Palomar College President Used Public Funds on Gifts to Elected Officials Overseeing College
President Joi Lin Blake spent $2,831 on gifts with public funds for Governing Board members. The California Constitution bans such gifts.
By Steve Horn
SAN MARCOS — For Palomar College’s sleep-deprived students, a vending machine is a place to buy instant coffees or cans of caffeine-injected energy drinks. But for the community college’s president Joi Lin Blake, funds raised from those machines have frequently served another purpose: money for gifts to elected officials sitting on the college’s Board of Governors
Blake may have improperly spent $2,831 on gifts for Governing Board members — public elected officials — using public funds, according to documents obtained by San Diego Bulldog. The gifts, given between November 2016 and December 2018, ranged from $13.33 worth of floral arrangements for each Board member to over $1,800 for a trustee’s retirement party.
The California Constitution bans those in public office from giving out gifts with public funds, denying the “power to make any gift or authorize the making of any gift, of any public money or thing of value to any individual, municipal or other corporation.” And though state law requires disclosure of those gifts by elected officials via the Form 700, none of the trustees did so, according to gift disclosure forms obtained by San Diego Bulldog.
Shannon Lienhart, a professor of mathematics at Palomar College, obtained the gifts records and provided them to San Diego Bulldog.
“After hearing from colleagues that the president was spending public funds in, what seemed to be, inappropriate ways, I filed several public records requests to find out more,” Lienhart said. “The more I learned, the more troubled I became. This is taxpayer money that should go towards educating students, yet Blake spends it as though it came from her own private bank account.”
One of the gifts was a $1,848.96 retirement celebration at a San Marcos hotel in November 2016 for former trustee Nancy Chadwick. The guest list included trustee Mark Evilsizer as emcee, former Palomar College President Bob Deegan and former Vista City Councilman Cody Campbell, among others. Four members of the Palomar Jazz Ensemble also came, paid a total stipend of $200 for the two-hour reception.
The gifts also included home-delivered artfully arranged fruit baskets to trustees as birthday gifts, with values ranging from about $50 to $80, a total cost of over $360. Blake gave them to Evilsizer, trustee John Halcón, former trustee and current Escondido Mayor Paul McNamara and trustee Nina Deerfield.
Blake also purchased $621.50 worth of candies as gifts for trustees and administrators during the holiday season in 2016. She further gifted cakes and floral arrangements, for a value of $201, during the 2018 holiday season.
Stephen Garcia, Assistant Superintendent and Vice President of Administrative Services at Palomar College, said Blake paid for the gifts via a $35,000 discretionary fund allocated in the college’s budget. The funds for that, he said, come from revenues raised from campus vending machines. The college received $62,369 in vending commissions for fiscal year 2017–2018 and $145,672 for the following year, according to budgetary documents.
The expenditure sheets for the gifts show them coded as “food for meetings.”
“The trustees of our governing board are highly dedicated public servants who work tirelessly for the betterment of our District,” Garcia said. “There have been opportunities where a token of our gratitude is appropriate, and we have done so.”
Legal experts, though, say such tokens are unlawful.
One of them is Michelle Giacomini — who works as the deputy executive officer for the California Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), a state agency which acts as a fiscal watchdog and investigative body for public schools and universities.
In an April 2018 presentation by Giacomini, she wrote that the ban on gifts with public funds exists “to ensure accountability to constituents and to prevent misuse of this public money.”
“Expenditures driven by personal motives or moral obligations, or for noble or virtuous purposes such as a desire to convey compassion, sympathy, joy, or gratitude, are not justified and generally do not serve a primarily public purpose,” reads Giacomini’s presentation, “and thus are likely unlawful gifts of public funds, even if they have been a longstanding custom locally or are based on benevolent feelings.”
Giacomini said FCMAT could not comment on prospective issues, saying the agency only has the ability to do so for closed investigations.
