Two tumultuous years after a probe into the illegal sale of palms at MiraCosta College eventually led to the prosecution of a department head and the departure of the president, trustees have received an accounting of the remaining trees.
According to a report given to trustees this week, the campus still owns 1,377 palms valued at $49,000.
Investigator Robert Price revealed a year ago that at least 2,300 palms had been donated to the campus in 1998 and that an undetermined number of them had been illegally sold.
A month later, Horticulture Department head Alleen Texeira pleaded guilty to grand theft involving what prosecutors said was the sale of 20 to 30 trees.
In January 2007, a staff report said 2,328 palms had been inventoried.
The new report, which trustees will discuss at a meeting Tuesday, doesn't address what happened to the nearly 1,000 trees that appear to be missing since that inventory.
Jim Austin, vice president for business services, prepared the report.
Reached by phone yesterday, Austin said he did not recall the number of trees inventoried but that, except for about six used as landscaping on campus, the rest of the palms had died.
The new report makes recommendations for the remaining trees, saying 987 should be sold, 95 kept for educational purposes and the remaining 295 trees discarded because they are diseased.
When then-college President Victoria Muñoz Richart announced the investigation into the sale of the trees in May 2006, she also questioned cash-handling methods on campus. The probe revealed oversight so lax that horticulture employees stored money belonging to the college in their own wallets or a baking-soda can.
Last June, Richart left the campus under heavy criticism, but with a settlement worth almost $1.6 million in cash, salary and benefits.
The repercussions continue.
A statewide commission responsible for community-college accreditations has told the MiraCosta board to put its house in order or face loss of accreditation.
And a private suit against the Richart settlement is wending its way through Superior Court.
Board President Carolyn Batiste said yesterday that three trustees – Gloria Carranza, Jacqueline Simon and Judy Strattan – asked for the palm-tree accounting, but she thinks it already was being prepared by college staff.
Austin's report says that an estimated $8,000 is spent yearly to maintain the plants but that last year the figure rose to $11,800 “to bump up some of the nicer palms that had been languishing in an attempt to increase their retail value.”
Batiste said she thinks some of the trees suffered by being hard to care for during the year-plus construction of a new horticulture complex in 2006.
The report regarding cash-handling says newly installed cash registers and other accounting procedures, including the drop-off of cash at the campus police offices, have worked well.
Also Tuesday, the board is to decide whether it can retain John Hendrickson as interim president for another year while it comes up with a method of selecting a successor. Last month, it rejected the findings of a trustee-appointed search committee.
Lola Sherman: (760) 476-8241; lola.sherman@uniontrib.com
