A Merced housing nonprofit’s CEO gets paid a ton of money. But is it legitimate?

The median household income in Merced County is $53,672. By comparison, California’s median household income is $73,235.

So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Merced County is one of the poorer places in the state.

Nor does it take much expertise to realize that if someone could earn an annual income of more than $500,000 while leading a Merced-based nonprofit, that would be an amazing deal.

In fact, someone does. Her name is Christina Alley. She’s probably unknown to most of the public, and the nonprofit organization that she leads, the Central Valley Coalition for Affordable Housing, is equally under the radar.

Its mission is to help get affordable housing built, a critical need in housing-short California. Creating housing units that are affordable is of particular importance in Merced County, given the low incomes that many people earn.

And while Alley has helped develop such housing locally, she has also focused her energies on projects in the state of Washington and Arizona. That raises a question about why this nonprofit is going so far afield when the needs are so great here. No affordable housing projects have been completed in Merced — the nonprofit’s home base — since 2014.

There’s more. In an investigative story by Sun-Star staff writer Abbie Lauten-Scrivner, readers learn that Alley has worked at the nonprofit since its founding more than 30 years ago. She has been its CEO for 25 of those years. The seven people who make up the organization’s board have been in that role for years, some as long as three decades.

So, how robust is the oversight by the board of its CEO?

Why is the coalition developing any projects beyond California?

How come Alley makes so much?

And why does the nonprofit not have a functioning website? That is such a basic of doing business in 2021, the lack of one is appalling.

To be fair, no one has brought any allegations of misdeeds against Alley or the organization. The board president strongly defends her work, saying she earns every bit of her exceedingly generous pay. Alley says she routinely works more than 12 hours a day, tackling issues in a field that is complex with legal, financial and government regulation challenges.

But no matter the justification, Alley’s pay is so out of whack with other top executives earn in Merced County, not to mention statewide, that further questioning needs to be done to make sure everything is on the up and up. If she is truly worth her pay, Alley should be able to hold up to scrutiny.

Comparing salaries

The nonprofit that Alley leads helps build and manage housing developments around the state for low-income, disabled and senior residents. The organization is of modest size, with just over 20 employees. The organization reported $7.6 million in revenue and $4.6 million in total expenses in 2019.

Alley took home salary and benefits worth more than $570,000 that year, which represented 12% of the nonprofit’s expenses. Put another way, her pay and benefits were 10 times higher than Merced County’s median household income.

For the years 2016-19, Alley had an average salary of $519,707.

The new chancellor of UC Merced, in charge of educating 9,000 students, earns $425,000 annually. The former chancellor and CEO of the UC Merced Foundation made $527,000. Merced County’s district attorney is paid $333,000; the head of the county’s Food Bank gets $86,923.

Lauten-Scrivner found that the CEO of the Bridge Housing Corp. in San Francisco earned $727,000 in 2019. But that salary was just 2% of the corporation’s expenses.

Time to ask questions

Lauten-Scrivner also discovered that Alley’s pay is higher than both the average and maximum compensation found among 112 nonprofits with similar operating budgets as the Central Valley Coalition for Affordable Housing.

The roughly 280 projects Alley oversees and the 60 to 80 hours worked on a regular week are key factors in deciding her salary, said board president Alan Jenkins. “It may look really high for Merced County, but she’s excellent at what she does,” he said. “This is a really unique job.” Jenkins has been at the helm of the board for 32 years.

If that is the case, neither he nor Alley should mind further inquiries into their operations.

Alley would not explain to Lauten-Scrivner the role of state and federal tax credits — essentially taxpayer funds — in financing the nonprofit’s projects. So Jim Costa, Merced County’s congressman, and state Assemblyman Adam Gray, who is from Merced, should ask Alley to be more transparent and open the books for review.

All might be exactly as it should be, and Alley could be worth every penny she gets paid. But she, Jenkins and the rest of the board need to prove it.