Schism over finances and leadership makes for troubled waters at Newport Aquatic Center

A bay flows between the Newport Aquatic Center and its neighbors. A gulf stands between its members.

Two former board members, supported by parents of young rowers, are several months into a bitter lawsuit that accuses organization leadership of misconduct ranging from credit card abuse to allowing for-profit operations at the nonprofit facility.

In the past two months, the center’s junior rowing director was fired and the executive board voted to remove the two members who filed the lawsuit. The two sides have shorthand nicknames (“director defendants” and “disgruntled directors”) and dueling websites — nacinformation.com (plaintiffs) and nac4life.org (defendants).

Billy Whitford, the aquatic center’s director for 21 of its 31 years, denies the allegations of misconduct. He says his opponents want to make the nonprofit Newport institution, which has supported generations of rowers and paddlers of varying ages and skill levels, an incubator for elite athletes.

The aquatic center offers recreational youth and adult programs, summer youth camps and public rentals, and it partners with community organizations to introduce people with disabilities to paddling. Among the programs are an outrigger paddling team for the blind and an introduction to boating for underprivileged youths.

But it also offers competitive programs such as the junior rowers and serves as a training facility for U.S. Olympic hopefuls and international teams.

“The truth,” Whitford said in a statement, “is that the lawsuit represents one of the several attempts by the plaintiffs and their underwriters to either acquire control of the Newport Aquatic Center … or destroy it so that they can replace it with an organization that serves the junior rowing program as an elitist program that gives preference to it and discriminate[s] against the other programs that NAC sponsors.”

The Newport Aquatic Center sits on four acres of the city- and county-owned shore at Upper Newport Bay’s North Star Beach, where it has an 18,000-square-foot building, fitness facilities and storage for more than 400 canoes, kayaks, paddleboards and rowing boats, or shells. NAC is in the midst of a 25-year no-cost land lease with the city that expires in 2022.

In December, then-board members Bruce Ibbetson and Donna Warwick sued Whitford, board members Bill Grant, Jon Van Cleave and Jim Netzer and several NAC staff members.

They claimed misappropriation of funds and breach of fiduciary duty and demanded that a judge appoint a receiver, declare the board’s bylaws invalid, remove Grant, Van Cleave and Netzer from office and bar Whitford from the premises.

Their 16-page complaint filed in Orange County Superior Court details a range of alleged misdeeds, including allowing a privately owned, for-profit canoe manufacturer to assemble and distribute boats and paddles on the premises. The complaint alleges the board is using bylaws that were never legally adopted “in order to perpetuate themselves in office.” It also alleges use of NAC credit cards for personal use and claims that at least $227,000 has gone missing from the junior rowing program.

The complaint refers to Grant, Van Cleave and Netzer as “director defendants” who have “engaged in a comprehensive, consistent, concerted, documented and illegal effort to prevent access to records of the misconduct and threatened those who sought to expose it.”

Grant, Van Cleave and Netzer have not spoken publicly about the discord.

But Whitford’s statement called Ibbetson — a 1984 Olympic silver medalist in U.S. men’s rowing — and Warwick the “disgruntled directors” and accused them of using minors and their parents as pawns in their fight against the NAC establishment. He called their actions “despicable.”

Paul Tobin, the lawyer for Ibbetson and Warwick, could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

The saga dates to 2016, when NAC hired Pat Rolfes, a parent with a business background, as director of the junior rowing program. After studying the program’s finances, he concluded it was missing almost $200,000 in cash, had $150,000 in unreported debt and had past financial statements that conflicted with one another. He and other parents pressed the issue with NAC leadership and obtained an outside assessment that they claimed revealed gross financial mismanagement and private operations in conflict with the center’s lease agreement with the city.

Whitford fired Rolfes in August. Rolfes demurred on giving details while he considers a wrongful-termination case.

Rolfes, who owns a company that packages coffee and tea and manufactures commercial brewing equipment, described leading a financial turnaround for the rowing program while serving in his $41,000-a-year side job. He said he doesn’t necessarily want his job back but does want an organization that is run “beyond reproach.”

In 2016, junior rowing pulled in $875,000 in revenue, enabling it to just break even, Rolfes said. This year, it made $1.2 million. Through fundraising, he oversaw the purchase of 14 new shells, he said. He started a financial aid program. But in trying to help, he said, “I was highlighting things that were not flattering for existing management.”

He said junior rowing accounts for about half the center’s revenue and more than half of its management demands. As such, he said, it should have its own fund. Currently, money for all the center’s programs are in a single pot.

Rolfes said Whitford probably made decisions in good faith but that poor choices snowballed.

He credits Whitford with keeping the NAC alive during lean years. “People love Billy Whitford,” he said. “They think [the lawsuit is] a personal attack. It’s not.”

He blames the board.

Chrissie Emmel, a parent volunteer with two children who row, agrees with Rolfes that the problem is with the board. She suggests a clean slate.

“I personally feel the place has been hijacked by a squatting board,” she said. “The place is too special to let that happen.”

Whitford, though speaking from the other side of the gulf, uses similar language.

“A good organization like the NAC should not have to endure the false accusations that have been made by the disgruntled directors,” he said. “But because it is a good organization, it is also worth fighting to preserve.”

This is the first of two parts. In Part 2, the Newport Aquatic Center board of directors pushes back and ejects colleagues who filed the lawsuit.

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHD