JACKSONVILLE, Ala. – The middle-age parents, unmistakable in their Boy Scout leader browns and khakis, clumped outside a training meeting here, their worries spilling out. These are troubled days for the grown-ups at the Scout get-togethers sprinkled among the churches, back yards and schoolhouses of Alabama’s rolling northeast.
Federal subpoenas have been flying around. FBI agents have been asking questions, and the administrators at the Boy Scouts’ Greater Alabama Council headquarters in Birmingham have had to tell hundreds of volunteers that their 22-county organization is under federal investigation.
Volunteers say paid Scout leaders have created fictitious “ghost units” for years to pump up membership numbers to trick donor groups and charities, including the United Way, into giving them more money.
In some cases, the alleged membership scams don’t even appear to have been very clever. Volunteer Tom Willis, a 1960s Eagle Scout who is also the father of two Eagle Scouts, says he was presented with a roster for a supposed group of 30 youths in Fort Payne, Ala. – each with the last name Doe.
“It seems to go against the basic things Scouts are about: trustworthy, loyal … trustworthy, most of all,” volunteer Susan Backus said as the stragglers trickled out of the Jacksonville training meeting.
String of scandals
The uproar in Alabama, the latest in a string of at least five bogus-membership scandals in Boy Scout councils nationwide since the 1990s, has exposed tension between unpaid volunteers and the professionals who are paid – sometimes handsomely – to run Boy Scout programs.
The United Way of Central Alabama, which received a subpoena and is one of several chapters that contributed money to the Greater Alabama Council, has given more than $6 million to the council in the past five years. Big membership numbers can translate to big donations, promotions and pay raises, many volunteers say, providing temptation for ambitious Scout leaders to engage in creative accounting.
“Just because these people call themselves Boy Scout professionals doesn’t mean they’re going to adhere to the principles of the Boy Scouts,” said Ralph Stark, a volunteer in Locust Fork, Ala. “They’re playing the game of a business person.”
Stark and other Boy Scout volunteers here describe a high-pressure recruiting environment. Boy Scout enrollment has been declining at the same time that the organization has been dealing with lingering controversies about the dismissal of gay and atheist Scout leaders. The number of youths in scouting programs – including Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts and coed Venturing groups – dropped more than 5 percent in 2003 from the year before to 3.2 million, according to Boy Scout statistics.
Manipulating numbers
The decline worries Backus and Stark, who volunteer 20 hours a week and rave about the impact they say Boy Scout programs can have on young people, particularly those without solid “family or religious” foundations. But the possible manipulation of numbers, both here and elsewhere, worries them more.
The Boy Scouts have a long history of membership imbroglios. In the mid-1970s, a large council in Chicago was caught boosting minority enrollment figures. During the 1990s, councils in Los Angeles, Vicksburg, Miss., and Jacksonville, Fla., were tangled in ghost-unit controversies.
In the past few months, as the Alabama case has grown from suspicions to a publicly acknowledged investigation, a civil rights leader in Atlanta has accused local Boy Scout leaders of falsifying minority enrollment figures to get more grant money. U.S. Postal Service investigators and a federal grand jury in Dallas have looked into allegations as recently as 2003 that a large Boy Scout council manipulated membership numbers.
“It can’t be happening in so many parts of the country unless there’s pressure from the top,” Willis said.
A common denominator in the Dallas and Alabama cases is Ronnie Holmes, the top-ranking executive in the Greater Alabama Council, one of four Boy Scout councils in the state. Holmes was a regional administrator when allegations of numbers fixing arose in Dallas in 2000. Dale Draper, a Dallas Boy Scout employee who discovered the phony membership figures, said his concerns were “swept under the rug” by Holmes during an internal audit.
“Before they did the audit, he told me, ‘I can tell you, we won’t find anything,’” said Draper, now a Scout volunteer in Utah. “It seemed like the good-old-boy network.”
Volunteers blanched after finding this year that Holmes was paid $221,369 in 2003 – more than eight times the $26,735 median household income in Birmingham and significantly more than other Alabama Scout executives, who made $82,000 to $145,800 in the same year.
Randy Haines, a Compass Bank executive and incoming chairman of the Greater Alabama Council’s volunteer board, declined to discuss any aspect of the organization’s publicly disclosed finances or to say whether the council has hired a criminal defense lawyer. Haines said he is unaware of manipulated numbers.
Backus, one of the volunteers, said membership scams have been an “open secret” for years in Alabama. They even had nicknames. One was called “Up and Out” and involved signing up Scouts near the end of the year, then double-counting them as new members on the rolls of that year and the next, she said. Volunteers also talk of getting long lists of units with fake names from council headquarters and from midlevel district executives. Backus ran across the problem seven years ago when she tried to contact unit leaders about a Cub Scout day camp.
“They’d say, ‘That pack has been dead for years,’” she recalled. “You’re seeing all these units on paper, but you’re not seeing any people. … You can only blame it on bad record-keeping for so long.”
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