Council Approval of Unbudgeted Expenditure to Team Kids Violates the Brown Act and Leaves City Staff Scrambling to Fund the Expense
Irvine City Staff Scrambles to Find Funding Need For Ad Hoc Expenditure
At the April 13, 2021 City Council meeting, Councilmembers voted 4-1 (with Kuo opposed) to become a Founding Sponsor of the Team Kids Conference, pledging $20,000 to do so. Questions regarding the funding prompted a public records request. The response from the city confirms the item was not previously budgeted, leaving city staff scrambling afterwards to find a source of funds for the impromptu expenditure. Assistant City Manager Michelle Grettenberg sent an email to staff stating, “We will need to work with budget on an appropriate non-departmental adjustment.”
Staff responded with the following questions since the item was passed by without any discussion on how the $20,000 would be accounted for:
Interim City Manager Marianna Marysheva requested the money be taken from a non-departmental fund. However, the budget adjustment would have to be made after July 1, 2021 to a [city account] by $20,000. Staff responded, “You have until then [July 1st] to decide where to reduce the $20,000 to balance the adjustment.”
The Finance Department responded, “have to take a closer look at Non-departmental [funds] — there may be places to squeeze about $4,000 to $5,000, but based on what’s in there currently, I don’t think we can squeeze out $20,000. I’ll do a more in-depth analysis, but would we have to pull from CMO [City Manager’s Office] budget to cover the difference?”
Staff stated the expenditure “will go to the Finance Budget staff report and there will be an increase of $20,000 budget in non-departmental with the off-set taken away from the transfer to contingency.” To which the Assistant City Manager replied, “what is an alternative to account for this unbudgeted item? I don’t think we have the funds to squeeze out of other places.”
Brown Act Violation
The nature of this request for an unagendized expenditure during a Presentation constituted a Brown Act violation. Irvine Municipal Code section 15-1-107(D), states “[e]xcept as otherwise provided in Government Code § 54954.2, no action shall be taken on matters not appearing on the posted agenda.”
Below is an image of page 4 of the April 13, 2021 regular meeting Minutes memorializing the action taken by the City Council.
Irvine Watchdog supporters submitted a Cease and Desist letter on May 5, 2021 in response to this Brown Act violation. On June 3, 2021, City Attorney Jeff Melching responded with the following:
The Team Kids matter did appear on the agenda, and the PowerPoint presentation for the agenda item made reference to 50th Anniversary Sponsorships. But in retrospect one could fairly argue that more could have been done to make the public aware that a City contribution/sponsorship was a possible outcome.
To that end, City staff have agreed to implement the following two modifications: First, whenever a substantive action is contemplated for an item on the agenda, the item will not be included as a “Presentation.” Rather, it will be included as an item of City Council business (on either the regular or consent agenda, depending on the nature of the item). Second, whenever there is a possibility that an agenda item will require a new appropriation or expenditure of funds, that appropriation or expenditure will be provided as a separately listed “Action” for the agenda item.
The two “modifications” are standard procedure which are already in place and were clearly violated by the city council in what is becoming a troubling pattern of behavior.
2 Comments
rgurien
June 16, 2021 at 11:07 amSo essentially the City Attorney is saying “we promise to follow the rules from now on.” And yet they’re still not going to fix the budgeting error. But hey, at least they produced the email records on this one.
What this error and the resolution approach tells me is that the City Attorney and the Interim City Manager do not know what they are doing. City Managers should have enough general knowledge of the city’s budget to know whether $20k can be “squeezed” from the budget, and if so, what combination of line items to take it from. And let me pre-empt the suggestion that “she couldn’t know, because it is for next year’s budget:” by April, the 2021-22 budget should have been pretty well sewn up but for the City Council’s approval (which is a whole other train wreck of a story…) So the fact that Marysheva didn’t know any of this is deeply concerning.
But let’s say she did know, but didn’t want to interrupt the Council members. That tells me she is more concerned about keeping the council members happy, and making them look good, than she is in being a competent fiscal steward of city funds.
And what of City Attorney Melching? Let’s say he he really believes this wasn’t a Brown Act violation. Why would he posit “future changes” to Irvine’s open meetings process that are already part of the Brown Act? And how absurd that he would think this fancy footwork gets the council off the hook. Beyond that, there were so many Brown Act violations subsequent to the April 13 meeting, I just have to wonder if he’s even aware of the Government Code.
Branda Lin
June 16, 2021 at 12:09 pmIt’s clear to me the City Attorney and City Manager are not doing their jobs in guiding the Council away from procedural or Brown Act violations. As a Councilmember, wouldn’t you want them to do their jobs to help avoid these types of situations? It’s not right to let city staff scramble. But hey, let’s double the Councilmembers’ Council Executive Assistant budgets and disregard the hard working city staff yet again. If they are having trouble finding funding for an impromptu $20,000 expenditure, what about the jump from $80k to $175k in CEA budgets per Councilmember that was thrown out and approved last minute? That’s an additional almost $500k to our budget that was unaccounted for! The Great Park Sponsorship Fund, which they said would fund the increased CEA budget, isn’t generating any money yet, so how are they going to fund this increase? This is not how our city and our city budget should be handled! You wouldn’t run your personal finances this way, would you?
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