Program gave some questionable grants

Last-minute spending hampered efforts to effectively utilize St. Petersburg's Front Porch Florida funds.

By LEONORA LaPETER and BRYAN GILMER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 23, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Antuan Shazell is a convicted felon. A professional heavyweight boxer with a 12-year-history of drug and weapons convictions in Pinellas County.

He is also the owner of a fledgling recording company that was recently approved for a $30,000 grant through Gov. Jeb Bush's Front Porch Florida program.

Grants like the one Shazell's SouthSide Entertainment received were meant to subsidize "established" programs that steer kids away from committing crimes. Shazell's company got one even though his company is less than two years old and he is on probation from his latest conviction in 1999 for possession of cocaine.

Front Porch Florida was Bush's idea to improve troubled neighborhoods by combining government resources with local residents' knowledge of community problems.

But in St. Petersburg, the application process for the first chunk of state grants was frenzied. The approval process was hasty. Then local decisionmakers and their guides in Tallahassee rushed willy-nilly like last-minute holiday shoppers to spend half a million dollars before a state deadline.

A Times review of the grant program found that the haste frequently led it into questionable territory:

No one checked the 162 St. Petersburg applicants' backgrounds. Local and state officials did not know about Shazell's criminal history when they approved him for the third-largest of 67 grants. He said he plans to start a program to teach kids the music business.

Thousands of state dollars went to religious programs. Some of it has been used to buy desks, chairs and other equipment to expand a private religious school, a move that infuriates a representative for public school teachers and may violate the state Constitution.

For the sake of convenience, state officials steered applicants to change some modest requests to bigger or more expensive items. A request for a $60 leaf blower was altered in Tallahassee in favor of a $300 top-of-the line model. A church request for children's art supplies was altered by state officials who sent a television and VCR instead.

Several of the grants went to programs outside the area designated to receive the money. There are no safeguards in place to make sure it will be spent on kids from the Front Porch area, a group of impoverished St. Petersburg neighborhoods.

Because the Department of Juvenile Justice waited until the last minute to hand out the grants, it didn't have enough time to spend all of the $2.1-million set aside for the six Front Porch communities in Florida. As a result, those communities missed out on more than $300,000 of the money approved for them. Records on how the $500,000 approved for the Opa Locka Front Porch zone was spent have not arrived in Tallahassee.

In St. Petersburg, where $142,000 of the approved $500,000 went unspent, the program Bush pledged would create "citizens of community, not clients of bureaucracy" has been marked by local infighting and precisely the kind of bureaucratic inefficiency Bush hoped to avoid.

"It's not residential, grass-roots run," said Chrisshun Cox, president of the Melrose Mercy/Pine Acres Neighborhood Association in the Front Porch area. "It's not helping businesses as far as economic growth. It's not helped one resident with home ownership or anything of that nature. Front Porch is failing us."

The person in charge of Front Porch statewide is Patrick Hadley, the governor's director of urban opportunity.

He acknowledges that the program started doling out money too quickly. He feared distributing so much money so soon might result in waste.

But, Hadley said, legislators and the governor wanted quick, visible results for Front Porch. And he and the Department of Juvenile Justice tried to comply.

"I knew that communities weren't ready to receive the money," Hadley said. "There was some bonding that needed to happen. I slowed down the process. When I had to stand before legislative commissions, I said I didn't want to waste tax money, just throw it out on the street."

Wheeling and dealing

Juvenile Justice officials in St. Petersburg said their bosses in Tallahassee didn't tell them to spend the $500,000 in Front Porch money for St. Petersburg until mid-May.

Knowing the state would take back any money they did not spend before the end of the budget year, June 30, they came up with a plan to spend the money fast within state guidelines.

Instead of giving out checks, they decided to buy equipment for community groups. So in the last week of May, local Juvenile Justice representatives raced around town telling people to apply by June 1.

A small committee of grant experts from the state, the Front Porch community liaison and an appointee from the neighborhoods group, called the Governor's Revitalization Council, flew through a review of the resulting 162 applications in just 21/2 days.

After that, Juvenile Justice officials launched into a break-neck shopping spree.

As Susan Stamper, a Juvenile Justice administrative assistant, explains it, state rules require first trying to buy requested items through standing state contracts. Next, her department tries minority vendors, and in some cases, seeks bids.

Officials had no time for that tedious process.

"There were lots of things we couldn't get because of time constraints," Stamper said. "It would have been a lot easier had each organization wanted one thing like TVs, which are on a state contract. There were so many vendors to contact and a month's time is not very long. Normally, this was a three- to four-month process."

Juvenile Justice officials did manage to get requested equipment for lots of reputable youth groups, including a piano and basketballs for the Boys & Girls Club and football and cheerleading uniforms for the Gibbs Jr. Gladiators Youth Athletic Association.

But sometimes, they urged community groups to change their requests to big items that are easy to get through state contracts.

At St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Nancy Shannon had asked for $380 in chess sets, construction paper, books, paints and puzzles for the church's "Wacky Wednesday" mentoring program for disadvantaged kids.

But when she met with Juvenile Justice officials, they asked if she didn't want something like a TV/VCR or a basketball hoop instead.

"Instead of these small little things, we could get these two big things," said Mrs. Shannon, who was thrilled. "They said, "Is this what you want that's best for the children?' I didn't know we could ask for big-ticket items like that."

