Former Official Accepts Plea Bargain

A former sanitation district manager pleaded no contest in court Tuesday to embezzling more than $200,000 in public funds by issuing herself checks through a fake company.

Carol Ann Deavenport entered the plea to roughly half of the 52 criminal counts she was facing for embezzlement, money laundering and committing income tax fraud for five years while she was fiscal operations manager with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Johnson said the plea is a good resolution to what he called a “total violation” of the public’s trust.

Deavenport used the money to “live a high life” that included dining out frequently at expensive restaurants, purchasing homes and making improvements on the residences, he said.

“It was public money, and she was a public servant,” Johnson said.

Deavenport pleaded not guilty to the charges in January, but changed her plea after prosecutors guaranteed her sentence would be capped at 10 years in state prison rather than the possible 33-year maximum sentence, Johnson said. Her attorney could not be reached for comment.

At her sentencing, set for Sept. 11, Deavenport also could face more than $400,000 in fines that would be used to pay restitution to the Ventura-based public agency, Johnson said.

The sanitation district, created by the county in 1970, has contracts with eight of the county’s 10 cities to store trash at the Toland Road landfill between Fillmore and Santa Paula.

Deavenport created a fake pavement vendor called Southwest Construction in 1995 and opened a bank account in its name, Johnson said. After issuing checks from the district to the company from June 1995 to February 2000, she wrote herself 27 checks and deposited them into her personal bank account, officials said.

The sanitation district, which has an annual budget of roughly $13 million, discovered something was wrong when Deavenport directed a specific employee to take a check made out to the fictitious company to the bank, said Bill Smith, the district’s general manager.

“That was such an unusual request, it alerted us,” Smith said. In checking it out further, the employee discovered that Southwest Construction did not exist.

Sanitation district leaders suspended Deavenport from her job, which she had held for 19 years, in April 2000 as authorities investigated the scheme. She resigned shortly thereafter and moved from Port Hueneme to a suburb of Las Vegas.

Investigators filed a felony complaint last November, and Deavenport turned herself in to Nevada authorities in December.

Though the sanitation district has been reimbursed by its insurance company for the $215,000 embezzled by Deavenport, Smith said the case has injured the district’s employees and the general public. Employees are pleased the case has moved ahead and are looking forward to the outcome of the sentencing, he said.

“Any time a public employee embezzles public funds, it creates a major loss of confidence in government,” he said. “It’s a very negative thing for those who remain.”