Mixing self-promotion with public cash, the Dietleins have managed to make the nonprofit Hale Centre Theatre a lucrative charity case.
Along the way, they've collected $100,000 salaries, company cars and an exclusive costume and set lease with themselves worth $132,000 a year - perks unheard of in the hangdog ranks of community theater. They have kept one quaint tradition: The actors still make poverty wages.
For the Dietleins, family-run theater is, first and foremost, a money-making venture.
Blair Feulner's career at community radio station KPCW has been equally enriching.
He launched the Park City radio station with $8,000 and a free room in City Hall 27 years ago. After pulling in "ash and sackcloth" wages of $13,000 a year for the first nine years, Feulner and his wife eventually were bumped to six-figure salaries.
And when the station sold an unused Coalville radio license for $3.6 million three years ago, the Feulners collected a "finder's fee" of $895,000. The rest of the money was meant to establish an endowment for KPCW and its sister station in Salt Lake City. In spite of that, the stations reported a $600,000 loss last year. But Feulner's $180,000 paycheck didn't suffer. In public radio tradition, KCPW and KPCW's low-wage journalists still go on the air twice a year to beg for listener donations.
It seems some Utah nonprofit managers have figured out a way to get rich running companies that don't make money. The United Way scandal it's not. But it's similar. And in Utah, apparently, they can get away with it. Hale Centre Theatre and KPCW's boards are complicit - by naiveté or design.
In a lucky coincidence, both the Dietleins and Feulners hired crisis spinmeister Chris Thomas (of Elizabeth Smart kidnapping fame) to help them explain their creative interpretation of nonprofit management rules.
Hale Centre Theatre started out 60 years ago as an outgrowth of founders Ruth and Nathan Hale's experience as drama directors for their Mormon ward.
In 1997, their grandchildren turned that fledgling for-profit community theater into a behemoth not-for-profit organization heavily subsidized by taxpayers. West Valley City residents financed an $8 million theater - with a $1 million rotating stage - in exchange for $48,000 annually in rent and an 18 percent cut of ticket sales (estimated at 220,000 seats this year).
Salt Lake County taxpayers have chipped in more than $3 million in Zoo, Arts and Parks taxes.
And, in an end-run around the rest of Utah's arts groups, the DietÂleins appealed to West Valley City Republican Rep. Ron Bigelow for even more cash this year. Bigelow, an LDS Church accountant and the patron saint of another publicly funded "family-friendly" venue, This is the Place Heritage Park, came through with the money. State taxpayers will cough up $100,000 a year for wholesome song-and-dance shows - an infusion neither the Tony-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival nor Pioneer Theatre Company can depend on.
Bigelow promises to "keep personal track" of the money.
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Both Hale and KPCW generate a fiercely loyal following - of Park City listeners proud to have their own National Public Radio station and theatergoers who like feel-good plays and musicals without potty language. But mass appeal is not enough to justify offensive salaries or manipulation of nonprofit guidelines.
Stan Swim, president of Orem-based GFC Foundation, which gives $3 million to $5 million annually to mostly conservative causes, wonders if board members are doing due diligence - reviewing nonprofit law and studying salary benchmarks.
"Just because you provide something people like doesn't mean the rules don't apply to you," Swim says. "You have a burden to act in good faith toward the community, because the public has given you a [tax] break."
Besides, "it doesn't look very good."
walsh@sltrib.com
