SANTA CRUZ >> A Santa Cruz County Grand
Jury report released Thursday blasts the Santa Cruz City Schools tax oversight
body for lack of transparency and accountability, and questions how taxpayer
revenue has been spent.
“Neither the Parcel Tax Oversight Committee
nor Santa Cruz City Schools has been able to verify that the Parcel Tax
Oversight Committee has met its responsibility to monitor expenditures and report
annually to the community,” the 28-page report reads.
The 23-member committee was formed in 2003,
and oversees the spending of three district parcel taxes, including Measures I,
J and P, which variously fund elementary school class size reduction, library
and counseling services and art, music and life lab programs.
The report found that the committee lacked a
full and publicly available documentation of its past meeting minutes, reports
and committee makeup, among other concerns. The committee effectively went
dormant during the 2013-2014 school year, and appeared at times to not comply
with requirements for a quorum during decision-making, according to the report.
The findings, however, come less than a month
after the Santa Cruz City Schools Board of Trustees took the first of two votes
to establish new guidelines and oversight for its Parcel Tax Oversight
Committee. The school board is scheduled to finalize the new bylaws at its May
6 meeting, Superintendent Kris Munro said.
Munro said she was aware that the grand jury
was conducting a general investigation into the district, but did not know the
specifics of their report until this week. The effort, however, drew the
district’s attention to several longstanding procedural issues with the
committee, Munro said. The district will have 90 days to formally respond to
the report’s numerous findings and recommendations.
“We are encouraged that many of the grand
jury recommendations are items that we have identified ourselves,” Munro said
in a release. “The fact is that as soon as many of these items came to our
attention, we immediately moved to remedy and correct.”
One report issue not yet addressed, however,
is whether the tax revenue should fully pay for services, or simply supplement
existing services. Other concerns highlighted a disagreement over the Parcel
Tax Oversight Committee’s role in making expenditure recommendations to the
school board, and how funding should be split to various competing needs, along
set percentages.
Bill Maxfield, a DeLaveaga Elementary School
parent and recent addition to the Parcel Tax Oversight Committee, said
organization bylaws “are a needed improvement.”
“It’s also important that the bylaws preserve
the status of the committee as independent, which is called for in the ballot
language,” Maxfield said in an email. “Ending the committee’s decade-plus
tradition of periodically providing recommendations to the school board would
be a disservice to students and taxpayers.”
During the school board’s March 25 meeting,
proposed bylaw language firmly established the committee’s role as an
observatory watchdog group, rather than a more proactive advisory body able to
make spending recommendations. The bylaw proposal came at the beginning of the
district’s public discussions on pursuing next year the renewal of the Measure
P parcel tax and a new school facilities bond measure.
In addition to its criticisms, the grand jury
report praised the district for initially instituting a tax oversight
committee, even though the move was not required by law. It recommended that
future parcel tax ballot language offer voters a clear percentage breakdown of
fund division among various priorities.
Grand jury foreman Sara Cordell said the
groups is very happy when organizations being investigated makes improvements
prior to the report being published.
“We did notice the improvements have begun
and are very pleased that the citizens of the county will be better served by
the PTOC as they become more transparent in their reporting to the public,”
Cordell said.
The Santa Cruz County Grand Jury is a
19-member group of volunteers chosen from the voter rolls and driver
registration records. Jurors serve for one year, although some may elect to
serve a second year. The Grand Jury term begins each year on July 1 and ends
the following June 30.
April 16, 2015
Santa
Cruz Sentinel
By
Jessica A. York
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