"We set it up as a for-profit so that it could make money and then donate the money back, but at the rate we're going, I'm not sure it ever will," he said. "We basically want to break even."
In other words, Cantor said that the WFP, as a non-profit entity, had established a for-profit entity
in the hopes of turning money back to the non-profit.
And while he said WFP does not actively encourage its endorsed candidates to use DFS, he ruled out the idea of DFS being hired by candidates who had not been endorsed by the WFP.
"Why would we want to do that?" he said. "We want
to help people who share our values."
Repeatedly, Cantor pointed out what he saw as the parallels between the DFS operation and how the Bloomberg 2009 campaign hires staff and companies to promote the mayor's re-election. He also made repeated references to his belief that DFS working on behalf only of WFP-endorsed candidates was the same as when other political parties or candidates contract companies specializing in either Republican or Democratic campaign work.
Of course, those companies are not owned by the parties, nor do they operate out of parties' headquarters, as Cantor confirmed that DFS has long been doing, and as the address on payments from WFP to DFS at 2 Nevins Street reported in state campaign finance disclosures show. Cantor said that Short, as a consequence of his illness, had moved away and was no longer a resident of 612 2nd Street. Indeed, the pinkish-brown, three-story row house on the quiet Park Slope street now has a piece of tape by the doorbell appearing to list the resident as "Timoney." The residence appears to be occupied, at least judging by the lights that were on and the number of potted plants filled with pink flowers on premises when the property was examined from the street on August 6.
When asked if DFS pays rent to the WFP for use of its office space, Cantor said, "of course."
When pointed out to him that no money shows up as coming into the WFP from DFS for this or other purposes on the WFP disclosure report, he said, "they pay it to the landlord ...' If they pay their fair share of the rent, you're asking, we have by square foot we measure, and the answer is yes."
In addition, he said that DFS pays WFP for use of the phone system and copy machines.
"You should think of them like a department of ours," he said. "We don't run this thing, but everybody knows this was created by us toward the goal of fighting toward a more decent society."
He said he sees no contradiction between thinking of DFS as a department of WFP or as the distinct corporate entity which it was filed as with the state Department of Corporations.
DFS has no listed phone number and has no website. No list of the people on DFS payroll, which Cantor numbered at 142 now at the height of campaign season, is publicly available.
One person, though, who seems to know about the inner workings of DFS is Bill Lipton, the WFP deputy director, who spoke on the company's behalf to the New York Times for an article published last October.
Reached at his desk on the evening of August 6, Lipton agreed to an interview, saying he had a couple of minutes to talk. Then, after being told that the topic was Data and Field Services, he responded with a nervous laugh and one-word answer: "Fuck!"
Lipton then said that he had no time to talk and would be referring all the calls to Cantor.
"It's not that complicated, but I've got an appointment," he said, trying to end the conversation.
Asked whether that meant he was unfamiliar with what DFS does, Lipton said, "it's not that I don't know anything, it's just that I'm running out and I don't have all the information that you want."
Lipton refused to answer any questions about whether he was an employee of DFS or not. Asked if he knew whether he himself was an employee of DFS, Lipton said, "I do. But I'd like to have somebody give you a call back."
Lipton returned a follow-up email asking him to clarify his employment status with DFS by referring questions to Cantor.
Lipton was not the only WFP staff member whose openness quickly evaporated when the topic of Data and Field Services was broached.
Calls to the main line at WFP headquarters on August 7 asking to reach Data and Field Services were transferred to Kristina Andreotta, the WFP canvas director.
Andreotta initially indicated her willingness to talk. But when she was told that the call was in reference to Data and Field Services, she too refused to answer questions and said the call should be routed through the communications department. She did not know whether she was supposed to talk to reporters without approval from that staff, Andreotta said.
When pressed to confirm her employment with DFS, she said, "I am an employee of Data and Field Services, yes."
When asked for her title or whether she was in charge of the company, she said she was putting the call on hold. About 30 seconds later, she came back on to say she would be transferring the call to the communications department. The call was then disconnected.
After being pressed for an answer to the question for days, Cantor finally said that there is significant overlap between DFS and WFP staff. Even he has trouble keeping track of who works for which entity when. As for whether there is DFS money going to WFP press secretary Dan Levitan, for example, Cantor said he "might be one of these people who might getting some, depending on what he's doing. People do different things at different times of the year--yes, he definitely has gotten paid by DFS at certain times of the year."
