Auditors Turn Up Problems at Shelter

The county-run homeless shelter at Camarillo Airport needs to keep better track of donations, petty cash and payroll, a review by Auditor-Controller Christine Cohen has found.

More than $29,000 collected by the RAIN Transitional Living Center between August 1998 and December 2000 was processed through an outside bank instead of the county’s internal accounting system, Cohen’s report says.

The center also was unable to document how it spent donated funds, kept poor track of supplies, failed to properly record disbursements of petty cash and turned in time cards that were not signed by a supervisor, the report says.

But County Executive Officer Johnny Johnston said most of the problems are minor and can be traced to RAIN’s transition from a grass-roots organization to a county-operated program.

“This started out as an experiment and then started to get larger and more institutionalized,” Johnston said. “Most of what was discovered was sloppy, but not corrupt.”

RAIN was created in 1995 to assist homeless squatters after their encampments on the bottom of the Ventura and Santa Clara rivers were washed out by torrential rains. Kathy Jenks, director of the county Department of Animal Regulation, volunteered to take over the project in 1998 when it moved to the airport.

The center houses about 60 men, women and children, and offers a variety of services to get them back on their feet, including counseling, health care, child care and job training. It operates on a shoestring budget of $900,000.

Many of its 23 employees are former clients, Jenks said. Most of the problems identified in Cohen’s audit have already been fixed, she added.

“Every nickel is accounted for,” Jenks said. “This is just a matter of getting all these records into the format and into systems that RAIN did not have access to until it became a real county department.”

At least one supervisor is not satisfied with Jenks’ explanation. Frank Schillo said Jenks should be dismissed for not using the county’s standard accounting procedures as soon as she took over the RAIN operation.

“She’s been around long enough to know there are all kinds of rules and regulations you have to follow,” said Schillo, based in Thousand Oaks. “You can’t just say it was a temporary system and that now you’re fixing it.”

Schillo, who often clashes with Jenks, said he will ask for an audit of Jenks’ Animal Control Department to make sure its fiscal operations are being managed correctly.