ProPublica

by Max Blau

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For the past several years, Georgia Power has gone to great lengths to skirt the federal rule requiring coal-fired power plants to safely dispose of massive amounts of toxic waste they produced.

But previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica show that the company’s efforts were more extensive than publicly known. Thousands of pages of internal government correspondence and corporate filings show how Georgia Power made an elaborate argument as to why it should be allowed to store waste produced before 2020 in a way that wouldn’t fully protect surrounding communities’ water supplies from contamination — and that would save the company potentially billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

In a series of closed-door meetings with state environmental regulators, the powerful utility even went so far as to challenge the definition of the word “infiltration” in relation to how groundwater can seep into disposal sites holding underground coal ash, according to documents obtained through multiple open records requests.

Earlier this month, Georgia Power was on its way to getting final approval from the state to leave 48 million tons of coal ash buried in unlined ponds — despite evidence that contaminants were leaking out. Georgia is one of three states that regulate how power companies safely dispose of decades worth of coal ash, rather than leaving such oversight to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself.

But last week, the EPA made clear that arguments like the ones Georgia Power has been making violate the intent of the coal ash rule, setting up a potential showdown among the federal agency, state regulators and the deep-pocketed power company. In a statement last week, the EPA said that waste disposal sites “cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater,” in order to ensure that “communities near these facilities have access to safe water for drinking and recreation.”

The EPA’s action follows a joint investigation by Georgia Health News and ProPublica that found Georgia Power has known for decades that the way it disposed of coal ash could be dangerous to neighboring communities.

“The coal ash rule was clear from the beginning, but industry had tried to inject uncertainty into plain language,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney who specializes in hazardous waste law for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice. “The EPA has made it crystal clear what the plain language of the coal ash rule means.”

Georgia’s environmental regulators said it’s too soon to determine exactly how the EPA’s actions will play out in the state. In a letter dated Jan. 11, the EPA asked the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to review whether coal ash permits it has issued to Georgia Power are “consistent” with the federal agency’s guidance. Georgia Environmental Protection Division spokesperson Kevin Chambers, who declined to answer questions about Georgia Power’s lobbying or make any regulators available for an interview, said that the state agency is “awaiting further clarification” from the EPA on how the announcement will impact future permits for Georgia Power’s ash ponds. The agencies are scheduled to meet about the issue later this month.

John Kraft, a spokesperson for Georgia Power, said in a statement that the company intends to “comply with environmental regulations.” The utility has repeatedly denied that its coal ash ponds have contaminated residents’ drinking water or caused health problems in communities near its plants. He declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the company’s lobbying efforts.

“We are evaluating EPA’s position,” Kraft said. “We will continue to work with them, as well as Georgia EPD, to safely close our ash ponds.”

Gloria Hammond at her home in Juliette, near Plant Scherer’s coal ash pond. (Rita Harper, special to ProPublica)

For those living near coal ash ponds, the EPA’s decision couldn’t come soon enough. Gloria Hammond, a longtime resident of the tiny rural town of Juliette, Georgia, relied for decades on a private drinking well to pump water to her home from an underground aquifer. But two years ago, a sample of her well water taken by an environmental advocacy group revealed unsafe levels of contaminants often found in coal ash. Now, Hammond drives 10 minutes to a Baptist church to access a supply of clean drinking water.

She and others suspect those contaminants leaked into Juliette’s groundwater from a nearby disposal site at Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired plant in the Western Hemisphere. The disposal site, less than a mile from Hammond’s house, holds nearly 16 million tons worth of coal ash in an unlined pond.

“They need to get the coal ash out of the drinking water,” Hammond said.

In early 2019, Chuck Mueller, GEPD’s top waste official, was grappling with a pivotal question that would impact thousands of Georgians for decades to come: How much of Georgia Power’s coal ash could legally remain buried in a pond without a protective liner? The utility had proposed disposing of 48 million tons — roughly half of its existing coal ash — that way. Mueller asked employees of his branch to figure out the answer.

After draining water from the ponds where ash is stored, Georgia Power is required to move the resulting dry ash into a landfill with a liner designed to prevent groundwater contamination — unless it can meet a set of requirements to leave the waste buried in an unlined disposal site.

The federal rule, which was enacted in 2015, allows utilities to bury the waste in an unlined ash pond only if they “control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the buried waste “to the maximum extent feasible.” Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator, says the rule is important because allowing water to mix with coal ash can lead to toxic heavy metals found in the waste migrating beyond the disposal site.

State regulators tasked with answering Mueller’s question read through dense Georgia Power filings and concluded that ash ponds at Plant Scherer, along with those at four other sites — Plants Hammond, McDonough, Wansley and Yates — contained waste that is submerged in groundwater, which some experts and regulators believe violates the federal coal ash rule.

Those findings were sent to one of Mueller’s top aides, William Cook, who oversees the state’s solid waste management program. Cook regularly met in private with Georgia Power representatives to get progress reports on the closure of the company’s ash ponds. That spring, Georgia Power representatives argued that state regulators could narrowly interpret the definition of a single word — “infiltration” — in the federal coal ash rule. The company believed this interpretation would allow millions of tons of waste to be left submerged in groundwater.

Georgia Power hoped to store coal ash in a way that only prevented water — such as rain falling from the sky — from seeping through a cover over the dry ash. They hoped regulators would disregard the presence of any groundwater that would soak the dry ash and potentially carry its heavy metals toward drinking wells.

Georgia Power representatives “believe that EPA would have written it in” if they wanted specific kinds of infiltration removed, Cook scribbled in his legal pad.

When Georgia Power representatives referenced an EPA document key to their understanding of “infiltration,” Cook asked his colleagues to review the document — which is 1,237 pages. They struggled to reconcile the case Georgia Power was making with the text of the regulation itself. John Sayer, head of environmental monitoring for the solid waste program, emailed his wife, an issues manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for advice on the meaning of the word “infiltration,” which he wrote had caused “contention” in this context.

Eventually, Sayer emailed a colleague that he’d found a federal report that noted “groundwater would qualify as infiltration.” But Georgia Power kept pressing GEPD officials to narrow its definition of infiltration to only include rainwater falling from the sky. After months of research by Sayer and other state employees, Mueller was left to make the decision.

Later that summer, Chris Bowers, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, sent Mueller a report that highlighted the flaws in Georgia Power’s plans. As part of the SELC report, a veteran hydrogeologist named Mark Hutson analyzed the plans for ash ponds at the five plants where waste was below the water table. Huston concluded those plans “will not control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the dry ash.

At a subsequent meeting with GEPD, Bowers shared another state’s approach to the meaning of infiltration. Duke Energy Indiana had asked state regulators to let the company bury coal ash in an unlined pond in the southwest part of that state. When state regulators realized Duke Energy Indiana had not described how it would comply with federal guidelines to prevent groundwater from wetting the dry waste, regulators told the company they would only approve the plan if the company could stop infiltration “from any direction.” (Duke Energy Indiana later responded that removing the ash could cause a “very high safety risk” at the site. State regulators ultimately allowed some coal ash to remain buried there, so long as the company took steps to minimize groundwater from soaking the waste.)

Environmental regulators in other states such as North Carolina have forced utilities to scrap plans that didn’t comply with this portion of the coal ash rule. But Georgia Power, as well another power company in Ohio, pushed ahead with their controversial plans. The financial stakes were high. At Plant Scherer alone, installing a liner could cost $1 billion, according to one state official.

“Georgia Power wanted to rewrite the rule to say there’s a limitation it doesn’t have,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with SELC. “It’s a preposterous proposal.”

One of Bowers’ clients, an environmental group called the Altamaha Riverkeeper, was grappling with this very issue in Juliette. The group soon discovered that water in the wells of Hammond and dozens of other Juliette residents contained concerning levels of contaminants found in coal ash. The group was worried that groundwater might be moving from the coal ash pond toward residents’ wells.

