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Another audit has dinged the Vineyard Redevelopment Agency’s finances, while also pointing out deficiencies with the city’s travel policy, cash handling, vehicle use and more.
The city hired Chris Harding, the Salt Lake County auditor, and his private firm, CPA Insight Solutions, to conduct the independent review. It comes after City Council Member Jacob Holdaway spent nearly two years raising questions about the city’s use of public funds, unearthing pricy memberships to World Trade Center Utah and trips the Vineyard mayor and her staff took overseas.
Holdaway has sought additional information about the city’s budget and use of funds from the Redevelopment Agency, or RDA, often to the annoyance and frustration of other Vineyard council members and Mayor Julie Fullmer.
“There’s a lot of trust without any verification,” Harding said during a presentation of his audit on Dec. 10, at the last council meeting of the year and Fullmer’s final meeting as the city’s mayor.
In a written statement, Holdaway called the findings “damning” but also “vindication” for assertions he’s made since being elected in 2023.
“The audit confirms what many of us suspected all along,” he said.
Harding’s 80-page report tracked spending over the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years. It found improper use of city purchasing cards. In some cases, city employees improperly shared the cards, split transactions to bypass spending limits and failed to turn in receipts or supporting documentation to demonstrate purchases were appropriate.
The audit also said the city needs to tighten up its travel policy. Some employees turned in booking confirmations instead of hotel receipts, according to the audit. Flight paperwork did not include travelers’ names or return dates. Rental car documents did not show rates or rental periods. City managers sometimes authorized employee travel only after the trip concluded.
Vineyard also lacks a clear policy on vehicle use and fuel purchases, according to Harding’s report. There are no written rules for mileage logs or validating odometers. The city has no caps on fuel payment cards.
One card Harding reviewed purchased 105 gallons of gas in a single transaction. Others showed fuel-ups of 80 to 90 gallons at a time.
“I’m sure there are some 18 wheelers, maybe, that take that amount,” Harding told the council, noting most trucks like those owned by municipalities typically use 35 gallons or less. “It might be for a legitimate purpose, but all we have is the gas receipt. We don’t know — did it make it to a city vehicle?”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Vineyard city offices on Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024.
When it comes to cash handling, Harding found the city lacked controls. When a previous finance director quit in December 2023, staff found an unsecured box of money with no notes or records linking it to any city account. Harding noted that while the amount of cash discovered was “immaterial,” lack of proper accounting could create trust issues with the city’s finances.
Some of the audit’s most consequential revelations, however, came from its review of the RDA. The agency oversees tax revenue collected to cleanup and redevelop the former Geneva Steel industrial site. It covers more than 2,000 acres, or 70% of the city’s footprint, including 350 acres that will become Utah City, Vineyard’s future downtown.
Developer Anderson Geneva has overseen much of the RDA’s environmental work. But Harding’s review found it often submitted billing packets that lacked important detail, like subcontractor invoices and scale tickets or manifests documenting contaminated materials trucked offsite. Vineyard had no paper trail to verify whether the amount of the hauled materials matched what the billing packets reported. The city also had no policy to review or approve project costs that went over budget.
In some cases, city staff only relied on informal emails from Anderson Geneva to justify payments.
“While email correspondence can serve as contextual information,” Harding wrote in the audit, “it does not constitute adequate support for public-sector reimbursement of large, multi-year remediation expenditures.”
In “several instances,” the audit identified RDA bills from a subcontractor with a 270% markup without any documents justifying the rate. The review also found the city had no contractual agreements that would show whether those markups were allowed or whether they could be challenged. City employees did not conduct occasional site visits or engineering reviews to confirm the accuracy or extent of the work reported by the developer.
As with most municipalities, the Vineyard City Council serves as its RDA board. But the audit found oversight was superficial at best. There was no evidence showing the council routinely reviewed reimbursements or expenditures before they approved payments. RDA meetings included periodic updates on projects, but no “transaction-level discussion” of bills or cost escalations from the developer.
“I‘m not recommending that Vineyard have a witch hunt,” Harding told the City Council. But he urged members to engage in more detailed scrutiny rather than “just rubber stamping whatever bill [they] send.”
Other findings from Harding’s review included unnecessary payments of sales tax for city purchases that are exempt and no formal utility billing policy for city properties.
Fullmer thanked Harding for his summary of the findings.
“If you think about where Vineyard came from, it was a closet full of random papers and notes,” she said of city procedures. “Then we grew and we made all these departments. ... Every day, we’re always putting in new policies.”
Fullmer was elected to the City Council in 2013. She became mayor in 2018. Shortly after her re-election in 2021, however, residents learned she had quietly pledged $5 million in RDA funds toward the controversial, and now defunct, plan to dredge Utah Lake and turn it into island real estate. Critics have scrutinized city leadership in the years since and asserted the mayor was too deferential to developers.
“Even though it’s a lot, I feel like sending this [audit] document to our staff and our new council,” Fullmer said, “is going to set the city up for success.”
Fullmer’s successor, Zack Stratton, said in an interview that reforming Vineyard’s RDA will be one of his top priorities when he takes office next month.
“We’ve got to get that fixed,” Stratton said. “There’s, millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars in that bucket.”
Pete Evans, a representative with Anderson Geneva, acknowledged the audit may raise concerns for residents. But he asserted the developer has used taxpayer funds responsibly.
“The reality is, we have all the backup for all the things that we’ve [been] paid [for],” Evans said in an interview. “We’ve been happy to share them with the city and we’re super committed to being transparent and open.”
State Auditor Tina Cannon conducted her own limited assessment of Vineyard’s RDA over the spring. She found the city had failed to report several hefty payments to developers as required by Utah law. It had also created “roadblocks” for those seeking more information on RDA spending.