A local AIDS nonprofit has payment problems with a former employee. How far do the problems go?

In October of last year, Mary K Mart hung up her red wig and high heels. She was done hosting drag-bingo fundraising events for a nonprofit she’d worked with for 12 years.

In October of this year, Mary, the alter ego of Randy Light, received a cease-and-desist letter from her former employer’s attorney, demanding that he stop disparaging the organization.

“You are entitled to your own opinions and to broadcast them far and wide,” Sarah L. Ford, an attorney with Parker Poe, wrote on Oct. 28. “But the law does not allow you to make damaging statements (verbally or in print) that you know to be false.”

There’s no question that the outspoken Light has made and continues to make disparaging statements about the Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolinaon Facebook, on the nonprofit’s Guidestar page, to the local media. The issue is whether those statements are, in fact, false.

Light’s central allegation, that the nonprofit owes him and other employees money, is an agreed-upon fact. But on social media, Light has portrayed the alliance as a shambles, plagued by an indifferent board of directors and declining revenues and unwilling or unable to meet its obligations. The nonprofit, on the other hand, says it’s getting back on its feet, and Light’s online vitriol isn’t helping.

Since 1989, the alliance has provided care, prevention and advocacy services to people living with HIV/AIDS. For most of its existence, the alliance’s reputation has been sterling; the drag bingos and other events it has hosted, along with grants from the state and local governments, have raised millions of dollars that go to case management, housing and feeding people with HIV, and providing free HIV testing and prevention advice. But after the Great Recession took hold, fundraising dried up, and by 2014, this once-renowned charitya Raleigh-based institution that in 2012 had an operating budget of $2 millionhit the rocks. After an accounting scandal in which the alliance fell behind on its payroll taxes by nearly $210,000, the state and Wake County pulled roughly $400,000 in funding in September 2014. The alliance was forced to furlough its staff for nearly two months, and now its leaders are trying to rebuild.

Light, meanwhile, has been complaining loudly that the nonprofit is more than a year late in paying him $1,465 in accrued vacation time. The nonprofit’s board chairperson, Melanie Dubis, acknowledges that this is true. She says the alliance will pay Light and nine other employees who are owed money before the end of this year.

But Light says that’s not good enough. “I wish the agency the best, I hope they continue to grow and thrive and provide these needed services,” he says. “But they should have already taken care of the folks who were with them a year ago when they were going through this huge financial crisis.”

If anything, the cease-and-desist letter made him all the more adamant that the alliance be called to account.

“I feel I have been as patient and quiet as I need to be at this point,” Light wrote last month to alliance board member Barbara Boney Campbell in a private Facebook message, which he then supplied to the INDY. “I have lost faith in many in this community… and will continue to post as I see necessary… and I have taken the high road only to be disrespected.”

“You know that you don’t look as good as you could when you write about it on Facebook for other people to see,” Campbell replied. “Airing dirty laundry in public is never the right thing to do.”

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This dispute likely wouldn’t have come to light if Mary K Mart weren’t a well-known staple of the Triangle’s LGBTQ community. In 2003, the alliance approached her to host drag-bingo events throughout the area. In 2010, Light was hired as a full-time event planner tasked with assisting in the production of all the alliance’s fundraising events, including several drag bingos per year, an annual AIDS Walk and an art auction.

Soon after he was hired, though, Light says he noticed the alliance was having difficulties. Donors and volunteers were no longer attending the group’s biggest events.

“The reputation of the alliance wasn’t very favorable in the community,” Light says. He lays the blame on then-executive director John Paul Womble. “Morale was low. It wasn’t a happy environment.”

Womble disputes Light’s characterization. He says the organization was in a transitional period, but “the morale of employees was not low to my recollection, in any way, form or fashion.” During his tenure, he says, the alliance was “doing well with volunteers, not losing them.” The financial difficulties, he continues, were the result of the recession. (Womble resigned in June 2012 over differences with some board members.)

Current alliance board members, however, fault Light for the decline in donor funds.

According to Dubis, the alliance raised more than $476,000 in the year before Light was hired. Three years later, it raised just $148,779.

“That gives you a little flavor of how the financial difficulties arose and accumulated over time,” Dubis says. “The development department over which Mr. Light was in charge was not bringing in the same amount of money that had been brought in in the past.”

Regardless of whose fault it was, the agency was in a full-blown financial crisis by the end of 2012. When Dubis was elected to the board in November 2013, the agency had debts totaling $206,466, not including the $200,000-plus it owed the IRS for missed payroll taxes.

Dubis says the alliance began repaying the IRS beginning in April 2014. By September, awaiting reimbursement for more than $200,000 from the state and Wake County for services already administered, the agency did not have enough cash on hand to continue operating; Wake County terminated its contracts with the alliance. Dubis says the current amount of IRS debt is approximately $74,000.

Amid the turmoil, the agency put all of its employees, including Light, on furlough. Light went to work for another agency, the Chatham Social Health Council, effective Oct. 1, 2014, according to Dubis. (Light says he didn’t resign from the alliance until December).