Fletcher Sams of the Altamaha Riverkeeper samples water near Plant Scherer for contaminant testing. (Max Blau/ProPublica)

After the test results were publicized, Fletcher Sams, head of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, attended a closed-door meeting in February 2020 with several Juliette residents, local officials, state lawmakers and Georgia Power lobbyists. (ProPublica and Georgia Health News described parts of the meeting in a story last year.) The environmental advocate told attendees that his samples had revealed concerning levels of boron, calcium and sulfate — all indicators of coal ash. There was also evidence of a contaminant researchers had linked to cancer, hexavalent chromium, which had previously been discovered in some California drinking wells by environmental advocate Erin Brockovich. Georgia Power has acknowledged the presence of boron, calcium and sulfate but said that the hexavalent chromium is “naturally occurring.”

Sams, along with the Juliette residents, hoped Georgia Power would excavate Plant Scherer’s coal ash and put it in a lined landfill. But Aaron Mitchell, one of the utility’s top environmental lobbyists, insisted the company’s plan complied with environmental standards. However, after being peppered with questions by Sams, Mitchell acknowledged that the coal ash would still be submerged in groundwater if its plan to bury the waste was approved by state regulators.

Hearing that, Sams turned to the lone state regulator in the room, Chuck Mueller. He asked Mueller if Georgia Power’s plans to let water come into contact with dry ash met the state’s environmental standards.

“It’s allowed by the rules,” Mueller replied.

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected president, he chose a new EPA administrator with deep knowledge about the perils of coal ash. Michael Regan was the head of the environmental agency in North Carolina, a state that had seen one of the nation’s worst coal ash disasters in 2014, when a ruptured pipe sent 39,000 tons of coal ash pouring into the Dan River. Six years later, Regan convinced the state’s largest utility to excavate coal ash from its unlined ponds, which was done in order to protect residents from possible groundwater contamination.

Following Regan’s confirmation, environmental advocates urged federal officials to address the language in the coal ash rule that Georgia Power had tried to exploit. GEPD pushed ahead with the narrower definition of infiltration.

In June 2021, three months after Georgia Health News and ProPublica’s investigation into Georgia Power’s coal ash handling practices in Juliette, EPA officials met with GEPD to discuss the issue of infiltration. According to records obtained by ProPublica, state regulators said that Georgia Power could leave waste below the water table because the company had placed monitoring wells around the edge of those ash ponds to detect if heavy metals were migrating toward nearby residents’ homes.

The following month, GEPD began the process of issuing permits for unlined ponds where ash would remain submerged in groundwater. State regulators issued a draft permit for the first of these sites, one of Plant Hammond’s ash ponds, a step that then allowed the public to comment on the closure plan. Chambers, the GEPD spokesperson, said that the agency used “the commonly accepted meaning of ‘infiltration’” — and determined that Georgia Power’s proposal was “allowable under the rule.”

Last week, the EPA rejected the premise that groundwater legally could remain in contact with the dry ash — a statement that will likely impact Georgia Power’s closure plans at Scherer and four other plant sites. In its letter to GEPD, the EPA urged the state regulators to review the reasons why the federal agency intended to deny a plan to bury waste at southeast Ohio’s General James M. Gavin Power Plant, one of the largest power stations in the country. In that proposed decision, the EPA noted that the plant operators had failed to demonstrate how their closure plan would prevent infiltration.

The EPA’s filing notes that “infiltration” explicitly means “any liquid passing into or through” the coal ash pond “from any direction, including the top, sides, and bottom of the unit.” To Sams, the EPA’s announcement means that Georgia Power and GEPD cannot move forward with an “incorrect interpretation” of the country’s coal ash regulation. The EPA “restated in bold-crayon-block letters what we’ve been saying: You can’t store this waste full of toxic metals in groundwater,” Sams said.

Meiburg, the former EPA deputy administrator, said utilities could still challenge the agency’s clarification on the concept of infiltration because it did not go through the full rule-making process. But if GEPD ultimately approves permits that are less protective than what the federal regulation requires, the EPA has the power to strip Georgia of its ability to issue permits, according to Evans, the Earthjustice attorney.

Gloria Hammond, for her part, sees the EPA’s announcement as an important first step toward someday restoring the quality of Juliette’s groundwater. In the coming months, GEPD is expected to make a decision about Georgia Power’s permit at Plant Scherer. After feeling long ignored by environmental regulators, she hopes that GEPD requires Georgia Power to remove the ash from Juliette’s aquifer for good.

“I’m praying Georgia will take that into consideration,” Hammond said. “I hope they follow the EPA.”

by Lydia DePillis and Derek Willis

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In May 2021, Terry Kilcrease thought he saw a lifeline. He was out of work, living in a hotel in Lewisville, Texas, when he ran across a promising ad on Facebook. People who worked for themselves, it said, could still get loans from the government’s then-13-month-old pandemic Paycheck Protection Program.

Kilcrease had just started selling credit card processing systems to small businesses in early 2020 before the pandemic killed much of the need for cash registers. He hadn’t thought he was eligible for the $800 billion program. But the ad, posted by a company called Blueacorn, convinced him it was worth a try.

“We’ve created a 60-second quiz that can tell you if you qualify and how much you can get,” one ad promised. So Kilcrease registered on the Blueacorn site and answered a few basic questions about his business.

“With a few clicks of a mouse, I had applied,” Kilcrease said. It was so quick, he doesn’t recall many details. Blueacorn checked for all required documents before passing along Kilcrease’s approved application to a lender, Prestamos.

Soon after, Kilcrease received loan documents from the Small Business Administration saying he'd been approved for a $4,790 forgivable loan, which he signed electronically and returned. The money would arrive in his bank account within ten business days, Blueacorn estimated.

Kilcrease was relieved.

“It was everything I needed to get going,” he said. “Just that little bitty bit.”

But the money never made it to Kilcrease. And it never appeared for hundreds of thousands of other applicants, either.

ProPublica has been tracking PPP loans since the government first posted millions of them in July 2020. We kept updating our interactive database as the SBA disclosed more loan information. When the last round of the PPP closed, in May 2021, we noticed something strange: The number of loans the government said it had made kept shrinking with every new release.

By the time the SBA posted its latest update in late November, about 575,000 loans had disappeared, subtracted from an original total of 11.8 million. Most of them came through non-bank online lenders or banks that worked with web platforms such as Blueacorn, which solicited and processed huge volumes of applications for small-dollar loans in the final months of the program.

When we checked with the SBA, they told us the total number of cancelled loans actually topped 1 million. A sizeable number of those were likely applied for by people who were attempting to defraud the program and didn’t make it through additional screening — it’s unclear how many, since the lenders we talked to declined to specify.

But plenty of would-be borrowers were acting in good faith. Scores of them wrote in to our tip lines, perplexed that they had been listed as loan recipients, since they had applied but never received any money.

Their situations sounded a lot like Kilcrease’s: a quick approval in spring 2021, followed by some kind of snafu, and then a monthslong runaround from companies like Blueacorn, eventually resulting in no money after the lender the companies worked with withdrew its initial approval.

The phenomenon prompted the law firm Bailey Glasser to file a pair of lawsuits late last year against Prestamos and another Blueacorn client called Capital Plus Financial on behalf of people who had similar experiences. Prestamos has denied wrongdoing, and Capital Plus Financial declined to comment on pending litigation except to say that the plaintiff was ineligible for a loan.

This game of pingpong was maddening for prospective borrowers who had been told money was on the way, whether they were eligible for the program or not. It was also a hassle for lenders, who never got paid for hundreds of thousands of loans they sent to the SBA (though they reaped billions for those that did get funded). And it likely could have been prevented if the SBA had required more screening on the front end, before approving loans in the first place.

