Northwest Area Foundation sued for pulling out of project in Yakima Valley

By: Robert Franklin, Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 5, 2002

When a foundation decides to pull the plug on a project, is that the end  of it?

In the case of the Northwest Area Foundation of St. Paul and a group of citizens in the Yakima Valley of central Washington, maybe not. A volunteer who claims to have put in hundreds of hours helping to plan a multimillion-dollar antipoverty program has filed suit against the foundation, saying it breached a "unilateral" contract when it ended planning for the project. Northwest Area says it will fight the suit.

The foundation, which works in eight states once served by the Great Northern Railway, has embarked on a plan to pump $150 million into about 16 communities to fight poverty during the next decade. The idea is to show what concentrated resources can do in a few geographic communities -- or communities of interest -- with great need and great opportunity for a long-term, sustainable future.

Northwest Area already has formed partnerships in rural South Dakota, central Oregon and with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. It has engaged in a planning process in north Minneapolis.

But Northwest Area ended the same sort of planning in the Yakima Valley in August, saying the three parts of the valley seemed unwilling to work toward the regional approach that the foundation wanted -- a statement some volunteers denied.

Some residents were angry. Julio Romero, an agricultural worker, filed a class-action suit last month in Yakima County Superior Court on behalf of himself and more than 300 other volunteers.

He asked that the foundation be required to give community groups the $1.25 million it "promised" to support the planning process to its completion, as well as triple damages for unfair and deceptive acts under the state Consumer Protection Act, plus attorney fees.

The volunteers, seeing "an unprecedented opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their children," put in thousands of hours, sometimes taking time off from work for daylong meetings, traveling 40 miles or more
and paying for child care, the suit said.

The suit noted that a final plan would have to have been approved by the Northwest Area's president, Karl Stauber.

Ellery July, the foundation's director of community activities and learning, said Wednesday that "we don't make promises" like those suggested in the suit, didn't authorize anyone else to make such promises and sees no basis for the suit.

The foundation did spend more than $750,000 for consultants, translators and child care during more than two years of planning, he said.

After the planning was ended, the Associated Press reported that David Silva, a Yakima Valley consultant hired by Northwest Area, acknowledged that there was some divisiveness among established social-service agencies over the regional concept, but said the proposal had a lot of support from low-income Hispanics and American Indians.

-- Robert Franklin is at rfranklin@startribune.com.