Money for Nothing

But almost from the very beginning, the trust fund was under attack: In 1992, then-Councilman Chris Luna suggested to his colleagues that they kill the fund, which he (and others, though less vocally) believed to be little more than a private slush fund for council member Charlotte Mayes, who beat Ragsdale in the 1991 council election. Mayes made it easier for folks to get those grants, which they didn't have to pay back, and some on the council, like Luna, believed Mayes used the trust fund "to reward campaign supporters in a fierce battle to retain her council seat," according to a March 11, 1993, story in The Dallas Morning News. Mayes, who served four terms on the council and died last year of leukemia, denied the allegations, and for his efforts, Luna was branded a "Tio Taco" by then-Councilman Al Lipscomb.

Back then, both private businesses and nonprofits were eligible for grants they didn't have to pay back. And it seemed to work, too, especially for small business owners to whom $10,000 was a fortune--like, say, Henry Smith, who owned Eagle Trophies on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard till he retired last year. According to former fund Chairman Caraway, Smith took his $10,000 and bought an engraving machine, which meant that no longer would he have to do everything by hand.

"He said to me, 'Thank you, son, now I can bid on contracts,'" Caraway recalls. "And he would be up in his shop late at night--he was on top of Grant's Barber Shop--and you could hear the computerized machine buzzing. It cost him $7,000, but look how that money was used. It changed his entire business and his entire life." (Smith, who closed his shop last year, couldn't be reached for this story.)

Albert Black Jr. got such a grant from the trust fund in 1991, when he moved his On-Target Janitorial Services from Rowlett to Logan Street off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Black, who had grown up in Frasier Courts housing projects and whose father worked as a doorman downtown, used the money to hire new employees and renovate the building, which, he says now, "wasn't much, but back then, every day, man, we were waiting for something good to take place." Black would eventually get his master's degree at the SMU Cox School of Business, change the business from janitorial services to a business supply and service company and open offices in Houston and San Antonio.

"The impact [of the $10,000 grant] is still something we consider very, very important to us," says Black, who in 2000 became the first African-American to chair the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce board of directors. "It created a momentum we're still building on. The trust fund was a catalyst for turning three employees into the largest African-American employer in the region--we have 169 full-time employees--and we think that's the kind of impact that allows us to say we've delivered. You're supposed to employ people with that money, add to the tax base. And I realize our story is not what the reputation of the fund is, and we may be a unique story, but it's not a story that can't be replicated over and over again. We expected to do real well because of the support we received from the trust fund, and we believed we were going to be held accountable if we did not deliver."

Five years after Black got his grant, business was so good that he renovated another warehouse, this time a 160,000-square-foot building on South Madison Avenue--in Oak Cliff, where it's well out of the area served by the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund.

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There is an obvious question: How is it one man can create a multimillion-dollar business out of $10,000 and another can find himself bankrupt, or at least on the desk of the city attorney, with $50,000 in his pocket?

To answer it, perhaps you must go back to 1993, when the city council was forced to overhaul the trust fund when it was revealed that its all-volunteer board approved 49 grants that it couldn't afford to pay out, lest the thing go broke. There was another problem, too: It had become too easy for businesses to get the grants and harder for nonprofits. The fund, wrote Lori Stahl in the News, had shifted "away from its grassroots focus," which the council fixed by making businesses ineligible for grants they didn't have to pay back. Now they would be allowed to borrow as much as $20,000 from the fund. Meanwhile, Fair Park-area residents could get grants for home improvements, and nonprofits could get anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 over a three-year period.

Not that Caraway believed it needed to be fixed. "When I was on the board it was moving forward," he says. "Since that time it's taken a dive." Nevertheless, for a while it appeared the trust fund could be trusted.