SBA spokesperson Christalyn Solomon said that the agency delegated that responsibility to lenders, which acted as “agents of the government to approve and disburse loans.” The SBA then assigned each loan a number, which confirmed that the government would guarantee it.

“Loans were removed for the FOIA Public Data Set because they were canceled by the lender,” Solomon wrote in an email. Several hundred thousand loans were also approved and then canceled before the SBA started publishing data on loans worth less than $150,000 in December 2020.

Blueacorn said it worked hard to reach as many self-employed people as possible, but wasn’t able to quickly obtain some information that would have been helpful in filtering out ineligible applicants. Prestamos, the lender to which Blueacorn submitted Kilcrease’s application, declined to comment on individual borrowers, citing confidentiality guidelines. But Prestamos said that a majority of its approximately 50,000 canceled loans resulted from borrowers not signing their loan documents.

Kilcrease’s bank rejected his PPP loan deposit in early June, yet Blueacorn continued to assure him the money was coming. “Don’t worry, your funds are secure and you will be funded soon,” a Blueacorn support worker wrote in a July message. “Both management and engineering are working on a solution as we speak.”

Kilcrease’s correspondence with Blueacorn after his bank rejected his PPP deposit. (Courtesy of Terry Kilcrease)

For weeks, not much happened. In August, Kilcrease got through to someone at Prestamos, the lender Blueacorn was working for. She asked for his 2020 tax return, which documented $5,600 in gross income. Then, e-mails show, she told Kilcrease he had provided conflicting numbers to Blueacorn and to the IRS, and his application would be formally denied.

Kilcrease said that he might have been confused about what information Blueacorn was initially asking for when he clicked a few buttons to apply back in May. But then why would they have approved him in the first place, and put him through months of hope, frustration and disappointment?

“They saw a whole lot of profit in people like me, sole proprietors,” said Kilcrease, citing the fee that lenders received for successfully funding small PPP loans. “They were given a hope, and it was just dashed, with no remorse and no recourse for anybody.”

The first round of the PPP, which kicked off in April 2020, mostly went to the largest small businesses. Clogged by applications from companies big enough to have bankers and accountants, the $349 billion fund was exhausted within weeks.

Realizing the need among actual mom-and-pops, Congress authorized another $320 billion in June 2020. That round reached millions more main-street-type companies: coffee shops, hair salons, restaurants, real estate agents.

By winter, the coronavirus recession was still hammering people who’d missed out on earlier rounds. Congress authorized the lending of unused funds and added more, while the incoming Biden administration tailored the rules to help sole proprietorships and independent contractors.

That’s when financial technology companies — user-friendly websites with automated application platforms that often partner with lenders to supply loans — saw a big opportunity.

In the earlier stages of the PPP, banks mostly served existing customers that already had documents on file, making it easy to process their government-backed loans. But as Congress pushed to include businesses on the fringes of the financial system, lenders had to deal with huge numbers of applicants they’d never assessed before.

They often outsourced that task to websites — we’ll call them loan processors — that marketed PPP loans to the self-employed and other small businesses and performed the basic checks required by the SBA. The SBA paid a fee for each funded loan to the lender, which in turn gave a cut to the processor for finding and vetting a borrower.

December’s stimulus package boosted fees up to $2,500 or 50% of small loans, whichever was less. Loan processors, which utilized aggressive social media outreach to people who had had any kind of self-employment income before Feb. 15, 2020, churned through millions of loan applications quickly.

In an effort to keep barriers to entry low, the SBA required very little verification on the front end. Once an application was approved and assigned an SBA loan number, borrowers were forbidden from applying elsewhere. So loan processors had every reason to lock them in quickly, with few anti-fraud measures, said independent fintech analyst Jason Mikula — even if it meant dealing with verification questions later on.

“At the end of the day, if they end up rejecting someone for being suspicious, they’re actually losing money,” said Mikula, noting that building automated fraud models takes time and money, even under normal circumstances. “There were no incentives in place to encourage these companies to be particularly careful about how they went about funding these things.”

An arms race followed. Fintechs competed for the self-employed, advertising their easy routes to quick, forgivable cash; some said they employed rigorous verification tools following SBA approval. But Blueacorn was the one that got really lucky.

By May 2021, the Biden administration had changed the rules again to prioritize loans made by community development financial institutions, which have access to special funding from the Treasury Department to support underserved populations. Blueacorn, which launched in Phoenix in 2020, happened to partner with two of them: Prestamos CDFI, an arm of the nonprofit service group Chicanos Por La Causa, and Capital Plus Financial, the CDFI subsidiary of a larger holding company called Crossroads Systems.

Those relationships allowed Blueacorn to keep lending through the end of the PPP on May 31, while other lenders were locked out.

By the end, the two CDFIs appeared to have processed more than $15 billion in loans to 955,000 small businesses, nearly all with Blueacorn. Blueacorn declined to detail its fee split arrangement with banks and other vendors. But Crossroads Systems said in an earnings report that it had made approximately $930 million on the program, $606 million of which went to its loan processors. (Crossroads also paid out a $40 per share special dividend as a result of what it called the “windfall” fee income, while keeping $120 million to reinvest in lower-income communities.)

Fintechs have positioned themselves as champions of the little guy, reaching truck drivers and dog walkers, especially people of color, who’d been overlooked by the big banks.

The companies’ promises to get money to thousands of independent workers from underserved communities is broadly true — but also somewhat overblown.

In May, June, and July, about 285,000 loans disappeared from the SBA’s loan database. The companies that originally processed the loans told ProPublica there were a number of reasons why so many ended up canceled after having been approved by the SBA. Some appear to have been held up by borrower errors and second thoughts, but many cancellations were the result of the SBA’s loose requirements for pre-approval screening.

One of the largest sources of canceled loans was Biz2Credit, an online lender founded in 2007, which withdrew about 115,000 loans after approving an original total of more than 300,000. A representative of the company, crisis communications consultant Michael Sitrick, said that the company employed “detailed underwriting protocols” after submitting the loans to the SBA. Canceled loans, he said, resulted from a combination of applications determined to be fraudulent after further checks, people who didn’t respond to additional requests for documentation and people who voluntarily withdrew their applications.

“Lenders were required to stop fraud whenever they found it,” Sitrick wrote in an email. “Given the sophistication of widely available document forgeries and other enterprise fraud, it was virtually impossible to detect fraud only by reviewing select documents prior to submission to the SBA.”

The pile of canceled loans also included about 30,000 made by an entity newly created by the lender Fountainhead, which prior to the pandemic had specialized in SBA-backed loans. Still, they had thousands of borrowers who didn’t sign their loan documents and inexplicable cancellations by the SBA itself after the agency had approved loans and banks had paid out the money.

“On occasion it would say ‘duplicate tax ID discovered,’” said Fountainhead’s chief operating officer, Michael Bland, referring to the SBA. “OK, well, what was your screening on the front end for? You went through your process and approved it, we closed it, I don’t know why that might be an issue now.”

Last month, Blueacorn lending partner Crossroads Systems agreed to purchase Fountainhead for an undisclosed amount.

When the SBA posted its most recent database update the day before Thanksgiving, it had dropped another 294,000 loans. About 140,000 of them belonged to the two CDFIs that had primarily worked with Blueacorn, Prestamos and Capital Plus, which accelerated their business in the three weeks after the program closed to regular lenders. In May alone, they approved at least 458,300 loans.

At the peak of the program, Blueacorn said, it had 300 people in the Phoenix area reviewing a deluge of loan applications. A quick scan of each one would usually lead to a quick signoff by the SBA.

