B. MARSHALL
Check sent to POISE Foundation, Sept. 10
The New Pittsburgh Courier has learned exclusively that the City of Pittsburgh Controller’s Office sent a $125,000 check on Tuesday, Sept. 10, to the POISE Foundation, the fiscal sponsor of William B. Marshall’s highly-popular Juneteenth Celebration, ending a months-long saga between B. Marshall and the city over when he would get the funding that Pittsburgh City Council allotted to his organization back in mid-June.
Patrick Cornell, Chief Financial Officer for the city’s Office of Management and Budget, confirmed in an email to the Courier on Sept. 10 that the City Controller’s Office confirmed the check was sent in the mail earlier in the day. It’s unclear what day POISE will receive the check in the mail.
It comes on the heels of another $125,000 check that the city sent; this one to Bounce Marketing and Events, run by Fantasy Zellars. The primary difference was that Zellars was selected through an RFP (Request For Proposals) to put on the new, city-sponsored Juneteenth celebration. That celebration, held June 29, saw the city send Bounce Marketing a check for the event on June 27, two days prior to that Juneteenth event.
B. Marshall has complained for months about that development, seeing as his Juneteenth event was June 14-16 at Point State Park and Market Square. Not only did he not get a check from the city two days before his event, but it’s taken all the way until mid-September for the city to cut a check for the POISE Foundation (and then facilitated to B. Marshall Productions).
During a press conference in August, B. Marshall blamed the city’s first Black mayor, Ed Gainey, for holding up the process of B. Marshall and the POISE Foundation getting their money.
MAYOR ED GAINEY
“For 10 years we have supported Ed Gainey and all his endeavors,” B. Marshall said about the mayor. “We have put him up on our platforms and allowed him to speak to the community. We voted for him. We have given him money so he could be the mayor of Pittsburgh. We thought it would be a change. As it turns out,” B. Marshall said, “we feel as though Mayor Gainey is the one trying to stop these events that we actually do for the City of Pittsburgh and for Black people.”
B. Marshall said that while he doesn’t have a monopoly on Juneteenth celebrations in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t understand why the city would, all of a sudden, start its own Juneteenth celebration, and then when the RFP went out for interested parties, B. Marshall applied but was not chosen—Bounce Marketing and Events was.
B. Marshall has continuously said that the city, at least in 2024, never wanted to give him (through the POISE Foundation) the $125,000 that was essentially promised to him for his 2024 Juneteenth celebration. B. Marshall said it took an intervention by Pittsburgh City Council in mid-June to find an additional $125,000 to allocate to the POISE Foundation for Juneteenth, a few weeks after City Council had voted (not unanimously) to approve $125,000 to Bounce Marketing for the city-sponsored Juneteenth.
That’s right—the City of Pittsburgh ended up spending $250,000 of American Rescue Plan dollars to support two separate Juneteenth celebrations that occurred Downtown, about two weeks apart.
In an exclusive interview with the New Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 29, Cornell, Chief Financial Officer for the city’s Office of Management and Budget, detailed the reason why Bounce Marketing received funding two days prior to its Juneteenth celebration.
“It was the same sort of American Rescue Plan agreement,” Cornell told the Courier. However, “in negotiations between Bounce and law (the city’s law department), the two parties agreed that as a smaller group, she (Zellars) needed access to the funds in advance. But there were also provisions in that agreement.”
An example of those provisions was that a financial advance would be given to Zellars, “and you have 45 days to provide the proof of payment” to a performing artist, Cornell explained.
B. Marshall has maintained that the city never gives money to entities prior to an event taking place, even though that obviously was not the case in the Bounce Marketing situation.
The Courier has also learned exclusively that in the last two years that the city has provided the POISE Foundation (and then to B. Marshall Productions) with $125,000 for Juneteenth, it’s taken at least a few months after the event for POISE to receive the money. In 2023, City Council approved the funding for B. Marshall’s Juneteenth event in mid-April—the check was cut to POISE in October 2023, a period of about six months, or nearly four months after Juneteenth. In 2024, City Council approved the funding in mid-June —the check was cut to POISE in mid-September, a period of about four months, or nearly three months after Juneteenth. The POISE Foundation is tasked with obtaining all necessary receipts and invoices, etc., from B. Marshall pertaining to what was spent on Juneteenth from an artists/stage/etc., perspective. Then the POISE Foundation sends that information to the city, which then has to go through a number of people to approve the invoices, get signatures, and ultimately get to the City Controller’s office, which then prepares an actual check to be made and then mailed.
It’s a process that doesn’t happen overnight.
Now that the City of Pittsburgh has fulfilled its obligation to B. Marshall and POISE on the $125,000, what’s next? Will there be a city-sponsored Juneteenth event in 2025? Will there be money allotted in the 2025 budget to support a city-sponsored Juneteenth financially? And what organization would be chosen to put the event on if there is a city-sponsored Juneteenth and corresponding money to support it?
“We won’t have access to the American Rescue Plan dollars the same way that we have for the past two years, so it’s going to be dependent on what we can find from the city budget proper,” Cornell told the Courier. However, “we have started proactively to figure out what next year’s Juneteenth celebrations look like for the city as a city-sponsored event.”
B. Marshall plans to forge ahead with his Juneteenth celebration, even if there is no money from the city to support him.
But then again, what does Pittsburgh’s Black community think about all this? There is a definite divide in the Black community as to who supports B. Marshall’s efforts and, in doing so, despises the perceived actions of the mayor, Ed Gainey, of trying to sabotage B. Marshall’s event by either throwing a city-sponsored event and/or allegedly removing city funding of B. Marshall’s event.
Then there are others who support the mayor’s efforts and aren’t too pleased with B. Marshall’s actions in the media or otherwise.
City Councilman Khari Mosley, who voted to give $125,000 to Bounce Marketing for the city-sponsored Juneteenth and $125,000 to B. Marshall’s Juneteenth, told the Courier exclusively on Sept. 10 with “full confidence” that “the mayor is extremely diplomatic and doesn’t express the kind of pettiness that is expected in politics. Oftentimes politics can be a tough business, but the mayor has always, in my opinion, been open, been willing to work with people that have criticized him. And even though with some of the challenges that the city has had working with B. Marshall, I think it’s evident in the fact that the mayor marched in the Juneteenth parade (sponsored by B. Marshall).”
Councilman Mosley added he’s never seen any evidence “of the mayor being retaliatory or anything like that. The mayor has always been diplomatic and willing to work with people that have criticized him.”
OLGA GEORGE
Mayor Gainey’s press secretary, Olga George, told the Courier that Mayor Gainey would not “hold anything up” pertaining to funds that were allotted to the POISE Foundation to be given to B. Marshall. “The mayor is in support of organizations that uplift the community,” she said, Aug. 29.
“The mayor has no grudge. He is all about transparency and making sure that we follow all the procedures necessary…Mayor Gainey is not about destroying or harming anyone. As he has shown, he is a man about bringing people together, about safety, about welcoming, about having a thriving community, and you can’t do that if you’re not about working with people, and he has proven that.”
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