Online News From The Tribeca Trib

CB1 and 'Friends' in Feud Over Funds

By Barry Owens and Carl Glassman

August is usually a quiet month for Community Board 1. Their business suspended until September, board members get a break from the liquor license applications, quality of life complaints, construction concerns, and numerous other matters that fill the board's calendar 11 months out of the year.

But for some members, work continued last month as the board, led by its new chairwoman, Julie Menin, struggled to settle a dispute with its benefactor, Friends of Lower Manhattan, over half a million dollars.

The 11-member Friends group, four of whom are currently on CB1, is headed by Madelyn Wils, Menin's predecessor as board chairwoman. Though Wils is no longer on the community board, she remains president of Friends of Lower Manhattan, a nonprofit organization formed in 2001 to raise funds to support community board projects and other initiatives Downtown.

A committee formed by Menin, called the Internal Workings of the Community Board Task Force, was at work last month on an agreement that would spell out how the two organizations will work together in the future-especially in deciding who has say over the $500,000.

The Friends organization, formerly called Friends of Community Board 1, changed its name to Friends of Lower Manhattan a few days after the task force's first meeting in July, a move that some task force members called divisive.

"We did what we thought was best to clarify that Friends was its own independent organization, with a mission that was broader than the community board," Wils said in a telephone interview. She insisted that the Friends board of directors was only ratifying a unanimous vote taken a year earlier, and was not reacting to the task force's actions.

Menin said she formed the task force to examine the operation of Friends at the behest of community board members. The chairwoman, who herself sits on the Friends board, said many CB1 members complained to her because the Friends group made its decisions without consulting the community board. She said she had hoped to rectify the situation by naming more community board members to the Friends board.

"No one is saying that Friends is not a useful organization or that it doesn't fund worthwhile programs," Menin told the Trib. "The key is just ensuring that an organization that is the fund-raising arm of the community board reflects community board input."

Some of the Friends board have a different view. Wils said that, despite its original name, Friends has all along been a separate group from Community Board 1. "I think that it has been made clear that the mandate of Friends of Lower Manhattan, its charter and its corporate papers, do not reflect that it is the fund-raising arm of Community Board 1, but has a much broader mandate in Lower Manhattan," she said. "And whether people don't want to accept that is more a personal impression than legal reality."

Friends has funded a staff person and equipment in the CB1 office, as well as a community board newsletter and land-use studies that have been key to negotiations with developers. It also played an important role in the creation of Millennium High School. When the group was formed in August 2001, it was made up mostly of active members of the community board. "A mutual benefit society" is how Paul Goldstein, district manager of CB1's and vice president of Friends, described the relationship between the two groups.

While the organization's goals were not in dispute, some community board members said they did not like how it operated. They complained that meetings were not open to the public (as community board meetings are), that spending decisions were made without board approval, and that, although the Friends operation had carried the community board's name and was run by CB1 staff, only a few members of the community board, those that also sit on the Friends board, were involved in making decisions for the group.

Now Menin and others on the board say that the community board should have a say over the $500,000 because the money was raised by Friends in the name of CB1.

"If I were raising money for Friends of City Hall Park and using their name, it seems to me that I would be responsible to turn that money over to City Hall Park," said CB1 member Una Perkins. "To just turn around and give it another name after the fact, I don't think that is right."

That view, however, is not held by all on the board.

Michael Connolly, a CB1 member who has donated money to Friends, said he believed the organization was "perfectly capable" of making its own spending decisions.

"It was my assumption when I contributed to Friends that they would spend the money they raised in a manner that would benefit the community at large, not necessarily just the community board," he said.

Under the task force's proposed agreement, according to a source who is familiar with it, Friends would be able to offer its own plans for spending the money so long as it first sought community board approval. Once the $500,000 is spent, however, the groups could part ways. Both groups would make "good-faith efforts" to cooperate in future fund-raising activities, the source said, but CB1 would work through its own, newly formed, nonprofit organization.

Wils, who was traveling last month, said she had not seen the proposal and did not want to comment until the Friends board could discuss it.

Along with differences over money, there is also the matter of who will hold the deed to a new 28,000-square-foot community center that was secured through a deal with the city and the developer of a residential tower at Chambers and West Streets.

CB1 voted in July to hand the deed over to Manhattan Youth, which will operate the community center, and to name community board members to the Manhattan Youth board of directors.

Wils and several other members of the Friends board, saying that the community center should be held in the community interest, wants Friends to have the deed. While Friends has no interest in running the center, Wils said, "the community was always meant to be in control of the community center, in perpetuity. In this regard, Manhattan Youth would be the operator as long as it served the community and its interests."

Bob Townley, director of Manhattan Youth and a CB1 member, said such concern is unfounded.

"There is no need for oversight," Townley said. "Our history is 20 years long, with 19 out of 20 in the black, and to put an intermediary organization in is costly, and not necessary."

However the differences are resolved, ultimately there are only two options for the groups-either grow closer together, or separate.

"I call them the marriage option and the divorce option," Bill Love, who chairs the task force that is examining the relationship between Friends and CB1, said in July following initial meetings between the two groups.

"From what I've seen so far," he said at that time, "if we do manage to come up with a satisfactory resolution to this, I do expect the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize."