City awards $110,000 grant despite risk assessment’s warning

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Water was pouring into the William H. Carney Lodge — enough to fill a barrel during some storms.

This little clubhouse in New Bedford’s West End was a gathering place for the city’s African American and West Indian communities for decades. But it’s been empty since 2020, and two years ago the displaced club’s members started pleading with the city for funding to replace the leaking roof so they could move back in. Without it, they said, the water damage threatened to compromise the structure beyond repair.

The city swept in with $110,000 of pandemic relief funds in December, funding the roof replacement and other renovation costs. Then, earlier this year, the city’s Community Preservation Committee recommended another grant of $215,000 for fire safety and energy efficiency upgrades.

But a New Bedford Light investigation found that city officials proceeded despite an internal report warning that it was a risky project.

A routine risk assessment for the first grant said a representative of the Carney Lodge lied repeatedly and refused to follow federal laws. The organization hadn’t filed its tax returns for several years when it applied for the funding, leading the IRS to revoke its nonprofit status.

The assessment concluded with a grave warning, that the organization “cannot be entrusted to manage federal funds.”

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Mayor Jon Mitchell approved the grant anyway, outside a competitive application process that other vacant property projects underwent.

City officials did not agree to be interviewed. In written statements, they said they disagreed with the risk assessment and provided a “relatively modest” grant of pandemic relief funding to revive an important space for the community.

The city’s public information officer did not directly address repeated follow-up questions about the risk assessment and process for awarding the grant.

The Carney Lodge, founded in 1915, is the local chapter of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, which calls itself the “largest Black fraternal organization in the world.”

Lodge members admitted that their organization was in disarray last year, though they have worked to fix the issues over the past few months. Its nonprofit status was reinstated last fall.

“We are an upfront organization,” said William Andrews, the lodge’s president.

A risky grant

Before the city officially awarded the Carney Lodge its pandemic relief grant, an internal city report completed in November warned that it was a high-risk project.

The city routinely conducted risk assessments on projects receiving federal pandemic relief funds. These reports evaluated the risk that a project would fail to meet its goals or comply with requirements. The Light obtained 13 of these risk assessments through public records requests.

The Carney Lodge assessment stood out. Not only did it receive the highest risk score of the 11 projects graded on the same scale, but no other assessments included warnings as stark or as detailed.

It said that Margaret Mott, a representative for the lodge, provided “repeated and blatant misrepresentation of facts” in emails and “adamantly refuses to follow federal procurement law.”

The fact that federal pandemic relief money was funding most of the lodge’s project also increased its risk, the report said. The organization’s failure to file its tax returns for multiple consecutive years was enough to automatically earn the project a high-risk score.

Jennifer Maxwell, the city auditor who prepared the report, declined to comment for this story. She resigned from her position in January, according to the city’s personnel department.

In an email to The Light, Mott said she never lied or refused to follow the law. She wrote that the assessment’s “accusations” were “baseless.”

“I had to fight tooth and nail for that funding,” she said in a brief phone interview on March 31. 

She ended the interview before a Light reporter could ask for more detail about the “misrepresentations” described in the report. She did not agree to a second interview.

It’s not clear what facts Mott, the lodge representative, may have misrepresented during the risk assessment process. The report doesn’t provide detailed examples.

City officials did not answer questions about which facts Mott allegedly misrepresented. City Chief Operating Officer Christina Connelly provided a one-sentence written response to The Light’s question asking for details on them: “I don’t know specifically what is being referred to here,” she said.

Public Information Officer Jonathan Darling wrote in a statement that “the City” disagreed with the assessment’s conclusions. He said there’s risk in any investment and that the city mitigated risks for this project by paying vendors directly instead of giving the money to the organization, and by inspecting the work.

The city officially awarded the grant on Dec. 15, two weeks before the city’s deadline to finalize its pandemic relief spending. Between 2021 and 2024, the city committed $82 million in federal grant money to various projects using its allocation from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Since then, the Carney Lodge’s roof has been replaced, and the next step is to replace the interior ceilings, the project manager said. 

Two letters

The Carney Lodge renovation did not have to go through a competitive process to receive its grant, unlike many other construction projects around the city that received pandemic relief funding.

The lodge sent a letter to the city’s chief operating officer asking for $110,000 last June, city documents show. Less than a month later, the mayor wrote back with a conditional award of $85,000 in pandemic relief funds. That number later grew to $110,000, the lodge’s full request.

