Glendale First!, Bea Wyatt, and I (among others) were the subject of a recent derogatory blog post punctuated by a plethora of question marks.
When you’re in public life, the best advice is clearly to ignore inflammatory personal posts, to let them enjoy a couple days of extra clicks as they fade back into the background noise. “Discipline over emotion” was a mantra of capital “C” hockey Captain Mark Messier, I have heard, and it worked well for him.
But, then, the Dalai Lama pretty much went the other way, so it’s confusing.
I’ll go with Mess for the most part and ignore most of the laughably inaccurate assumptions in the blog post. But, I have to gunga galunga the accusation that implies personal dishonesty.
The Set Up
That post culminated in a disingenuous implication of fundraising impropriety that was prefaced with the text below that was pulled from a page on the Glendale First! website promoting a fundraising event:
We are planning a series of fundraising events to, hopefully, retire the debt the committee incurred during the successful opposition to all of the anti-Coyotes referendums. We are proud to be a partner of Desert hockey Development in their inaugural Grow The Game Classic golf tournament to be held June 14, in Glendale, at The Legend at Arrowhead.
Above emphasis mine. The “coup de grâce” is dealt in the final paragraph of the post in question:
One may assume that the debt the committee incurred in opposition to anti-Coyote efforts was in part, an estimated $11,000 personally spent by Bea Wyatt and George Fallar. It may be fair to ask how much of the money raised from this golf tournament went to reimburse Fallar and Wyatt. If they did receive reimbursement from a golf tournament primarily publicized as a fund raising event for Desert Hockey Development didn’t they, in essence, do the very same thing that Bea Wyatt has accused the 2 councilmembers under threat of recall of doing? Instead of using all of the funds raised for Desert Hockey from the golf tournament was part of that money used to retire previous debts including that of George Fallar and Bea Wyatt? Are we witnesses of the case of the pots (Feiner and Wyatt) calling the kettle (councilmembers) black??
Woof, BURN!
There is one simple to understand, and correct, answer to the insinuation “It may be fair to ask how much of the money…”. No, it isn’t. The term “none of your business” comes to mind.
We’re not sure how, exactly, a group of private citizens running a private fundraising event equate to a group of elected officials voting on a city budget and managing taxpayer and fee payer funds.
It’s a stretch of logic, but let’s play along for awhile and pretend there’s some similarity.
The phrase “…retire the debt the committee incurred…” clearly indicates the funds raised by the golf tournament will go to two destinations. Read it and understand it.
Campaign Finance Reports
Glendale First!, unlike the political action committees and independent expenditure committees currently in favor with the blog author, is careful about filing timely and correct campaign finance reports.
Because of that, any human with a computer connected to the Internet has easy access to determine where money came from and where it went by reading public campaign finance reports available on the Glendale (AZ) website. The process is simple, as is the math.
The links to the campaign finance reports are even conveniently listed on the right side of every Glendale First! web page, right where they should clearly be hidden from prying eyes.
One wouldn’t even have to estimate how much was personally spent or by whom, many dollars are accounted for publicly. Unless she has somehow forgotten, the blog post author has knowledge of how to find and read campaign finance reports based on the contents of some of her other posts.
Now it’s my turn to complete a paragraph with a leading question. Why not answer a question by spending ten minutes on the Glendale, AZ city web site reading campaign finance reports instead of leaving a leading (cue spooky music) “question” about pots and kettles designed to impugn the reputation of the people being indirectly accused?
Click and Learn Facts
It’s easy, here’s the first applicable report, here’s the second applicable report, and here’s the third applicable report. That took five minutes of “research”.
To discover what the personal investment is for Glendale First!, one would have to peruse prior permutations of the political committees to follow the money backwards. I’ll leave that to anybody that cares to click around for a few minutes.
The answer is, there wasn’t enough money raised by the golf tournament or anything else to defray our personal expenditures. There was no deception with the golf tournament or anything else, despite the hopes of some.
The second part of the answer is that enough money went into Desert Hockey Development to keep it active providing free services to kids in the Glendale community for another year.
Everything has been and will remain completely above board and public.
When DHD, eventually, grows enough (if memory serves $50k or more donations per year) to legally have to file 990 forms with the IRS, people will be able to peruse those filings to their heart’s content. Until then, DHD files a 990-N with the IRS, both of which are visible online should one care to look.
And, they won’t find anything that isn’t completely straight up and complete.
Don’t Delete The Directions!
There was even a discussion on the Facebook page of the blog author about this very subject. One of the comments on the thread was from the aforementioned Bea Wyatt, in which she explained how the blog author could determine where said money came from and went.
Alas, that entire Facebook thread was “deleted” shortly after Bea’s comment was made, and the image capture didn’t really capture well even if the names of the posters are a bit legible and familiar to people familiar with these events.
We’ll leave it to the reader to assign motives to the blog poster deciding to sign off an already distasteful blog post laden with massively incorrect assumptions with a final, leading question she could have easily answered; a question that purposely left a cloud of dishonesty on us.