by Melissa S. Green

In August 2011, court documents in the divorce of Allen Prevo, son of Anchorage Baptist Temple pastor Jerry Prevo, raised questions about the actual ownership of certain ABT properties benefiting from religious property tax exemptions. Now, nearly a year later, Municipality of Anchorage tax assessor Marty McGee has ruled that $61,000 in back taxes are owed on two of those properties.  Pastor Prevo is already marshaling his arguments. What will they be? Chances are, they’ll include an unhealthy, high-sodium serving of red herring. 

Updated 17 July with video of KTVA Channel 11 News story (bottom of post).

Sunday’s edition of the Anchorage Daily News, posted late Saturday night on the ADN website, included a lengthy story by Richard Mauer on municipal tax assessor Marty McGee’s determination in a property tax issue involving the Anchorage Baptist Temple.  The issue was first reported in a story broken by Bent Alaska on August 29, 2011, based on court documents in the divorce trial of ABT pastor Jerry Prevo’s son Allen Prevo and Holly Jo Jaggers (who returned to her maiden name after the divorce), and involved ABT properties in which Allen Prevo and certain other ABT staff members were secretly earning equity — i.e., ownership interest.

As reported by Richard Mauer,

The Anchorage Baptist Temple improperly claimed tax-free status for the homes of two of its ministers and now owes the city more than $61,000 in back taxes, the Anchorage Assessor has ruled.

The assessor, Marty McGee, said Friday his decision was final for the two homes in question — the residences of the Rev. Allen Prevo, the church’s lighting technician, and the Rev. Tom Cobaugh, its education minister.

McGee said the church wrongly asserted it was the sole owner of the properties, a requirement under state law for tax-exempt status. The city’s nine-month investigation determined that the two pastors held undisclosed ownership interests in their homes, he said.

The ruling could be expanded to include the home of the church’s chief pastor, the Rev. Jerry Prevo, Allen Prevo’s father, pending receipt of a sworn statement about whether he too holds an unrecorded interest his property, as he did for several years. McGee said he had expected the statement from the senior Prevo on Friday but it hadn’t been received by the close of business.

Other media in Anchorage are now preparing to report on the story.  Earlier today, Bill McAllister of KTVA Channel 11 News interviewed Jerry Prevo and later interviewed me for a story to be broadcast tonight.

Pastor Prevo will undoubtedly speak out in other news venues as well.  Prepare yourself. Chances are, anything he’ll say will include an unhealthy, high-sodium serving of red herring.

How to eat red herring

I first wrote about Pastor Prevo’s affiliation with red herring on my personal blog Henkimaa.com in 2009, in the run-up to the summer-long effort for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64.

There are two kinds of red herring — (a) the actual prepared fish, and (b) the rhetorical device named after it.  I wrote in 2009:

As described by Michael Quinion of World Wide Words, kippers are “herrings that have been split, salted, dried and smoked” — a method of preparation that helped preserve fish for market in the days before refrigeration and rapid transportation. Nowadays, one can also buy kippers in a can, like sardines.

Quinion goes on to explain a method of preserving herring for even longer than kippers will keep:

Red herrings are a type of kipper that have been much more heavily smoked, for up to 10 days, until they have been part-cooked and have gone a reddish-brown colour. They also have a strong smell. They would keep for months (they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but in this state they were inedible and had to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be heated and served.

It’s this kind of herring from which comes the term for the kind of red herring for which Rev. Prevo has recently been fishing so fervently and with such monumental success. Known in rhetoric by the Latin name ignoratio elenchi (“ignorance of refutation”) or by the alternative English name the irrelevant thesis, the red herring is the most general and common of the fallacies of irrelevance: an argument in which the premise bears no logical relationship to the conclusion. Quinion relates that most etymologies he consulted state that red herring became the metaphor for this kind of logical fallacy because it was believed that the very smelly fish was sometimes dragged across the ground — for example, by escaped convicts — to confuse the scent being followed by tracking hounds. Quinion gives strong evidence for a different etymology. But regardless of etymology, its meaning in English usage — an argument which distracts people from the real issues involved — remains.

Read back through Quinlon’s explanation again for advice on how to eat red herring. You have undoubtedly heard the caution, “take so-and-so’s words with a grain of salt.”  Here, the opposite advice applies. Red herring is already so salty it’s inedible: you must soak it to remove the salt before you can heat and serve it.

But given it’s been dragged across the ground to throw off the hounds, who knows what kind of yuck it’s been dragged through?

My advice, then: don’t eat it.  At all.  And don’t be thrown off by it, either.

You are now better equipped for Pastor Prevo’s interview on tonight’s broadcast of KTVA Channel 11 News. But there’s more.

