Community frustrated with East Central Community Center’s management

A cost-cutting move by Spokane City Hall to let a nonprofit run East Central Community Center has led to charges of exclusion and mistreatment, leading many longtime community members to rail against the center’s new leadership and call for the director’s dismissal.

More than 50 people attended a town hall meeting last week to express frustrations over the center’s management. As voices were raised and allegations thrown, Gloria Ochoa, the city’s director of local government and multicultural affairs who managed the discussion, continually had to remind speakers not to address the director of the center, Landon Carrell, who sat silently in the back of the room.

Speakers said they were “treated like dirt” at the center, that they weren’t “allowed to open our mouths” and that the center’s executive director ignored them.

“The community center used to be the heart and soul of the neighborhood,” said Sandy Williams, who grew up going to the center. Williams is the Eastern Washington representative for the Washington Commission on African American Affairs who sits on a panel created by Mayor David Condon to look into the center’s operations. The panel will give its recommendations on the center’s future to the mayor next month. “It doesn’t feel that way anymore. There’s a lot of mistrust. A lot of feelings of disregard.”

In December 2012, the city handed over operations of the center to the East Central Community Organization, which has worked in the neighborhood since 1980, mainly as a housing organization. At the time, the city’s neighborhood services director, Jonathan Mallahan, said the move was motivated by the “shrinking resources at the city.”

The total budget for the final year the city operated the center ran close to $1 million. The city funded almost 65 percent of that. The following year, the center’s budget drastically dropped. Its expenditures fell to $566,000.

With substantially less funding from the city, the organization raised program fees.

“The city threw money at things to keep the peace and keep everybody happy. Everything was free,” said Chris Venne, ECCO’s board president. “We were asked to run it for a whole lot less. But we had to pay our bills. Things weren’t going to be free anymore.”

Williams said Venne misses the point. Community members have told her they’ve been “priced out” of using the center because ECCO was “plugging a shortfall.” Longtime users of the center have said it’s changed from being run like a community gathering place to being operated as a business.

“People are feeling like they aren’t welcome anymore,” Williams said.

In response to the complaints, Condon created a panel to examine allegations that the community center has been poorly managed.

Also on the panel are George Kessler, president of the East Side Kiwanis Club; Julie Honekamp, CEO of SNAP; Kim Ferraro, executive director of the West Central Community Center; Spokane City Councilman Mike Allen; Jim Hanley, vice chair of the East Central Neighborhood Committee; and James Wilburn, president of the NAACP Spokane.

Venne and Carrell make no apologies for the way the center’s run. Venne noted that youth programs were extremely limited since 2004, following the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to revoke the city’s license to provide day care after a child was left unattended in a van.

Last year, the center brought back a summer youth program that served 23 youths. This year it served 108 youths. The center also has basketball and tennis camps and ongoing judo, tennis and volleyball programs.

According to numbers provided by an ECCO board member, the center served more than 3,200 families through its food programs. The city provided the same service to just 2,100 families in its final year.

Carrell said he researched the “best practices” of community centers around the country before implementing new fee structures. With a background in grocery retail, he said, when new management of a company comes in, “you lose customers. You don’t keep all of them. But in the end, you provide a better product.”

Mallahan said he thinks ECCO has done a lot of good with less financial support but said community centers “need to be welcoming places.”

“People go to a community center not to be treated as a customer or cog in the wheel,” he said. “They need to be felt welcome. The center needs to realize that.”

Councilman Mike Fagan, whose district encompasses part of the neighborhood, said ECCO’s management of the center has been “impressive.”

“What they currently have is management that is definitely watching the pennies,” he said. Fagan said that when the city ran the center, it created an “expectation” that led to some community members having a “sense of privilege or entitlement.”

Despite praise for management, he criticized its “customer service” and said things had to change.

“Some staff should be reviewed by the ECCO board for replacement,” he said. “If management is not changed, the center is going to continue its downhill slide.”

Fagan said Carrell will likely have to be replaced as the center’s director, simply because “that is where the ire is being cast right now.”

Williams wouldn’t go as far as Fagan calling for Carrell’s dismissal but said she felt that Carrell wasn’t hired properly.

“My issue is, whoever the director is, they should have a search process,” she said. “The fact that they didn’t do that is an issue.”

Williams noted that some felt there was a “bait and switch” when ECCO took control of the center because when it was awarded the contract, it told everyone that its director would be Ivan Bush, a former director of the community center and a leader in Spokane’s African-American community. But Bush never got the job, and before long Carrell was moved from his role as the center’s business manager to its director.

Carrell said firing him would be “unwise” because under his leadership ECCO has made significant improvements in the center’s operations even with less money.

Williams said she doesn’t believe changes at the center are racially motivated, but she has heard that people in East Central’s black community feel they’re being unfairly treated.

“There’s a feeling that there’s an attitude that people in the African-American community are takers. That it’s us-against-them,” she said. “The center is such an amazing place. The role that it has not only in the neighborhood but in the city cannot be downplayed. There’d be such a loss if the center went away.”