Rath of the Times

Reborn Overture still “at the bottom of the trough”

Charitable review decries center policies

Funds are uninsured

By Jay Rath

Documents released this fall by the fundraising arm of the Overture Center for the Arts portray an alarming downward financial spiral, even as the non-profit officially took over management of the center yesterday, Jan 1.

 A lot of ink has been spilled over Overture’s fortunes these last few years, but the reported dollar amounts relate only to its management board, the Madison Cultural Arts District. Little or nothing has been reported about the center’s fundraising organization, Overture Center Foundation Inc. Its responsibilities are now hugely expanded, to cover all aspects of the facility.

Aside from an October audit, the most recent available tax records for the foundation, from 2009, document a net loss of $567,652. In that year the fundraising organization had more than $1.42 million in expenses (including funds expended for Overture programming) but revenue of only $861,694.

Organizations that vet the health of non-profits use tax returns alone. In the case of the Overture Center Foundation, that’s impossible. More than six months into its current fiscal year, the foundation still has not filed a return for 2010.

However, an Oct. 13 audit report by the foundation’s own accounting firm, Johnson Block and Co., suggests that, when it is eventually filed, the foundation’s 2010 tax return will show an additional net loss of $449,917. The foundation’s assets present a similar picture, falling from $1.2 million in fiscal 2008 to $644,810 according to its 2009 tax return.

“The last couple years have been pretty tumultuous,” says Overture president and CEO Tom Carto. It began with good news in June 2010, when Overture and its banks reached a forbearance deal to eliminate $28 million in debt left from the liquidation of the center’s trust fund.

At the time, the entities that make up Overture “were all facing the specter of foreclosure or bankruptcy because of that looming, very large debt,” says Carto. The debt is now settled, but reserves were tapped out to make a down payment on the forbearance agreement. “There’s no question that we’re at the bottom of the trough and have been for about a year, because of the elimination of the debt,” he says.

It’s a complicated financial picture. Many entities make up what the average person thinks of as “Overture.” The Overture Development Corporation built the center. The Madison Cultural Arts District (MCAD), an appointed board, managed it through December. The City of Madison employed most Overture administration and operations staff.

Overture Center Foundation Inc. is a non-profit corporation created in 2001. It was originally named the 201 State Foundation. The official mission of the foundation has been “to cover operating and debt service expenditures of the Arts District.” As part of the deal that paid down debt in 2010, the foundation took over management from MCAD yesterday. (It’s yet to be decided whether MCAD will subsequently be dissolved.) City of Madison employees who work for Overture will now become foundation employees. The foundation has already hired more employees and taken on one-time costs related to the transition. The foundation is also taking over MCAD’s finances.

While the bottom lines of both MCAD and the foundation were tapped to pay off debt, the foundation paid the greater price. Officials expect that remaining MCAD assets will give the foundation a lift.

“It’s been planned to be that way, in anticipation of comingling of all the funds,” says Carto. “It was quite deliberate for the foundation board, in tandem with MCAD, to draw down its principal to make sure that those [debt] commitments were met.”

Overture’s annual report, released in October, already merges MCAD and foundation figures. Viewed that way, there’s some improvement. Overture began its 2009-10 season with net assets of $172,360,713, and ended the season with $188,628,994. MCAD’s increased value will in part offset foundation losses -- at least on paper.

The financial picture is complicated even here. According to a MCAD audit report prepared by Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, the increase in MCAD net assets was “due primarily to the debt forgiveness” and other changes.

Other concerns are revealed by foundation records, and by the Johnson Block audit, including $245,980 in foundation cash that is not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That is, the foundation has too much money in too few banks; the FDIC insures cash balances only up to $250,000 per financial institution.

Then there are taxes. The foundation’s fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30. Its tax returns are due Sept. 30 each year. Filing late is a habit for the foundation, muddying timely assessments. For example, the 2008 return was received by the Internal Revenue Service more than three months late, on Jan 6, 2010. The 2009 return was received by the Internal Revenue Service more than seven months late, on May 9, 2011.

