Collingswood’s deputy mayor says she voted to send tens of thousands of dollars to the nonprofit that runs the borough’s historic Scottish Rite Auditorium without being told the money could never be paid back. Amy Henderson Riley says she cannot account for where that taxpayer money has gone, even as the theater’s operator still owes the borough nearly $5 million stemming from a 2003 loan.
According to NJ.com, Collingswood has sent the Collingswood Foundation for the Arts more than $100,000 in payments described as loans since Henderson Riley took office in 2025. She says she was later told those payments were not loans at all and would not be repaid, and that she has requested the foundation’s financial records without receiving them. Henderson Riley, who has acted in and directed shows at the theater herself, says she simply cannot trace where the money went.
The debt traces back to 2003, when Collingswood borough commissioners approved borrowing $5 million in bonds to lend to the foundation for renovations at the Scottish Rite Auditorium, a theater built in 1931, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Taxpayers finished paying off those bonds in 2016. Jim Maley, now the foundation’s president and a sitting borough commissioner, and Louis Cappelli Jr. signed the original loan agreement, and Maley told the Retrospect at the time that event revenue would maintain the property and repay the debt.
Conflicting Accounts of What the Loan Actually Was
Accounts of what that 2003 deal actually required diverge sharply. Maley has since said the $5 million bond was labeled as a loan but carried no expectation that the borough would ever be repaid, telling the Retrospect, “It absolutely was labeled as a loan with no expectation that we would be repaid,” according to the Retrospect. Maley also said no specific loan terms were ever set for the renovation money and that the borough’s investment in the theater was made in public view with wide support, characterizing it as an investment to create a community amenity rather than a straightforward debt…