Red herring in winter: Prevo’s reaction to ADN’s January story

We already have some what we might hear Prevo claim in KTVA’s broadcast, based on what he wrote in January on the conservative blog The Northern Right in reaction to Richard Mauer’s first Anchorage Daily News story about the tax assessor’s investigation. Prevo was also reacting at that time to Rep. Berta Gardner’s (D-Anchorage) introduction in the Alaska Legislature of House Bill 305, which would have undone 2006  legislation that greatly benefited the Anchorage Baptist Temple. The 2006 legislation expanded religious property tax exemptions in Alaska and also broadened the definition of a minister, essentially permitting religious organizations that were so inclined to ordain anyone they wanted to claim held a “ministry,” and for church-owned housing occupied by that “minister” to be tax-exempt.  The 2006 legislation was widely criticized, but withstood a court challenge by the ACLU of Alaska — and also withstood Gardner’s bill, which failed to gain legislative support. In fact, Anchorage Baptist Temple associate pastor Glenn Clary — who had lobbied for the expansion of religious tax exemptions in 2006 — emailed Republican legislators with a copy of Prevo’s statement just before traveling to Juneau in early February to lobby them against Gardner’s bill. (Copy of email at right.)

Prevo’s statement read in part:

ABT believes it has properly requested tax exemptions based on legal counsel. It seems this issue comes up about every time “special rights” for homosexuals comes up in our city which is coming up in April. If passed, these “special rights” for homosexuals will take away the rights of religious groups, churches, organizations, businesses, religious people, and individuals.

I have opposed “special rights” for what the Bible calls immoral behavior since the 70’s. It seems these recent accusations are again a move to diminish my opposition to these “special rights”. ABT feels they are fortunate in that the city’s tax assessors’ office will be looking for the facts rather than fodder to write a newspaper story and if the church has been mistaken, we look forward to correcting any discrepancies.

Here is an excellent example of Prevo’s masterful use of red herrings.

First, he distracts ABT members and apologists from focusing on the actual issues at play in the tax assessor’s investigation by obfuscating the difference between two separate issues regarding religious property tax exemptions:

1. The tax exemptions Anchorage Baptist Temple is actually entitled to under the law (including the 2006 legislation); versus
2. The secret “tax-free house purchase agreements” program between ABT and certain favored ABT staff members, including Jerry Prevo’s son Allen.  These agreements were functioning below the Alaska Legislature’s and the MOA tax assessor’s radar— both before and after the 2006 legislation Gardner’s bill was intended to reverse  — and to all appearances those agreements were and still are outside the law.

Just to make it absolutely clear: Alaska law gives religious property tax exemptions only to homes fully owned by a church. Homes in which select ABT employees are secretly gathering equity — ownership interest — are not fully owned by the church, and are therefore not entitled to a religious exemption.

Prevo’s second red herring  — incredibly — attempted to cast blame for the tax assessor’s investigation on “‘this issue com[ing] up about every time ‘special rights’ for homosexuals comes up in our city” — most recently, Proposition 5, the Anchorage Equal Rights Initiative which apparently failed to pass in the bollixed April 3 Anchorage municipal election.

As I wrote in February,

Patent nonsense, of course. The last time that the issue of equal protection against discrimination for LGBT residents came up in Anchorage was 2009, and ABT wasn’t being investigated by municipal tax assessors then. At least, not that I or anyone I’ve ever talked with was aware of.  The last time tax assessors investigated ABT was in 2004; that investigation resulted in certain ABT properties housing religious teachers being put back on the tax rolls until ABT, as previously described, lobbied Ben Stevens, Lyda Green, and company to make the legislative changes of 2006, which took them back off the rolls again. An ordinance or initiative for LGBT equality was nowhere on the horizon in 2004 or 2006.  Was ABT being investigated by tax assessors in 1992? 1975? Those are the other times LGBT equality was up for public debate in Anchorage.

Nope. Just another of Pastor Prevo’s red herrings.  In fact, ADN’s story, and the municipal assessor’s investigation, had nothing to do with the Anchorage Equal Rights Initiative. They came about because (1) Jerry Prevo’s son Allen filed in 2010 for divorce from his wife, a divorce which was granted last August 1; (2) an anonymous tipster tipped off Bent Alaska to evidence in the court filings of possible fraud; (3) we chose to look into it and discovered issues that were sufficiently “loosey goosey” (to use Judge Pfiffner’s memorable phrase) that I wrote a story about them; and (4) the Anchorage Daily News and the municipal assessor, among others, confirmed our impression that the ABT’s arrangements with Allen Prevo looked fishy, and followed up my story with more in-depth investigation….