Levitan directed calls about DFS to Cantor.
"At any given moment, there are some people there, some administrative people for example, who work for both," Cantor explained. "Data entry, and some people who get paid by both. People often have two jobs. You know that."
Cantor said he did not think that Lipton was an employee of DFS, but indicated that he thought Lipton might receive a very small payment from the company. As for Andreotta, Cantor said he was pretty sure she is now just a DFS employee.
Over the course of several conversations, Cantor seemed to only be able to identify WFP staff as DFS employees after being told what kind of work that person was performing. He was unable to provide any hard and fast rules demarcating between the two despite being pressed repeatedly to do so.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB) requires campaigns to keep and show copies of all contracts with vendors, to prove that there are agreed-upon fees for particular services. The CFB even provides timesheets for employees of contractors to use. However, because these documents are used in the post-election audits the CFB conducts for every campaign, they are considered material in pending investigations and not available for public review. In fact, the CFB does not necessarily even request copies of these contracts until after the election.
"When someone switches over to a campaign, they're paid 100 percent by the campaign. The money routes through DFS and then to a paymaster [payroll company]," he said explaining that the checks which are issued to employees of both DFS and WFP "are funded from different sources at different times of the year."
Such paychecks, Cantor said, do not appear any different, nor is there any marking on them that indicates which dollars are being paid on behalf of DFS work and which on behalf of WFP work. There is not even a marking on the checks which says whether they are drawing on DFS or WFP funds, Cantor said, though adding later that everything is "fully documented."
Several times, Cantor said that the going rate for DFS organizers was $82 per day, or what he estimated as $30-40,000 annually. Notably, this would mean that most DFS employees would be making significantly higher salaries than WFP employees if there were separate staff. Cantor said there are 15 current WFP staff members. With the WFP sending $215,448 to its payroll company, Prestige Employee Administrators, in the first six months of the year, suggests that the WFP's cumulative payroll payments will be $431,000 for 2009. Accounting for approximated payroll taxes which would be included in the money sent to Prestige but not part of the salaries, that would peg the average annual salary of WFP employees at $25,666. This assumes that Cantor, Lipton and other WFP higher-ups, who are presumably among the 15-employee head count Cantor provided, are all on the exact same salary level. Since their salaries are likely higher, the average for the rest of the staff salaries must be lower.
In other words, WFP employees seem to be making salaries in the very low $20s, perhaps even lower, unless they are simultaneously being paid from some other source.
The WFP made just $37,000 in payments to The Hartford during this same period to cover employee benefits. The WFP often brags about its employees' benefits packages being better than what others provide.
The lines between WFP and DFS expenditures are blurry on more than just staffing costs, however. They go to expenditures as well.
Cantor said that the $554,629 in wages paid from the WFP to DFS so far in 2009 reported on the July WFP disclosure report were to cover the costs of canvassers to fundraise for the WFP and raise awareness on issues including "the importance of taxing the wealthy instead of cutting crucial services, campaign finance reform, health care and green jobs." He said that these costs--which spiked in February and then again in May, June and July--were to cover operations in Suffolk, Nassau and Rockland counties.
Asked whether he was able to provide an hour-by-hour breakdown of the work, Cantor said he could.
"I'm not interested in doing it,"he said. "If you have people that you want to know how much they get paid, I suppose I could tell you, but I don't like putting people's shit on the street."
Despite repeated requests to see the "perfect records" of DFS activity Cantor said he could access, he did not provide any specific information or documentation about the canvasses' locations, dates, hours involved or staff hired.
During this same period in the first six months of the year, the WFP spent $42,755 on rental cars charged to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, with rental costs spiking for bills paid in February, at $13,579, and in June, at $15,034. Though Cantor said he was unfamiliar with the specific rental car charges, he said he was confident the cars had been used to transport canvassers working on health care, green jobs and "fair share tax reform." In other words, while the WFP was paying wages to DFS to cover staff costs, the WFP was itself paying for the rental cars that staff would use, splitting the expenditures as if there is no difference between the two entities.
Neither Cantor nor others at the WFP provided responses to questions asking them to account for several costs listed as wages or expenses which had addresses but no names attached, nor why the names had were missing from the disclosure report. A total of $862 in wages and $14,257 in expenses (several listed as travel reimbursements) makes up these unattributed expenditures, along with $210.59 marked as costs for literature, $2,224.10 for fundraising and $1,500 for consulting.
Cantor declined comment on these charges.
BobbyC