Responding, Julie Lanthier — acting Palomar College director of marketing, communications and public affairs — said the California Fair Political Practices Commission’s fact sheet for local elected officials provides an exemption for Blake to give the gifts to Trustees as a “reciprocal exchanges” or “reciprocal holiday gifts.” The FPPC is a state agency which provides regulatory oversight over lobbying, electioneering and governmental ethics laws.
That fact sheet points to the California Code’s Section 18942, which has provisions about reciprocal gifts exchanged during the holiday season or birthdays.
But Lanthier, when pressed, said that none of the Governing Board members ever provided Blake with any presents in return.
“I think your interpretation of reciprocal gift may be narrow,” Lanthier said. “Not all gifts are reciprocated.”
The state code on gift reciprocation, however, dictates that the “value of the benefits exchanged is not substantially disproportionate” between the parties involved and that “the parties typically rotate payments on a continuing basis so that, over time, each party pays for approximately his or her share of the costs of the continuing activities.”
And the fact sheet, along with Section 18942, also do not mention authorizing gifts purchased with public funds.
Lanthier also pointed to the legal authority found in Palomar College Board Policy 6925, allowing the college’s president to make a “purchase of food, refreshments, and other items” for certain meetings which overlap with meal times. The events listed in the policy include events recognizing volunteers and employees, events to honor educational figures — such as the Chadwick event — committee meetings and others.
All of the current trustees who received gifts— except for Deerfield — did not respond to requests for comment and all requests for comment were routed to Lanthier. All requests for comment to Blake were also routed to Lanthier. Palomar College legal counsel Regina Petty also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
For his part, Escondido Mayor and former trustee McNamara said that when he received the gifts from Blake, he did not know they came from public funds.
“I, and I suspect all of the Board, are unaware of who paid for the gifts since they were simply signed by her,” he said. “In our ethics training, this sort of small holiday token is often asked if it is reportable. We’ve been told that small tokens of this nature given across the board do not rise to the level of reporting. So, I will not be making an amendment to my Form 700.”
Chadwick said in response to an email that she was “not aware that Blake did this,” adding that “This is first time I heard of this.”
“I was not part of any planning for my retirement reception,” Chadwick said. “I just showed up.”
But Deerfield said she feels misled and will no longer receive any gifts of the sort going forward.
“I trusted Dr. Blake to know the rules and not endanger the trustees by giving holiday gifts with public funds,” said Deerfield. “However, I decided this year not to accept any gifts from the district or from Dr. Blake, however small, just to be on the safe side.”
Bob Stern, the principal co-author of California’s 1974 Political Reform Act which created the FPPC, said that he believes that “the president should pay for gifts out of her own pocket if that’s what she wants to do.”
And based on the circumstances, were Stern an attorney with the FPPC, he said that while he would not bring an enforcement action against the trustees due to the relative smallness of the gifts, he would require them to submit amended gift disclosure filings.
Jay Wierenga, communications director for the FPPC, said the agency could not comment on the facts of any given scenario unless it opened an official investigation into the matter.
“The requirement for reporting gifts is on the Form 700 itself, and the instructions, and people are supposed to fill out their form 700s to the best of their knowledge, ability, accuracy, and truthfulness,” Wierenga said. “Anyone can file a complaint if they suspect someone or some group has not complied with the Act. FPPC Enforcement looks at every single complaint to determine whether to open an investigation or not.”
Over a decade ago, the California State Auditor investigated the Los Angeles County Prison for providing $1,800 worth of free security and other accommodations to a film production company shooting at the facility. The state Department of Corrections would subsequently fire a high-level manager, while doling out a pay reduction to another manager.
More analogous to Palomar, in 2015 the North Carolina state auditor published an investigation about a community college president who bought gifts from the college’s vending account. Those included paying for personal flight upgrades, buying expensive meals for himself and his spouse, flight tickets for his wife out of the account and more.
That president resigned in the midst of the audit, the results of which were eventually referred to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, which launched its own criminal probe. The District Attorney’s office there ultimately declined to press charges against the president.
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