Sep 09, 2005  |  By: PETER ROSENSTEIN  | COMMENTS     

IT HAS NOW been six years since the Cherry Fund decided it was important to set aside money for a new GLBT Community Center in Washington, D.C. We now need to ask what has been achieved, so we are not asked to throw good money after bad.

When the Cherry Fund decided to hold back some funds from the annual spring circuit party, attendees were told the money would go to a then non-existent entity. Understandably, many questioned the validity of that.

It is now six years later, and we can legitimately still question what the purpose of “the Center” will really be? What we know is that in these past six years, the Center has spent nearly all the money and has to show for it mostly in-fighting among a small board of directors and no real benefit to the community.

The one successful project that the Center has undertaken is a series of films in Stead Park. But in reality, the same people who put this together could easily have added their efforts to a group like One-In-Ten, which produces the annual gay film festival, and accomplished the same thing.

WHAT WE KNOW they have done with this money raised for a charity is spend nearly $90,000 on a study to determine if anyone really wants the Center. This study, completed by a California group called Aplomb, asked questions like whether the Center should be accessible to the handicapped or include transgender needs in its programming.

We also know that $10,000 was paid to the partner of a Center board member for a strategy document that amounted to little more than a history of the Center — clearly a short document.

We also know that the Center has rented office space and hired a managing director, who was recently fired, and that a board member has been asked to leave. Patrick Menasco, the driving force behind the Center and its first president — who I believe had the best of intentions — has resigned from the board.

We also know that the Center tried to take over a city park, causing broad conflict in the community before District government eventually refused to go along with it.

We are now led to believe that there is only about $25,000 left of the original $275,000, and the current Center board is unwilling to release a detailed report on how the money was spent. It is incumbent on the Center board now to release a detailed accounting of how money was spent.

Until now, Board President Michael Sessa has hidden behind IRS filing rules to delay release of the information. Whatever the legal requirements about the minimum the public must be told of the financial standing of a non-profit organization, continued refusal only encourages the conclusion that there have been improprieties or at least some questionable expenditures.

THE BLADE RECENTLY reported on discussions between Whitman-Walker Clinic and the Center regarding collaboration on Capital Pride. For anyone who believes in Capital Pride as an important and positive event in our community, this was cause to shudder.

Here we have two organizations, both in apparent financial difficulty that was in part self-inflicted, both asking for community help while refusing to release financial information, both still under the leadership of those responsible for their current state, discussing collaboration on an event that is difficult to put together and usually only marginally successful from a financial standpoint.

As someone who has been involved in a small way with the building of a GLBT community center in Rehoboth Beach, Del., and seeing the slow and steady progress of that project, I am not opposed to community centers.

But after six years of planning and discussion over what will be the fourth attempt in Washington to form a GLBT Community Center, we really need to sit down with all the facts and be realistic about what is happening and why.