“I think there was just a – I don’t want to say a mess, it’s not the right thing to say,” explains Cindy Hughes, a financial consultant who has served as the foundation’s interim chief financial officer since August 2010. “But there has just been such a challenge and they were just so short-staffed, is probably what the biggest issue was.”

While she adds that the late filings are not uncommon in her work with other clients, it has been a challenge. “It took us months to get things back in shape to be able to produce financials.”

Given the confusion, an outsider’s view would be helpful. Charity Navigator is a nationally renowned non-profit organization that assesses the health of other non-profits for the benefit of potential donors. It’s been endorsed by Smart Money magazine and Reader’s Digest, as well as the South Carolina Secretary of State and the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General. Forbes magazine named its searchable website “best of the web.” PCWorld calls it, “the Consumer Reports of the non-profit world.”

Charity Navigator uses only tax returns in assessing non-profits. The organization has never assessed the health of Overture Center Foundation Inc. It recently took a look at the foundation for this article.

“They do not have many of the proper policies and procedures in place,” says Sandra Miniutti, Charity Navigator vice president of marketing and chief financial officer.

For example, according to the foundation’s 2009 tax return, it did not provide a copy of the return to all board members before filing it. The foundation has no written conflict of interest policy or whistleblower policy. It does not have a written document retention and destruction policy.

“As a result, they'd probably score low on our Accountability and Transparency review,” says Miniutti.

There are still other concerns. The foundation’s 2009 return is still the most recent tax document available. It shows that 36 percent of foundation expenditures went to administration and fundraising, and 64 percent to programming. For a non-profit, the industry rule of thumb is that no more than 35 percent must be spent on administration and fundraising. More than that, and all sorts of red flags go up for potential donors.

“Our calculations confirm yours,” says Miniutti. “And we've found that most of the charities we rate spend at least 75 percent of their budgets on programs/services with only the remaining 25 percent spent on administrative and fundraising costs. So, this charity is less efficient than most of the charities we rate.”

How that assessment might change with the foundation taking on even more administrative responsibilities remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, “Things are very tight, but we have a plan to rectify that over time,” says Carto. “Overture has played it close to the bone because there is no reserve under us at the moment. But the debt is gone. Now the plan, going forward, is to rebuild that reserve. We have budgeted surpluses, and will be budgeting surpluses for the next five years to increase that reserve.”

And Janet Piraino, foundation vice president of advancement, says fundraising is going very well. “We are poised to break $1 million in pledges so far this fiscal year,” says Piraino, a former chief of staff to previous Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

As for the 2010 tax return, “It’s in process right now,” says Hughes. “I think if anything, what I can assure you is that, going forward, this is all going to be done on a more timely basis.”

How I came to lead a global expedition

 
Believe it or not, a lot of thought goes into The Washburn Expedition.

The world’s first Facebook novel began when friends nagged me to join the social media site. I did. And then I rapidly decided that my life was not interesting enough to make constant updates.

So I created a fictitious life.

As a result, I “lead” an expedition sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Washburn Observatory (which is real) and Museum of Natural History (which is fictitious). It’s a serial novel updated twice each weekday, set sometime between 1890 and 1947 – we’re never quite sure when.

Part of it is based on the adventure novels of Zane Grey. Part of it is pure Indiana Jones (who has made several unrecognized appearances in the expedition, as has his ingénue, Marion Ravenwood). Part of it is based on Bernard Heuvelmans’ On the Track of Unknown Animals. Most of it is a direct lift from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad; our party similarly consists of arrogant Americans who are viewing the world through parochial eyes.

 
Early on, we established that the expedition was underwritten by the father of Rita Rennebohm. She began as merely Rita, and she was meant to be Rita Hayworth. Somehow I have yet to get around to using Hayworth’s images. But blame Rita herself; she’s grown to be an even worldlier character, usually portrayed with images of Anita Loos.

