High school sports are rarely about gobs of money.
Athletic budgets are stretched thin, with schedules shrinking to keep programs alive and coaches surrendering months of their spare time for a yearly supplement that rarely tops $3,000.
Overseeing it all is the Florida High School Athletic Association, whose board convenes in Tampa today to select its next commissioner. It's a job advertised with a $115,000 salary, and if that makes you swallow your sunflower seeds, wait until you hear about the benefits.
In the past decade, one commissioner cashed out with $100,000 in unused vacation and sick days, and his successor enjoys eight weeks of paid vacation each year, in addition to 12 sick days and 14 paid holidays. Then there's the $117,000 check former commissioner Ron Davis got as a retirement supplement in 1997 and the all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii he got on the FHSAA's tab three years after he left office.
And if you stop by the Wyndham Westshore hotel today, you'll likely see the gray 2003 Ford F150 4x4 truck driven by commissioner Bob Hughes, purchased with $32,000 in FHSAA money in September. The main difference between that truck and the 2004 Dodge Intrepid that was leased last spring as his company car? When Hughes leaves office next year, he gets to take the truck with him.
It is the latest in a series of lucrative perks given to the head of a nonprofit organization by a board of directors that seems to have a hard time saying no to its top employee. As it gathers to select the FHSAA's next leader, a few people are concerned the board is just along for the ride.
"The problem is we've given Hughes too much," said former board president Bob Burnside of Miami. "The board has let him take too much power. The board runs the association; he runs the day-to-day operations. He's just doing things and coming to the board for approval."
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If board members have trouble saying no, they have no problem saying, "I don't remember."
The Times contacted 22 current or recent board members for this article, with most having little or no recollection of matters they approved as recently as last fall. They are volunteers, unpaid for attending four quarterly board meetings, but when asked about details of what they approved, their responses often blurred together into one foggy non-answer.
"I'll try to go back and see if I have paperwork from that meeting," said Bob Cotter, athletic director at Clearwater Central Catholic, asked about the line item about the truck in the current budget. "Quite honestly, I'm not even aware of that."
Said another first-year board member, Charles Bethel of Hialeah: "I'm not familiar with that. I don't remember it coming up. I'm very not aware of that."
Half of the 16 members are finishing their first year on the board, including Cotter and Bethel. Hughes, 61, said inexperience should excuse them from being accountable.
"Understand, you're dealing with eight rookies, so in all fairness, it's really unfair to criticize them when they've been here a year or less than a year," he said.
Go farther back with more tenured board members, however, and you have no better luck finding answers as to why or even how the board took certain actions.
Hughes' three-year contract extension, signed in 2000 to keep him in office until January 2005, was approved by the board before it had actually been written. A committee chaired by then-president Howard Hinesley, superintendent of Pinellas County schools, recommended a three-year extension, and minutes show the board agreed "the contract be drawn up and executed by Dr. Hinesley and Mr. Hughes without any further need of approval by the Board of Directors."
But Hinesley said last week he was never involved in any negotiations of benefits included in that extension and he wasn't even sure he had signed the finalized contract.
"I probably signed it. I may have," said Hinesley, whose signature indeed is on the contract. "What I think I remember was that it was explained to the board, but I didn't sit down and negotiate anything."
Several board members told the Times they had understood a finalized contract would be brought back for approval, but that never happened. Hinesley said the contract was drawn up by Leonard Ireland, a Gainesville attorney who has been the FHSAA's legal counsel since the mid 1970s. Hughes oversees the position of legal counsel, which is an issue for some former board members.
"I asked Hughes during a meeting, "Is Leonard Ireland the board's attorney or your attorney?' " said former board member Randy Merrill, a lawyer from Naples. "I think there's a conflict of interest there."
Hughes said he never heard such complaints from members while they were on the board.
"It's easy to throw rocks at somebody after you're gone and say, "I forgot this' or "I didn't do this,' " Hughes said.
As part of the contract extension, Hughes agreed to freeze his salary at $109,000, and in exchange, he says, the FHSAA gave him everything he asked for, including doubling his paid vacation time to 40 days a year. Add in sick days and holidays and Hughes was paid for 66 days in 2003 in which he did not work, more than a quarter of a normal work year.
That is almost the opposite of his predecessor, Davis, who appears to have taken almost no vacations nor suffered any illnesses in his eight years as commissioner. When he left office in 1999, he was paid for 247.5 days (an average of more than 30 a year) of accumulated vacation and sick days, good for a $100,959 check.
