February 24–March 2, 2000

hit and run

Citizens’ Defiance?

Citizen DiCicco: The city councilman founded the alliance.

A state agency has stopped payment on a $500,000 grant to a civic group controlled by staffers and allies of State Sen. Vince Fumo because the group has failed to account for more than $700,000 worth of previously obtained grants.

A spokesperson for DCED, the Department of Community and Economic Development, says that financial audits on three large grants to the Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods are long overdue, including one that is now more than two years late. Although Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit South Philadelphia street cleaning organization, was awarded another $500,000 state grant last May, DCED spokesperson Megan Neuhard says the agency won’t write the check for that grant until the audits on the other grants come in.

"We have had correspondence and discussions with them back and forth and were assured we’d be receiving [the audits]," says Neuhard. "I know there were verbal obligations that they would be filed by the end of 1999, but they were not. So at this point we needed to take further steps." Neuhard says that Citizens Alliance is the only organization in the state that is having a grant check withheld. The state has taken legal action against two other nonprofit groups who have failed to file audits, Neuhard says, but neither group had other grant money pending in the DCED pipeline.

Under the terms of DCED grant contracts, financial audits are due 120 days after each contract’s agreed-upon expiration date. The Citizens Alliance has so far failed to file audits for a $500,000 contract that ended in October 1997, a $55,000 contract that ended in June 1998 and a $150,000 contract that ended in June 1999. Yet another state grant paid out to Citizens Alliance, for $550,000, should be due for an audit before the end of the year.

Citizens Alliance was founded by City Councilman Frank DiCicco, a longtime Fumo ally. According to its most recent tax filings, DiCicco is the president of Citizens Alliance, while two members of Fumo’s South Philadelphia district office staff, Ruth Arnao and Edward Hanlon, serve as secretary and treasurer, respectively.

"I know we were late on some of the filings," DiCicco said in an interview last week on the floor of City Council chambers. "There was an accountant supposedly getting everything in order. That much I know. I don’t know to what extent they were completed." DiCicco maintains he is no longer president of the Citizens Alliance, and, though he still sits on the board, he doesn’t know who the new president is. "I don’t know how we’re working that, I’ve got to find that out," he said. "Why don’t you give me a call and I’ll find out what’s going on." Subsequent calls to DiCicco were unreturned.

Citizens Alliance has been one of the primary beneficiaries of the state’s controversial Community Revitalization Program, from which it has drawn almost all of its funding over the past several years. Critics say the CRP grants have been awarded to legislators’ pet projects on the basis of their political power, much like the now-defunct Walking Around Money, or WAMs once were. Fumo, as Democratic chair of the appropriations committee, had long been regarded as the "King of WAMs," and programs run by his allies and associates have been frequent recipients of CRP grants as well.

According to its 1998 tax filing, the Citizens Alliance has accumulated more than $1 million worth of real estate, vehicles and equipment, mostly bought with CRP grant money. Its assets include trucks, vans and street sweepers, all housed in a garage near 12th and Wharton Streets, which Citizens Alliance also owns.

—Noel Weyrich