The Colusa City Council last week decided to follow the recommendation of an ad hoc committee, composed of Council members Greg Ponciano and Denise Conrado, to take responsibility when responding to the Colusa County Grand Jury so they can finally move on with lessons learned.
The 2022 Grand Jury found city staff had misused public funds and violated local, county, and state policies in organizing last year’s three large festivals.
“We decided that the City Council needs to take responsibility for what happened in the summer of 2021,” Conrado said. “So we appreciate the Grand Jury’s work. Their investigation included public documents and that is where they got the Grand Jury’s findings, so we are acknowledging our responsibility. But we are also stating what the City Council has done since to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
As required by law, the City Council must issue an official response to the Grand Jury to Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Thompson within 90 days of the official report.
The council, on July 19, rejected city staff’s initial response, which largely denied the findings of the Grand Jury or attempted to absolve the city of blame, while noting the city had taken some corrective measures to overcome some deficiencies in judgment.
“After seeing the first response, and then the second response, it really came to light that it was actually really disturbing that we (went) from denying everything to acknowledging everything,” said City Treasurer Devin Kelly.
Kelly said she was greatly disturbed that city staff and the city attorney allowed for a deceptive response to the judge to be presented to City Council in first place, especially after a year of revelations and public discussions that led to the Grand Jury investigation.
“That is another issue that shouldn’t be ignored,” Kelly said.
But City Council members, especially newcomers Conrado and Daniel Vaca, said they are now more involved in overseeing staff than they were a year ago (as the City Council admitted in the response) and are course correcting staff as needed, including how they responded to the Grand Jury’s findings.
“We rejected (the first response) and we corrected it,” Vaca said.
Ponciano acknowledged the time he and Conrado spent preparing the corrected response.
“The sentiment of the ad hoc was that we felt a responsibility to acknowledge the grand jury’s findings; they put in a lot of time and effort into this,” Ponciano said. “Their findings were not based on opinion, they were based on fact. And so we thought it was very important that each of our responses acknowledge that.”
While the city did acknowledge violations that could have posed a liability to the city, they informed the court in their final response that the council has instituted new policies and has set protocols for event budgets, credit card use, and purchasing requirements, and that they intend staff to follow them in future.
The council said at the Aug. 16 meeting that they also had more work to do in overhauling a number of municipal codes that needed updating.
The council also said they would take the Grand Jury’s recommendations to increase staff and perform additional audits under advisement, and are open to at least discussing such mechanisms for increasing efficiency.
“We, the City Council, take pride in our community and consider ourselves very fortunate to be living in such a great city,” the final response states. “We greatly appreciate our hardworking staff and employees. We have learned valuable lessons from the events of summer 2021, and we are putting the lessons learned into policies and procedures that will ensure the mistakes won’t be repeated. The summer 2022 events are proving the new and updated policies are working.” ■