Friday, May 13, 2011
By Jaclyn Shambaugh, Staff writer
Fayetteville Observer
The handbook for the Lumbee Tribe Boys and Girls Club is a 10-page stapled booklet given to every child between ages 6 and 18 who signs up for membership.
It includes information about club hours, membership requirements, rules and activities and a club calendar.
It also is riddled with grammatical errors, typos and omitted words.
And according to a March review of tribal spending by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it cost the tribe more than $30,000.
HUD has said the pay received by Rose Marie Lowry-Townsend, who was hired as a consultant to write the handbook, was excessive, according to a report presented Monday to the Lumbee Tribal Council.
The HUD report states Lowry-Townsend was paid $110 per hour to write the handbook, receiving payments from Feb. 19, 2010, to May 11, 2010, that totaled $30,312.48, meaning she was paid for more than 275 hours of work on the handbook.
After her consultant contract ended, Lowry-Townsend was hired by Tribal Chairman Purnell Swett as the tribal administrator. She remained in that job until May 7.
Lowry-Townsend did not return several phone calls seeking comment for this story.
Directors of other Boys and Girls Clubs voiced surprise about the amount spent on an organizational handbook.
Don Williams, head of the Boys and Girls Club of Cumberland County since 2008, has been with the organization for 22 years. He said he has never paid to have a handbook written.
“That rate is astronomical,” Williams said. “In my opinion, that sounds like a gross misuse of funds.”
Ron Ross headed the Cumberland County club until 1996 before moving to the Boys and Girls Club of Lumberton-Robeson County. He said he has done away with a handbook altogether.
“If you come in to sign up your child, you get our application and on the back of that are our rules,” Ross said. “That’s what a membership handbook would have in it. We do it in one page.”
Steve Morris, the regional service director for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, oversees 25 chartered clubs in the state, including the Cherokee Youth Center and the Lumbee club.
“I’ve never heard of anyone paying $30,000 for a handbook,” Morris said. “If a club needs a handbook, we can give free samples of what a handbook looks like. And we typically just share handbooks between clubs and tell each club to modify it to fit local needs.”
The Lumbee Tribe Boys and Girls Club operates at four sites: First Nation and Southern Spirit, both in Lumberton; Pembroke; and Hawkeye in Red Springs.
Ellen Lowery, who has managed the Pembroke location for six years, estimated the combined membership of the clubs to be near 400 children. Each sites uses the same membership handbook.
Lowry-Townsend’s consultant contract was one of eight complaints addressed by HUD in its review.
According to the HUD report, Lowry-Townsend’s contract was executed without following proper procurement procedures for competitive bids – a requirement for all contracts over $5,000.
The hourly rate exceeded the consultant services compensation limit of $74.76 per hour.
Because the contract was out of compliance with HUD policies, the tribe must reimburse the full amount paid to Lowry-Townsend using nonhousing funds within 30 days of May 6, the date the report was sent to the tribe.
Louise Mitchell, a member of the Lumbee Tribal Council since 2008, said the need for a handbook was not raised at any of the council meetings. She said Swett acted on his own in approving the contract.
“That was something that the chairman did executively without us,” Mitchell said. “I was not aware that a manual had been written until I read the report Monday night.”
Wanda K. Locklear was the tribe’s youth services director and oversaw the Lumbee Tribe Boys and Girls Club at the time the contract was executed. She died in July 2010.
Information in the HUD report compared Lowry-Townsend’s pay with Locklear’s at the time of the contract. According to the report, Locklear made $44,562 a year, or $21.42 an hour.
The report said “no information provided by (the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) provides justification to value the services of Dr. Lowry-Townsend at approximately five times that of the director.”
Swett said the statement in the HUD report that “the primary responsibility of Dr. Lowry-Townsend was the development of an organizational handbook for the club” is incorrect.
“That was not something she came in there to do to begin with,” Swett said. “Her task was to do a thorough evaluation of the Boys and Girls Club program. The manual was the end product and not the beginning product.”
Swett said Lowry-Townsend was not interviewed by HUD during the department’s review.
Elena Gaona, a spokeswoman for HUD, confirmed that Lowry-Townsend was not interviewed for the March review. She said HUD does not interview contractors in regard to questions about contract procurements.
“In that circumstance, we would talk to the administrator of the contract,” Gaona said. “In this case, that is the tribe, and specifically, the tribe chairman, Mr. Swett.”
Gaona said Swett confirmed that competitive procurement procedures were not followed, putting the contract out of compliance and deeming any further interviews unnecessary.
Swett did not give The Fayetteville Observer details on what other duties Lowry-Townsend carried out as part of her evaluation of the Boys and Girls Club.
Tribal Council member Pam Hunt said she has not seen evidence that Lowry-Townsend performed any other duties beyond her work on the handbook.
“We were told that other services might have been included in that cost,” Hunt said. “But I have seen nothing that confirms that.”
Hunt questioned the need for an evaluation of the club.
“It was not brought to my attention that there were any major problems with the Boys and Girls Club,” Hunt said.
Lowry-Townsend’s term as tribal administrator culminated May 7 at the end of her one-year contract and following a ruling by the Lumbee Supreme Court that the tribal chairman could not extend the administrator’s contract without council consent.
Her stint as tribal administrator was the focus of another complaint addressed in the HUD report.
While the report stated that contract length and pay were matters best handled by the local Lumbee government, HUD found fault with Lowry-Townsend’s severance package, which would have required the tribe to pay the administrator twice her salary if her contract were terminated for any reason other than death or incapacitating disability, with no limit on how long payments would have to be made.
The report states the agreement is not “necessary and reasonable” and “would not have been agreed to by a prudent person mindful of the responsibilities to the tribe, tribal employees, the public at large and to the federal government.”
