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| For months, no journalist would touch this story. Urban Tilth and Rich City Rides are both darlings of the Richmond progressives, serving youth, promoting biking, fighting Chevron, saving Point Molate (or maybe even saving the world), you name it. Yet, there was a seamy dark side to all this, involving tens of millions of dollars in public funds and charitable contributions diverted for personal use. While some profited, others were sacrificed, including Taye McGee. The scheme has been protected and covered up by public agencies, elected officials and public employs at all levels of government, including the City of Richmond, Contra Costa Supervisor John Gioia, the California Strategic Growth Council and The California Attorney General’s Office.
Figure 1 - What the tangled Web of Nonprofits Looks like in graphic form
Rich City Rides wasn’t burglarized, police say, pointing to possible dispute between business partners
A look at Rich City Rides’ nonprofit’s ties to Urban Tilth following a fundraising effort linked to a bike shop burglary police say never happened.
by Julia Haney and Joel UmanzorJuly 29, 2024, 6:00 a.m.
The doors of Rich City Rides' bike shop have been locked since the store shut down in January, with paper covering the windows. Police say a burglary that was reported at the Macdonald Avenue co-op never happened. Credit: Julia Haney
Overview:
This story was reported and published in a collaboration between Richmondside and Richmond Confidential.
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Najari Smith, co-founder and co-owner of Rich City Rides, reported to police on Jan. 13 that he walked into the bike co-op on Macdonald Avenue in Richmond and found thousands of dollars of merchandise missing. In the following days he gave media interviews about the reported theft and started collecting donations through a GoFundMe campaign with a goal of raising $200,000 for the beloved neighborhood shop.
After investigating the report for several months, Richmond police now say that there was no burglary. But RPD Public Information Officer Lt. Donald Patchin said they are investigating whether any other crimes occurred “related to the handling of business funds and property.”
“It appears this is a business dispute amongst the owner/operators of the business,” Patchin said in an email and a phone interview.
“From the very beginning, all signs pointed to it not being a burglary,” he said, adding that security cameras had been turned off, and there was no sign of forced entry into a safe or the building.
A quick summary of this story
WHO: The Rich City Rides nonprofit was founded 12 years ago in Richmond. Two years it opened a cooperative bike store and repair shop of the same name. The store was shut down in January due to financial problems, owners said, but the nonprofit remains.
WHAT HAPPENED: A burglary was reported Jan. 13 at the co-op bike shop at 1500 Macdonald Ave., where its nonprofit is also located. Police now say there was no burglary and that they are investigating whether any other crimes took place.
WHY IT MATTERS: The reported bike shop burglary was listed on a fundraising page as one of the reasons public donations were being solicited. The sponsor of the Rich City Rides nonprofit, Urban Tilth, has an active online fundraiser running on behalf of the nonprofit. The nonprofit has received publicly funds, and Urban Tilth is run by Richmond City Council member Doria Robinson, who has a personal relationship with the business owner who reported the burglary that police say didn’t happen.
The investigation is time-consuming, Patchin said, because it could involve subpoenas for business records and bank accounts and “going through those with a fine-tooth comb to try and determine if there was any malfeasance.”
In a phone interview the week of July 15, Smith maintained that the store was burglarized, but said he understands that if items are missing because of an internal dispute between himself and his business partner, it wouldn’t fit the legal definition of a burglary.
Smith’s estranged business partner, Felonte Roshni McGee (who goes by “Taye”), said that he hasn’t been contacted by police with an update on the investigation.
“That’s a version of what I’ve been saying the whole time,” McGee said, when told by a reporter that police said no burglary occurred. “Nothing was ever stolen from the shop.”
Patchin said the investigation is focused on the Rich City Rides bike shop, not the nonprofit of the same name. He said it came about through various allegations made during the burglary investigation.
Three people with ties to the shop, including McGee, have insisted there was no burglary. They say Smith spent so little time at the shop in the year leading up to its closure, that he was not familiar with its inventory. Smith acknowledged that he had been more focused on the nonprofit and was dealing with a death in the family, but he says he could see something was amiss when he went to the shop in January.
