The Kern County Grand Jury issued a blistering
report Wednesday outlining ongoing dysfunction, missing money and shady
contracts at the Lamont Public Utilities District.
Grand jurors didn't name names, saying the
report is designed to encourage the district to right the ship and fix chronic
problems with leadership, money handling and political cronyism.
But a series of reports by KBAK Channel 29
news reporter and Californian community columnist Jose Gaspar have detailed the
specifics of the problems the report outlined.
They include since-fired district General
Manager Mario Cervantes allegedly approving the construction of a $240,000
sewer line in 2011 to benefit a commercial development owned by his brother,
current district board member Miguel Sanchez.
The allegations were contained in a lawsuit
filed by the utilities district against Cervantes, which was later settled with
Cervantes and the contractor paying a total of $30,000.
Attempts to contact Sanchez Wednesday were unsuccessful.
The report by the Services and Special
Districts Committee of the grand jury also calls for financial reform in Lamont
after it was discovered $210,000 in payments from customers reportedly went
missing over the course of three years. The utilities district has hired a firm
to investigate the missing money.
Grand jurors also said the five members of the
utility district’s governing board are unaware of district policy and
procedures, state public meeting rules and other basic aspects of their duty.
There is a 3-2 political split on the board, the report states, and the
incessant bickering between factions and their supporters is disrupting the
PUD’s ability to function.
Peter Cosentini, a professional city manager
who is halfway through his third month as interim general manager at the Lamont
Public Utilities District, acknowledged the agency is troubled.
“Staffing is a problem here. The state
controller’s office is also here just completing their audit,” Cosentini said.
One of the auditors “said, ‘you have minimal staff here. It’s so lean that if
one person (in) the organization goes away, you become non-functional,”
Cosentini said.
The auditor wasn’t wrong, Consentini said.
“I see what we do here and the people we have
to do it and we’re bare-bones,” he said. “That’s the underlying bedrock problem
here. You don’t have enough people to do the job.”
Consentini hit many of the same points that
the grand jury did in his management response to a Brown Armstrong audit of the
Lamont PUD presented to the governing board in late March.
The audit, with which Consentini generally
concurs, said the Lamont PUD has a problem with too much overtime, its pay
structure is a mess, its water fund is propping up its sewer fund, which has
run a deficit for 16 years, and the district desperately needs
professional financial staff.
He said the governing board approved his
action plan to respond to the audit and agreed to consider hiring new financial
staff — potentially a financial manager with CPA certification — to run the
district’s finances.
Right now, the grand jury noted, the
district’s office manager handles all district financial and human resources
functions without “a degree or certfication in accounting.”
Consentini said no government agency should
have only one person handling its cash.
“You need two people in finances for checks
and balances. We have only one,” he said. “When you put in place a structure
that protects the financial system, then you don’t have a quarter of a million
dollars walking out the door.”
April 13, 2016
The
Bakersfield Californian
By James Burger
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