Napa County Grand Jury • 2011-2012

approved projects.*

Published: May 01, 2012 80 pages Consolidated Report
View Original PDF

Findings 13 findings

F1
Construction of the Mt. Washington water storage tank is a build out of the City's water infrastructure. It supports growth and will store NBA water, both of which are counter to the letter and spirit of Measure A.
F2
Construction of the Mt. Washington water storage tank should have been listed in the 1998 Ordinance as an "approved project" or should have gone through the "replacement project" process.
F3
Solage Resort Drainage Project should not have been paid with Measure A funds as the City of Calistoga had no duty to pay that $600,000 cost.
F4
As the defense of a lawsuit by a municipality is a general governmental function, the legal fees paid by the City of Calistoga for the Kimball Creek Bypass litigation was an improper use of Measure A funds. The invoices for the fees paid by the City of Calistoga for the Kimball Creek
F5
Bypass litigation provided inadequate information to allow the FPWIA to make an informed determination as whether the billings were reasonable and appropriate. The City of Calistoga should have acknowledged its breach of public trust much
F6
earlier in the bypass litigation. The Measure A Ordinance did not explicitly describe how the approval process
F7
should operate and as a result the Organizational Chart was arbitrarily drawn. To the degree the chart is used as a schematic model for Measure A projects, its flaws are transferred into the approval process.
F8
The County Public Works Director improperly certified the legality of several Calistoga Measure A projects.
F9
County Counsel is on the Flood Protection Funding Flow Chart to put agreements into proper form, but has no formal role reviewing proposals for compliance with Measure A. In practice County Counsel sometimes reviews proposals but does not review all proposals, and even as to reviewed proposals, County Counsel renders no formal opinion as to compliance with Measure A.
F10
The approval process is ineffective since the Flood Protection Water Improvement Authority (Board of Supervisors) has approved projects that lack compliance to Measure A requirements. Greater care should be taken to examine in reasonable detail the compliance of projects and their expenses.
F11
The Financial Oversight Committee exemplifies the disability of the system by being placed at the end of the approval process. The Ordinance intended the Financial Oversight Committee to "Ensure ongoing community input in the finalization of all projects..." (Emphasis added.)
F12
The Financial Oversight Committee is the community "watchdog" for Measure A projects and should constantly monitor the projects in all stages, instead of only after the termination of those projects.
F13
The Financial Oversight Committee is improperly constituted and has passively performed its role.

Recommendations 11

No Responses Found 5

Government entities assigned to respond to this report. No response documents have been linked in our database.

Calistoga City
County of Napa Agency
Napa County County
Napa County Auditor-Controller Elected County Office
Napa County Board of Supervisors Elected County Office

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.