McGee said in a March interview that the bike cooperative was “closed indefinitely.” It remains locked up with paper covering the windows.
Many cyclists were saddened by news of the bike shop’s closure and its uncertain future. They expressed concern on social media and in the chat sections of the group’s online fundraisers. Rich City Rides has been a staple in Richmond for more than a decade, hosting regular group rides and advocating for bike access and biking infrastructure — and by extension, green space.
“I don’t want to cast a negative light on my community. I love Richmond.“
— Najari Smith, co-owner and co-founder of Rich City Rides
Najari Smith, center, is a co-founder of the Rich City Rides bike shop and founder and executive director of the nonprofit project with the same name. Here he’s pictured on Nov. 20, 2022 at the Richmond BART plaza at an event celebrating the third anniversary of the dedicated Richmond-San Rafael Bridge bike lane. Credit: Najim Rahim
Rich City bike shop requests donations after burglary report
Smith launched the Rich City Rides nonprofit in 2012 under the fiscal sponsorship of Urban Tilth, a food justice nonprofit founded and led by Richmond City Council member Doria Robinson, who is also Smith’s romantic partner. Urban Tilth currently has an active online fundraiser for the nonprofit on the platform JustGiving.
Rich City Rides’ bicycle store and repair shop was founded as a co-op in 2014, and it operated financially as its own entity. The nonprofit, which is still open, continues to host community rides, youth activities and repair workshops. It also provides bikes to residents in need.
“Over the past 10 years, we have provided over 3,500 free new and refurbished bikes to Richmond residents,” the nonprofit project wrote in its February newsletter.
When Smith posted the fundraising page after reporting the burglary in January, he wrote that he had planned to dissolve the co-op bike shop amid “insurmountable debt.”
“We were trying to raise money to settle those debts and to end the business, so me and my partner (McGee) could walk away,” Smith said.
“Help us turn a setback into a bounce back,” he asked potential donors, more than 60 of whom contributed.
The GoFundMe campaign is no longer active, and a social media post about the burglary has since been deleted. The fundraiser had collected at least $4,000 in contributions before the page was taken down.
Smith says these donations will be used to “pay off the credit card debt the bike shop incurred.”
Rich City Rides nonprofit’s website has a homepage message stating it is transitioning to an independent nonprofit known simply as Rich City — “a beacon of community development.”
The nonprofit has been able to accept tax-deductible donations because it has received fiscal sponsorship from Urban Tilth, which is a 501(c)(3) organization. The fiscal sponsorship model allows an organization to receive the benefits of nonprofit status without the hassle or cost associated with establishing and maintaining a 501(c)(3).
The co-op and the nonprofit were based in separate units of the 1500 Macdonald Ave. location. Smith said the co-op started as an initiative of the nonprofit project.
“The offices for the nonprofit for years were located upstairs in the back of the bike shop. So people would not necessarily know that there were two different organizations,” said former employee Jason Woody.
“One of my big regrets is not changing the name,” Smith said in reference to confusion between the co-op and the nonprofit. “Hindsight is 20/20.”
The agreement between Rich City Rides and fiscal sponsor Urban Tilth was “confusing to a lot of people, including me for the first seven years,” McGee, the shop’s former co-owner, said.
Community members would come to the bike shop asking to donate, McGee said. “I’d have to go to them and say, ‘No, you cannot donate anything to this for-profit establishment. You can surrender these things, but we cannot give you any tax write-off papers,’ ” he said.
Woody and McGee were let go from the nonprofit last year. McGee worked at the co-op until it was shuttered in January.
Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth, said any claims of confusion about the relationship between the nonprofit and the bike co-op are disingenuous.
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“They know the difference, especially the co-owners who were party to the creation of the (California) co-op corporation, including the signing of incorporation papers and the ongoing business management,” she said in a May email. “They know and knew.”
Rich City nonprofit received financial help from its sponsor Urban Tilth
Richmond City Council member Doria Robinson, pictured here at a council meeting, is executive director of the nonprofit Urban Tilth, which is the fiscal sponsor of the Rich City Rides nonprofit. Credit: David Buechner
Before Robinson was elected to City Council, the California Strategic Growth Council announced on Oct. 28, 2022 that it had awarded $35 million to Richmond and a group of nonprofits, including Urban Tilth and its nonprofit project Rich City Rides, to build green infrastructure.