But sometimes, between approval and funding, Blueacorn would find flags of fraudulent activity like an improbable concentration of applicants with very similar paperwork in a small geographic area — hairdressers making more than $100,000 a year on the south side of Chicago, for example. The processor would ask those borrowers for more documentation, and if they failed to provide it, cancel the loans.

Blueacorn said that thousands of loans it had approved and attempted to fund, meanwhile, were rejected by banks where applicants had savings accounts. Some of the banks had run their own know-your-customer checks on the accounts and sent them back to the processor for additional verification. Others cut off fintech processors entirely if they seemed to be vectors for fraud, causing problems for those who were genuine.

“Towards the end of the program, the willingness of recipient banks to work with PPP lenders got worse by the minute,” said Barry Calhoun, Blueacorn’s CEO.

Eric Kinney is the senior vice president for risk at Oxygen, a banking platform for small businesses. He said he saw so many people attempting to move PPP money into offshore accounts or into cryptocurrency assets that he blocked loan proceeds from “four main PPP lenders.”

“There are a couple lenders who we’ve said no to, we’re not going to accept any more payments,” Kinney said, declining to name the companies. “A referral channel that has a high fraud rate on it, it’s our job as a company to monitor that and block certain situations.”

Loan processors would try to work with borrowers and their banks to provide the requested information. If that didn’t succeed, they had the option of putting the money on a debit card, but that required even more documentation from borrowers, resulting in an outpouring of angry posts on internet message boards like Trustpilot, the Better Business Bureau, Reddit and Facebook.

Now, borrowers who were approved but never received their money are plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed against Prestamos CDFI and Capital Plus Financial last October and December, saying that the failure to fund the loans constitutes a breach of contract. In a motion to dismiss, Prestamos said that the loan document created no obligation to actually fund the loan, and a spokesperson declined to comment further on the case. Capital Plus Financial hasn’t yet filed any responses, but told ProPublica that the sole named plaintiff had provided an “illegible” tax return that wasn’t signed, which is why the company decided to revoke his loan.

Blueacorn’s Calhoun said much of the hassle could have been avoided from the beginning had the SBA allowed lenders to access more documents that would ensure the borrower was legitimate. Creating a quick way for certified, regulated loan processors to pull an applicant’s tax records, for example, would have provided a hard check on who was eligible.

“A few adjustments would’ve gotten rid of a lot of the lazy fraud,” said Calhoun. “Because there was so much ambiguity, it encouraged a lot of people.”

This happened more smoothly in other countries where companies file federal taxes quarterly or even monthly, allowing the government to know their exact income without the need for lenders to request documentation that was sometimes difficult to verify. Instead, the SBA allowed applicants to file draft tax returns, which can easily be manipulated.

The whole experience left Terry Kilcrease feeling cynical.

“The big companies made out like fat cats, the lenders made out like fat cats, all these companies that already had plenty of money,” Kilcrease said. “The people like me who are struggling to get there were just completely forgotten about.”

Did Your Company Get Bailout Money? Are the Employees Benefiting From It?

Correction

Jan. 14, 2022: Correction: This story originally misstated the name of a lender that was responsible for 30,000 canceled loans. It was Fountainhead SBF, not Fountainhead Commercial Capital, which is a sister firm.

by Anjeanette Damon

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Representatives for a prominent casino developer this week defended his decision to raze nearly 600 housing units to redevelop part of Reno’s downtown into an entertainment district and floated his “vision” to contribute land for a publicly funded affordable housing project.

Many of the several hundred people at a virtual town hall Monday welcomed the idea of better affordable housing in the area but met the proposal by Jacobs Entertainment with skepticism. The idea floated by Jeff Jacobs, who has demolished 15 motels that were used as last resort housing, includes 850 “affordable and workforce housing units” built above public parking garages that would ostensibly provide parking for his nearby planned entertainment venues. Jacobs wouldn’t build the housing; rather, he would contribute land for a project to be built and operated by the Reno Housing Authority.

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Monday’s town hall followed a ProPublica investigation that found the city has failed to require that Jacobs replace the affordable housing he razed despite a critical shortage. The investigation also found the public has repeatedly been cut out of the decision-making process. Since 2016, Jacobs has bought more than 100 parcels in downtown Reno, clearing much of the land and leaving most of the lots vacant as he pitches ever-changing ideas for the area.

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Prior to the town hall, Jacobs held a briefing for reporters on his affordable housing idea but did not invite ProPublica and didn’t respond to the news organization’s request to attend. At that briefing, he criticized the town hall, organized at the urging of Reno City Council member Naomi Duerr, as a way for “a couple council people” to “let their supporters have a shot at us,” according to News 4-Fox 11. Duerr argued the public felt excluded from the process and deserved more participation.

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At the town hall, audience members grilled Jacobs’ representatives on the housing demolition and the lack of significant development so far on the land he has assembled. They also tried unsuccessfully to pin the developers down on their affordable housing proposal. In response to pointed questions from audience member Selena Kaffer, Jacobs’ lawyer Garrett Gordon said he could offer no timeline or other details for the housing concept because the company has yet to begin a “conversation” with public partners such as the city of Reno and the housing authority.

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“At this point it’s a vision, it’s a proposal,” Gordon said. “We have to work with numerous agencies to bring such a huge project to fruition. I don’t have a timetable for you tonight but certainly will in the coming months.”

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Kaffer countered: “So just to clarify where we are at, in the last five years 500 to 600 units have been demolished, and we don’t have a timeline for when 850 units of affordable housing will be rebuilt to replace those.”

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But Gordon said it’s wrong to think of the demolished motels as lost housing, given the state of disrepair of many of the units.

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“They really shouldn’t be considered housing units at all,” Gordon said. “It shouldn’t be slumlords who are providing our housing units for the most vulnerable in our community. It should be the Reno Housing Authority.”

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As of February, an estimated 2,550 people lived in Reno’s weekly motels, which have become de facto housing of last resort. While many are in poor condition, ProPublica found others that were well-managed and well-kept motels — some of which Jacobs has also tried to buy — that were a critical resource for those seeking shelter in the city’s difficult housing market. While Jacobs offered relocation assistance to people living in his motels, ProPublica found their lives were thrown into chaos and not everyone wound up in a better situation.

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Mayor Hillary Schieve and four council members attended the virtual town hall, but none sat on its panel to field questions or defend the lack of city policies to preserve affordable housing or deter housing demolition. According to the participant log, Schieve left the meeting after 21 minutes. Council members Neoma Jardon and Oscar Delgado did not log in, according to the document. Video of the meeting also streamed on YouTube and remains available online.

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Many in the audience clamored for more affordable housing as well as a stronger voice in what will eventually be built on the swath of Jacobs-owned land covering 15 square blocks of downtown.

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“This meeting should have happened before most of these places were demolished,” said Ilya Arbatman, who said he worked at a music store demolished by Jacobs. “A vision is something you have before you tear things down.”

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Jacobs has yet to detail a comprehensive plan for his land, some of which he intends to develop into event space, some of which he’s marketing to other developers for market-rate housing, hotels and other unspecified uses.

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“He’s moving forward strategically, methodically,” Gordon said during the meeting, noting potential plans for an amphitheater and zip line.

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ProPublica asked the Reno Housing Authority about the viability of Jacobs’ concept for 850 affordable housing units. The authority owns and manages nearly 1,300 affordable housing units and has developed several projects smaller than the one Jacobs would like to see.

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“With scarce availability of developable parcels, the RHA is interested any time a local developer would like to pursue housing in the Truckee Meadows, especially when they’re willing to offer land,” said RHA spokesperson April Conway. “Any increase in the numbers of rental units takes a little pressure off of the available housing apartments.”

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Conway said the authority couldn’t provide a time frame or a cost estimate for the idea.

“Any costs associated with a housing project needs a feasibility study done first, and with rising costs everywhere, it wouldn’t be prudent to make even a ballpark guess at this point,” she said.

