The Sacramento City Council voted Thursday night to fund an external audit of the credit card use of the mayor, council members and their staffs.
The council also approved a plan to speed up an already planned internal audit of the credit card use by all city employees. The council votes on both matters were 7-0; Mayor Kevin Johnson and Councilman Rob Fong were absent from the meeting.
City officials are directing additional resources to examining credit card use at City Hall following the resignation of a mayoral aide last month after it was revealed she had allegedly used her city-issued credit card to make personal purchases.
Lisa Serna-Mayorga, the former council operations manager who was later transferred to a post within the mayor's office, is now under criminal investigation by the Sacramento Police Department.
Sources have told The Bee that Serna-Mayorga reimbursed the city for $9,000 in credit card charges that included a trip to Disneyland, gasoline and groceries.
The firm of Macias Gini and O'Connell will be paid up to $12,000 to conduct the audit of the council and mayor offices. City officials expect that examination to take about two weeks.
Roughly a dozen council members and staffers have city credit cards, according to a list of employees with cards provided by the city in response to a Public Records Act by The Bee. Council members Angelique Ashby, Jay Schenirer and Darrell Fong are the only elected officials with cards.
No one in the mayor's office currently has a city credit card. However, the audit will look at the past three fiscal years of credit card usage, a time during which the mayor's former chief of staff had a card.
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