What the hell are you smoking? Are you insane? What have you done with the real R. Neal?

Also, one thing that has been claimed during this shit-flinging session is that KTSC only books Convention Center events 14 months or more in advance. Inside 14 months, SMG handles bookings. If that is true, what portion of the blame for CC operating losses can be fairly placed at KTSC's feet?

I keep thinking about SMG executives watching this mess and laughing quite nervously. A lot of people want to kick KTSC to the curb, but if they are replaced with a private, for-profit firm, the level of transparency will drop to somewhere between opaque and SuperPAC. Others seem to think KTSC feeds from the same trough as Ijams, KAT Senior Riders, Beck Center, etc, which is not true. The only place where money has been freed up for other purposes is on KTSC's balance sheet.

I don't see where anything constructive has been accomplished. Plenty of destructive politics, though.

"...any conduct of Ray that is seriously prejudicial to the best interest of KTSC, that violates KTSC's mission, that brings KTSC into disrepute" as grounds for termination with cause."

This part is hilarious. Channel Stephen Colbert for a minute. "When you sign a contract and the terms of that contract end up making the KTSC look bad, you have brought the KTSC into disrepute by agreeing to the terms they offered you. Your conduct in accepting money KTSC authorized, that later leads to serious questions about how your agreement with KTSC violates KTSC's mission, is all the cause they need to terminate you. Any public relations major will tell you: That's just basic contract law!"

One more time and then I've got devote time to other things.
Plus, there's too much that still isn't clear here, and I don't feel that a forum such as this is the best place to address the issue in much more detail.

Randy - you may well be correct about the legal technicalities surrounding Gloria's contract and compensation. And there seems to be quite a bit of responsibility to be shared on what has been allowed to happen here and why.

But still, as my mama has always stressed, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

I would also argue that Gloria, as Executive Director, had and has an ethical and moral obligation to the mission of KTSC. And there are manyt legitimate questions about how the organization operated, how decisions were made, how priorities were set, the percentage of $$$ going to salaries vs to the mission of the organization, conflicts of interest, sweetheart deals, etc etc. that still need to be more fully assessed and addressed. This is not all about Gloria, but it's also about the board, how they have exercised their fiduciary responsibilities, and the basic structure of the organization and how it is funded and why.

As an example...and I still haven't seen the exact documentation of this so I'm uncertain of the details...I've only heard from some journalists...But it appears that KTSC was receiving income and perhaps even basing bonuses on events that they not only had absolutely nothing to do with bringing to town, but in fact refused to offer any support for whatsoever. If this is true - and I've also heard this regarding events that I had nothing do with myself - then I have a problem with this (whether technically allowed by contract or not). Especially when, on the few occasions we've approached them to support a worthwhile activity, we have always been told that they "don't have any money" to support it.

KTSC may well have accomplished some great, worthy things in our community. But there are many who feel that they've also neglected supporting many other events and opportunities. And ideas and appeals for engagement have never been received with open arms. Instead, it would seem that KTSC has been allowed to operate as something akin to a private fiefdom.

Hopefully, the events of the past couple of weeks will lead to a positive change. Personally, I think this will be very good for our community. We'll see.

Have a great weekend!

Randy, I agree with you on what I think is your primary point: Gloria Ray is being made the fall guy for failures, oversights and poor performance by those ultimately responsible for this organization - its Board, and more specifically, its Exec Committee.

However, I find it pretty hard to believe that Ms. Ray was unaware of what appears to have been a totally disengaged Board and Exec Committee when she negotiated these outrageous deals for herself over and over. Did she have a legal right to take advantage of a Board that was asleep at the wheel, exploiting their lack of oversight to her own financial benefit? Probably so. But that doesn't make her behavior ethical, nor was she serving the best interests of the organization or the community in exploiting the Board's willful ignorance. Also, I do not see Ms. Ray's failure to disclose her BCBS Board membership as a minor problem. I see it as a very major one.

Basically, we had a very expensive,quasi- governmental agency that was functionally disconnected from the real local government systems that provide some basic checks and balances and accountability, and that's how this was allowed to get to this point.

On a related note, we have the exact same type of situation with the way Knox County contracts with for profit vendor University Pathologists to provide Medical Examiner services to the tune of $970,000 annually. The only difference is that the services being provided are far more sensitive and important, and the money paying the bill comes out of general coubty tax revenue rather than a special set aside tax. Just try finding the "Office of the Knox County Medical Examiner" on the official Knox Co org chart. Try figuring out who in Knox Co. Government oversees the ME's office. Try finding any quarterly reports by the ME's office. Try finding any meaningful or specific documentation of how the nearly $1 million annually we pay University Pathologists is broken out and spent. Heck, try pretending you are a bereaved Knox County citizen who needs to get in touch with the Office of the ME, and try even finding a phone number or email address thru which to make such a contact. Good luck with that.

If anyone (media, blogger, public official or concerned citizen) would like a copy of a comprehensive brief I've written making the case that the ME's office is operating as a rogue shadow department of county government with no functional oversight or accountability, email me at kagnotify@gmail.com and I will be pleased to email you the document, along with a copy of the county's current contract with University Pathologists. It's a situation that will look very familiar to anyone who has followed the unfolding KTSC story in recent weeks.

-Katie Allison Granju
Knoxville, TN

Also, I do not see Ms. Ray's failure to disclose her BCBS Board membership as a minor problem. I see it as a very major one.

