The grand jury released a report last week interrogating the county’s contributions to blight, along with an investigation into the county cemetery district
The Fresno County grand jury found the county has been poorly managing its $1.4 billion real estate portfolio and the cemetery district. Issues include a lack of consistent data, Brown Act violations, and overworked staff.
The county has 90 days to respond to these findings, and many solutions are already underway.
Does Fresno County know how much property it owns?
The grand jury concluded that the county’s management of real estate contained many errors and discrepancies that were “sufficient to undermine confidence in the County’s overall management of its real estate” and required significant reform.
Notably, the investigation began after a TikTok published by the county advertising recruitment for its Department of Internal Services. Portions of the video were filmed at the University Medical Center — a long-abandoned hospital building in southeast Fresno.
The grand jury launched its investigation after discovering the cost to secure the UMC campus and other vacant properties in the county was $2.5 million annually in the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
Fresno County is currently negotiating a sale of the University Medical Center with developer Sevak Khatchadourian. Khatchadourian first made a $6 million bid for the property in October, and negotiations have been continuing since then. The county board of supervisors has a closed session agenda item involving the sale as recently as Tuesday.
The jury wondered “Were County properties significant factors in blight?”
But the investigation led to more questions than answers.
The grand jury conducted interviews with multiple county departments, including the ISD, the county administrative office and the assessor’s office. Each department’s documents, which should more or less carry the same information between them, appeared to have discrepancies.
An example includes the county administrative office documenting 265 properties that the county owns — totaling a $1.4 billion valuation. The property count, however, showed only “a little over half the properties identified on the ISD list,” which caused the jury to question both the true valuation and parcel inventory.
“Taken together the lists of real estate provided to the grand jury were informal, closely held, and inconsistent. They included outdated data and raised questions as to the history of the property and why the property was even in the county’s inventory,” the report reads.
Many of the jury’s interviews with county employees found that the departments are aware of the issues, and many of the current staff work hard to correct long-standing issues. The process was described by the jury as “noticeably reactive rather than proactive.”
“We believe gaps in institutional memory contribute to the County’s challenges because little property history is readily at hand,” the jury’s report said.
Acknowledging the county’s desire to be efficient, the jury said they believe the current system of real estate management should be reformed.
“Maintaining an efficient and cost-effective level of staffing is desirable,” the report reads. “However, given the value of county assets concerned—nearly a billion and a half dollars–the current minimalist approach, where real estate oversight is vested in a single position, is inadequate. The current approach may well result in missed investment opportunities, unnecessary maintenance costs, false starts, and unexpected liabilities.
“Reforming Fresno County’s real estate management will require additional staff, but sometimes underspending is more costly in the long term than investing in the necessary plans, processes and controls.”
Following the jury’s reports, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors and County Administrative Office released a statement thanking the jury for their work.
In the news release, the county said they plan to “either surplus or use land and properties mentioned in the report, including UMC Campus, Elkhorn, Selma Ag Land, and the Cantua Creek community center.”
The county has 90 days to release a formal response to the grand jury.
Cemetery district staff overworked?
The grand jury also published a report highlighting the poor management of the Cemetery District.
To its credit, the Jury’s investigation also found that the District was aware of these issues, and was already underway in getting them fixed when the investigation took place.
“Although we found the District being managed at a basic level, it was noncompliant in some regulatory areas and has not been following basic accounting principles,” the grand jury’s report reads. “We also found the District and its employees are compassionate toward their customers.”
The District is governed by a board of trustees appointed by the Board of Supervisors.
The district oversees the Clovis, Red Bank, Academy, Tollhouse and Auberry cemeteries. The district totals about 55 acres of land — though Red Bank Cemetery is undergoing a 40-acre expansion.
The district currently prioritizes the opening and closing of gravesites, setting up burial services, leaving ground maintenance and setting up headstones as secondary.
However, the jury’s report found that staffers might be overworked.
The district used to employ 18 people to oversee the area, but now they only have nine — including the manager and assistant manager. The investigation found that the current staff has no dedicated, full-time mechanic or sprayer.
“The opening and closing of gravesites and setting up the burial site for services takes two of the Department’s employees. There are an average of 12 burials a week which is one or two a day,” the jury’s report reads. “Since at least two to four employees spend about half their day on burials, they are not available during that time to do landscape and maintenance work. This effectively leaves five employees to do maintenance work on the five cemeteries.”
But inconsistent ground maintenance is only part of the problem. Two water wells between the Clovis and Reb Bank cemeteries broke down within the last 18 months — resulting in the flooding and death of grass. The pumps have since been replaced, and the jury found that the grass is already “starting to turn green.”
A larger issue may be present, however, as the district has failed to submit an audit since 2019 — a document submission that must be met annually. This, along with the district not having a publicly available agenda for its board meeting during two jury visits, potentially exposes the district to Brown Act violations, California’s government transparency laws.
The district credited its failure due to the loss of its previous accounting firm. The personnel change, the report found, led to “a complete set of financial records no longer being prepared.” The county was asked to re-audit their 2019 filing as a result.
The county is currently preparing all of its documents for an audit to run from 2018-2023, and they’re also in the process of automating the records system, which should streamline the process of filing future audits.