Jamie Beletz might have been known as a political operator when he took over the Pierce County charity Gateways for Youth and Families, but he also had a track record of running nonprofit organizations.

It wasn’t good.

At a Kansas trade group, he exited five months into a 26-month employment contract and, according to its former director, left behind a financially troubled organization.

More recently, he was fired as the head of a Tacoma-based business incubator group amid charges of impropriety.

In 1995, Beletz took a job as director of membership services for the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions. The nonprofit, then based in Lawrence, Kan., is an association of government agencies that administer and regulate workers’ compensation acts.

George Gomez, the former director of the Kansas state Division of Workers’ Compensation, hired him. Beletz worked under Gomez as the assistant director of the state agency.

When Gomez left the organization in December 1998, it didn’t have any money problems, Gomez said without offering specifics. A review of the organization’s financial statements shows it was still solvent in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1998, with $77,339 in net assets.

Beletz became interim executive director when Gomez left. In November 1999 the “interim” title was dropped. His future wife, Mel Curtiss, became deputy director.

In March 2000, five months into Beletz’s 26-month employment contract, the board president negotiated a severance agreement in which Beletz agreed to leave his $75,000-a-year position. The agreement gave Beletz three months of paid administrative leave and included a nondisparagement clause in which representatives of the association promised to not say anything bad about him.

When his successor, Gregory Krohm, took over, the organization was in deep financial trouble, Krohm said. It was $226,000 in debt as of June 30, 2000, according to the organization’s 1999 IRS Form 990.

Several board members from Beletz’s tenure declined to talk in detail about him, saying they didn’t believe they were allowed to.

Krohm said there were a lot of “goofy financial issues” when he took over. For example, he said Beletz set up a foundation called the Center for Workers’ Compensation Studies while Beletz worked at the association. It wasn’t clear to Krohm what it was or why it existed.

According to the program for a 2000 conference of the National Occupational Injury Research Symposium, where Beletz and Melody Cathey were listed as speakers, the Center for Workers’ Compensation Studies was established to “supplement the IAIABC committee research work and meet their educational and scientific research efforts.”

In April 2004, the Internal Revenue Service included the Center for Workers’ Compensation Studies, then based in Lacey (where Beletz was living at the time) on a list of organizations that either failed to establish or had been unable to maintain their status as public charities or operating foundations.

BACK IN WASHINGTON

Beletz apparently left Kansas in 2000 and returned to Washington, where he had gone to college at Western Washington University, and worked in the 1980s as a staffer at the state House of Representatives.

He found work again, serving briefly in early 2001 as executive director of the state Democratic Campaign Committee, and later on Bill Baarsma’s Tacoma mayoral campaign.

Baarsma said he scrambled to hire a new campaign manager when his first manager resigned unexpectedly. He learned of Beletz through friends in the Democratic Party. Beletz did a good job through the election, the mayor said.

But after the election, Beletz began doing things that made Baarsma uneasy, including telling people that Beletz was going to be the mayor’s chief of staff. Baarsma said he had no authority to hire a chief of staff, and told Beletz as much.

“I’m not a strong mayor,” Baarsma said, referring to Tacoma’s city-manager form of government. After that, Beletz began pushing to change Tacoma’s form of government to a strong-mayor format, but the effort fizzled, Baarsma said. Eventually, the mayor lost contact with Beletz.

In December 2001, Beletz got another chance to run a nonprofit organization when he became executive director of the Washington Association of Small Business Incubators (WASBI). The board of directors of the newly formed association elected Beletz as its first executive director.

A few years later, things ended badly there, too. And once again, there were questions about money.

By the fall of 2004, Tim Strege – director of a small-business incubator in Tacoma and a member of the WASBI board – began having run-ins with Beletz. On the surface, it appeared that Beletz’s embrace of Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi was the reason for the friction. Strege is a prominent Democrat, and the incubator had received funding from a Democratic governor. Beletz made a radio ad for Rossi as an example of a Democrat favoring Rossi, at the same time he housed his business at the incubator.

But e-mails between Beletz and WASBI board members, and e-mails and other correspondence between the incubator association and the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED) show there were other problems, too.

WASBI had been hired by the state to prepare a report about small-business incubators in Washington. The state agreed to pay $50,000. Beletz, as WASBI executive director, hired Seattle lobbyist Lincoln Ferris for $22,500 to help with the report. After a while, Ferris started complaining about not being paid, and his complaints raised concern among WASBI board members.

