Angel Flight Agrees To Appoint
Independent Board

 

Angel Flight of New England Inc., a nonprofit that provides hospital flights for sick patients, will appoint an independent board under an agreement with Attorney General Martha Coakley that was announced in December, following a series of governance problems raised by pilots and staff early last year.

In January 2010, the founder of the North Andover-based organization, Lawrence Camerlin, summarily fired the board of directors, after one member confronted him over employing his own daughter for $80,000 a year. The board members, many of them pilots who donated their time flying patients, also were large financial contributors to the group.

Coakley’s office said that Angel Flight’s board has been under the control of its founder and his wife, Ruth, under the group’s original bylaws. The attorney general’s office said it determined that the nonprofit organization “did not assure an independent board that was free from management’s direction. Therefore, the governance structure did not comply with good governance standards for nonprofit charitable boards.’’

Under the agreement, Angel Flight will amend its bylaws to establish a board that is independent of management, and establish a conflict of interest policy mandating annual financial disclosures by directors and certain staff.

Camerlin and his lawyer did not return requests for comment.

Camerlin started the operation in 1996, after selling his ambulance business and getting a pilot’s license. The group has flown more than 32,000 flights to transport people with cancer and other serious maladies to medical facilities in the Northeast, and has a devoted board of volunteer pilots who are passionate about flying their own planes to help patients.

The Boston Globe first detailed the problems at Angel Flight in April. After one large donor on the board, who is also a pilot, Joe Howley, confronted Camerlin about his daughter being on the payroll, Howley was fired last December. When the remaining board members demanded that Howley be reinstated, or they might demand that their sizable donations be returned, Camerlin fired the rest of them.

At nonprofits, the director or chief executive is meant to answer to the board, not to control the board. The new governance requires that, for five years, Angel Flight must give the attorney general’s office 60 days’ advance notice of any proposed changes to the Angel Flight bylaws that would diminish the authority of its independent directors.

Howley and other fired board members have started a competing organization, Patient AirLift Services. But they say they remain bruised from the affair, and called on Coakley to look more deeply into Angel Flight’s spending and operations.

Howley, in a e-mail, said he felt the attorney general’s action was just a slap on the wrist for Camerlin. “I am extremely disappointed he was allowed to continue in his capacity,’’ Howley said.

-From “Angel Flight agrees to appoint independent board”, by Beth Healy, Globe Staff , The Boston Globe, December 24, 2010, at http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2010/12/24/angel_flight_agrees_to_appoint_independent_board/, retrieved 1/3/11.

 

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