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The authority recently completed its first housing project in two decades, a 44-unit senior housing complex that cost $13 million. Even with a $1.5 million donation from Jacobs, the authority struggled to finance the project.

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“There would be many resources needed for a project like this,” Conway said of Jacobs’ idea. “But funding would be first and foremost.”

If the idea did come to fruition, the number of units would dwarf the 326 units built in Reno in the past six years.

by Justin Elliott and Jeff Ernsthausen

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The chair of the Senate Finance Committee is demanding information from several billionaire developers to determine whether they are abusing a Trump tax break that was supposed to benefit poor communities.

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Citing ProPublica’s reporting on the program, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent letters today to Jorge Perez of Related Group, Kushner Companies and several other developers asking for details on how they are taking advantage of what’s known as the opportunity zone program.

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The program, created in President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul, provides a series of tax breaks for making investments in swaths of specially designated land around the country. The program’s bipartisan advocates contended the program would funnel money into disadvantaged neighborhoods that were otherwise starved for investment.

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Under the program, investors receive tax advantages. Chief among them is that any gains on projects in the zones are tax-free after a number of years.

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But ProPublica and other news outlets found that investments often went to develop projects that benefit the affluent. In a series of stories in 2019, ProPublica reported that developers around the country had successfully lobbied to get favored tracts included in the opportunity zone program, at the expense of poorer areas. Several of those tracts were in well-off areas or were sites of long-planned projects that predated the tax break, suggesting that public subsidies could flow to projects that were going to happen regardless.

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Now Wyden is scrutinizing the tax benefit. “I have long been concerned that the Opportunity Zone program may permit wealthy investors another opportunity to avoid billions of dollars in taxes without meaningfully benefitting the distressed communities the program was intended to help,” Wyden wrote in the letter.

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Wyden’s letter zeroed in on one of the projects highlighted by ProPublica: an opportunity zone in West Palm Beach, Florida, that contains a superyacht marina owned by a major Republican political donor.

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“It appears that the Opportunity Zone program is already helping subsidize luxury real estate development by wealthy developers, and in many cases will allow these investors to realize the gains on their investments completely tax-free,” Wyden wrote. “Among the investments that have reportedly qualified for these generous tax breaks, are projects that include luxury apartment buildings and hotels, high-end office towers, self-storage facilities and a ‘superyacht marina.’”

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In his letter to Perez, head of a company developing the luxury condo project in the West Palm Beach zone, Wyden requested information on when the project was conceived; details of any lobbying of public officials on the opportunity zone issue; and numbers on job creation and tax benefits associated with the project.

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Asked for a response back in 2019, the West Palm Beach developers said they were not motivated to seek the tax break for their own benefit and hoped to spur additional economic development for the surrounding area.

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Wyden’s letters are designed to fill in details about how the program is unfolding. While some have called for its outright abolition, even supporters of the opportunity zone program have decried the lack of any reporting requirements that might allow experts to measure whether the tax breaks are achieving their stated goals.

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In 2019, Wyden introduced legislation that would increase reporting requirements for opportunity zone investors and curtail the kinds of projects that would qualify for tax breaks under the program. The legislation would also remove areas that were originally designated as opportunity zones that weren’t actually poor, including well-off areas of Detroit and Baltimore that ProPublica reported on that year.

by Isaac Arnsdorf and Robert Faturechi

]

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Federal and state authorities are still actively investigating billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography, according to new court records.

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In 2020, ProPublica first reported that South Dakota authorities had started investigating the state’s richest man and had referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice. But it was not clear what the DOJ did with the referral or whether state investigators were still pursuing the case.

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Now, in a new affidavit, the special agent in charge of the case for South Dakota’s Division of Criminal Investigation, Jeff Kollars, said that the probe remains open and that it included briefings as recently as Dec. 16 with “at least one jurisdiction.”

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The affidavit does not specify the other jurisdiction. But in a separate filing on Monday, South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg confirmed that both state and federal probes are active. “The investigation by state and federal authorities is ongoing,” Ravnsborg said in the court filing.

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Sanford’s attorney did not respond to a request seeking comment. A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment.

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The investigation of Sanford started because of a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the court records show. The center is a private nonprofit that operates a tip line for people and companies to report images of suspected child sex trafficking and abuse. The organization’s staff reviews the tips and refers them to law enforcement. A spokesperson for the organization declined to comment.

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Investigators obtained five search warrants in 2019 and 2020 for Sanford’s email, phone and internet data. The documents do not specify what, if anything, investigators found in the searches.

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ProPublica won access to the search warrants after more than a year of litigation that reached the state’s highest court. Sanford unsuccessfully asked the courts to conceal the search warrants, which are supposed to be publicly accessible under state law, and to block ProPublica’s reporting.

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The warrants name Sanford “in the matter of possession and distribution of child pornography” and indicate that investigators and a judge concluded there was probable cause to believe that the data would contain evidence of a crime. The affidavits describing the basis for probable cause were not disclosed. The new court records were filed in response to ProPublica’s request to unseal the affidavits.

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Sanford’s attorney, Marty Jackley, has previously declined to address Sanford’s conduct except to say the billionaire hasn’t been charged. In his latest filing, though, Jackley offered a new explanation: that Sanford’s email account was hacked and being used by someone else. The filing included examples of messages typical of email scams asking contacts to send money overseas, spanning 2016 to 2019. The filing described the emails as “exonerating evidence.”

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Jackley was the state’s previous attorney general and is currently running for the office again. Jackley did not comment on how he would handle the case if he were to win the election for attorney general.

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Sanford, 86, made his fortune from First Premier Bank and Premier Bankcard, a major issuer of high-interest credit cards for high-risk borrowers. He is one of the country’s biggest philanthropists, focusing on children’s organizations.

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After ProPublica reported the existence of the child pornography investigation in 2020, some beneficiaries of Sanford’s charity initally distanced themselves. Others did not. South Dakota’s major hospital system still bears his name and accepted more than $650 million from him in 2021. The state’s governor, Kristi Noem, also accepted $100 million in scholarship funds from Sanford and his companies in 2021.

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Do you have information about the Denny Sanford case that should be public? Contact Isaac Arnsdorf at isaac@propublica.org or 203-464-1409.

by Anna Clark, ProPublica, and David Jesse, Detroit Free Press

]

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This article was co-published with the Detroit Free Press.

Baker College sells itself as a place where students thrive and lives are transformed: “a haven for those who dream big.”

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From humble beginnings as a small business school in Flint, Baker rose to become the largest private college in Michigan, forging a presence in online learning and in Michigan towns where many students thought a college degree was beyond their grasp. For decades, the school’s marketing touted low costs and employment rates of nearly 100% for job-seeking graduates — making the dream seem both affordable and achievable.

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But for many the Baker reality is neither, an investigation by the Detroit Free Press and ProPublica found.

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What the college’s ads don’t say is that less than one-quarter of its students graduate — far below the national average for private four-year schools, according to federal data. Baker has the third-lowest graduation rate among 26 private four-year schools in Michigan.

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The ads also don’t point out that 70% of Baker students who took out federal student loans have problems making payments two years after leaving college. An exceptionally large number of former Baker students with loans have filed claims with the federal government that they were defrauded or misled by the college.

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Nor is there mention of the Baker students who find themselves struggling long-term after leaving the school. Ten years after enrolling, according to federal data, fewer than half of former Baker students made more than $28,000 a year, the lowest rate among schools of its kind in the state.

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All this has occurred under the watch of a college oversight structure with unusually close ties to Baker’s leadership, the Free Press and ProPublica found. The joint investigation relied on public records, internal reports and more than 50 interviews, including with current and former students, faculty and employees.

