on the city, state and federal level, the nonprofit executive said those grants are generally clear and up front. Those grants are either ones you apply for that supply what is needed or they are grants for which you have to find matching funds, or grants for which you have to show your expenditures in order to get reimbursed. He explained that’s not how Buscaino’s grant process went.

Apparently, many of the nonprofits were told that while it would take time to receive their money, they will be reimbursed up to 50 percent of the grant they won, if they keep track of their expenditures.

One nonprofit head asked, “How are our nonprofits that don’t have anything supposed to benefit from that?”

The nonprofit head posed the hypothetical, “if we’re a non-profit and we need to buy a vehicle to deliver food because that’s part of what we do. It’s what we wrote the grant for…. We don’t have $15,000 to drop on a truck. How are you going to reimburse us for money that doesn’t exist in the first place? This is why we ask for the grant, so that we can do the work,” he said.

Continuing the thought further, he said it would be great if these organizations already had $70,000 for which they could be reimbursed. But why then would they need the $70,000 in the first place if they already had it? It doesn’t make sense, right?

Even if Joe made good on this promise, how unfair is it to tell nonprofit organizations to purchase something for $15,000, and have the city pay them back with an IOU.

What made this so galling, besides the fact that Joe Facebook-lived these events and got on television talking about how he gave all of these organizations tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, is that people connected to Joe has, according to my sources, begun reaching out to these organizations’ donors and constituent bases using the information he harvested from the competition. To say these folks feel used is the understatement of all understatements.

These organizations depend on individuals donating funds to them. So, when Joe gets on television and says he gave these organizations $30,000, $50,000 or $100,000, donors who were previously donating to these organizations would shift their monies to organizations they perceive as more in need.

Now there’s talk of going to the City Attorney over this. It’s not lost on these organizations that Joe opposed the cuts to the police budget that made these grants possible in the first place. These were supposed to address social justice and alternative crime prevention. Not be used to finance acts of patronage to elicit love, adoration and votes in third world countries.

To recap, Mayor Eric Garcetti initially proposed a budget that included a budget increase of more than $100 million over the previous year while most other city departments faced budget cuts. After pushback by a coalition of groups organized by Black Lives Matter L.A., the mayor altered the budget by shifting $150 million to other budget priorities such as Reimagined Community Safety, Universal Aid and Crisis Management and Built Environment. Joe is on record opposing this recording of priorities.

But here we are ―Joe cheesing in front of the cameras in black and brown communities, taking credit for money they haven’t received. I gave Buscaino’s office an opportunity to respond to this critique. I did not receive a response before we went to press.