Grand Jury Urges Look at Trustees’ Operations : Recommendations: A report to the county says a firm should be hired to examine how the Community College District board is being managed.

The Ventura County Grand Jury ended its yearlong investigation of county government Monday with a recommendation that the embattled County Community College District undergo a management audit.

District Trustee James T. (Tom) Ely has been under investigation for three months by the district attorney’s office because of allegations that he charged thousands of dollars of personal expenses to the district.

Although the grand jury report does not mention Ely by name, it urges the county to hire an outside auditing firm to examine the way the Board of Trustees does business--focusing on the board’s Operations and Procedures Manual, which Ely wrote last year. The trustees voted Dec. 5 to put the manual into use.

The grand jury report said that recent developments involving the district Board of Trustees “might be interpreted as internal problems. Financial and management accountability is an absolute must to keep the respect of the students and community.”

Greg Kampf, chairman of the district board, and Trustee Greg Cole said that language refers to Ely’s troubles.

However, Ely said the report refers not to him, but to the disappearance of travel records and expense receipts that he turned in to the district. “The district office is in turmoil,” he added.

Cole said that some rules in the trustees’ manual may be improper, including a rule that allows trustees to seek reimbursement for car expenses incurred while driving between their homes and board meetings.

But Ely said such reimbursement “has been the practice and procedure and policy in the district and in every district in the state.”

“Believe me, we’re going to go over that procedures manual with a fine-tooth comb,” Cole said.

“I don’t mind the trustees being audited; that’s absolutely no problem at all,” Kampf said. “Most of our financial accounts have been audited. . . . The district attorney has done quite a bit of that already.”

The grand jury also recommended that the county:

* Expand night court hours and locate municipal courts in cities around Ventura County to ease congestion in the courthouse.

* Establish a gang-control committee of police, school, probation and parole officials to curtail gang activities.

* Install video cameras in police booking areas to provide information during trials about behavior of mentally ill defendants at the time of their arrest.

* Make the county agricultural commissioner’s office a full-blown agency instead of a one-man office to improve crop quality and consumer protection.

* Allocate money generated by county sales taxes to each city based on its population instead of on the amount of money collected in its retail stores.

* Assemble a task force to establish soil and ground-water pollution standards that would govern cleanup operations.

The grand jury formally presented its 123-page report to Judge Edwin M. Osborne, presiding judge of the Ventura County Superior Court, who thanked the jurors and excused them from their task.

County Clerk Richard Dean then picked the 1990-91 grand jury, choosing 19 names at random from 30 names locked in a barrel. Osborne appointed one of those chosen, Lyle Wray, a 49-year-old retired corporate executive who lives in Thousand Oaks, as grand jury foreman.

The other grand jurors include 11 men and seven women, and range in age from a 20-year-old Oxnard College student to a 79-year-old retired Teamsters Union business agent.

The district attorney’s office already is preparing to send cases to the grand jury for indictment, which California voters decided to allow when they approved the Proposition 115 Crime Initiative bill June 5. The county may have to impanel a second grand jury just for criminal cases, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald D. Coleman, special legal adviser to the grand jury. The Legislature would have to approve such a move first, as it did in Los Angeles County, Coleman said.