On Thursday, baseball at Petco Park begins again. But when the first pitch is thrown, fans won’t know exactly what the Padres or the team’s concessionaire Delaware North has done to change their practices, following major concession scandals in the park last year.
Fans won’t know, because Padres and Delaware North officials won’t say.
Last year, Voice of San Diego broke two major stories about Petco concessions. The first revealed a phantom nonprofit group called Chula Vista Fast Pitch had been pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year inside the park, even though it wasn’t a real charity. The second exposed two other groups paying their workers under the table and below minimum wage, even though the workers were supposed to be volunteers.
Given the fake nonprofit was able to operate in Petco for nine years and that illegal payments to supposed volunteers seemed to be widespread, I wanted to know how the Padres and Delaware North might stem these practices this year.
I requested interviews with top officials more than a month ago. When I didn’t get a response, I requested statements. I never heard back.
The most we know is this: Delaware North committed last year to provide “additional resources” toward the review of charity groups’ legal status and “heightened operational standards in 2024.”
What that means is quite unclear.
Exactly how Chula Vista Fast Pitch managed to operate within Petco Park for nine years is one of the biggest remaining mysteries of last year’s investigations.
Stadium workers told Voice it was an open secret that Chula Vista Fast Pitch wasn’t a real nonprofit.
Finding out whether a group exists on paper, and has charitable, tax-exempt status, is extremely easy. In the case of Chula Vista Fast Pitch, officials either knew the group wasn’t real or they failed to check.
Officials at Sports Arena noticed in 2015 – and quite easily – that Chula Vista Fast Pitch wasn’t a real nonprofit.
Since last year’s stories, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the local District Attorney’s office have both begun investigations into the stadium scandals. As of last December, neither the Padres nor Delaware North had been contacted in regards to the investigations, officials said.
A quick refresher on how concessions work: At most stadiums and venues throughout the country, a mix of paid workers and volunteers staff the concession stands. Charity groups bring in the volunteers. Each charity group typically gets one or several stands. They then get to keep roughly 10 percent of the revenue from their stand to go toward their charitable purpose.
The whole system “is an absolute cesspool,” Jordan Kobritz, a minor league team owner, previously told Voice. “There are a lot of guilty parties involved: the sports teams, the concessionaires, some of the nonprofits.”
Voice’s investigation found charities luring in workers with cash payments that violated minimum wage and tax laws. Charities are allowed to give their volunteers small stipends, but not cash payments that approximate – but do not exceed – minimum wage.
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It’s interesting that in at least one of the concession stands that was staffed by this fake non-profit, that stand (in the left field corner) has been turned into a “grab and go” type stand, with fewer people working it than before.
And unfortunately that stand is still ran by the same NPO staff under a different “new” name.