$3.5 Million in Equipment Seized From Citrus College : Investigation: U.S. authorities confiscate 12 truckloads of government surplus items that employees may have intended to sell.

Federal investigators raided Citrus Community College in Glendora and two other locations, seizing $3.5 million worth of federally donated equipment that college employees may have intended to sell illegally, officials said Tuesday.

Investigators confiscated 12 truckloads of equipment, including generators, engines, forklifts and compressors from a commercial storage facility in Ontario.

They also seized documents from the home of a Citrus College employee in Huntington Beach, said John Wynes, regional inspector general for investigations of the federal General Services Administration.

Wynes said no arrests have been made but a criminal investigation by several federal agencies is under way.

“It’s a significant investigation,” Wynes said. “It’s one of the largest we’ve been involved with in California in the last few years.”

Officials at Citrus College confirmed that investigators from the FBI, the General Services Administration and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, an arm of the Department of Defense, presented a search warrant Friday afternoon and searched the school’s storage area, where they inventoried all the heavy equipment.

Isaac J. Romero, the school’s vice president of instruction, said the federal agencies are investigating the school’s use and disposition of surplus government equipment obtained through a state agency that coordinates donations from the federal government, including the Department of Defense. Romero refused to answer additional questions.

Wynes said the investigators are looking into what happened to truckloads of equipment that federal agencies donated to the school in the last 18 months.

“Basically . . . there was a concern that the equipment was being misused, that it was being sold for someone’s personal gain,” Wynes said.

He declined to say to whom the equipment might have been sold, to name the employee whose house was searched or to say how many college employees are under investigation.

But, he said, “there is no indication that high-level administrators are involved in criminal activity.”

Citrus College serves about 10,000 students in the San Gabriel Valley. Like many educational institutions, it is eligible to receive donations of unused, extra or obsolete government equipment through the state Agency for Surplus Property.

But institutions must comply with federal laws that regulate how they may use the equipment. In many cases, federal law prohibits the resale of the equipment for a set amount of time. This is especially true where former military equipment is involved, Wynes said.

For instance, Citrus would be free to use military engines donated by the Department of Defense in its shop classes. But it would be prohibited from reselling them without special permission from the government or without making modifications that would reduce the equipment’s strategic military value, Wynes said.