Bartlett House Board Member used Homeless Shelter as Dirt-Cheap ‘Storage Unit’
This is Part 2 of the homelessness series. Read Part 1 here for the Bartlett House backstory.
Bartlett House board member Christopher Meyers, from Pittsburgh, utilized Bartlett House’s homeless shelter on University Avenue to store his personal business’s arcade equipment, as reported by another board member to WVMAD.
Who is Chris Meyers? According to a Dominion Post article from 2022, Meyers has “built a vending route of indie games, jukeboxes, dartboards, pool tables—anything that takes coins—across six states ... He has now created over 40 ‘barcades’ throughout the east coast.”
Meyers allegedly boasted about saving $40,000 in moving and storage costs by using the nonprofit’s building as his personal storage unit, according to a source familiar with the arrangement. He paid the nonprofit a mere $150 per month in rent for the main space of the nearly 12,000 sqft. building.
Meyers told fellow board members that his business saved the $40K because his arcade equipment would need moved to Pittsburgh instead, a costly endeavor. Sources indicate that Meyers failed to pay the $150 rent on time and only settled up after persistent reminders.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit faced the burden of a $250,000 collateralized loan for the building, currently at risk of bank seizure.
Was the rent a fair arrangement for the nonprofit, or did it take advantage of the nonprofit’s tax-exempt assets?
Exit 1 Storage, located a couple of miles away on Hornbeck Road, charges $120/month for a 96 sqft storage unit—almost 60 times smaller than Bartlett shelter's main space. The math works out to $1.25 per sqft, a competitive rate in the Morgantown area.
However, even with the most generous calculation, Meyers paid the nonprofit a mere $0.03 per sqft.
If Meyers’ business had paid market rate for a Morgantown warehouse the size of the homeless shelter's first floor, the rent would have been approximately $6,000 per month, according to warehousespaces.com's current Morgantown monthly average of $1.04 per sqft. Bartlett House, a struggling nonprofit, received just over 2 pennies on the dollar for their space. Yet, the taxpayers of Monongalia County just gave Bartlett House a $35,000 emergency bailout to cover shelter employee payroll, following the board of directors' disastrous mismanagement.
Nonprofit volunteer board members using nonprofit assets for their personal businesses is unusual.
In fact, it could be illegal. The IRS provides a special form available to the public for reporting violations of the federal tax code: IRS Form 13909. This includes nonprofit tax violations such as, “Directors/officers/persons are using income/assets for personal gain.”
Editorial Note: WVMAD is not alleging Bartlett House’s board of directors used nonprofit assets for their personal gain; only the IRS can make such a determination.
Meyers expressed desire to purchase Bartlett’s shelter for his arcade business, and have Bartlett finance the purchase
In further enmeshment, Meyers stated he wanted to purchase the University Avenue building for his Starport arcade business. Meyers sought a real estate attorney—coincidentally, a fellow Bartlett House board member named Stephen Royce, who practices law at Steptoe & Johnson.
The two board members attempted to persuade the remaining six board members to provide “owner financing” to Meyers. Despite repeated warnings from the former Bartlett House Executive Director that this arrangement was not in the nonprofit organization's best interest, the deal persisted.
Eventually, Meyers disregarded requests for updates on the status of his purchase intent and stopped attending board meetings, and the deal ultimately fell through. Now, the board faces the challenge of finding a new buyer for $595,000, as Clear Mountain Bank froze the loan for only 90 days. There is a possibility that the bank may choose to take possession of the homeless shelter to satisfy the overdue loan.
We sent an advanced draft of this story to Chris Meyers. We agreed to give Meyers an entire week to respond, and to publish comments in their entirely so he had a fair opportunity to address the questions about his use of nonprofit assets.
The following is his response: Chris Meyers did not respond to our email.
Stephen Royce has been recently removed from the Board of Directors page on the Bartlett House website. We emailed Royce to ask if he resigned and to comment on this story, but did not receive a response.
What do you think, Morgantown? Do you think Bartlett’s board of directors should continue to oversee millions in homelessness public funding, following the taxpayers’ additional emergency bailout?