On a Monday evening in late July, board members with the West Side Community Organization made clear to their executive committee that the proverbial writing was on the wall. Rather than be forced out of the executive committee, the board president, vice president and treasurer all resigned the board.

The board secretary and two other elected members stepped down days later, resulting in the departure of almost half of the neighborhood district council’s 13-member board.

Board elections, which are community driven, usually take place in November, but the late July shake-up drew an audience of some 20 or so residents, including state Rep. Maria Isa Perez-Vega and other longstanding West Siders rallied by an email alert. Several of them raised their voices as they accused the three top board members of attempting to fire longstanding executive director Monica Bravo.

The three members of the executive team repeatedly denied that was their intent in reviewing bylaws and hosting closed-door executive sessions without her, but the rest of the board — and many in the audience — felt otherwise.

“It was sad. It was very unusual,” said Bill Johnson, a business consultant and former board treasurer, who was among those forced to resign their position last month. He read a statement to the room accusing the organization of racism.

Within moments of their three resignations, two of their most vocal critics were appointed to the executive board in their place, including new board president Amanda Otis and treasurer Sebastian Ellefson.

Otis said Tuesday that she and other board members had repeatedly attempted to work cooperatively with the executive committee.

“In many attempts to get clarity, I was just met with no conversation,” said Otis, calling accusations of racism misplaced. “There was no transparency.”

Three members depart

As the three dispatched board members left the room, some audience members cheered, hooted and clapped. Not lost on the departing members was the fact that all three of them were Black, leaving behind a board that is now all white or Latino.

As one of the city’s 17 official neighborhood district councils, WSCO derives some of its funding directly from the city, and represents community concerns to St Paul’s City Hall. Its mission statement calls for building “collective power to advance justice and racial equity in the community for all people.”

Myisha Holley, who until July 22 had been board president, recalled comments from the audience indicating that the West Side “was ‘our side, and you’re just a visitor here,’” she said. The racial overtones, she said, were hurtful. Her own daughter served on the board at the time but would later resign.

”My kids were raised here,” Holley said.

GillEtté Kinnon-Williams, who had served as the board’s vice president, also felt that the meeting grew to be racially charged. “It was not normal,” said. “It was not productive. … It was chaotic.”

Board secretary Laurie Sovell resigned Aug. 9 after questioning why the community had turned on its Black board leaders with such vitriol. In her two-page letter of resignation, she said that while she disagreed with some of the executive committee’s “style of leadership,” she did not feel the committee had wanted to fire Bravo.

“Why was I, the sole white person on the executive team, the only member of the team NOT invited to resign at the July 22nd board meeting?” she wrote.

“It was a really emotionally charged and hostile room,” said Sovell on Monday, noting the discussion would have benefited from a mediator.

Public statement

In response to media inquiry, Bravo and Otis co-signed a public statement on Aug. 13 acknowledging that the July 22 meeting “got out of hand” and that a facilitator would have “added structure in addressing this difficult conversation.” The two maintained, however, that the former WSCO executive committee “undertook an interpretation of the bylaws that interfered with the day-to-day operations of the organization and excluded the executive director.”

“After continued requests for clarity were not answered, we asked our executive team to voluntarily step down from their executive positions,” reads their statement. “This decision was not made lightly and was driven by an urgent need to address internal dysfunction and the continued lack of due process.”

Since July 22, two of the district council’s paid staff members have given their notice. Among them was Mayra Avila, the community organization’s tenants rights organizer. Avila had played a key role in rallying Spanish-speaking tenants of low-income housing to support ballot approval of the citywide rent control ordinance in 2021.

“My experience, how I’ve been treated, how I saw that, the board that questioned Monica was forced to resign,” said Avila in a recent interview, shortly before leaving the organization. “That’s the same for me. I don’t feel like I can question anything in the role that I’m in, or put up boundaries or even ask for a raise.”

On July 22, “there was a lot of screaming, shouting,” she said. Within days, her manager also gave her two-week notice.

Beyond Otis, efforts to reach members of the new board for comment were unsuccessful. Ellefson on Aug. 16 sent an email referring all media questions to Bravo.

A gradual, then sudden, unraveling

During the previous year, Johnson, the former board treasurer and small business consultant, had raised questions about what he described as the organization’s touch-and-go finances, and he hoped to move some of WSCO’s funds into interest-bearing accounts through Ameriprise or another financial institution. It was an effort he said his board supported but Bravo opposed.

Johnson had also raised questions about limited community outreach outside the West Side’s historically Mexican-American community. The “WSCO charter is to represent the peoples of the West Side,” he said. “This group never seeks or speaks to the Somali, Black or Asian communities.”

Some board members have noted the irony of the council’s implosion at a time when it should have been celebrating a milestone. In mid-July, the community organization unveiled an 80-page consultant’s report on the history of the West Side Flats, which was hard-hit by flooding in 1952.

More than 2,100 people — most of them Mexican-American — were forced to relocate, according to the study’s findings, and the Port Authority eventually installed a flood wall, inviting industry rather than residents to occupy the land where homes once stood. A paid community advisory group met for 18 months prior to the release of the report, which calls for a variety of reparations.

