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Youth charity falls short of promise

Florida Youth Conservation Corps aims to help disadvantaged young people learn life skills. Critics question its success.

By COLLINS CONNER and BRIDGET HALL GRUMET
Published June 26, 2005

DADE CITY - Each year, the state hands millions of taxpayer dollars to Florida Youth Conservation Corps to maintain highway rights of way. In return for the no-bid contracts, the Dade City company promises to give disadvantaged youth both life skills training and scholarships.

But the nonprofit delivers neither, according to ex-employees.

"FYCC is not what it advertises itself to be," said former crew chief Jeff Jernigan of Hawthorne. Instead, he said, "I think it's a place where they can find cheap labor for (FYCC) to make money."

FYCC said 46 trainees got scholarships from 1999 to 2003, but none came out of FYCC's pocket. Instead - unbeknownst to state leaders who supported the program - FYCC asked Americorps to provide them. Americorps is a national work-study program funded by federal tax dollars.

After that arrangement ended in 2003, FYCC officials said, the company took over awarding the scholarships. But 30 ex-workers interviewed by the St. Petersburg Times could not name a single person who got one. FYCC refused to provide records to document any scholarships.

A three-month examination by the Times also found that FYCC:

Sent its top staff - including St. Petersburg City Council member Jay Lasita - on all-expenses-paid trips to the Dominican Republic where FYCC sponsors a baseball team.

Paid $73,000 one year for management travel and conferences. FYCC says it was building business contacts to place young people in jobs.

Stacked its board with nine relatives of executive director Bartolome Colom, and, at various times, employed his wife, his two daughters, his brother, his nephew, a son-in-law and a stepson-in-law.

As for life skills training, FYCC said it was dropped because students weren't interested. Robert Stinebaugh, who worked as an FYCC supervisor for five years before quitting in 2004, said he and other managers were told to end the sessions when FYCC learned it had to pay employees to attend them.

Stinebaugh said the program initially helped some young people turn their lives around.

"For the first year or two, they were really pushing it hard for kids," Stinebaugh said. "Then everything went to pot."

For more than 50 former employees, ex-board members, DOT officials and others who spoke to the Times, the key concern is that FYCC failed the very people it promised to help.

Kenji Houston of Panama City, Fla., who worked for FYCC for a year and attended vocational school, is one. He said he got an FYCC certificate, but not the promised school money.

"I thought I was going to actually have a future there," he said. "Turns out I didn't."

All of FYCC's income - $3.5-million to $4.5-million a year - comes from state and local government contracts. Because of that, FYCC officials repeatedly declared their records were an open book.

"You go there to the office, you have the right to investigate, 'cause we are public," Colom told the Pasco County Commission in 2001.

The DOT requires that FYCC open to the public all records related to the road work contracts.

On May 18, Terry Blackmon, the company controller and Colom's right-hand man, promised Times reporters he would provide records of FYCC's spending and proof it gave educational incentives.

A week later, FYCC declared those records private.

FYCC's program is aimed at "disadvantaged youth," usually high-school dropouts, 18 to 25 years old, with few skills. It pays them $7 an hour to paint curbs, repair guardrails and perform other roadside work, mostly for the DOT. They're recruited through newspaper ads, jobs centers and word-of-mouth.

"It provides an opportunity for someone who is off track educationally, life-wise, psychologically, to get back on track," said Lasita, the St. Petersburg council member wh o lobbies for FYCC for $30 an hour plus expenses and a company vehicle. He said his pay last year was $20,000.

Among FYCC's promises: a $500 bonus to those who pass the GED test or attend community college, reimbursement for up to nine credit hours of schooling, and a $4,725 scholarship for those who complete a year's employment.

In a June 21 letter to the Times, Blackmon said that "for reasons that are not known to us, the (trainees) have not used the benefits at the rate that we expected."

Blackmon said the organization is now focused on getting the youth into full-time jobs.

Kami Duncan, a former supervisor from the city of Interlachen, said FYCC bragged about providing school incentives, but put up a wall when she tried to get them for her workers.

"One kid had been wanting to go to vo-tech for months," Duncan said. FYCC officials "kept telling me they couldn't find the paperwork" for the educational benefits, even though Duncan said she sent it to them daily.

FYCC would not document the payment of any educational perks.

Lasita said the company didn't track who got the perks. "Internally, the organization has imperfections," he said. "But I don't think there's anything willful there. Its intentions, its mission and its approach are worthy and good."

Lasita said the Times was interviewing only disgruntled ex-employees . "In fairness," he said, "there's another side of the story."

Nelson Bettencourt, who recruited workers for FYCC, said he came to believe the young people were misled.

"I remember having parents come in with their kids, saying, "Oh my God, this is heaven-sent,' " said Bettencourt, who worked with Latino Leadership Orlando. "These parents had very high expectations of their kids getting a GED through this, a college education or some savings."

Colom, a native of Puerto Rico, has spent 25 years working with immigrants, migrant laborers and disadvantaged youth.

In a sworn deposition before the Florida Bar in 2000, Colom said he earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Miami. In 2001, he told the Pasco County Commission he had a law degree and was "still practicing."

Neither is true. Though Colom attended the University of Miami, he received no degree, according to university spokeswoman Margot Winick. As for the law degree and practice, Colom told the Florida Bar he had neither.

In 1999 and 2000, the Bar investigated him for practicing law without a license after hearing that Colom had collected thousands of dollars from immigrants. Without admitting wrongdoing, Colom signed an affidavit in 2000 promising not to pass himself off as a lawyer.

The Times faxed questions about these incidents to Colom. He did not respond.

