Every year, ACORN hosts a “Year End, Year Begin” (YEYB) meeting for its organizers. We’ve obtained the detailed agenda for the YEYB conference for 2007. Special dinner speakers for the conference include Eliseo Medina, Executive Vice-Presiden of SEIU and Mark Ernst, CEO of H&R Block. As you can see, the conference covers all aspects of ACORN’s or its affiliate’s work. And, that could be a problem for ACORN.
Conference sessions include how to lobby state legislatures, organize labor unions, build the Working Families political party, conduct get out the vote efforts, as well as providing housing and credit counseling.
Remember, ACORN’s housing and credit counseling work is done primarily through the ACORN Housing Corporation, which receives a substantial portion of its funds from taxpayers. Most of its staff are paid through taxpayer dollars. Their attendance at a conference with such overt political activism raises troubling concerns.
Of course, ACORN could have erected strict fire-walls at the conference. It is possible that ACORN Housing employees weren’t allowed in the political sessions. Or, that they were using vacation time to attend the conference, so taxpayer funds weren’t underwriting their attendance at political workshops. It is also possible that ACORN kept a very strict accounting of the costs of the conference. Any cost sharing by ACORN Housing would have been strictly limited to the sessions dealing with housing and credit counseling. The more politcal ACORN “holding company” would have picked up the costs of the political sessions.
These are all possible. But, for some reason, we doubt ACORN was that thorough in protecting taxpayer funds.
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