People Against Drugs Affordable Public Housing Agency

My time as a blogger is almost entirely congruent with the time I’ve served as Chairman of the Board of People Against Drugs Affordable Public Housing Agency PAD), so it seems strange that I’ve never written a word about it. I imagine it’s because it has been a relatively depressing saga.

I became involved with PAD because the Texas Attorney General was looking for some respectable (and perhaps gullible!) nonprofit people willing to serve on PAD’s Board of Directors. During the past fifteen years PAD had operated an apartment complex called Country Creek in Garland, Texas. There wasn’t anything wrong with the operations of the apartment complex, which was professionally managed and provided needed housing for working people with limited income. But the Attorney General has a problem with how PAD used most of the proceeds from the apartment complex—to support a NASCAR Truck Racing Team.

I suppose the effort was a success of some sort, because Green Light Racing, as it is now called, is still in business. You can check it out here if you like: http://www.greenlightracing.com/main.htm. I have to admit that before I became involved with PAD I didn’t even know that NASCAR had truck races.

The Attorney General, however, didn’t feel this was an appropriate use of the assets of a nonprofit corporation (and there were many other serious problems alleged in its lawsuit). The Attorney General sued. PAD went into bankruptcy to stop the lawsuit. All the directors of PAD except for one ended up resigning and, after much difficulty, an agreement was reached to rebuild the Board of Directors. The Attorney General would appoint two directors, the remaining director would appoint two directors and those four directors would elect a fifth member of the board of directors. If the directors deadlocked, then the Attorney General would appoint the fifth director.

The Attorney General appointed me and Elizabeth K. (Betsy) Julian, the President of the Inclusive Communities Project (you can find its website here: http://www.inclusivecommunities.net/index.php).

The appointment of the heads of two local nonprofit organizations that specialize in housing issues probably points to what the Attorney General thought PAD should be doing—and it certainly wasn’t racing trucks. The four directors appointed by the different parties managed to elect a fifth director, but that’s about all we managed to agree on. After a short time the directors that were not appointed by the Attorney General resigned. We elected two more directors with expertise in the housing arena, and less than a month after first hearing about PAD, the five of us were suddenly running an organization with no staff, no institutional memory, records that were a complete mess, the IRS after it, that was in bankruptcy and that owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to creditors—much of which we didn’t have the slightest idea why.

For the last eight months we’ve struggled to work our way out of this morass, and last Tuesday, thanks in large part to the good work done by our bankruptcy attorney, Vickie Driver of the Pronske, Patel law firm, the Court finally confirmed our Plan of Reorganization.

Now that the worst is finally past, I feel that I can talk a little about how we got through the last few months and a little about what we hope the New PAD can do in the community.

BTW: In spite of the name, I’ve never know what People Against Drugs did against drugs—except put a little sticker that said “PAD” on the racing truck.