The state formed the original Florida Youth Conservation Corps in 1987 to pay young adults to spruce up state parks. For a time, the program was managed by the Eckerd Youth Alternatives, where Colom worked for several months.

That initial work-study program lapsed in the mid 1990s.

In 1998, Colom dusted off the FYCC name and incorporated it as a private nonprofit to provide roadside maintenance for the DOT.

He urged several legislators, including then-Rep. Sharon Merchant, R-West Palm Beach, to change the law to provide up to $2-million in state highway contracts to youth-work programs, without any competitive bidding. At the time, FYCC was the only company that fit the bill.

The proposal came as the Legislature was pushing welfare-to-work initiatives, Merchant said.

Lawmakers later removed the dollar limit on such contracts. At FYCC's urging, the Legislature voted in 2003 to allow cities and counties to hand out similar no-bid contracts.

Over the years, other companies, similar to FYCC, got some road contracts, but none has an annual income anywhere near FYCC's.

This past legislative session, state Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, tried to cap the state contracts at $600,000 per nonprofit. Once an FYCC supporter, Fasano turned against the company in 2001 after Colom filed state documents listing Fasano as a board member - a post the legislator had declined.

The House of Representatives said no to Fasano's proposed cap after Lasita swayed Jacksonville Beach Rep. Don Davis, Fasano's counterpart in the House.

Lasita "explained . . . the guy (Colom) wasn't with them anymore. They were hoping it wouldn't reflect on their total organization," Davis said.

Fasano said Lasita gave him the same line two years ago, when FYCC needed his help.

"I think (Lasita) pretty much came right out and told me (Colom) had little or nothing to do with organization," Fasano said.

Lasita said the two men misunderstood. "I said basically the plan was for him (Colom) to phase out," Lasita said.

FYCC is a family operation.

Its Dade City property - 35-plus acres - backs up to Colom's 10 acres, where he and his wife Rosa live in a modest double-wide mobile home.

The company employs Colom's wife as an office worker at $9 to $10 an hour; her son-in-law is president of the board.

Nine of Colom's relatives serve on FYCC's volunteer board. But that doesn't diminish the company's integrity, Lasita and Blackmon said, because Colom's relatives don't do everything he wants.

An expert in nonprofits said "it's a problem" to have a board full of relatives.

"It runs contrary to every thoughtful rule of governance," said Daniel Kurtz, an attorney with Holland & Knight in New York. "It cripples the board's oversight function and that's the key function boards have."

The directors could not be reached for comment. FYCC president Brendan Norton, the husband of Colom's stepdaughter, refused to comment.

FYCC spent $7,000 to $8,000 to support a youth league baseball team in the Dominican Republic, a charitable act that "could serve as a source of pride and motivation" for FYCC's trainees, Blackmon said.

Besides buying equipment and supplies for the team, FYCC sent Blackmon there to audit the team's expenditures and to help team officials find bargains, Blackmon said.

Lasita said he went to the island last year to get familiar with the area so he could help Colom lobby other nonprofits to help young players. He also represented FYCC at the season opener. "I threw out the first pitch," he said.

Office manager Wanda Wright went there "collecting some receipts from previous money we had sent down," Blackmon said. FYCC paid all expenses. Other officials, including Colom, visited the island.

Former workers said Colom became interested in supporting the Dominican team when he visited his daughter Myrna, who attended medical school there.

Though the company has closed its books to public scrutiny, its IRS filings as a tax-exempt organization are available online. According to those filings, FYCC spent $457,215 in four years on travel, conventions, conferences and meetings. The vast majority was for the management, not the workers. But FYCC refused to provide an accounting of the travel spending, saying its "internal records are not subject to a public records request."

Ex-employees give Colom credit for being a hard worker, but they say he made their lives miserable. They blame outbursts by Colom for the turnover in both trainees and supervisors.

"He'll berate them, yell, scream, holler," said Marsha Decena, FYCC's recruiter until she quit earlier this year. "When I left there, he just got done calling a girl in the office a fat, stupid idiot."

Lasita attributed Colom's conduct to "an overabundance of passion."

Decena said Colom shortchanged workers' pay and docked them for uniforms they were required to buy, for repairs to damaged equipment or for conduct he found unsatisfactory.

Blackmon said the fines and fees were levied to teach the young adults to be responsible. He also said the $150 uniform fee was later reimbursed to the workers - along with a $20 bonus. But he would not document such reimbursements.

According to Decena, Colom refused to pay her overtime. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen (Colom) change the hours on a timecard," she said.

Other employees echoed her complaints. Several reported the alleged pay discrepancies to the U.S. Department of Labor, which is investigating.

FYCC also ran into trouble with the DOT in the Panhandle district, which measures success, in part, by whether a worker remains on the job for at least three months. Last fiscal year, a dozen made the list; this fiscal year, none.

That led the DOT to yank FYCC's $300,000 contract in Bay and Calhoun counties and give it to another nonprofit, created by ex-FYCC workers who soured on the company.

Said Mac Watters, a DOT assistant maintenance engineer in Panama City: "We do everything we can to work with them and help these young people, but you reach a point where you're not getting your dollar's worth, so to speak."

Though a number of DOT officials said they were very satisfied with FYCC's work, Don Frey of the agency's West Palm Beach office discovered that FYCC was billing for 10 hours pay on eight hours' work.

Frey denied $7,000 in pay requests.

Bettencourt, the Orlando recruiter, said FYCC cheated its young workers.

"It's a huge savings for the state or the government to be privatizing this (road work)," Bettencourt said.

"For these agencies to be abusing the people they're hiring, it's totally unconscionable."

Times staff writer Saundra Amrhein and researchers Caryn Baird and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report.

[Last modified June 26, 2005, 00:35:56]