A grand jury was right to slam Sacramento County officials for mishandling COVID funds

In the strongest possible terms, a grand jury has laid bare the astonishing lack of oversight and complete mishandling of millions in federal COVID relief dollars by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and the bureaucrats working for them.

It was in the summer of 2020, in those early, frightening months of the pandemic, that the public learned that $104 million of $181 million allocated to Sacramento County for the purpose had been funneled into the budget of Sheriff Scott Jones.

The revelation was in keeping with the broader mismanagement of county affairs under then-CEO Nav Gill. It was Gill who announced that he had moved the money into the Sheriff’s Office budget for existing public safety employees. The grand jury believes that may turn out to be a violation of federal regulations, as the CARES Act, which provided the funds, specifically prohibits their use for already-budgeted staffing.

Gill subsequently resigned, but not before he was caught flouting the county’s indoor mask mandate and accused of creating a “caustic” workplace.

The grand jury report called the county’s actions “questionable and opaque maneuvers that skirted the intent of the CARES Act to the benefit of county coffers with scant regard for the needs of its citizens.”

It also made it abundantly clear that the county mishandled the funds in contrast with the city, highlighting the enormity of the county’s failure to serve its citizens.

The jury wrote: “The City of Sacramento was the only other local governmental entity located in Sacramento with a large enough population to qualify for its own CARES Act funding,” and it “distributed nearly its entire $89.6 million CARES Act allocation to community agencies and business to help alleviate COVID-19 impacts.”

But the county’s CEO chose to fund law enforcement, and the Board of Supervisors looked the other way.

In doing so, the grand jury said, the supervisors abdicated their duty to provide oversight. The board did not request or receive any reports on the allocation or use of the funding until more than three months after the funds were in hand.

Using this money for the Sheriff’s Office “ignored many of the critical public health needs” needed to contain the spread of COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, said the jury, and that more than likely increased the number of deaths in Sacramento County.

The Sheriff’s Office, the main beneficiary of the funds expressly set aside to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on our county, chose instead not to enforce numerous active emergency orders issued by the state.

County officials said later that Gill had put the money into the sheriff’s budget and transferred the same amount from that budget back to the general fund. They said it was a placeholder to ensure the county wouldn’t lose the money if it failed to allocate quickly enough to meet federal guidelines. The money was eventually returned to its stated purpose, county officials said.

Still, the city was able to put its federal aid to good use in the specified time frame without such a ridiculous spectacle.

The jury rightly recommended that the supervisors appoint an independent panel by June to conduct a full audit of the county’s allocation of CARES Act funding as well as adopt a transparent budget allocation and approval process for the board, the CEO’s office and the sheriff’s department.

Sacramento County District 1 Supervisor Phil Serna has since released a statement in which he calls for a full and independent audit of the CARES Act money received by the county.

“Despite many known attempts to explain what actually occurred separate from conjecture, assumption and at times misguided inference, the fact remains that there’s a good deal of confusion in our community concerning the very serious matter of pandemic response and the use of scare resources to fulfill Sacramento County’s responsibilities,” Serna wrote.

“The lack of governance and oversight by the Board of Supervisors,” the grand jury wrote, “allowed the county executive to violate the first goal of the county’s stated criteria for use of the CARES Act funds.”

This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 3:30 PM.