After sitting on the sidelines for seven years watching the chaos taking place with the PDA employees and paid staff members (not the volunteer board), the mess that was created by this organization does not surprise me and should not surprise anyone else.

Many key staff positions at PDA were not necessary, and, yes, most were being paid well above the norms for equivalent positions that exist out in the market within the hospitality industry. 

Also, when the top position at PDA and key staff personnel are being compensated to a level that is twice that of what the park ranger earns who is responsible for seven state parks in the region, it should have been very obvious that something was terribly wrong. 

Top staff at PDA were also being paid well over the equivalent of what the top Fort Worden Treatment Center staff members were being paid when the Juvenile Diagnostic Center was being operated on the Fort Campus several decades ago, and many of the treatment center positions required much higher levels of education than the top tier PDA staff.

As for the financial executive officer position at PDA, that work could and should have been outsourced to a qualified CPA firm, and it would have cost much less than paying for a full-time, in-house executive. All that PDA really needed was a bookkeeper who would be responsible for transferring figures and data to the CPA firm who would have made sure that the books were not being cooked. 

As past state audits indicated, the PDA lacked internal controls, which made it ripe for fraud. 

Simple fixes in accounting procedures could have been put in place to stop the fraud, but PDA staff obviously had no interest in that.

Bayly Miller
TACOMA