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Davis' vacation cashout wasn't the largest or most controversial check he got. In 1997, he was accused by his own comptroller of a dozen financial improprieties, including a $117,000 check he received as a retirement supplement.
Davis' contract provided him a generous retirement, with the FHSAA paying an additional 25 percent of his salary into a fund. On top of that, he received a lump-sum check for one year's salary and benefits, worth $117,000 before taxes.
The five members of the executive committee who approved the payment, when recently contacted by the Times, had little recollection of the action, except that they wanted to extend to Davis the same benefits given to the previous commissioner, Fred Rozelle. For Rozelle, the board bought an annuity worth one year's salary and let him have the interest, with the principal to revert to the FHSAA upon his death.
"I recall the circumstances, and an annuity does seem to ring a bell," said then-president Buddy Bales. "I certainly don't recall that it was a lump-sum kind of thing."
The FHSAA hired two lawyers to conduct an independent investigation, and ordered an audit from Davis, Monk and Co., a Gainesville accounting firm. Officials said those studies exonerated Davis of all wrongdoing, but when asked recently they could not produce copies of either inquiry.
"(Comptroller Roberta Elkins) and I went through every record here," said Hughes, who referred the matter to Ireland, who had not responded to the request as of Wednesday. "We don't have them and have never seen them."
Davis' perks weren't over. In 1998, he asked to have his retirement date moved up 31/2 months, but also asked that his salary be paid through the full term, that he be allowed to use his company car for the duration and that he continue to accrue sick and vacation days after he stopped working.
All his wishes were granted, in effect giving him a severance package worth $31,000 some eight months after he had announced his resignation.
One more condition of his early retirement: The FHSAA would pay Davis' expenses to attend the next three annual summer meetings of the National Federation of State High School Associations, the last of which was scheduled for Hawaii in 2001.
In 1995, while Davis was commissioner, the state auditor general questioned the practice of bringing former commissioners to conventions as part of the FHSAA contingent. The FHSAA stopped paying for former commissioners to attend the conventions, that is, until Davis became a former commissioner himself. His trip to Maui cost the FHSAA more than $2,300.
Davis said last week of the three trips: "You can call it a perk, but there's a lot of states that do the same thing."
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Hughes is well-liked, if not revered, as a commissioner, having repaired the FHSAA's image with the Legislature and various state organizations for superintendents, school boards, athletic directors and coaches. He has led the FHSAA out of dark times, calling it "building bridges and mending fences," and he has a loyal following.
"All I know is that Bob Hughes walked on water," former board member Jim Kirton said. "I would have voted to extend anything to him. He made such a difference that whatever he wanted, I would have voted for it."
The board is extending that gratitude with money that comes from across the state. The FHSAA operates on an annual budget of $3.14-million, about 60 percent of which comes from revenues from playoff tickets. About 12 percent is dues from member schools, taken directly from local athletic budgets.
Board member Marian Krutulis, director of Gulliver Prep, a private school in Miami, is another Hughes fan. She chaired the finance committee when the current budget was introduced. Asked about the $35,000 item related to Hughes' truck, she didn't recall if it had been discussed.
"I was in the back of the room, working on something Mr. Hughes had given me to do," Krutulis said. "If I listened to that particular item, I think I listened with one ear. I don't know that I paid too much attention."
She said even if the line item had been called into question, she "would have just ignored that. ... I feel very strongly that he deserves anything and everything we can give him."
Hughes was so confident the board would approve the purchase that he completed and signed the purchase order three days before the budget was approved. He picked up the truck the day after the budget was finalized.
At the same time, the FHSAA was cutting back in other areas. For years the organization had fully covered the cost of health insurance for employees and their families. Last year, Hughes recommended the FHSAA reduce its contribution to 50 percent of the cost of coverage for families, a savings of about $30,000. Hughes' contract exempts himself from the cut and provides full medical coverage for him and his wife until age 65.
"I have a separate contract," Hughes said of the disparity between him and his staff. "So do most CEOs."
What many CEOs don't have is a board so apparently willing to bend to their will. Asked for a single instance in which the board had denied a request, Hughes was stumped.
"In a general sense, I can't think of anything right now that the board had an issue with," he said. "There have been issues where things have been modified, but I can't give you exact examples, over time."
With his salary and benefits, Hughes said he has been a bargain for the FHSAA, weighing his accomplishments against his compensation.
"The people who are knowledgeable would say they've gotten a really good deal, more than fair," he said. "Absolutely. I really believe that."
