Trinidad Concerned Citizens for Reform

The partially renovated liquor store that Ward 5 ANC, Wilhelmina Lawson purchased and donated to the community on behalf of her 501c3 nonprofit organization, Trinidad Concerned Citizens for Reform, Inc. (TCCR) is at risk of being turned over to a new owner this July, likely never fulfilling the vision Ms. Lawson and the community has for it to become a job training and placement center. The risk is especially great for the Trinidad neighborhood given the economic crisis the nation is suffering. When America has a cold, Trinidad has the flu. This Northeast, D.C. neighborhood is one of the City’s most impoverished.

Last summer, Trinidad became notorious in the mainstream media for violence that was reportedly a symptom of an alternative economic structure that plagues residential D.C. In fact, in the ‘80s, Northeast had been home to the City’s largest open air drug market, run by one of the nation’s top three most notorious cocaine dealers, Rayful Edmonds, III. This was just blocks from where MPD instituted military-style checkpoints last year as part of a Safe City Initiative that will also place 30 police cameras in Trinidad.

When Lawson moved to Trinidad in the early ‘90s, she immediately noticed a need to clean up the neighborhood. She co-founded TCCR in 1994 and began by literally picking up trash and evolving to landscaping and running out-of-school time educational and recreational programs that has enrolled more than 100 youths. Her goal: to change Trinidad “from a drug community to a garden community.

While considerable work has been done to “green” Trinidad before the word became stimulus package-mainstream, Lawson knows that to truly create a sustainable environment for the residents of this neighborhood – one of the City’s largest population of under 18-year-olds – jobs are needed. She sits on her porch daily and is asked by young men if she knows of any work.

“In order to continue to the family cycle and life cycle, we need to have jobs and training and education,” Lawson said. “I see it everyday. This is what they’re approaching me about, they want jobs.”

Though TCCR, in partnership with another local nonprofit, DC Greenworks, received a grant from the District Department of Employment Services to employ up to 24 youths beginning in June to plant rain gardens in the neighborhood as part the Mayor’s Green Summer Job Corps, Lawson, and the young men wonder, “What will happen after the summer?”

The former liquor store that sits at Montello Avenue and Queens Street has been a “beacon of hope” for the community. Neighborhood meetings resulted in a plan for the three-story building to be a resource center housing career and academic labs and administrative space that will serve as a training ground for people wanting to enter or re-enter the workforce. However, a faulty registered agent had not been delivering notices of property taxes owed to the City, and a bill has collected beyond Lawson’s means. She had mortgaged her home to purchase the building.

Perhaps had Ms. Lawson been aware, she would have sooner been able to inform the City that the property is owned by her 501c3, and property taxes, now totaling up to $14,000, should not have mounted in the first place. However, as time continued to lapse, the City put the building up for a tax sale and it was purchased by Embassy Tax Services.  Unable to resolve the issue so far, Embassy Tax Services initiated a lawsuit March 2008 in the District Superior Court to foreclose on the property and revoke Lawson’s right to redemption – her ability to buy the property back from the tax sale purchaser. Absolute right to redemption passes after 6 months from the tax sale. Lawson has been to court 3 times asking for extensions as she works to fundraise.

“In our last court hearing, May 13^th [2009], the court indicated that it was going to be unwilling to consider further extensions,” explained Ellen Cohen of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP, a local firm that is working the case probono. “We need to come up with the money or TCCR needs to move on and accept that it might lose the property, and we really just don’t want that to happen.”

In order to redeem, TCCR will have to come up with the back taxes owed to the City as well as the $4,300 in legal fees incurred by the Embassy Tax Services. The next court date is scheduled for July 15, 2009.

According to Cohen, Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas, Jr. and his office has expressed a willingness to find an administrative solution at least to the City’s portion of the bill.

Grassroots community activities are being planned and an online campaign is being run on FaceBook.com, GoodSearch.com, and TCCR’s own website, www.TCCRinc.org to help secure the other funds needed, and to continue to generate the resources needed to complete renovations on the building. So far, approximately $100 has been raised.

“I get so excited when I think of the possibilities,” said Lawson. “All it’ll take is just delivering the resources and the support that’s needed.”