Lips are mum on why, exactly, the city needed to file a lawsuit last week against Seattle Out and Proud (SOaP), producers of the annual gay pride parade. Of course, by all accounts, SOaP is over two years delinquent on a debt for using Seattle Center facilities, which the city operates, for a post-parade festival in June 2006. The group paid about $10,000 of its bill; it still owes the city $125,000, according to the lawsuit. But SOaP organizers said they have tried to work out a payment agreement with the city, even offering just under the amount requested by the city attorney’s office, and yet the city filed the lawsuit anyway. When I asked the city attorney’s office why it didn’t accept the offer, I got a bizarre set of answers. First, Senior Assistant City Attorney Thomas Castagna, who had been negotiating the debt and filed the suit, said he couldn’t talk about it. Then the city attorney’s office’s public information officer, Ruth Bowman, said, “We do not talk about pending cases. Sorry!” So I pointed out to City Attorney Tom Carr that the city has repeatedly commented on lawsuits before a judge hears the case (such as this one and this one). “We are the collection lawyers on this one. You have to talk with Seattle Center about the negotiations,” Carr wrote in an email. “The call on what is sufficient comes from the client, which is why you should talk to Seattle Center.” Not so, says Seattle Center. Seattle Center forwarded the debt to the city in April 2007. “After we send the file to the city attorney’s office, it is up to the city attorney’s office to decide how to proceed with that case,” says Seattle Center spokeswoman Deborah Daoust. At that point in the payment negotiations, she adds, “We make no call at all.” A follow-up email to Carr asking why the payment negotiations failed has not been returned.

But SOaP hasn't backed up its claim that it made a reasonable offer to pay off the debt and avoid the lawsuit. When I tried to reach SOaP president Eric Albert-Gauthier, who I spoke to last week, I got his voicemail repeatedly and no call back. He said he would let me know how much SOaP offered to pay (which could indicate whether a payment plan would have been sufficient and negate the need for a lawsuit). A few days later, I heard back from SOaP board member Jon Mejia, who joined the group last November and had limited knowledge of the case.

Mejia confirmed—to his understanding—that SOaP has been negotiating with the city attorney’s office, not Seattle Center. But he didn’t know how much the group had offered to pay. He did say this, however: “I am looking for some sort of joint statement [between the city and SOaP] that we can put out to the press shortly." But he also says focusing on SOaP's financial problems misses “the bigger story.” In Seattle, he says, “gay pride doesn’t get the same kind of support as the parade in San Francisco.”

Sorry, SOaP, you may feel like you’re not getting the sort of public support that gay pride receives in San Francisco, but it's hard for us right now. We want to be champions of our gay pride parade. But public support comes with accountability and public transparency. “I think they made their mistake when they ceased to pay anything and they ceased to communicate about it,” says Daoust on the debt to Seattle Center. “Calls weren’t getting returned and the payments stopped.” Given that history—which has, for right or wrong, resulted in a lawsuit—I’m sure few people feel confident about giving their money and support to a group that hasn’t honored its debts, hasn’t asked for help when it needed it, hasn’t been forthright about what happened, and has no clear vision for rescuing itself from its current troubles. At SOaP's current rate of payment to the city ($10,200 over 33 months), it would take the group over 30 years to pay off its debt.

But there is some hope for SOaP in its new blood. Mejia, who works professionally as a consultant for food and beverage companies, says SOaP is working out a deal with Barefoot Wine & Bubbly. He says the company will create a drink, sold in bars around town, which directs a percentage of the proceeds toward paying down SOaP’s debt.

In this week's In the Hall, I critiqued mayoral candidate Mike McGinn's three-point campaign platform, which includes a promise to take over the Seattle schools in two years if they haven't shown measurable improvement. I noted in my column that "taking the schools over is hardly a panacea. According to a recent report by the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, school district, which is contemplating a mayoral takeover, governance reform doesn't have 'sustainable impacts on student achievement' and 'requires repeated efforts over several years.'" I concluded that McGinn's two-year timeline for improvements seemed either "wildly optimistic—or wildly cynical."

For the record, I suspect the former—turning around our schools, even if it can be done (and the data suggests otherwise), would take a new mayor more than two years under the best of circumstances (and right now, with the state education budget under siege, Seattle schools are in the worst). However, this morning, McGinn alerted me to an AP story that ran in the Seattle Times about Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan, who told a forum of mayors and school superintendents this week that mayors should be allowed to seize control of big-city schools.

Urban school superintendents generally last three years or less, Duncan noted. He acknowledged Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso, asking how many superintendents the city had in the past 10 years. The answer was seven.

"And you wonder why school systems are struggling," Duncan said. "What business would run that way?"

After the forum, Duncan told The Associated Press that urban schools need someone who is accountable to voters and driving all of a city's resources behind children.

"Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven't had that leadership from the top," he said.

"That lack of stability, that lack of leadership is a huge part of the reason you don't see sustained progress and growth," Duncan said.

Of course, mayors can be voted out of office after four years—accountability to the voters hardly ensures stability. My sense is that as long as we keep cutting funding for education (the current senate budget, for example, cuts spending for K-12 and higher ed by $2 billion), no one—not an appointed school superintendent who serves at will, or a mayor accountable to the voters every four years—will be able to reduce the achievement gap. Our schools need leadership—but they also need money.