This is the first time the city has disclosed that it provided a pandemic relief grant outside of a competitive application process.

Connelly, who oversees the city’s pandemic relief spending, had said in previous interviews that the city chose grant recipients by issuing requests for proposals, or RFPs. Each RFP invited organizations to apply for funding in a specific category, such as housing or child care, and required projects to meet certain criteria. An internal city team or committee approved or denied the applications. 

At first, officials told The Light in two written responses that the lodge received the grant through the “Vacant and Abandoned Property program,” though not through an RFP. 

But the Carney Lodge project did not come close to meeting the requirements listed for the program in a 2022 announcement.

Those projects needed to have a budget of at least $750,000, about seven times the size of the lodge’s request. And the program couldn’t fund more than 50% of project costs — but the Carney Lodge project was mostly funded by the pandemic relief grant at the time. The program’s application window closed at the end of 2022, more than a year before the lodge applied for funding.

A committee reflecting “a mix of perspectives” reviewed vacant-property applications and recommended which ones to fund. But the Carney Lodge project bypassed the committee. After receiving the lodge’s letter, Connelly recommended the grant to the mayor, who approved it.

After The Light asked for more information, Darling updated the city’s response and said the grant was actually awarded through the The Vacant or Abandoned Property Rehabilitation Fund, not the The Vacant or Abandoned Property Rehabilitation Program. He said the program was only one part of the fund, comparing it to slices of a larger pizza.

Darling did not respond to The Light’s request for documentation showing that the fund and program are separate entities.

Darling declined further comment in response to follow-up questions, including whether the city ever publicly advertised that projects could receive money from the fund outside an RFP, and how many organizations other than the Carney Lodge were awarded grants in this way.

Connelly said that the mayor has the authority to decide which organizations receive pandemic relief funding, and federal law doesn’t require the city to award the money through a competitive process. The city followed all federal requirements, Darling added.

A building in imminent danger

Members say the Carney Lodge was “an anchor in the neighborhood,” a gathering space and venue for birthday parties, wedding receptions, and cookouts before it closed during the pandemic — which is when the leaks started.

The century-old building was in imminent danger of becoming a total loss by late 2023, members wrote in funding applications. The wind and rain damaged the ceiling structure, floors, and wooden supports under the floor.

The Carney Lodge’s tax status had also deteriorated. The IRS automatically revoked the organization’s nonprofit designation in 2017 because it hadn’t filed a tax return in three years, according to the agency’s website.

The organization didn’t have any income, lodge president Andrews said, and the past treasurer who was “supposed to be taking care of that” wasn’t submitting the returns. The IRS reinstated the organization’s nonprofit status in September 2024 after it filed the proper paperwork.

But the missing tax returns didn’t stop the city’s Community Preservation Committee from awarding the lodge $25,000 in early 2024 for emergency roof repairs. A picture of the IRS revocation notice was included in the lodge’s application.

The committee makes recommendations to the City Council on how to spend the city’s Community Preservation Act funding, which comes from a surcharge on property tax bills.

Jessica Bailey, who manages the city’s Community Preservation Act funding, said in a statement that the funds were awarded despite the organization’s defunct tax status because applicants aren’t required to be nonprofits.

Another grant

Around the same time the risk assessment was finished in November, the city’s Community Preservation Committee started reviewing applications for the next funding cycle.

The Carney Lodge asked for $215,000 to fund safety and energy efficiency upgrades, on top of the earlier $25,000 grant for roof repairs. The lodge’s application said this second grant would fund a new fire suppression system, HVAC system, and insulation, and replace the building’s windows and doors.

There’s no evidence that the committee received a copy of the risk assessment as it decided whether to approve the lodge’s grant application.

Officials said the committee was aware of the pandemic relief grant. But the committee does not appear on a list of city departments that would have received a copy of the risk assessment.

Earlier this year, the committee recommended the lodge’s $215,000 funding request. The city council’s finance committee unanimously passed the grant with no discussion last month, referring it to the full council.

The council is set to vote on final approval of the Community Preservation Act grants on Thursday at 7 p.m. 

Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org

Editor’s note: This story was modified on Friday, April 11, 2025, to reflect that the William H. Carney Lodge, a local chapter of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, was founded in the West End of the city in 1915 by African Americans and West Indians. Cape Verdeans became involved in the organization many years after it was founded. The lodge is named after Sgt. William H. Carney, who served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War and was the first African American to receive the Medal of Honor.

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