The Heidelberg Project is under fire again -- figuratively this time.
This is from a staff profiles album at the project's Facebook page.
Investigative reporter Steve Neavling, writing at his Motor City Muckraker blog, looked at the nonprofit's publicly posted tax records. He raises pointed questions about its financial priorities and, separately, its level of openness to Detroit Fire Department arson detectives.
A Motor City Muckraker investigation has found that the Heidelberg Project has transformed from a volunteer-driven organization focused on art installations to one that spends more than $190,000 a year – most of its budget – on four full-time employees, three part-timers and two contract workers. . . .
Very little of its annual $200,000 budget was dedicated to the art project and its diminishing properties, an analysis of the nonprofit’s tax records shows. Of the 50 parcels in the two-block area, just four belong to the Heidelberg Project after losing homes to foreclosures.
Now authorities say the project’s artist, Tyree Guyton, and his wife, Executive Director Jenenne Whitfield, aren’t cooperating with arson investigators from the ATF and Detroit Fire Department after six of the eight art-studded houses were destroyed by arson since November.
“They are saying a lot to the public, but they haven’t been very cooperative,” according to a high-level fire official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. “We need to talk with them.”
Whitfield denies she and Guyton have stopped cooperating.
“Of course that is not true,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Why we would we do that?”
Whitfield, whose annual pay as executive director jumped from $1,000 in 2009 to $61,000 in 2012, declined to answer follow-up questions.
A Motor City Muckraker investigation has found that the Heidelberg Project has transformed from a volunteer-driven organization focused on art installations to one that spends more than $190,000 a year – most of its budget – on four full-time employees, three part-timers and two contract workers.
Neavling, a Free Press reporter from 2-006-12, labels his expose a the first part of an ongoing series.
Below is a four-minute fund-raising video by the project last fall, posted as part of a month-long Indiegogo drive that raised $54,280 before Christmas.
-- Alan Stamm