But Light’s involvement with the CHSC stretched back to at least May 2014. That month, Light and the CSCH’s executive director, Ricky Duckwho is married to Stacy Duck, the alliance’s executive director from June 2012 to December 2014signed an agreement stating that the alliance, when it was financially stable, would reimburse the CSHC for help with two upcoming drag-bingo fundraisers. The events happenedone in August 2014 at the state fairground, and one in October 2014 at Koka Booth Amphitheatre. But Ricky Duck says he never got $5,000 that he was owed.

Dubis counters that she “questions the veracity of the agreement.” Light didn’t have the authority to sign it, she says, and it wasn’t cleared beforehand with the board. Stacy Duck, however, claims she received an email from a board member granting Light permission to sign the document.

Either way, the alliance has no plans to reimburse the former CHSC, which is now called Wellness & Education Community Action Health Network, or WECAHN.

By winter, Light had soured on his former employer. “[The board members] were saying, ‘Oh well, we’ll never work with Mary K Mart anymore,” Light says. “But they didn’t mind working with me for 12 years.”

And so Mary K Mart took to her widely followed Facebook page. She posted messages that, to Dubis, were “inappropriate at minimum”insinuating that an alliance drag bingo host looked like Elmer Fudd, for example.

But, unpaid vacation time aside, Dubis says she doesn’t understand how the relationship between the alliance and Light became so embittered.

“People in the sandbox are throwing mud, and it doesn’t serve any purpose from a social standpoint or from a community standpoint,” Dubis says. “This is significant, meaningful work that the alliance is doing.”

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The work may be meaningful, but the alliance is doing less of it. Its operating budget today is $500,000, a quarter of what it was a few years ago. Although the alliance no longer receives funds from Wake County, it still has three ongoing contracts with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services totaling $440,000: one for substance abuse counselling, another for HIV prevention and a third for intervention services. (The latter expires next month, though DHHS could renew it.)

A spokesperson from DHHS told the INDY that the state evaluates contracts on a case-by-case basis. The department reinstated contracts with the alliance in October 2014, when the nonprofit was deemed to be in good standing again by the state’s budget office. Sue Lynn Ledford, the director of Wake County’s Public Health Division, says that although the county is no longer funding the alliance, the agency and the county still work together “very nicely” on various projects and at testing sites.

“They are doing what they should be doing right now, trying to stabilize their base operation,” Ledford says. “It takes a bit of time after something like this to stabilize, but once it’s stable, they can begin delivering what they define as their core mission.”

This past September, the alliance hired a new executive director, Hector Salgado. Salgado makes no bones about the fact that he’s there to “restore the agency” financially, and that in trying to do so, the alliance has dredged up old enmity.

Since he was hired, he says, “We have been doing activities, testing events, Facebook publicity, in an attempt to do my job.” Indeed, the group’s Facebook page features posts almost every day about an upcoming holiday bingo event at the Durham Armory, a Thanksgiving food drive and free HIV/STD testing nights. It has garnered more than a thousand “likes.”

But with the good publicity has come the bad.

“This has kicked up a social media sandstorm where one or two people have gotten support saying we have a lot of funding because we are doing these events, or because I was hired,” Salgado says. And because the perception exists that the alliance has stabilized, people wonder why Light and others haven’t been paid. “The truth is we are still a struggling nonprofit providing vital services to our community.”

Like Dubis, Salgado says the alliance remains committed to paying its 10 former employees for their accrued vacation time by the end of the year. “There is one individual who says that’s not good enough, who wants to be paid before everyone else,” Salgado says. “Otherwise, we have no outstanding bills.”

Salgado also disputes Light’s charge that the alliance has lost credibility within the LGBTQ community. Even during the financial upheaval, he says, there was never a lapse in the services the agency provided. Since November 2014, Salgado says, the alliance has provided more than 300 counseling sessions, conducted more than 2,000 HIV tests and distributed more than 10,000 pounds of food to the community.

“We still collaborate with other former employees,” Salgado says. “Out of the 10 former employees owed [vacation pay], many are still volunteering and in communication with the understanding they will be paid. I think the negative publicity is unfortunate, but I am here for the rebirth of the alliance. The organization has made mistakes in the past, but we are making great strides toward the future.”

But the best way the alliance can look to the future, at least according to Light and Ricky Duck, is to pay up.

“What I don’t understand is, if they would just pay these 10 employees, pay my agency, pay [any other] agencies, all this would go away, and the alliance might actually have a good name in the future,” says Duck. “But as long as they keep dragging everybody through the mud, this could continue forever. None of us are willing to give up what is owed to us.”

Which prompts a larger question: With the loss of contracts, the budget cuts, the downsizing, the changing national environment for health care nonprofits and the bad publicity on top of it all, will the alliance be able to survive?

The alliance says it will. Womble, its former executive director, isn’t so sure.

“It can be done, but it will take an enormous amount of skill, time and energy, and I’m not sure the clock is on their side,” he says. “I pray it is, because the people who founded the alliance and worked with it for years did it with the right vision and compassion and nonjudgement. It was about service. I love that agency, and it just breaks my heart to see what’s happened.”

This article appeared in print with the headline “Dirty laundry”