School district checking on misuse of funds

The St. Helena Unified School District hired a firm owned by the father of Chief Business Officer Catrina Firman to review mishandled funds at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School.

GRW & Company Inc. is a Fort Jones,-based company started by Gary Wilkins. Firman was working for GRW when she first came to the district on an interim basis. She left GRW when she became a full-fledged district employee early this year.

Superintendent Allan Gordon said GRW's Catherine Drew was brought in early this year to conduct an independent audit of the handling of student funds after he became concerned that some of the funds might have been inadvertently mishandled; specifically, some student body fund deposits at RLS Middle School seemed to have been recorded twice.

"We had concerns about what we call inappropriate procedures, especially in the area of student body funding," said Gordon. "(Drew) was telling us not how to run the district, but how financial reports were being handled at RLS."

Napa County Superintendent Barbara Nemko said the arrangement seems appropriate because Drew is auditing the books at the school sites, not the district office where Firman works./St. Helena Star

St. Helena ousts Bowers from committees

City committees have lost one of their most outspoken members.

The City Council voted 4-1 Tuesday, with Mayor Del Britton dissenting, to remove Sampson Bowers from all city task forces, commissions and subcommittees. In addition to serving on the general plan subcommittee and being interested in joining the Community Task Force on Global Warming, Bowers is a member of the Living Rivers Council, which filed a legal action against the city earlier this month.

Councilmember Eric Sklar, originally sought to adopt a new policy barring anyone suing or threatening to sue the city from sitting on city boards, commissions, task forces or subcommittees. He said the involvement of such people in city-created bodies was an inherent conflict of interest.

"The privilege of serving on a board, I don't feel should go to somebody who's threatening to sue us and suing us at the same time," said Sklar, who insisted that the discussion was not personal, but a matter of principle.

Bowers argued that although he does act as the LRC's spokesman, he was not involved in their decision to bring legal action against the city, and wished the matter could have been settled through mediation. He insisted that he could remain a valuable part of the city's decision-making process.

"It could be that by doing what Eric is asking you to do, you might very well be denying your citizens their civil rights to freedom of assembly, speech and association," said Bowers in response to the original, broader policy. "I doubt that you would want to go up against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."/St. Helena Star