Hermosa Beach Withdraws $1,000 in Sister City Funding

Hermosa Beach’s Sister City Program, a volunteer group that sponsors a student exchange with a city in Mexico, suffered a setback on Tuesday when the City Council withdrew its annual $1,000 contribution to the program.

The program had been a target of criticism earlier this year over charges that local students had been poorly supervised on the group’s annual exchange trip to Hermosa Beach’s sister city of Loreto, Mexico.

But Mayor Roger Creighton, who was among those previously questioning the management of the civic organization, said the decision to pull the city’s contribution to the program was unrelated to the controversy over the Mexico trip.

Creighton and other city officials said the decision was based on the refusal of the program’s director, George Barks, to make an adequate accounting for the funds.

Barks, who was not at the council meeting, said on Wednesday that his books were unavailable to the city treasurer because they were being independently audited.

The program director added that he had not explained that to city officials when he refused to turn over the organization’s financial records.

“I guess I should have told them,” he said, “but I didn’t want to give them incomplete documents.”

He added that he hopes the city will reconsider its withdrawal of support when the books become available, because the city’s annual contribution represents about a fifth of the program’s $5,000 annual budget.

“I suppose we could survive without it,” Barks said, “but every little bit helps.”

The criticism concerning the trip to Loreto in February focused on charges by parents that supervision had been so lax that several of the 21 seventh- and eighth-graders who participated in the excursion were able to sneak away from four chaperones and get drunk.

In one incident, a 14-year-old boy passed out after sharing a bottle of vodka with five friends, Barks acknowledged. In another, a 13-year-old girl reported that the teen-agers in her host family had shared cigarettes and a case of Corona beer with her and two friends while driving around Loreto.

Barks launched an investigation into the incident after it came to light in late March. The program director said his group is rewriting guidelines for the trip and hopes to have new rules ready by the beginning of the school year.

But the Hermosa Beach school board--which in the past had helped recruit students for the trip--subsequently decided to end its participation in the program.

Barks said he plans to present the school board with the new guidelines for the trip in hopes of getting it to reconsider its decision.