Rich City Rides said in its application that it would use its portion, $3.7 million, for an E-bike lending library and a Rising Youth Fellows Program, to “build a base of Black and Brown Richmond youth leaders to advocate for climate justice in Richmond.”
The plan has been to base the E-bikes in Unity Park at 16th Avenue and Ohio Street. In a July 16 Instagram post Rich City posted an architectural drawing of a structure that would house the fleet, saying it would be built by next year.
Rich City Rides also executed a plan to buy the Macdonald Avenue building, launching a fundraiser for the purchase in 2023. Urban Tilth stepped in to help, paying $4.3 million for six properties, including the Macdonald units housing the Rich City Rides nonprofit and the bike shop.
Urban Tilth then sold five of those parcels to Rich City under a “bridge loan” for the same amount, using the properties secured as collateral, according to a recent audit of Urban Tilth’s financial records.
Robinson said in her email that the nonprofit project has repaid some of the loan — though she did not say how much. She said she expects the loan to be fully repaid by year’s end.
“We’re working on it,” Smith said recently. “We want to complete that by the end of the year.”
In tax filings, Urban Tilth has noted its role as a fiscal sponsor over the years, including through a sponsorship agreement. Rich City Rides, in a 2024 newsletter, said it “has been a fiscally sponsored project for the past 12 years.”
Comprehensive fiscal sponsors collect donations, manage funding, disperse paychecks, and assume fiscal and legal liability on behalf of a project.
“Maintaining control over the donated funds is a requirement of a legitimate fiscal sponsor arrangement,” according to the National Council of Nonprofits. The sponsor and project often have aligned missions, and typically the sponsor charges a fee for the service.
“If the fiscally sponsored entity is under the umbrella of the fiscal sponsor, then the fiscal sponsor has all of the authority to purchase real property on behalf of its program or project,” said nonprofit lawyer Daryl Reese, who is based in Santa Rosa.
Urban Tilth charges nonprofits a fee, and, in turn, offers insurance, business operations support and networking opportunities, according to Robinson.
“We believe in the work of our [fiscally sponsored] projects and want them to succeed,” she said in her email.
In response to questions about the relationship between Urban Tilth and Rich City Rides’ nonprofit, Robinson wrote, “Throughout our work we have been working with lawyers and acted according to their sound guidance which has stood up to close scrutiny from state and local authorities to this day.” She then accused the media of being “quick to assume and believe that projects led by Black leaders are somehow doing something wrong.”
Two former friends now in dispute over business property
Sharing a love for biking and the community, Smith and McGee launched the bike cooperative a decade ago with two other founders who have since left the organization. McGee says the partnership brought together his deep Richmond roots with Smith’s business acumen.
“In the years following, we grew in name and legend as a special magic light in a city with a tough, rugged past,” Smith wrote about the early years on the recent GoFundMe page.
“We had a great relationship when it first started. I thought we were taking care of each other,” McGee said. “I admired him.”
“We were very close friends,” Smith said. “I watched his kids grow up.”
But as the nonprofit project was expanding, the bike shop was experiencing financial troubles, according to Smith. And by 2023, both Smith and McGee said they had plans to dissolve the cooperative.
Richmond police spokesperson Patchin said this detail complicated the burglary investigation.
“The problem is that there were already issues among the business owners,” he said. “They were already in the process of potentially shuttering the business before this occurred.”
The former friends’ relationship today is a far cry from how they described it in the early years, when McGee says they would always find each other at the shop after outings and activities.
They have accused one another of sending people to threaten them. Smith said he filed a report with Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety at the end of 2022. McGee said he filed a report with Richmond police and that the people who threatened him last August also stole a couple items from the co-op.
Richmond police declined Richmond Confidential’s public records requests for McGee’s 2022 threat report. The city said there was no record of a call to the Office of Neighborhood Safety from 1500 Macdonald Ave. in the time frame Smith referenced.
