Arts Council gets Fresno County support despite $1.8M embezzlement, guilty plea
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors continued its relationship with the Fresno Arts Council on Tuesday despite the council’s recent failure to catch embezzlement by an employee until she stole nearly $2 million.
The arts council received a unanimous approval from the board, which re-designated the arts council as the official county partner for another year in connection with the California Arts Council.
The council has operated in Fresno since 1979, but in recent months made headlines when the $1.8 million embezzlement came to light. The former operation manager, Suliana Caldwell, made her first appearance in federal court Monday, when the 46-year-old entered a guilty plea to charges related to the theft.
The arts council has since cut ties with its paid staffers, which included Caldwell and Executive Director Lilia Gonzales-Chavez, according to Andrea Mele, the interim executive director. The council was being run by volunteers, she said on Tuesday.
“We regret deeply that this loss of funds has occurred, that some arts organizations face lengthy delays in receiving their awards, and that this turmoil caused certain projects to be canceled outright,” Mele said. “We have taken decisive action.”
She said the council’s board was working on hiring a third-party accounting firm to oversee spending. The board in the meantime has been doing its own cross-checking of payments. One board member, Karen Simpson, said she is an inactive certified public accountant, and has logged in daily to double check the payments for which the council has a hand.
The Fresno Arts Council was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which went toward projects in rural Fresno County, Auberry, Sanger, Selma, Coalinga, Firebaugh, Del Rey, Kingsburg and Yokuts Valley, according to Mele. The council is working with a Kings County group to establish an arts council there.
Supervisor Buddy Mendes confirmed from the dais with County CAO Paul Nerland that the county doesn’t give any money to the council. Designating them as a partner does allow for the group to apply for grants from the state.
Supervisor Luis Chavez threw his support behind the group, saying he wanted to give its leadership the opportunity to rebuild its trust.
“I, for one, I’m not going to let one individual tarnish the decades-old tradition of the Fresno Arts Council,” Chavez said.
Supervisor Brian Pacheco applauded the group for speaking to the board, and addressing the embezzlement issues.
“I think any of us that ever served on multiple boards, volunteer basis and all that, nothing ever goes perfect,” he said. “So each one of us probably have some instance that we had something — maybe not to this magnitude — but we had something didn’t go the way that we had hoped it would.”
