Amador County – A state audit of 2008-2009 Indian Gaming Special Distribution Funds was released Tuesday, with Amador County among seven counties receiving scrutiny.
Six of seven counties randomly audited, including Amador County, were reported to have problems in distributing the grants. Among those reviewed was tribal gaming funding given by the Jackson Rancheria Casino to the Amador County Sheriff’s Department, through the “county benefit committee,” in the amount of $88,200. The audit report said “Amador County was unable to explain why it awarded the amounts it chose.”
State Auditor Elaine M. Howle’s office conducted the audit of 20 grants distributed in the seven counties, which were chosen, the audit said, for the amount of funding received and for their geographical area. Amador County was the first county audited by the Bureau of State Audits. The audit recommended that “the county auditor review each grant application to ensure a rigorous analysis of a casino’s impact and of the proportion of funding for the project provided by the grant.”
The report recommended that “benefit committees should consider a grant application only when the county auditor certifies that the applicant has quantified the impact of the casino and verifies that the grant funds requested will be proportional to the casino’s impact.”
The report said Riverside and Amador Counties “disagreed with various determinations we made regarding the relationship of casino impacts to the grants their benefit committees awarded.” The report said Amador officials “suggested that the current grant requirements are rigid, unresponsive, and overly prescriptive.”
Amador County Administrative Officer Chuck Iley and Sheriff Martin Ryan both sent letters of comment about the draft audit report in January, and Ryan defended his department’s methods. He noted that in 2008, casino-related sheriff’s department activities, arrests and reports more than doubled all other county statistics, except in traffic citations.
The audit report noted that during fieldwork, the department “initially determined that the Amador County Sheriff’s Department was unable to quantify the impact of the casino for a grant it received.” In later review, the “sheriff’s department provided information that quantified the number of incidents the sheriff’s department indicated were casino related and showed a proportional relationship to the amount of grant funding received.”
The auditors concluded that “a sufficient number of incidents occurred at the location of the casino for us to consider that the impact was proportional to the grant funding.”
Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