In response, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter has proposed expanding a Rondo-based homebuyer program known as the “Inheritance Fund” to include the descendants of displaced families from the West Side Flats.

Together with payments to the advisory group, the “Flats to the Future” report, prepared by consultants Research in Action, cost more than $325,000 in grant funding, a sum that took some board members aback. “This high quality quantitative and qualitative participatory research is worth every penny spent and has already yielded returns,” said Bravo last Friday.

Kinnon-Williams felt the report, while well-written, compiled information that was largely well-trod territory.

“I don’t think they dug up any more (details) to serve the needs of the community,” she said. “That study cost too much money … without having a true measurement of what results we wanted, other than to say we studied it. That money could have supported the community in a different way.”

Otis, who is Caucasian and has children with her Latin partner, said Johnson in particular was “very dismissive” of the “Flats to the Future” project, as well as a proposed Latino museum on the West Side.

“Bill was just very forward focused, which has its spot too,” she said. “There was so much missed potential to work together and to work on the future of WSCO, and be educated on the deep, rich history of the West Side.”

Kinnon-Williams, who had previously served on west metro boards related to Hennepin County Northwest Suburbs, Community Action for Suburban Hennepin and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, said she and other members of the executive team had several concerns with WSCO’s organizational structure. They supported Bravo’s request to take a three-month paid sabbatical last summer.

Conflicts didn’t arise, she said, until the executive committee began probing the possibility of a “different type of executive director staffing with a co-leadership structure.”

“We were asked to go to community events, but I didn’t see any programming other than a housing program that had been picked up by a staff member,” Kinnon-Williams said. “I was just very vocal about making some changes to support staff and the executive director. … It wasn’t a strong board. It wasn’t a functional board. It was so foreign to what I was used to.”

Kinnon-Williams felt the board’s executive officers should set the agenda for monthly meetings, rather than the executive director, who did not have a vote and should attend meetings on an invite-only basis.

“We found that she set the agenda and we just kind of fell into it,” she said.

A staff conflict

Avila, the tenant organizer, said she had sought a substantial raise that better reflected her work with tenants in two languages. Avila presented her case in writing at the recommendation of WSCO’s human resources staff, only to later discover her proposal had been rewritten into an entirely new job description, at less pay than what she had requested.

It called for creating “strategy for environmental justice, for community care, and running local, state and national campaigns,” Avila said. “I’d be responsible for everything I was already doing and more.”

A fellowship Avila sought to fund through the national Tenant Union Federation would have allowed her to hire an apprentice from the community, whom she could train in housing advocacy. “I had a timeline. We talked to HR. We talked to our tenant union leaders. My manager was at every meeting,” said Avila, who tapped a key volunteer for the role.

The volunteer signed on the agreement Avila had drawn up, but Avila said a WSCO administrator later told her to hold off and asked for access to a copy.

Avila came back from vacation three days later to discover the document had been altered with what her administrator described to her as minor edits.

“When I opened up the new agreement, it wasn’t minor edits,” she said. “Many things had changed. … It looked like a contract. (The apprentice) would have to work some weekends, some nights. Sometimes she would have to work more than 20 hours, but only get paid 20 hours. It seemed like it was an organizational apprenticeship, not just learning about tenants but a bit of administrative work and learning about environmental justice.”

“I thought I had done the right thing,” Avila added. “I thought I had talked to the people I needed to talk to, and that it had been approved by Monica.”

Avila said she was told to translate the new fellowship agreement in written Spanish for her new apprentice, but she declined. “I’m not supposed to be translating anything, especially a legal document,” she said.

Holley — a housing coordinator in her professional life — was soon roped into conversations as board chair. Holley called Avila to ask that the fellowship be paused while details were worked out. On July 8, Bravo sent an email declaring the apprenticeship was on hold due to financial considerations and until a payment process was established, she said.

“WSCO has very clear financial and signatory processes,” Bravo said. “Unfortunately for all involved, these processes and policies were not followed, resulting in a fellowship agreement that was null and void.”

Efforts to sort out the details soon triggered blowback on all sides.

Bravo said she received written indication from the board chair on July 8 to “cancel a specific scheduled human resources personnel meeting, and I was notified at that time that I should no longer attend executive team meetings.”

In a joint statement, Holley, Kinnon-Williams and Johnson said “our executive committee needed space to discuss the unclear fellowship contract and rising concerns revealed by looking into this matter, including staff concerns.”

About 10 days later, as the “Flats to the Future” report was made public, the board held a closed-door emergency meeting to sort out why Bravo’s role was being diminished. Otis noted employee grievances are supposed to be reviewed by a sub-committee of the full board under the bylaws, and that had not happened.

On July 22, before a sizable audience, three executive members resigned their seats. On Aug. 1, Avila gave her notice, as did her manager, and then Holley’s daughter, and then Sovell, the board secretary, and then another board member.

“While decisions by members of the executive team … do not align with my style of leadership, and I question the executive team’s interpretation of the WSCO by-laws, I feel the reaction by the E.D., some members of the board, and some community members to these decisions was more emotional and drastic than was justified,” wrote Sovell, in her Aug. 9 letter of resignation.

During the July 22 meeting, the executive committee “did not get a chance to speak,” Sovell added. “It felt to me like the exact thing that they were being accused of doing was done to them.”

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