There are a lot of murky things in this whole deal I don't have totally sorted out, but two things are clear to me: 1) the board, especially the executive committee, didn't perform their duties, and 2) Ray absolutely had a duty to report the BCBS board membership. She didn't.

I cannot wait until this city/county grows up and quits the behind the door contracts with the insiders be they good ole girls or good ole boys.

This whole thing stinks.

Presumably, the City and County performed such calculations as part of their due diligence regarding the amounts they paid under their contracts.

Apparently not.

Knoxville News Sentinel:

The city of Knoxville has no records of Knoxville Tourism and Sports Corp. performance reviews before it has given money to the marketing group under the current contract, which has been about $1 million a year since 2008.

[..]

The group, using its own formulas presented to the city, claimed to have brought more than $134 million in economic impact in 2011-12. A spokesman from the city said that evaluations were handled via discussion.

The city was supposed to have a formula, quarterly meetings and an annual review of over/under payments. None of that appears to have happened, or at least the city can't produce any records. Sounds like Haslam can go in the blame barrel now, too. Rogero appears to be addressing the problems.

I don't post on the KNS web site, where it has been decreed that Gloria Ray falsely claims to have hired Pat Summitt. They're having lots of fun branding her a liar.

And they're wrong.

Pat Summitt was here, but she was a barely-paid graduate assistant. The previous coach left, and she inherited the program, with a 'salary' that just just peanuts. Pat got an offer from Kentucky and she was ready to move on, until Gloria Ray persuaded her to stay. I've heard them both tell the story.

Here's an excerpt from a Metro Pulse story I wrote about her in 1996, when her empire consisted of the Sports Corp.................................................................................................

"It's quite natural that she should have more than an average fan's interest in the games. She was there in the beginning, as UT's first women's athletic director, hired away in 1977 from Mississippi College for Women where she coached tennis and basketball. She held the job until 1984, and is commonly credited with laying the foundation for what is now one of the premier women's athletics programs in the country. She has an undergraduate degree from East Tennessee State University, a master's from UT.

It was Ray who long ago named the Lady Volunteers, and it was Ray who persuaded Pat Head, a 22-year-old part-time coach and graduate assistant who'd just about decided to move on to a place where they took women's athletics seriously that Tennessee was fixing to do just that.

"I told Pat, 'You need to stay around and see if things aren't different,'" Ray says. "That's not to say that the people who came before me couldn't have done it, but the university gave me the structure to grow."

Ray counts Pat Head Summitt, who sits on the Sports Corporation's board of directors, as "a dear friend," but she says the relationship was not without its sharp edges. Peculiar things can happen when two fierce competitors take road trips together.

Like the time Ray and Summitt rode together to Sneedville for a banquet in a high school gymnasium and got into an argument over what they'd probably have for dinner. Summitt said ham, Ray said roast beef. The discussion grew so heated that they drew up a chart predicting the whole meal: entree, vegetable, drink and dessert. Their hosts were there to greet them when they arrived, and Ray laughs when she recalls what happened.

"We both jumped out of the car and yelled 'What's for dinner?' They must have thought we hadn't eaten in days."

R.Neal said:

Have you been able to determine if the following (from the city's contract, 1.3.b) occurred and was documented by the city?

Yes, those things all occurred.

On documentation, see the prior post. As with most contracts, the record of services received is the payment of the invoices.

One thing that has been nagging me of late is the fact of the "volunteer board". Given the numbers being thrown around, $134million in economic impact for the city/county -$400k in CEO compensation - several tens of employees, why is it a volunteer board? Is that normal procedure? Should there not at least be a per meeting honorarium? What is the CEO of BCBST paid? If Ray is getting $90k a year to sit on their board, how does she justify a non-compensated board for her own organization? Would it not be better for the city/county for the board to have "some skin in the game"?

Somebody explain to an uneducated poor kid from East Knoxville how come it is working this way.

Oh, shit, Dupree

Yahoos all over the internet are trashing the board members and saying they should return their pay.
You're deploring the fact that they served for free.
Whatever the problems were up there in the executive committee, how the hell are we going to get people to serve on non-profit boards in the future, if they're going to be subject to this kind of unfiltered abuse?

I'm no fan of this economic impact figure that measured the effectiveness of the KTSC. Nor am I a fan of Ms. Rays salary being tied to hotel/motel revenue.

That being said, if there was a flaw in the design of the operation and compensation system of the KTSC wouldn't it make more sense to just put all the cards on the table, say "We didn't anticipate these variables", and start over from scratch ?

This is starting to seem like a lynch mob and crucifixion over something that, frankly, has been available for public consumption for quite some time. I've never been a huge fan of the way KTSC operates, but this reaction is way overboard.

What did y'all think was gonna happen?

According to the people that run it, the convention center was "not built to make money".
(link...)

If there still is to be a KTSC after all this, set up incentives based on CC occupancy rate, not the unquantifiable hotel/motel occupancy rate the incentives are based on now. Same for events that the KTSC specifically brings in. Count heads, not beds.

KTSC is being taken to task for acting as a pass-through for county funds that ended up in the hands of multiple nonprofits, including KMA, Dogwood Arts, Kuumba, the zoo and Rossini.

County Commission approved paying KTSC $2.47M in their 2008 budget, based on projected tax collections. Actual hotel/motel collections came in 7% shy. Rather than making KTSC rebate the $185k, Ragsdale told them to donate it to local tourism-related charities. They did.

Now they are "in trouble" for this horrible action. So who pays back the money if this alleged irregularity turns out to be anything more than scandal mongering? The zoo or Ragsdale?