California State Parks chicanery

UPDATE 12 August 2012:  Gov. Jerry Brown has asked lawmakers to spend some of the newfound parks money on a matching fund to solicit future donations -- rather than return money to donors who gave when they believed the system was broke.  WTF!?  Meanwhile, California's Joint Legislative Audit Committee has voted unanimously to approve an independent audit of the state parks department to examine how and why nearly $54 million in two special funds went unreported -- even as budget cuts were threatening to close 70 parks.

UPDATE 28 July 2012:  The Sacramento Bee reports that two more high-level employees have departed the state Department of Parks and Recreation in the wake of a financial scandal. Ann Malcolm had been chief counsel at the Parks Department for two years.  The other is Jay Walsh, who was a special assistant to parks director Ruth Coleman.
Gov. Jerry Brown has directed the Finance Department to audit state parks to explain the $54 million surplus.  Brown also asked the attorney general's office to investigate. On Thursday, the attorney general set up the phone hotline and a special email address to collect tips. 

State employees and members of the public with relevant information are urged to call (916) 324-7561 or email ParksInvestigation@doj.ca.gov.

Legislative Republicans have urged Democratic budget leaders to repeal $15.3 million in annual funding for state parks that lawmakers passed in June.  "As you are aware, the recent budgetary scandals at the Department of Parks and Recreation have undermined the public's faith in government," wrote GOP Assembly members Jim Nielsen and Beth Gaines. "As leaders on the Budget Committee, it is imperative that we work together to restore credibility to an already damaged budget process.

Finally, the California State Parks Foundation, a longtime nonprofit partner with the state, wrote to the governor and Legislature to request a separate probe by the state auditor to assure an "autonomous and unimpeded audit" of state parks. It urged lawmakers to appropriate the surplus to keep parks open and to fund new revenue generating programs.

ORIGINAL POST: 

To all the well-meaning types who rose to the defense of numerous California state parks following threats of park closure due to budget problems  — well, it should come as good news that the breathtakingly incompetent Ruth Coleman, director of the system since 2003, resigned Friday (20 July 2012) after officials discovered that her department had sat on $54 million of unspent money that it had not reported to the Department of Finance as required by as required by long-standing state fiscal policy.  In an especially astonishing bit of accountability for these times, the park department's second-in-command, Acting Chief Deputy Director Michael Harris, was actually canned.

You may remember that this whole park-closure debacle arose from a shortfall of "just" $22 million.

These events came a week after the Sacramento Bee broke the news of another scandal – involving an unauthorized vacation buyout program offered to employees at park headquarters in 2011 – which cost the state more than $271,000.  Manuel Thomas Lopez, the former deputy director of administrative services at state parks, admitted to The Bee that he was responsible for the buyout.  He was demoted in October and resigned in May.

While we here at SDVO do not mean denigrate the efforts of those who sought to protect their favorite state parks, the take-home lesson here is that we continue to pay huge sums of state taxes to fund these parks, and to pay very well the people who run them.  Rather than merely acquiescing to the truly bone-headed idea of locking up our state park gems, or else falling prey to extortion by public officials, our efforts should have gone into making those of Ruth Coleman's ilk explain why they had so miserably mismanaged our irreplaceable public assets in the first place.  If we had done, just maybe we could have all saved a lot of time and effort and money.