… But of course it wasn’t anyone at ADN, any more than it was me, who filed divorce paperwork on Allen Prevo’s behalf on June 6, 2010 (that was Wayne Anthony Ross, who represented Allen Prevo throughout the divorce proceedings); nor was it ADN (or me) who testified, as Allen Prevo did in open court at his divorce trial on April 5, about the formerly secret “tax-free house purchase agreements” program at ABT:

“I’ve worked for ABT for 15 years — you have to at least work there that long and then they will make a way for you to be able to make your rent go toward your equity in your home,” Allen Prevo testified. “If you continue to stay there and you eventually pay off the home, then the home is yours. But it’s all done, basically, verbal agreements, nothing in writing.”

It also wasn’t ADN (or me), but rather Judge Frank A. Pfiffner who wrote in the “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” incorporated by reference in the divorce decree of August 1, 2011:

ABT has legal title to the residence at 2230 Banbury Drive in Anchorage.  There is no deed of trust on the residence. However, ABT and Allen Prevo have an unrecorded agreement in place whereby Allen Prevo owns the equity in the residence. The agreement provides Allen Prevo is vested with the equity from prior ABT housing [reference to an earlier ABT-owned home for which there was a written agreement signed by Jerry Prevo, which was Exhibit 3 in the divorce case]…. The paper equity on the Banbury residence is a marital asset…. The court finds that the correct paper mortgage balance is $121,518.26 as validated in Exhibit 3 and by Allen Prevo’s testimony. [emphasis added]

It was Allen Prevo’s divorce, and the facts it brought to light, that twigged anyone to questionable practices at the Anchorage Baptist Temple.

The fact that the first person to follow up on that anonymous tip we got last August is a lesbian — well, that’s just gravy.

Red herring. Don’t eat it.

Update: Red herring in July — ADN followup & KTVA story

Following the initial posting of this story, the Anchorage Daily News published a followup, and KTVA broadcast its story which included interviews with municipal Chief Fiscal Officer Lucinda Mahoney, Jerry Prevo, and me.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that ABT won’t get dinged for taxes on the house Jerry Prevo himself occupies:

 The investigation, reported Sunday in the Daily News, concluded that the church’s claim for tax exemptions on the residences of two of its pastors was improper and that back taxes were due.

But the bill for back taxes will not include the residence of Prevo, the Baptist Temple’s chief pastor.

The statement, delivered Monday to Anchorage Assessor Marty McGee, affirmed that a 1994 real estate sales agreement between the church and Prevo was terminated in 2005. The affidavit was signed by Floyd Damron, chair of the church’s board of deacons.

As for the other two properties, McGee found that the pastors occupying them were in fact purchasing them from the church.

And here’s KTVA’s story filed by Bill McAllister.  Spot the red herrings.

Besides blaming the unspecified “liberal blogger” (i.e., me) for its current tax problem, Prevo also blames the Anchorage Daily News, telling KTVA,

I think the Daily News has probably damaged the state of Alaska more than any other one organization by attacking people unjustly — senators and congressmen, oil companies and others.

ADN knows a red herring when it sees one.  In a written statement to KTVA Channel 11, ADN editor Patrick Dougherty said,

I can understand why Reverend Prevo would like to divert the discussion from his church’s tax avoidance practices to the newspaper.

References

• 22 May 2009. “Prevo’s red herrings” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa.com).
• 1 Aug 2011. “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” by Judge Frank A. Pfiffner (Allen Prevo v. Holly Jo Prevo (3AN-10-08113CI)).
• 29 Aug 2012. “Prevo divorce documents raise ‘loosey-goosey’ questions about Anchorage Baptist Temple house” by Melissa S. Green (Bent Alaska).
• 15 Jan 2012. “Inquiry targets Anchorage Baptist Temple tax exemptions —REV. JERRY PREVO: Did staff members acquire equity in baptist temple-owned homes?” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News).
• 17 Jan 2012. “Prevo Responds to the Anchorage Daily News” by Jerry Prevo (The Northern Right).
• [undated]. Note from Glenn Clary to Alaska legislators prior to his February 1–4, 2012 trip to Juneau, and incorporating Jerry Prevo’s response to Richard Mauer’s 15 Jan 2012 ADN story.
• 29 Feb 2012. “Anchorage Baptist Temple prepares to enter Prop 5 debate, as tax assessor’s investigation continues” by Melissa S. Green (Bent Alaska).
• 15 Jul 2012. “Baptist Temple owes $61,000, assessor says —Homes of two church pastors aren’t exempt from taxes” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News).
• 16 Jul 2012. “Assessor concludes Prevo’s home is exempt from city taxes — Residence of Baptist Temple’s chief pastor remains exempt” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News).
• 16 Jul 2012. “City says ABT owes taxes; ABT says critics play politics: Prevo deciding whether to appeal decision regarding property taxes” by Bill McAllister (KTVA Channel 11 News).