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The president of the college, records show, serves on its Board of Trustees, which is supposed to provide a check on the decisions of the school administration. And a retired Baker president served as chair of that board until very recently — at the same time being paid more than a million dollars from the college for five years of part-time work.

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Education experts caution nonprofits against compensating board members, saying it can lead to decisions that are not in the best interest of students or the college.

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“I’ve never seen the president of an institution become the chairman of the board after he retires,” said James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University who has studied higher education finances for decades. “It certainly is not doing best practices by any stretch of the imagination.”

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The new board chair is another longtime Baker executive who previously served as the institution’s top academic officer and a campus president.

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Some former students have no regrets about their time at Baker; they’re grateful for a teacher or adviser who came through for them when they needed it. “I think it is a great place for adult learners to engage,” said Jules Tarrant, who earned degrees from both Baker’s Flint campus and its online program. Thanks to a scholarship, the school helped her transition from a tumultuous home life. She now lives in Northern Virginia and manages a grocery store. “My friends and family can’t believe how successful I’ve been,” she said.

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But others express frustration after seeing what was supposed to be a life-enhancing experience become a lifelong financial burden. They describe confusion about shifting academic requirements and a lack of career counseling. Or dismay about not getting their degrees. Sometimes, it’s pure anger.

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After graduating from high school in 2013, Daniel Church pursued an ambitious bachelor’s/master’s degree program in computer technology at Baker but said the department began to lose faculty and fell into disarray. Intent on sticking it out, he took out loans to stay in school and navigated unexpected graduation requirements. Then, after six years, he gave up in defeat.

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Today, Church drives a truck cross-country, with the hope that someday he can erase more than $30,000 he said he borrowed for a degree he never received.

“I will never get that time in my life back,” he said.

Former Baker College student Daniel Church in Lapeer, Michigan (Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press)

Baker officials, in response to questions, traced the school’s low graduation rate to its open enrollment policy of accepting virtually any applicant with a high school degree or GED. They also said the college is not allowed to restrict student borrowing.

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In a statement to reporters, Baker emphasized a continuing commitment to improving student outcomes and reducing student loan debt, though it did not provide specifics. It did not comment for this story on the students or the experiences they described.

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Bart Daig, Baker’s president and chief executive, talked to reporters last summer before declining additional interviews. He said he believes Baker’s marketing efforts — costing $9.7 million in the 2019-20 school year, more than the college spent on financial aid — are necessary because its breadth of educational opportunities are not well-known.

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“We’ve been extremely modest over the years,” he said.

Baker Spends More on Marketing Than Student Aid

In the 2019-20 school year, Baker College’s marketing spending outstripped what it devoted to financial aid.

Source: Audited financial statements. (Note: Table includes all private nonprofit four-year Michigan colleges and universities, excluding seminaries and specialty schools such as business or art-only programs. Data for some schools was not available.)

In 2019, Chief Operating Officer Jacqui Spicer gave a rare response to critiques of Baker when residents in Ferndale, outside Detroit, pushed back against the college’s plan to move its main campus there. Some complained at public meetings about Baker’s academic reputation and called the school predatory.

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“Being predatory, I don’t think that’s the way in which we operate,” Spicer told a reporter at the time, adding: “We always put our students first, and I think it’s just disappointing people think that we’re predatory, because we really do have the students — they’re top of mind for us.”

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Baker began as a for-profit school in 1911 but became a nonprofit in 1977, then entered a period of rapid growth. Since the recession, however, enrollment has been in a tailspin.

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Competition in the online education market contributed to the erosion, as did its own decisions to close campuses, including those in historically industrial communities like Flint and Allen Park, while eliminating most certificate and associate degree programs. It is now Michigan’s second-largest four-year private college by enrollment, after Davenport University.

The school’s search for a new campus signaled a major pivot, with Baker trying to appeal to more traditional students, especially those seeking bachelor’s degrees right out of high school.

After failing in Ferndale, Baker found a warmer welcome in Royal Oak, a well-off Detroit suburb, where it is building a $51 million flagship campus scheduled to open later this year. The marketing strikes a familiar theme of hope, tailored to a new audience. A YouTube ad highlights sophisticated labs and experienced instructors, along with disc golf, live music and sushi.

“Your path to your dream career begins at Baker College,” the ad declares.

Construction crews work on building a new Baker College building along South Lafayette Avenue in downtown Royal Oak, Michigan, on Nov. 1. (Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press) Student Debt

Baker has long made affordability its selling point. Full-time undergraduate tuition is around $11,000 a year, cheaper than most of the state’s other private colleges.

That makes Baker “quite attractive for students who are concerned over the cost of college,” Daig said. One glossy ad champions a “quality education minus the long-term financial sacrifice.”

But most Baker students are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. They often turn to federal and private loans to pay a large chunk of their costs.

“We can’t stop them from taking a federal loan, which — it is not within our authority,” Daig said. “We can strongly encourage them not to do it, and we can package them with that institutional aid so they don’t need it. But a lot of times, they took it.”

Several students interviewed for this story portrayed their interactions with the school differently, saying Baker officials didn’t urge caution.

Bart Bechtel said he took out more than $40,000 in student loans while pursuing an online associate degree, with encouragement from Baker — even though the amount surpassed what he needed for tuition.

Financial aid officers, he recalled, told him he was eligible, so he might as well take advantage of the full amount. He said they talked about how he might need money for family expenses, his son and Christmas presents.

“We were going through a lot at the time with our son getting diagnosed as autistic, and Baker was very quick to suggest more and more financial aid to pay for things,” Bechtel said, referring to student loans. “So we became sort of dependent on them for that.

“It was not a good time or situation, and I feel like they took advantage of that.”

Bart Bechtel (Mary F. Calvert, special to ProPublica)

Dan Nowaczyk, who graduated from Baker’s Flint campus in 2016, recalled students talking about the extra spending money they could get from loans.

Once, he said, some students were talking about aid disbursement and one asked the others: “How much money did you guys get back?”

Nowaczyk recalled saying that he took out only enough money for classes and books. When the student said he came away with more than $10,000 beyond that, Nowaczyk said he felt obligated to tell him these were loans that had to be paid back — because the student didn’t seem to know.

“The financial aid department was not very good at explaining student loans,” he said.

Nowaczyk finished with a bachelor’s degree in information system security and $60,000 in debt, “less than I was expecting, so I’m not too upset,” he said. He now works at Kettering University in Flint as head coach of esports.

Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media at Baker’s Auburn Hills campus for 14 years, saw the Baker experience backfire for low-income students who weren’t prepared for college. (Tessmer’s relationship with the school ended with a settlement after she filed a lawsuit for breach of contract and retaliation; in a countersuit, Baker disputed her claims.)

“Anybody got in,” she said. “If they could get financial aid, and they had a pulse, you could become a Baker student.”

But getting in was no guarantee of success, she said, and retention was a constant problem in her program. Students, she said, “were promised a better life but ended up with debt and no degree and no job in their chosen field.”

She added: “Baker College has ruined a lot of people’s lives.”

Low Earnings for Baker College Students

A decade after enrolling, fewer than half of Baker College students make more than $28,000 a year.

Source: U.S. Department of Education data, updated August 2021. (Note: Table includes all private nonprofit four-year Michigan colleges and universities, excluding seminaries and specialty schools such as business or art-only programs. Data for Hillsdale College was not available.)

In its response to questions from the Free Press/ProPublica, Baker said financial aid award letters and loan request forms list each student’s maximum eligibility for federal loans, as regulations require, as well as “the reduced amount recommended to cover their institutional charges. This was done to reduce over-borrowing.” The college also provides students with aggregate loan totals and estimated monthly payments.

Baker also noted that if students took out private loans, these were disbursed without the college’s “awareness or involvement.”

