Trustees mute to critics, eye cuts

Written by Jennifer Wadsworth
Monday, 14 July 2008

A few people laid into Delta College trustees today for mismanaging $250 million in bond money that will force them to break promises to voters. The board said little in response.

Where has all the money gone? And what should San Joaquin Delta College officials do with what’s left of the $250 million Measure L bond, approved by voters in 2004 to fix up the college’s main campus and build three new satellite schools?

These were some of the questions Delta's bond team addressed at a lengthy meeting today with college trustees, where they suggested cancelling or downsizing projects voters thought would be done by now, including a proposed satellite campus in Mountain House.

The campus, about six miles outside Tracy, was originally budgeted for $90 million. If trustees on Tuesday go with today’s bond committee suggestion, just $65 million will be left for Lodi, Manteca and Mountain House campuses.

The public today also had a chance for the first time to sound off before school trustees about an investigation that charged the San Joaquin Delta College policymakers with squandering many millions of dollars in taxpayer money and breaching open government laws.

Echoing the San Joaquin Civil Grand Jury report, the public called trustees to task for their alleged mismanagement — a problem more recently raised in an accreditation report.

Trustee Ted Simas joined the public in scolding fellow trustees. He berated them today for cornering themselves into a position where they have to consider scaling back some of the college’s biggest projects.

“When in the hell are we going to consider the students in this district?” he asked the bond committee and his peers. “We’re going to give the public our little scraps and cut Mountain House to pieces.”

The college refused to take questions about the grand jury report at a June workshop held to discuss the bond.

Even today, trustees refrained from responding on the spot to the mostly critical comments. They said they’d record them and come back with official answers at a later date.

Only a handful of people spoke up during the public hearing.

The meetings about the bond and the grand jury report — scheduled for a combined 4½ hours — lasted no more than a couple.

Matthew Wetstein, a former teacher and interim dean of planning at Delta, charged the seven-member board with violating open-government laws this very afternoon, in the hour prior to the day’s second public hearing.

“You have to get better at the way you discuss matter in front of the public,” he said, accusing them with having brought up the grand jury report during the just-finished closed session, despite it being absent from the printed agenda.

Board president Leo Burke denied as much.

“We didn’t have time today,” he replied to Wetstein’s question of whether trustees brought up the report behind closed doors, when the agenda said they’d be talking about the proposed Lodi campus.

Basically, the board needs to get better at sticking to the agenda, summed up Wetstein, who nine years ago sent a letter to a county prosecutor to investigate whether trustees were indeed guilty of violating the Brown Act.

“Even then I knew,” he said after the meeting. “That’s why I got up there today.”

The board has two months to draft a response to the grand jury report.

The first half of today’s meeting picked up where officials left off with last month's Measure L bond workshop.

The newly formed bond oversight committee urged trustees to pool the budget for the Mountain House, Lodi and Manteca campuses into one "regional fund," which would give the school nearly $83.5 million in remaining bond money to work with for all three proposed satellite campuses.

The bond team talked about what projects trustees could vote to cut. As is, the bond is $60 million over budget, officials revealed last month.

Plans to build a $10 million shipping and receiving warehouse on the main campus will likely get nixed and the money used instead to pay for the satellite campuses, should the board at its regular meeting Tuesday night follow the committee’s suggestion.

In recent weeks, trustees have had to examine which of the nearly two-dozen projects to scale down or cancel. Thirteen of them are over budget, especially the proposed Mountain House campus, which trustees say would cost about $30 million more than originally approved.

The committee will also research whether it’s still practical to move the satellite campus to Tracy, near Chrisman and 11th Street — an option that would undoubtedly take longer, reminded Kathy Roach, a bond committee consultant.

Still, the Mountain House site ran into yet another delay when planners realized that an application to the California Department of Fish and Game to build on a streambed was never filed.

“We don’t know who dropped the ball on that,” Roach told trustees.

At the regular board meeting set for Tuesday this week, trustees will officially decide on how to use what bond money is left.

On Thursday, trustees will meet at a Stockton country club to put start drafting a formal code of ethics — something the grand jury suggested at the end of its two-year investigation.

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