Blog note: This article appeared just two days after we posted the article about the grand jury report. It is nice to see media suppor for a grand jury recommendation.
In the strongest possible terms, a grand jury has laid bare the astonishing lack of oversight and complete mishandling of millions in federal COVID relief dollars by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and the bureaucrats working for them.
It was in the summer of
2020, in those early, frightening months of the pandemic, that the public
learned that $104 million of $181 million allocated to Sacramento County for
the purpose had been funneled into the budget of Sheriff Scott Jones.
The revelation was in
keeping with the broader mismanagement of county affairs under then-CEO Nav
Gill. It was Gill who announced that he had moved the money into the Sheriff’s
Office budget for existing public safety employees. The grand jury believes
that may turn out to be a violation of federal regulations, as the CARES Act,
which provided the funds, specifically prohibits their use for already-budgeted
staffing.
Gill subsequently
resigned, but not before he was caught flouting the county’s indoor mask
mandate and accused of creating a “caustic” workplace
The grand jury report called the county’s
actions “questionable and opaque maneuvers that skirted the intent of the CARES
Act to the benefit of county coffers with scant regard for the needs of its
citizens.”
It also made it abundantly
clear that the county mishandled the funds in contrast with the city,
highlighting the enormity of the county’s failure to serve its citizens.
The jury wrote: “The City
of Sacramento was the only other local governmental entity located in
Sacramento with a large enough population to qualify for its own CARES Act
funding,” and it “distributed nearly its entire $89.6 million CARES Act
allocation to community agencies and business to help alleviate COVID-19
impacts.”
But the county’s CEO chose
to fund law enforcement, and the Board of Supervisors looked the other way.
In doing so, the grand
jury said, the supervisors abdicated their duty to provide oversight. The board
did not request or receive any reports on the allocation or use of the funding
until more than three months after the funds were in hand.
Using this money for the
Sheriff’s Office “ignored many of the critical public health needs” needed to
contain the spread of COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, said the
jury, and that more than likely increased the number of deaths in Sacramento
County.
The Sheriff’s Office, the
main beneficiary of the funds expressly set aside to mitigate the impact of the
pandemic on our county, chose instead not to enforce numerous active emergency
orders issued by the state.
County officials said
later that Gill had put the money into the sheriff’s budget and transferred the
same amount from that budget back to the general fund. They said it was a
placeholder to ensure the county wouldn’t lose the money if it failed to
allocate quickly enough to meet federal guidelines. The money was eventually
returned to its stated purpose, county officials said.
Still, the city was able
to put its federal aid to good use in the specified time frame without such a
ridiculous spectacle.
The jury rightly
recommended that the supervisors appoint an independent panel by June to
conduct a full audit of the county’s allocation of CARES Act funding as well as
adopt a transparent budget allocation and approval process for the board, the
CEO’s office and the sheriff’s department.
Sacramento County District
1 Supervisor Phil Serna has since released a statement in which he calls for a
full and independent audit of the CARES Act money received by the county.
“Despite many known
attempts to explain what actually occurred separate from conjecture, assumption
and at times misguided inference, the fact remains that there’s a good deal of
confusion in our community concerning the very serious matter of pandemic
response and the use of scare resources to fulfill Sacramento County’s
responsibilities,” Serna wrote.
“The lack of governance
and oversight by the Board of Supervisors,” the grand jury wrote, “allowed the
county executive to violate the first goal of the county’s stated criteria for
use of the CARES Act funds.”
The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board
February 17, 2022
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