Is Delta Senior Housing Communities (DSHC) truly a functioning organization?

The following quote seems appropriate given what I have to question.

“We tend to see the leadership vacuum issue arise when the nonprofit is really one person’s exercise.  There may be a board of directors, but they are uninvolved placeholders.” Why Nonprofits Fail.  Foundation Group 2022."
 https://www.501c3.org/top-5-reasons-why-nonprofits-fail/

 Prior to Delta Senior Housing Communities abandoning the Bretton Woods senior affordable project, about 70 low-income seniors had signed the interest list for DSHC units at Bretton Woods. Other names will have been added. I raise this with you because between 70-100 seniors are out there not knowing that DSHC has withdrawn. I sent the following apology and explanation to the local media two weeks ago.

 “I feel that I must ask the citizens and voters of Davis for your forgiveness relating to what did not happen with the 150-unit senior housing project assigned to Delta Senior Housing Communities (DSHC) at the Bretton Woods project. My apology is because in 2021 without a word to the City of Davis or the public, Bill Powell and DSHC abandoned the four yearlong effort to build affordable senior housing at Bretton Woods. 

 From 2016 through 2021, I worked tirelessly on behalf of Delta Senior Housing Communities, Inc. (DSHC) to win passage of Measure J. (approval of what is now Bretton Woods). If Measure J passed, then DSHC would be given five acres of land to build 150 units of low-income affordable senior housing. Although I asked Bill Powell, the President of DSHC, to help me win passage, he never did and in three years he did not attend any of the many neighborhood meetings or the twice weekly booth at the Davis Farmers Market. I think the DSHC President may have attended one event but in that four-year campaign, the other three DSCH officers/board members never attended any event (Kelly Ramos VP, Blayney Breckenridge, Secretary and Sue Tarleton, Treasurer).  During that time, I began to think that DSHC was moribund as the board of a non-profit tax-exempt entity.

In 2021, I received a letter from Bill Powell, the President of DSHC, that the board no longer wanted me to work on the project. With one short letter, my almost 20-year service to DSHC came to an end. And that was it. After four years of gaining the support of the Davis public that they would be building 150 units of affordable senior housing, DSHC vanished from public view. 

No apologies to the Davis public, who supported the West Davis project, who voted for it, who wrote letters in support and who testified at public meetings. No DSHC apology to between possibly 70-100 or so Davis residents who put their names on the Bretton Woods Interest List for affordable senior housing and no effort to contact them either. There are Davis seniors out there who still think they have an opportunity to move into DSHC housing. This neglect is unacceptable.

Lacking a response to the community from DSHC, I now feel I need to apologize to the citizens of Davis.

What type of a board is DSHC to abandon low-income seniors and disappear from public view without a word of apology to the citizens of Davis and no communication to the seniors on the list for four years after a citywide vote in 2018?

For the past three years, to learn about what DSHC is doing, I have asked the President and Secretary of DSHC to provide me with the annual IRS Form 990 they are legally required to submit, without response from DSHC.

 As DSHC has chosen not to explain or apologize I will."

At some point, this will come up as on their web site Mercy Housing informs the public that they have not yet started an interest list.

The question that remains is: “Is DSHC a truly functioning organization?”

I recently asked a number of the organizations that monitor the conduct of tax-exempt nonprofit 501 c 3 to look at DSHC re questions about DSHC's seeming corporate inactivity, lack of standards of board governance and oversight, lack of adequate corporate record keeping, possible acts of perjury, and I ask the question, “Is it a one-man show with an unengaged board that possibly neglects to ask for or receive critical corporate reports and records?”

David J Thompson

These are my own remarks and not representative of any other entity.