As did Cone and Hoggard, I read with interest Mark Binker’s story in today’s N&R on the N.C. Legislative Black Caucus Foundation as well as his post over at Capital Beat.
So it turns out the real story may be that money may be missing from the foundation’s finances. Binker says the Charlotte Observer’s Mark Johnson looked into it, though I don’t see where Johnson directly raises that issue. But this is what he does say:
The caucus awarded $54,000 in grants, including scholarship funds, in 2005, according to a federal filing.
The group raised more than $245,000 that year, spending $50,000 on its own conference, another $41,000 on other conferences and conventions and about $20,000 on meetings, accounting, phone bills, printing and travel, according to the federal form.
Help me out here, but that leaves $80,000 in unaccounted funds that may or may not show up. But the facts (as the Observer just presented them) definitely say that the caucus spent twice as much on administrative costs as it did on grants and scholarships in 2005, just as it did in 2004. In other words, the money’s not going where it supposedly can do the most good.