If students don’t repay federal loans after leaving Baker, the government can garnish their wages, tax refunds and Social Security benefits. It can also hire collection agencies and file lawsuits to pursue payment. Unlike other forms of debt, federal student loans are extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.

For Baker, the loans pose no risk or obligation. In fact, they provide a steady source of government-guaranteed revenue.

About 51% of Baker’s tuition revenue comes from federal student loans. Add in Pell Grants given to low-income students, which don’t have to be paid back, and about 72% of Baker’s tuition is backed by taxpayers.

By comparison, in the years before it shut down following federal penalties for predatory practices, ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit college system, relied on federal funds for about 76% of its revenue. Studies by several researchers have concluded that having a large percentage of tuition money coming from federal funds can be an indicator of a predatory for-profit school.

Davenport University, which Baker officials say is similar to their school, isn’t as reliant on public coffers. Only about 37% of Davenport’s tuition comes from federal loans. Including Pell Grants, about 49% of its tuition comes from the federal government.

Most nonprofit schools fundraise, seeking donations from successful alumni and others to reduce dependence on student debt. Not Baker. Its website states that “tuition is our sole source of income” — it doesn’t solicit donations.

Student reliance on loans can also be reduced through generous financial aid, often supported by college endowments. And Baker, in fact, has a sizable one.

The Jewell Educational Fund, a nonprofit affiliated with Baker to help with financial aid and capital projects, has nearly $300 million in net assets. That gives Baker a wealthier endowment than Kalamazoo College in western Michigan, Seton Hall University or Gonzaga University.

But it hasn’t lessened the need for Baker students to go into debt, because Baker hasn’t aggressively spent the money on scholarships. Baker spends about 3% of the Jewell endowment earnings annually. Davenport, with an endowment of about $28 million, has a policy to spend 5% of its earnings each year.

In search of relief, former students can file claims with the U.S. Department of Education, saying they were misled when they borrowed the money. As of December 2020, according to data published by Yahoo Finance, of the 266 institutions with more than 100 “borrower defense” claims of deception, only five were nonprofits. The rest are for-profits and “covert for-profits,” where the moneymaking mission is clearer. “Covert for-profits” is a term that has been applied to colleges that very recently changed from for-profit to nonprofit, with little difference in how they actually operate. Among the five nonprofits that had a high number of claims, three are shuttered colleges, and one recently regained accreditation 20 years after losing it. The other is Baker.

Claims are not proof of wrongdoing, and Baker’s written response to reporters said the college has never been alerted to a successful application for borrower relief. Students file the claims under penalty of perjury. The Department of Education declined to answer questions about the claims against Baker, but it recently revived a borrower defense enforcement unit that had been dormant during the Trump administration.

Robert Niles, a former student with more than $83,000 in debt incurred while getting two associate degrees at Baker’s Cadillac campus, is preparing a borrower defense claim against the school.

He said he is citing Baker’s claims of 99% employment in the job market, which persuaded him to enroll because he believed it would give him his “best chance” at a better life. He will contend the training he received was insufficient for more than changing oil on cars.

For about three decades, Baker ads cited a “graduate employment rate” of nearly 100%. Its website, too, promoted this; it still claims “one of the highest available graduate employment rates in the country.”

When asked about the source for these numbers, Daig cited the National Association of Colleges and Employers. However, NACE said it does not evaluate individual institutions. It collects information that colleges self-report, often based on surveys. It would not comment on Baker’s claims. Baker’s public disclosure forms for certain programs say it calculates the employment rate using responses to a survey sent by the school to graduates.

It uses the same survey to estimate that its 2020 graduates with bachelor’s degrees make about $52,000 a year.

Niles first studied computer-aided drafting and design but said he couldn’t find a job in the field. Hoping to enhance his earning potential, he returned to Baker for training in automotive services. He graduated cum laude for both associate degrees.

But even with those credentials, he said, he earned just pennies more than what he had made previously as an auto mechanic intern. After graduating, he had to study on his own to obtain certifications for the skills he needed to make more. “It has nothing to do with any of those degrees,” Niles said.

One lesson from his time at Baker, he said, is this: “It’s just a business, you know. I mean, all Baker is is a business.”

Baker College’s campus in Owosso (Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press) College Structure

College presidents sit at the top of a management flowchart, but they do not typically operate without oversight. Independent boards of trustees serve as a check on decision-making and a judge of performance.

On Saturday, for example, the University of Michigan Board of Regents fired President Mark Schlissel following an investigation they said showed an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Previously, the board questioned how Schlissel handled the pandemic and sexual misconduct scandals.

At Baker, Daig, the president, is actually a trustee, too. And the chair of the board through August was Daig’s predecessor as president, F. James Cummins.

Having ex-presidents as members of the board is a red flag, higher education experts said, because they are too closely tied to the operations of the college and their former colleagues.

“Essentially, this would make them their successor’s boss,” said Finkelstein, the higher education expert. “Regardless of whether they are being paid as a board chair, a university employee or just serving as a volunteer, this seems to be a unique situation and runs against virtually any principles of good governance.”

Baker did not answer repeated questions about whether Daig voted as a trustee. In its statements to reporters, Baker described its board as knowledgeable and involved, citing “constructive discourse and feedback.”

Meanwhile, the role of former president can be lucrative at Baker. In every tax filing by the college since Cummins retired in 2016 and joined the board, he has been one of the school’s most highly compensated individuals.

Cummins’ compensation for 2019-20 was $202,000 for a reported 22 hours of work a week. The tax filing said he played multiple roles, serving on the systemwide Board of Trustees and the Board of Regents, which provided guidance for branch campuses. Some state and federal filings also list him in a “secretary” position.

Ed Kurtz was 26 years old and Baker was still a for-profit school when it hired him as president in 1968. He led the school until 2002 and went on to serve about 13 years on Baker’s Board of Trustees, holding various titles, including chairman and vice-chairman.

During Kurtz’s time on the board — which overlapped with his two controversial stints as the state-appointed emergency financial manager of Flint — the college paid him more than $2.2 million for a reported 1 to 40 hours of work a week, for an average of about $170,000 a year.

Baker bylaws examined by reporters say that “no stated salary shall be paid to trustees, as such, for their services.” The bylaws do permit payment to a trustee who works for Baker College itself.

Former presidents have served as board chair since at least 1986, according to Cummins in a 2006 Flint Journal story.

Their leadership roles can stretch for decades. Robert Jewell, now 91, is a past president who owned Baker when it was a for-profit college. On documents, he was listed as a member of the Board of Regents of the Muskegon campus as recently as 2019. That year, the college paid him $10,450. Jewell could not be reached for comment.Baker said in its written responses that “Ed Kurtz and Jim Cummins received deferred compensation which was paid while serving on the board. Also, the Board Chair is an employee of Baker College.”

Demetri Morgan, assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago, said this type of arrangement is problematic.

“Board members are supposed to be free of any real or apparent conflicts of interests,” said Morgan, who studies how colleges are run. “Being a paid employee of Baker potentially impedes a board member from carrying out their fiduciary roles because the threat (perceived or real) of employment termination is more than enough to circumscribe one’s actions.”

Kurtz could not be reached for comment; Cummins declined to comment for this story.

Baker told ProPublica and the Free Press that as of Aug. 31 — three weeks after reporters asked questions about a possible conflict of interest — Cummins’ board tenure came to an end.

The new board chair is Denise Bannan, who retired in 2020 after 35 years as a top Baker executive. She has been provost, vice president for academics, president of the Owosso campus and Baker’s liaison to its accreditors. She made more than $300,000 in 2019-20, her last full year as an administrator, records show.

As for the other trustees, Baker doesn’t list them anywhere on its website or its student handbook — a potential problem for a student or anybody else who wants to contact the board with concerns about the way the college is run. When reporters asked who the current board members were, Baker declined to provide a list and instead recommended looking in the organization’s tax filings, which provide information for 2020 but nothing more recent.

