WHERE do we start?

With the Fort Worth Way, where else?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram article is very telling.  Though it’s like telling the same story over and over again.

A council member who was the only paid member of the nonprofit in 2010.  A board member is the sister of said city council member.  The city repaying over $220,000 to the government.  The city wanting to shut the nonprofit down.  HUD, Jay Chapa, TAD, economic development, floods, missing documents, mineral rights, gas leases…Just another day in Fort Worth.

The nonprofit, United Riverside Rebuilding Corp., would have to shut down and surrender mineral rights.


"We have no problem giving them the property," Phyllis Allen, a board member and sister of Gray, said for the board.

"But how the city can decide we need to cease to exist is beyond me," she said. "We're independent."

The dispute hinges on two homes United Riverside built and sold. In May 2006, United Riverside, with Gray as director, accepted $287,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development money administered by the city's housing department.

United Riverside maintained that it sent the documentation early on but that the originals were later destroyed by a flood in its offices. The city has said it never received the documents.

Through April last year, the city has repaid the government about $700,000 on grants made from 1994 to 2006, Chapa said. During that period, the city made grants to nine organizations under the program and repaid money to the government in cases related to seven, he said.

The total money the city distributed to the organizations involved: likely more than $5 million, Chapa said.