Bond Committee Member Plans Further Record Requests

Alicia Minyen is not done asking questions.  

The controversy over reams of documents requested by Minyen, a volunteer member of a local school district's Bond Oversight Committee, now stretches into September.

Minyen, a committee member for the Measure C Bond Oversight Committee for the Mount Diablo Unified School District, said she is preparing another written request for more documents as she sees various items that "raise red flags" for her.

The committee is scheduled to meet next at 7 p.m. at the board room of the school district office, 1936 Carlotta Dr. The timetable is for the committee to prepare an annual report to the full Board of Education after that meeting, Minyen said.

Measure C was a bond measure school district voters passed last year authorizing $348 million in bonds for capital projects.

A controversy heated up when Minyen, a certified public accountant and certified fraud examiner, requested a raft of documentation in August. The district responded by providing 1,496 pages of records at 10 cents a page (the rate it would charge any member of the public making a request under the auspices of the Public Records Act).

That resulted in a broadside from the Contra Costa Times criticizing Greg Rolen, the school district's lawyer, for levying the charge on Minyen, a volunteer serving on the district's Bond Oversight Committee. The newspaper said the district has a "long and dismal reputation for lacking in even basic transparency."

Furthermore, Rolen said the district had extended itself to accommodate Minyen's many requests, and scheduled a meeting where committee members could ask questions of bond counsel and financial advisers.

That batch of records cost Minyen $149.60. Earlier in the summer, another batch of records cost her $67, she said.

Convenience

Minyen said she was surprised that she was charged, but she acknowledged, "It was convenient for me to take them home and look at them on the weekend."

Many requested records have not been provided, Minyen said: lease agreements, title transfers, lists of vendors, line item details on disbursements and contracts.

She said she had requested records explaining a lease arrangement that dates back to 1994 in which the district created a nonprofit organization, leased part of a building back to that organization and made arrangements for the rights to a rental stream for part of the property.

As to the volume of her August request, Minyen said she had sent a request to the district to sit down with accounting staff and modify her request, but the district ignored the request.

Eighty percent of documents she received in August, Minyen said, were documents supplied to the IRS for Clean Renewal Energy bonds the district is receiving for . Minyen is worried about the district's vulnerability if the IRS audits and finds that the district may have deviated from terms of some of those reports to the IRS.

The district believes its solar project, with construction under way at many school sites this summer, is the largest one in a K-12 district in the country.

Minyen said she is concerned about revenues, including federal tax credits, generated by solar power installations on schools, and whether that revenue may be applied to general fund purposes. Minyen said she has consulted with specialists in the provisions of Proposition 39 in the office of State Controller John Chiang.

"It's not like I'm trying to be a pain," she said. "It's just that there are red flags that I see."

Proposition 39 was a 2000 California constitutional amendment that, for school district bond issues, lowered the approval threshold from 66.7 to 55.0 percent.