Experts in higher education governance who reviewed Baker’s bylaws questioned whether any real checks and balances exist at Baker. “This is very atypical,” said Morgan.

So much so that when the Free Press/ProPublica asked Morgan to review Baker’s governance documents, he texted fellow researchers to see if they could think of any institution that was similar. They couldn’t.

Baker’s nonprofit status gives the college tax advantages, wider access to gifts and government aid and the ability to promote itself as having a public service mission.

But, George Mason’s Finkelstein said, “this looks more like a legacy structure for a for-profit enterprise. I have never seen a nonprofit college set up this way.”

Baker said its governance documents “have been and continue to be reviewed by accreditors, attorneys, accounting firms, etc. The articles of incorporations, bylaws, and governance structure are the result of professional advice designed to enable Baker College to fulfill its mission.”

The Higher Learning Commission, a private accreditation agency, found no flaws in oversight when it gave its most recent stamp of approval to Baker in 2020. “The Board operates independently,” it declared in its review.

The commission, which declined to comment for this story, based its conclusion on interviews and written documents, including the school’s bylaws. It also cited the minutes of trustee meetings, which describe the proceedings tersely.

The meetings reviewed by the commission occurred during a time of some of the most significant changes in Baker’s 111-year history, including the decision to close and sell campuses and build a new one. Votes on all matters were unanimous.

Baker’s Many Incarnations

Baker prides itself on a long history of pivoting quickly and changing with the times.

As it grew, it began issuing not only certificates, but associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. It expanded by buying business schools and Bible colleges across the state, while also making inroads in new communities and then broadening further through online education. In recent years, it bought a California-based online law school that it’s bringing under the Baker brand.

In 1999, Forbes applauded the college’s online efforts and revenue gains. “Such growth is impressive given that it has been achieved despite a complete absence of state or federal funding — even any fund-raising,” the magazine wrote.

John Matonich, a former member of the Board of Regents for Baker’s Flint campus, said one thing he always admired was the school’s nimble approach. “They recognized things pretty quickly, and they made changes when they needed to,” said Matonich, a retired CEO of Rowe Professional Services, a civil engineering consulting company.

Driven in large part by a massive online program, Baker grew from just shy of 4,000 students in 2000 to about 26,000 in 2015, dwarfing other Michigan private colleges.

Then, as more schools entered the online marketplace and demographic shifts meant fewer high school graduates, enrollment dropped. It slid to about 6,000 students in 2020, according to federal data. Enrollment for 2021 has not yet been reported.

Fewer students means less money. The school brought in $96 million in tuition for the 2017-18 academic year, according to audited financial statements. Two years later, it was $55 million.

This coincided with dramatic changes.

Baker shut down its campuses in Flint, Allen Park and Clinton Township in 2020, and will soon close one in Auburn Hills. The Port Huron campus slashed operations two years earlier, while leaving open its culinary program there. Many campuses had received millions of dollars in recent renovations. Baker also closed extension campuses in rural communities.

A 2020 report delivered to accreditors affirmed that the school wanted to target “a more traditional student market that is academically prepared to succeed at the college level.”

Spicer told the Free Press in 2019: “We recognized that our business model wasn’t sustainable, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re making this shift.” She also said the school had “a lot of students who were at-risk,” which went “hand-in-hand with how our campuses have historically operated.”

The change in strategy at Baker doesn’t sit right with everyone.

Cleamon Moorer Jr., a former administrator and faculty member, observed with dismay as Baker shut down campuses and sought to attract different kinds of students.

“I think it’s insulting. I do,” said Moorer Jr., who served about three years as Baker’s first dean of a consolidated school of business. “Because now it’s almost as if you’re blaming the students for your institutional failures.”

Cleamon Moorer, Jr., a former administrator and faculty member at Baker College, in his office at American Advantage Home Care, Inc. in Dearborn, Michigan (Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press) Students Lost in the Shuffle

Baker’s dismal graduation rate almost certainly has something to do with the “at-risk” students Spicer mentioned — people who may come from low-income backgrounds, who didn’t excel in high school or who are balancing school, parenting and a full-time job.“

Open enrollment institutions generally do not have high graduation rates,” Baker officials noted to reporters in a written statement.

But for many students, the biggest hurdles placed in their way came from Baker itself.

Baker often starts programs, then changes them, moves them or shuts them down before students finish. It opened a campus in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 2016 that closed nine months later.

A common criticism among students is the lack of guidance once they begin school about everything from internships to graduation requirements. Students said they were on their own to find required internships. Baker once promoted “free lifetime placement service,” but recent graduates said they were simply referred to Handshake, an online platform.

“Baker College does have a Career Services department that continues to offer both current students and alumni assistance with social media profiles, resume writing, and career search and placement services,” Baker said in its response.

The department has four full-time and two part-time staffers. Davenport, which has roughly the same student population as Baker, employs 12 people full-time. It also makes use of Handshake and offers lifetime services.

Bechtel, the student who took on $40,000 in loans, earned an associate degree in web design but found his experience disappointing. Required courses, he said, taught computing languages he considered obsolete. When he reached out to student services — tutoring, tech support, career counseling — “they never returned my phone calls,” he said.

A year in, Bechtel said, Baker changed the requirements for his web design program without exempting current students. He’d taken required courses that no longer counted toward his degree. It bothered him, but he decided it wasn’t worth a fight.

More changes to the requirements came a year later, and then again the year after that. “I raised a whole lot of hell,” he said, until Baker waved him through with his existing credits.

Bechtel graduated in 2011. Neither the coursework nor the degree proved useful, he said. At home, he taught himself the programming language SQL, which got him jobs. He and his wife make decent salaries, he said, but his student debt — now up to $58,750 — has them living “paycheck to paycheck.”

“I’m not going to be able to retire because I’ll be paying these off,” Bechtel said.

Bart Bechtel’s diploma (Mary F. Calvert, special to ProPublica)

Daniel Church, who enrolled out of high school as a full-time student in Flint, ran into trouble when Baker switched from quarters to semesters in 2017 to better align with other college calendars. In a booklet, Baker pledged the change would be cost-neutral and would “not disrupt your academic progress or increase your time to graduation.” But for Church, it did.

Church said he needed more time and money to finish getting bachelor’s and master's degrees in Baker’s tech program. So he quit to work as a long-haul trucker, driving cross-country and saving paychecks.

He “didn’t go home,” he said, and “didn’t see anyone in my family. I worked my arse off.”

Church put aside thousands of dollars to pay for school. But when he got back to Flint, he learned he’d have to effectively repeat some of his quarter-based classes in the new semester system and complete an internship, costing him more than he had saved.

Baker gave him a list of leads, he said, but the companies he contacted weren’t taking interns. He decided it was time to give up on Baker.

“At that point, I just threw my hands up and laughed, because it was just so unbelievable,” said Church, who is now 27 and said he has more than $30,000 in loans. “How could any institution that expects itself to be taken seriously do this to people?”

After living in his parents’ house during the pandemic, he’s back to driving the truck.

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

Agnel Philip of ProPublica and Kristi Tanner of the Detroit Free Press contributed to the data analysis.

David Jesse was named the Education Writers Association’s best education beat reporter in 2018 and was a 2020-21 Spencer Fellow in Education Reporting at Columbia University. Contact him: djesse@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @reporterdavidj. Subscribe to the Detroit Free Press.

Update, Jan. 15, 2022: This story was updated to reflect that the University of Michigan Board of Regents fired President Mark Schlissel.

Correction

Jan. 15, 2022: This story originally misstated what happened with Baker College's Port Huron campus. Baker slashed operations there but left open a culinary program; it did not cease operations entirely.