Poor, naïve boobs that we are, we never recognize Rita’s true, lusty character. Her exclamations of “Um! Ow! O!” are taken from the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberand; Nemo always woke from his fantastic dreams with those comments.  

Rita’s last name is drawn from the late Wisconsin governor and drug store magnate, Oscar Rennebohm. In the context of the expedition, her father is Lord Rennebohm, always portrayed by robber baron J.P Morgan. At last report, he was fleeing police. He’s emerged as our arch enemy.

Rita took over the estate after a brief stay at home, during which Lord Rennebohm “fell on a knife, several times.”

Dr. Allenby, the expedition’s secondary leader, is based on British Brigadier General Edmund Allenby. We often hear about the doctor’s “wretched pet,” Jocko. When Jocko rarely appears, we see that he is a stork – Gen. Allenby’s actual pet, and the photos of the two of them together are real.

Young Reggie is our naïf, a university student that we’ve taken along. Contrary to the belief of many readers, he is not British. He’s merely a New England kid who desperately wants to pretend that he’s Ivy League. Constantly trying to impress, he begins his entries with “toujers,” and closes with real Latin phrases. In between, he always refers to something as “rummy old” – another attempt of his to sound upper crust.

Reggie’s fraternity, Omega Lambda Chi, has the same name as the hoax fraternity created by American composer Charles Ives, when he was a student at Yale. Ives even created a marching song for it. Speaking of Yale, in the novel I sometimes recall my student days there, during which I met our last cast member, Billie the Cowboy. Barely literate, it’s never explained how Billie was able to enter Yale. Still, my college roommate is an accomplished pilot who has saved the lives of all in the expedition many times.

 
When portrayed as a cowboy pilot, Billie is portrayed by images from Sky King, a radio and early TV adventure series. Otherwise, he is almost always portrayed by Broncho Billy Anderson, silent film’s first star. Anderson was a producer/actor/director, today too-seldom remembered. Interestingly, our first filmed hero of the Old West was a Jew. Once in awhile, Billie the Cowboy is also portrayed by a youthful Will Rogers.

Before The Washburn Expedition settled into a permanent format, color photos were sometimes featured. That will never happen again. We are stuck in the age of black and white photography. When I can’t find a good black and white image, I have to manipulate a color one to make it appear that way. The only exceptions are the early red telegrams, or “Marconigrams,” by which we receive new orders from headquarters.

My own portrait is that of Harold Lloyd, from Professor Beware, an early talkie of the silent film star’s. The curator of the Washburn Observatory and Museum of Natural History is Prof. James Watson, and in fact he was an early and real director of the actual Washburn Observatory. He was famous in his day as one of the discoverers of the planet Vulcan, which supposedly existed between the sun and the orbit of Mercury.

There are lots of hidden jokes throughout. Somehow, no one ever figured out that our visit to Howell Island and its benevolent host, Thurston, was a reference to Gilligan’s Island. Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was also an early allusion.

Writing the expedition began as a lark. More than 1,200 posts later, it sometimes is a chore. We’ve visited every continent and even inner earth!

 
But so far we remain on the trail, encountering new, “savage” natives and marveling at the last unmapped spots on the globe. We “discovered” the Nile, claimed it, and named it “New Potomac.” We took a V-2 to Paris, and mistook its residents as strange Moon creatures. Soon we’ll go to London, to take part in an unspecified royal wedding. (Definitely not in 2011 – but who knows when?)

Welcome to The Washburn Expedition of the University of Wisconsin Washburn Observatory and Museum of Natural History.

Welcome!

    

This will be a place for me to collect and share the various areas of my work, including cartoons, commentary, reviews and news. It's a broader continuation of an earlier column and blog I wrote in Madison, Wis., "The Rath of Madison."

I've worked for The Onion, Disney, MTV and many publications. I recently won an award from The Milwaukee Press Club for best analytical reporting. I also write the first (and only?) Facebook novel, a serial dime-novel parody called The Washburn Expedition.