In December 2004, board member Jim Thomas sent Strege an e-mail saying, “Tim, do you have any knowledge of what’s going on with the check book for WASBI. I paid Jamie $5,000 on 8/31/04 and another $5,000 on 10/15/04 for consulting. He said this is the same amount he received from you for using Lincoln as a consultant. Do we have a handle on the WASBI expenditures at this time or is this something we need to bring before the Board of Directors?

“These e-mails from Lincoln are starting to give me a bad feeling in regards to our fiduciary responsibilities,” Thomas added.

A few days later, Thomas went directly to Beletz with his concerns, sending an e-mail with the subject line “Financial House in Order?”

“Jamie, I have a question in regards to the financial condition of WASBI,” Thomas wrote. “Those e-mails from Lincoln have left me feeling uncomfortable about the financial matters of WASBI. Can you assure the WASBI board that our financial house is in order?”

Beletz replied, criticizing Ferris for allegedly failing to perform his duties, and defending his own management of the organization.

“I’m not averse to having our books open for board members and such,” Beletz wrote. “It’s my responsibility to do it. … What I am averse to is having former subcontractors tarnish my image with colleagues and people asserting that we may have a bigger scandal at WASBI than the ‘Gregoire v. Rossi’ fiasco. If anyone has a problem with the way I do business, they should come to me first.”

The WASBI board fired Beletz. In a March 16, 2005, letter, it alleged that Beletz double-paid himself on reimbursements from the CTED, and forged Strege’s signature on at least two occasions.

A SHADOW GROUP

Beletz didn’t leave quietly – he attempted to create a new organization with the same name. He went to the Tri-Cities in April 2005 and held a shadow board meeting of WASBI complete with officer elections. Minutes of the meeting show the group discussing his “attempted firing.” Afterward, Beletz sent out a news release announcing his election as WASBI board president, and he sent letters to state agencies purporting to represent the association.

Over at the real WASBI, Strege and Ferris spent months tracking Beletz’s moves and attempting to undo them. They refiled articles of incorporation with the secretary of state, wrote to the state Public Disclosure Commission, and attempted to sort out the mess with CTED officials.

On April 27, 2005, Ferris – who replaced Beletz as WASBI executive director – sent an e-mail to Victor Vasquez, director of the economic development division at the CTED, informing him that Beletz had been terminated for, among other reasons, falsifying invoices to the CTED under the terms of the incubator study contract.

“Mr. Beletz submitted vouchers for payment to CTED that required the countersignatures of Mr. Strege as president of WASBI,” Ferris wrote. “The invoices dated November 5, 2004 and February 3, 2005 were never signed by Tim Strege, to which he will attest, but carry what appears to be a copy of his signature. We believe that Strege’s signature was forged on these invoices.”

Ferris also alleged that Beletz wrote checks to himself on WASBI’s checking account, effectively double-paying himself for work related to the CTED contract.

The News Tribune has obtained copies of two checks written on WASBI’s bank account made out to Jamie Beletz and signed by Jamie Beletz, and one check to Innovial – Beletz’s consulting company – signed by Beletz.

“We believe that Mr. Beletz has unlawfully enriched himself at the expense of CTED and WASBI,” Ferris wrote.

The controversy got the attention of state officials, who held off making a final payment to WASBI until they could sort it out. The state finally concluded that its contract was with the non-Beletz WASBI and made the final payment.

Despite the allegations of fraud and forgery, state officials didn’t go beyond trying to determine where to send the last check for the incubator study. They considered it an employment dispute between Beletz and WASBI, said Dara Fredericksen, managing director of the state’s community economic assistance center.

Beletz continued running the fake WASBI awhile longer. In August 2005, Beletz advertised for an executive director for the association. Applicants were instructed to send information to the “WASBI Executive Director Search Committee” located on North Bristol Street. The address is that of Beletz’s Tacoma house.

In September 2005, an attorney for the real WASBI sent Beletz a cease-and-desist letter telling him to stop telling people he represented the association, and demanding the return of bank statements and other financial records that Beletz took from the organization.

In December 2005, Beletz finally stopped saying he was part of WASBI, according to a copy of his résumé supplied to The News Tribune by a former Gateways employee.

He didn’t need to claim the title. He was about to become the paid president of Gateways for Youth and Families.