Spending Patterns for State Sesquicentennial Criticized

California’s official 150th birthday program engaged in questionable spending that included a staff trip to Scotland, and repeatedly failed to file required tax returns, legislative investigators say.

State funds were spent for contracts that were not put out to bid, fund-raising fell dramatically short of targets and local celebratory committees that were supposed to receive state help to hold their own festivities got little or nothing.

Moreover, investigators say that of $350,000 given to a nonprofit foundation for consulting contracts, only a little more than $200,000 actually was used for that purpose.

Investigators from the Joint Legislative Staff Task Force on Government Oversight said the question of how those funds were used “will remain unanswered until the task force receives the financial records it has requested. . . . We are unable to explain at this moment what was done with the remaining $148,174. It is possible that the money was unspent, or was diverted to some other use.”

Sean Walsh, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, said the Democrat-controlled task force is driven by partisanship, and that the three-year schedule of sesquicentennial celebrations is on track.

He also said the Sesquicentennial Commission gradually would be phased out, and the lion’s share of the activities would be taken over by the nonprofit foundation.

The executive director of the commission, Robert Elsner, quietly submitted his resignation to Wilson last week, as the chairman of a key Assembly committee raised the possibility of denying the commission’s latest $972,000 budget request.

The chairman, Assemblyman Michael Machado (D-Linden), ordered a Feb. 24 hearing on the issue before his Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. The commission is supposed to present him with a revamped management plan.

“Unless they can come back with a high probability of being successful, I would find it difficult to recommend to the fiscal committees that his funding should stay in place,” said Machado, who expressed concern with several expenditures.

A number of contracts were let without competitive bidding, including $10,000 a month to two Los Angeles-area promotion firms to develop marketing strategies and corporate awareness for the sesquicentennial. The companies were not successful and were fired by the commission in May 1997.

In one case, a Texas consultant was given a two-day, $2,500 contract to review the California commission’s draft business plan.

Machado focused on the commission after small towns in his district, which includes portions of the Gold Country in the Sierra Nevada foothills, complained that the state commission failed to deliver on promised support for local celebrations.

The commission, officially called the California Gold Discovery to Statehood Sesquicentennial Commission, was set up by Wilson’s executive order in January 1994 to coordinate 33 months of festivities commemorating the California Gold Rush and California’s 150th year of statehood. California joined the United States in 1850.

The nonprofit Sesquicentennial Foundation was established to conduct fund-raising.