Your Signature Will Do, Counselor

Attorney Jane Muir, who recently became secretary of the War Memorial Youth Center Association, has written three polite pages defending the reverter clause. She can keep them. I don’t care whether the City’s reverter case is strong or weak. Truth be told, I don't much care about the reverter at all. What I care about is the entity on the receiving end of it, and whether its refusal to produce records that should be entirely innocuous is really an effort to bury past misconduct, the kind that might poison its own claim to a piece of public land.

For three straight years the Association stopped filing its taxes. Those same years, Kirk, who along with his wife and daughter enjoyed virtually unchecked control over the organization, was—how should I put this—drowning in a cesspool of financial trouble with three mortgages and a debt collector on his heels. Meanwhile, a six-figure investment account supposedly under professional management at Morgan Stanley, during years when the market more than doubled, somehow produced what amounted to no real gain at all.

So yeah, I want to see the bank statements and tax returns. That is the entire ask. Not a theory about the deed, not a lecture on donor intent, not a history lesson from someone with no appreciable history with the association. Just the statements and returns please.

For the life of me, I can’t understand Ms. Muir’s reluctance to produce them. As I’ve demonstrated repeatedly, the most reputable nonprofits on earth post their audited financials for anyone to read, gladly, as a matter of course. Yet here is Ms. Muir, waxing poetic about an organization whose existence she appears to have discovered only sometime in the last year, telling the public it has no right to see how its own donated money was handled—the same public from whom this Association solicited donations in the first place.

But fine. If that is how it is going to be, if the records must stay locked in a drawer, then let me offer Ms. Muir a way to back this organization without opening a single page to the rest of us.

Certify it.

She is an officer of the Association and a member of the Florida Bar. So let her, in writing and over her own signature, state that she has personally reviewed the Association’s bank activity and tax filings for the years in question and found the money properly handled and every obligation met. Forget public disclosures. Forget the statements. I’ll settle for just her name, her license, and a few short and clear sentences standing behind this organization the way she was so eager to stand behind it in her e-blast.

And if Ms. Muir feels she isn't the right person to certify this herself, there's an even easier path. She can hand the relevant records over to an independent, licensed CPA and let them confirm that the records contain no loans, no transfers, no distributions to members, and no activity that violates state or federal law or the Association's own bylaws over the years in question. It costs a fraction of a full audit, and I'd wager the City would even spring for it. That way the public gets the peace of mind it's after, and the Association still keeps its financials and tax records private—because Lord knows, a nonprofit that won't let the public see its books is always a sign that everything is on the up and up.

Come to think of it, one has to wonder why a proper review and certification hasn't happened already, if only as a matter of basic good practice. Pull the Association up on Sunbiz and you'll find it has weathered more churn than my stomach after a midnight run to Taco Bell. You'd think a new slate of officers would look at turnover like that and treat it as a red flag in its own right. You'd think they'd want a thorough review. And you'd think that if it came back clean, they'd be racing to wave the results in front of the very public whose faith, trust, and money they ostensibly value.

In any event, if Ms. Muir is willing to certify that the books are clean, then I, for one, will consider the matter settled.

And if she isn’t, either after her own review or a third party's, then, well, everyone will understand precisely what that means. It's one thing to vouch for an organization via a flowery paean. It's quite another to vouch for it in an attestation you signed as a lawyer.

The statements, counselor, or your signature. Either will do.