Not all of the organizations thought larger was better.

At 20th Street Church of Christ, youth director Larry Collins asked for a $60 leaf blower to remove sand from a slippery basketball court that he also wanted refurbished. He got a $300 gas-powered parking lot cleaner -- but not the $3,600 in concrete for the new court surface.

Collins is thankful for the blower, bleachers, basketball nets and basketballs he got, but he specifically priced the electric blower at Home Depot because he didn't want to use a gas-powered model around the kids.

"That's overkill," said Dominic M. Calabro, president of Florida TaxWatch, a public interest government research institute in Tallahassee. "They might have been better off giving them two brooms. If someone asks for a fish, you don't need to go out and get a 300-pound tuna."

Juvenile Justice officials said they were only trying to help small groups take full advantage of the program within the time limit. They noted that in some cases, they were able to secure lower prices than the groups' original estimates.

"We took on an enormous project and we were up against the wall on this," said Norman Baker, program administrator for the Department of Juvenile Justice. "We had an opportunity not to go forward at all, but we said, "Let's make it happen.' "

But why the rush in the first place?

The Legislature gave Juvenile Justice the $500,000 for St. Petersburg last year. The agency waited until May to decide to spend it.

Juvenile Justice officials offer this explanation: They were waiting to make sure Florida's Legislature would approve more money for Front Porch in this year's budget before they spent last year's.

"We were guarded in the way we approached it," said the department's assistant secretary for programming and planning, George Hinchliffe. "We did not want it to be a one-time expenditure that would be a ripple in the pond."

Background checks

Juvenile Justice officials said they would normally check the criminal background of grant recipients but did not check the Front Porch recipients because they were getting grants to buy things -- not yearlong program grants.

So $30,000 was approved for Shazell, who is under contract to box for Don King Productions. He wants to expand his recording studio and create a recording industry education program for youth. He asked for more than $100,000 in guitars, amplifiers, keyboards and a computer to make it happen.

Shazell and his partner, Fletcher Axon, said the equipment would be used to help about 90 kids learn about making music and videos. But Axon acknowledged that he and Shazell would probably use the equipment for their for-profit business, too.

Shazell, who has given three birth years to police, says he is 28. His criminal history begins in 1988 and includes convictions for possession of crack cocaine with intent to sell, possession of marijuana, possession of cocaine, lying to police, carrying concealed semi-automatic weapons and being a felon in possession of a weapon.

"So a person can't change?" asked Tee Lassiter, a community activist who helped Shazell's group get its funding. "As far as I know he's running the business SouthSide, and he's personally shown me a contract with Don King Productions where he's doing professional boxing. As a community activist and a person, I know everyone has a history and skeletons in their closet. If a person tells me he's changed, I take that."

The state's last-minute handling of the applications gave SouthSide just one item in this year's grant, a $3,495 computer. But they have been approved for other items in the current year's budget, and may yet receive all $30,000 worth of equipment.

The 6-foot-4, 240-pound boxer says his drug and weapons problems are in the past. His last conviction came after a highway patrol trooper saw him drop a packet of cocaine during a traffic stop.

"I don't do drugs," he said recently. "I take drug tests for boxing, and I passed."

In West Palm Beach, Juvenile Justice officials required background checks for applicants in their Front Porch program -- at the last minute, according to Mary Williams, a volunteer who helps with the Juvenile Justice program in that Front Porch Community.

"Anyone who would work directly with children had to be background-checked," Williams said. That included dozens of people, and organizations struggled to find the money to pay for checks that cost $35 apiece.

Hadley, statewide director of Front Porch, does not know Shazell, but he said someone with a criminal history should not necessarily be disqualified from working with kids.

"If they're reformed, they sometimes can be your best instructors. They've been there, done that and understand they can't continue in that mode," he said.

The bottom line

Ernest Fillyau, a former St. Petersburg City Council member who served as the neighborhoods' representative in reviewing the grant applications, and Rodney Bennett, the Revitalization Council chairman, see a lot of good in the "out of the box" Juvenile Justice spending in St. Petersburg.

"For once, we went to community-based, faith-based organizations," Fillyau said. "Ninety-five percent of the time, it's the big organizations who have grant writers who say they are working in the targeted area" who get funded.

Still, several programs that Juvenile Justice funded are not located in the targeted neighborhood. And although Fillyau and Bennett say they will keep an eye on the use of the equipment, there is no guarantee it will be used to benefit neighborhood children.

Bennett says the fact that 67 organizations benefitted from a single program is great, especially because many are new.

"You have to cut away some of the barriers to people who want to get funded," he said.

Hadley agrees -- to a point.

"It certainly worked to the advantage of some of the mom-and-pop organizations out there," he said. "I think it worked out real well for them."

But maintaining the credibility of Front Porch means upholding reasonable standards, Hadley believes. The Legislature appropriated $2-million for Front Porch this year, which will probably be equally divided among the Front Porch communities.

"We are meeting now because there will be more structure in our approach on the next round of funding," he said. "It won't be as open or as liberally done as it was this time around."

-- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this story. Leonora LaPeter can be reached at 893-8640 or lapeter@sptimes.com. Bryan Gilmer can be reached at 893-8848 or gilmer@sptimes.com.

Front Porch communities

St. Petersburg

Opa-locka

Fort Lauderdale

Pensacola

West Palm Beach

Tallahassee

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