Richmond police also declined a public records request for the burglary report Smith filed in January.
After reporting the burglary in January, Smith turned to GoFundMe, as he did when Rich City Rides tried to buy its building last year and when he said the organization needed money to repair a vandalized van in 2020. “We know we can come back stronger than ever,” he wrote on the January GoFundMe page.
Smith also wrote that there was no sign of forced entry. “The only way this could have been done is with access to a key and the ability to disarm the alarm system,” he wrote on the page, which has since been unpublished.
McGee took that as an accusation.
“He’s telling people that I robbed my own store. And so I’m ashamed to really be outside,” McGee said. “It’s really depressing. Like I gotta keep on answering questions from everybody.”
“My whole existence of being a bike rider and a person of this community, and being a pillar of my community — it all has been wiped away.”
— Taye McGee, former co-founder of Rich City Rides co-op
In a recent phone interview, McGee reiterated, “That would mean that I would be stealing from myself. And I do not steal. l am not a thief. And I definitely don’t steal from myself,” he said. “My whole existence of being a bike rider and a person of this community, and being a pillar of my community — it all has been wiped away.”
Smith said on the fundraiser page that two days before he discovered the burglary, he had drafted a plan to dissolve the cooperative, which he said had accumulated $185,000 in debts.
An Instagram post advertising the fundraiser said, “The proceeds will go to resolving the 200K debt the bike shop owes.” The post has since been taken down.
One of the 60 people who donated to the fundraiser wrote in the comments section: “A business like this serves the community in many different ways. Hoping they are able to get back on their feet and get back to serving the community.”
A mural on the side of the Rich City Rides building in downtown Richmond depicts co-founder and co-owner Najari Smith on a red bicycle. Credit: Julia Haney
Woody reported the page as fraudulent to GoFundMe, saying in an interview that he did not believe a burglary had occurred. Brian Barnes, former general manager of the bike shop, also said in an interview, “There was no burglary at all.”
Woody said the fundraiser was deactivated after he made that report. It was later reactivated, but has since been taken down again.
Since last year, Urban Tilth has been hosting a fundraiser for the Rich City nonprofit project on JustGiving, raising more than $14,000 so far.
Rich City announced in its February newsletter that it intends to establish official nonprofit status, which would separate it from Urban Tilth’s sponsorship. Records show it has been registered with the California Secretary of State and Franchise Tax Board, as required. But it does not yet turn up on the IRS or California Attorney General’s lists of charitable organizations.
On Feb. 28, the California Attorney General’s office — which registers and manages state nonprofits — sent notice to Rich City to submit its registration fee, bylaws and IRS paperwork.
“It’s a process,” Smith said. “We’re working through our financials so that we can do the final submission for our 501(c)(3). We’re working on it.”
The Attorney General’s Office said by email on July 17 that its Registry of Charities and Fundraisers had not received a response from Rich City.
“Ignoring a Notice to Register may lead to penalties, administrative or legal action, and the loss of tax exemption status with the Franchise Tax Board,” the office said.
Two days later, the attorney general’s office sent Rich City a “final notice to register.” As of July 28, Rich City was still listed as “not registered” on the attorney general’s website.
Tagged:Downtown Richmond
Julia HaneyFreelance reporter
juliahaney@berkeley.edu
Julia Haney is a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
What I cover: I cover schools in Contra Costa County and the communities around them.
My background: I'm a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism where I've reported stories about birth doulas, online bullying, climate and the West Contra Costa Unified School District. In the summer of 2024 I'm interning as an audio reporter at KALW through the 11th Hour Project.
More by Julia Haney
Joel UmanzorCity Reporter
joel@richmondside.org
Joel Umanzor Richmondside's city reporter.
What I cover: I report on what happens in local government, including attending City Council meetings, analyzing the issues that are debated, shedding light on the elected officials who represent Richmond residents, and examining how legislation that is passed will impact Richmonders.
My background: I joined Richmondside in May 2024 as a reporter covering city government and public safety. Before that I was a breaking-news and general-assignment reporter for The San Francisco Standard, The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle. I grew up in Richmond and live locally.
Contact: joel@richmondside.org |
