Tuesday, February 20, 2007

UPDATED: Dirty laundry being aired in Deep Ellum

By Teresa Gubbins , Mike Orren

Updated 11:17 a.m., February 27, 2007

DALLAS — Two organizations in Deep Ellum are in the middle of a showdown, and one side has taken it public.

The dispute involves the Deep Ellum Association (side 1), which represents business owners and residents; and the Deep Ellum Foundation (side 2), which represents property owners.

In any other neighborhood, the dispute might be viewed as nothing more than a he-said-she-said deal. But in Deep Ellum, everything acquires a larger-than-life symbolism, especially when the conflict lies between stereotypes such as "money-grubbing landowners" vs. "self-righteous activist."

At the eye of the storm is Gianna Madrini, president of the Deep Ellum Association (DEA). Until she came along, the Association and the Foundation co-existed for about 10 years, with the Foundation granting a spot on its board to the Association in a sort of "let the little guy have a seat at the table" arrangement. Madrini's been on the board for the two years she's been president of the DEA.

Last Wednesday, after a confrontation between Madrini and Foundation president Barry Annino, the board tried to vote her out. (A vote was taken but the motion failed for lack of a unanimous vote.) Westdale, the realty company that was providing free office space to the DEA, barred them from the space and changed the locks.

That’s when the avalanche started: phone calls from Madrini, hints of misuse of city funds, an accusation that Annino had "threatened" her, and a letter that we posted on Friday from Madrini to Annino, calling for "clarification."

Contacted by phone, Annino explained that the locks on the offices were being changed because, "There were five keys out and the electric bill got a little weird ... It was time for regulation. We didn't know who was going in and out."

He went on to say that there’s never been a requirement to have an Association member on the Foundation's board.

"It's not an obligation on the Foundation board's part," he said. "It's the right thing to do."

When asked if the DEA might get back in good standing, Annino said, "What would be good is a change. That might be good. Sometimes you need a change."

A change in leadership? "Yeah, that might be nice," he said.

As for her claim that she'd been threatened, Annino replied, "I can see how she might think that. That's not the case. It's a matter of actions that are frustrating."

What actions?

"We need to keep that under the table," Annino said. "Sometimes it's just the chemistry."

Annino said he had nothing against Madrini, and that he recruited her to be president of the Association.

"I asked her to do it," he said, "because she brought a lot of good stuff to the table. Maybe she wants to be the boss. Maybe that's the problem. It just doesn't help the neighborhood."

"I think it’s that all these tough old guys don’t want me in their boys club," Madrini said. "They don't like me, I don't much care for them, either. But I don't think it's about that, I think it’s about our roles in representing and uplifting Deep Ellum. I live here, I'm a business owner, we own property here, I'm just really upset and disappointed in how they’ve been running the neighborhood so long."

While many in the neighborhood, such as Tanner Hockensmith, who is VP of the DEA, have praised Gianna for her dedication, Annino called her disorganized and often absent, claiming she spent a lot of time in New York. (Her cell phone has a 917 area code.)

Madrini didn't entirely disprove this when she neglected to return a number of phone calls for this story.

Foundation treasurer Ken Carlson, who works for Westdale, said that having her on the board was detrimental to getting anything done.

"It seemed like she had trouble understanding the difference between the roles of the Foundation and the Association," he said. "It got to the point where every one of our meetings would break into a fight."

In the short term, what’s at stake is the use of "Public Improvement District" funds, collected from Deep Ellum landowners and doled out to the Foundation by the city of Dallas. The Deep Ellum PID takes in $150,000 annually. The Foundation administers that money, including a consultant fee paid to Annino of $2,400 per month, plus salaries for a street-sweeper and part-time office assistant.

Madrini also charges that the PID money isn’t being spent in as timely a manner as it should.

Annino concedes that all the money was not spent, but says there is no explicit requirement that all the money be spent every year. To the contrary, he says that, "it's so little money that if you want to do anything big, you have to save it up every year. You've got to be prudent. The Board monitors the money and how it is spent. You have to justify spending it or saving it."

PID beneficiaries have included the Bark Park, a dog park that’s been a pet project of Annino’s; an event Madrini hosted called Lofty Living, for which she was given $2,500; and more recently, life in deep ellum, a church and art space that was granted $15,000.

It's hard to tell what exactly has been going on at the DEF meetings. Despite Annino's claims of everything the board does being exhaustively chronicled on the Deep Ellum website, the latest minutes available are from the May meeting and are pretty skimpy. We asked Annino when the minutes for the February 14 meeting would be available (before we knew about the letter from the DEA). He said it would be at least three weeks, "because I don't have my girl any more...It takes a lot of time to do."

Some folks are looking for extra-organizational solutions to Deep Ellum's problems. Pegasus News reader Sam Crutsinger started a Deep Ellum listserve in response to these contretemps:

"There are lots of normal people living down here who have no idea about all the turmoil happening around them and I want to bring that uncensored information directly to their email, straight from the mouth of the community," he wrote. "It won’t be packaged into biased articles or press releases. It won’t be limited to discussions only during scheduled meetings."

On Tuesday, Madrini was staging a cleaning-out of Association property from the Westdale office space, with video documentation planned, which she was optimistic would be covered by two local TV stations.

In the long run, disputes like this become grander given the area’s shifting sands, with the imminent DART rail line set to open in the neighborhood in 2009.

Conspiratorial theories have circulated that the property owners want the neighborhood to go to seed so they can cash out, leaving a massive development in their wake.

"They're not concerned about the here and now," Madrini said. "They just want us all to go away until DART comes in."

But there is also the inherently prismatic quality of this much-pondered neighborhood, whose personality and prospects look different to each person who views it.

"You have a diverse group of property owners, and it can be extremely different to get them on the same page for anything," said Carlson. "I think most of us just want the neighborhood to get better, plain and simple. You look around one day and you think, 'It’s getting better.' Then you find out the Gypsy Tea Room is closing down, Yahoo is moving out, and you say, 'No, it’s not.' But then the DART rail coming in seems like that should be a positive.

"But there is nothing being planned to say, 'Let's let this neighborhood fall apart'."

UPDATE: Unfair Park has an update from Gianna Madrini (babe, didn't you get our flowers?), who's decided to sever the Deep Ellum Association from the Foundation, and has founded some new entities: a Web site called savedeepellum.org (logo: a clenched fist. yeah!) and a new organization called D.E.E.P. with a MySpace page. They're planning a gallery walk on March 10 at 6 p.m. followed by a show at Club Dada.

Mayoral candidate Tom Leppert addressed Deep Ellum and DART in an interview yesterday.

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• Downtown Dallas > Deep Ellum

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