The city manager won’t answer our questions about Measure P. So we’re publishing them here.

Editor’s note: Doug Hoagland of The Munro Review has questions about whether city officials did enough to monitor the Fresno Arts Council, where $1.5 million in Measure P tax dollars disappeared in an alleged embezzlement. Looking for answers, he emailed Fresno City Manager Georgeanne White on March 4.

In part, Hoagland’s questions were prompted by his reading of the City’s now-terminated agreement with the Arts Council to administer the Measure P money. No other media seems to have asked the questions he posed.

Hoagland received no reply, prompting this open letter to White, the City’s top manager.

Hello Georgeanne,

I want to be as straightforward as you were in declaring with gusto that the City is totally free of blame in the fiasco sparked by the embezzlement at the Arts Council.

That’s nonsense.

Your words at the Feb. 23 meeting of the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission were unequivocal: “The City did nothing wrong. I stand by that 100%.” You also said: “If people want to be angry, be angry with the Fresno Arts Council.”

Pushing all the blame on the Arts Council might satisfy politicians at City Hall who did nothing as the grants program struggled over the last two years. But reality is more complex, as I’m sure you know.

I’ll go into more detail below about questions I posed in my March 4 email, which I sent to georgeanne.white@fresno.gov. The email didn’t bounce back so I have to assume you got it. You’re freezing out the one reporter – me – who’s been writing about the ins and outs of Measure P since October 2022. That was long before the alleged embezzlement made headlines. Forty-four news articles and commentaries later, I’m still trying to keep the public – particularly the arts community – up-to-date, which I hope is your goal, too.

The saga of Measure P: See past coverage in The Munro Review’s comprehensive archive

To jog your memory, the questions in my email are about City Hall competence and due diligence, admittedly touchy subjects for you. Look, there’s no question that the Arts Council blundered horribly but the City has fiduciary responsibility for Measure P’s millions. In other words: You own this and have from the start.

You’ve complained publicly about not getting more frequent financial reports from the Arts Council. I know you don’t need this background, but here it is anyway.

The City-Arts Council agreement for Measure P required the Arts Council to make an annual financial report to the City. You’ve said the Arts Council missed a Sept. 30, 2025 deadline for that annual report about the first round of grants that totaled $9.4 million.

Again, your words from Feb. 23: “I wish there had been quarterly reports in that agreement. There weren’t. That wasn’t ultimately what was negotiated.”

In my March 4 email to you, I pointed out that you signed the agreement and I asked: “Why didn’t you insist on quarterly reports that you now wish had been a requirement of the agreement?”

◊     ◊     ◊

A couple of other things:

One: I texted Lilia Gonzáles Chávez at the Arts Council on March 5 and asked if the City asked for quarterly reports in those negotiations. She didn’t reply. I sure wish I knew the answer.

Two: I went outside of Fresno to get a take on you sounding as if you were powerless to demand more frequent reporting (and perhaps greater accountability) from the Arts Council. My outsider of choice: Adam Butz, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at Cal State Long Beach.

Butz said that as city manager, you would have had leverage to require the Arts Council to make quarterly reports because that’s standard practice for large cities – especially when negotiations with outside organizations involve millions of tax dollars. A comment from Butz might sting. “The city manager’s office – or whoever is doing the negotiating – if they had any bit of savviness, they would require quarterly reporting.”

One final issue. It wasn’t part of my email to you, but I’ll include it here because of relevance. An arts administrator who knows a lot about Measure P raised the following two points to me. That person asked not to be identified out of concern for retribution.

Point One: The Arts Council required arts organizations and artists that got Measure P grants to make quarterly reports or risk losing some of their grant money. My take on the arts administrator’s point: Why wasn’t the same accountability demanded of the Arts Council?

Point Two: When the Arts Council didn’t meet the Sept. 30, 2025, deadline for the financial report, why didn’t the City dispatch one of its auditors to figure out what was going on? My take on the arts administrator’s point: Good question. Four months would pass before the Arts Council notified the City in early February 2026 that a former employee had embezzled $1.5 million in Measure P funds.

◊     ◊     ◊

In my March 4 email, I also asked questions that go to another vital point: How much did the City know about the Arts Council’s capacity to handle millions of Measure P tax dollars? Did the City, for example, know what financial controls were in place at the Arts Council to keep a bad actor from stealing money?

The arts administrator I referred to earlier said the City should get a break on these questions. This person said the Arts Council had a good reputation in Fresno, had shown it could handle large sums from the feds and had no history of financial impropriety.

If it’s true that history is prologue, the City had no reason to do a deep dive into the Arts Council’s inner workings – or so goes the reasoning of the arts administrator.

And yet . . . well, here we are with a dumpster fire.

◊     ◊     ◊

Two words suggest an alternative the City might have followed instead of simply trusting the Arts Council. Independent audit. The City could have asked the Arts Council for an independent audit before signing the agreement in 2023. Think of it as trust but verify.

Did that happen? That was one of my questions to you.

Amy Kitchener, executive director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, based in Fresno, helped me understand the importance of this. And she should know. She headed up the audit committee of the national Grantmakers in the Arts while serving on its board. Kitchener explained that it’s the “gold standard” for nonprofits (like the Arts Council) to keep up-to-date independent audits to prove financial soundness to donors (like Fresno taxpayers, represented by the City).
An independent audit is about more than numbers. It looks at an organization’s financial controls.

Georgeanne, you’re a veteran at City Hall, and I’m told that you’re a fiscal expert. So you already know what “financial controls” mean. I didn’t. Kitchener gave me a couple of examples. Does the same person who opens mail that brings in checks and other financial documents also manage online accounts? Best practice says it should be two different people. Does more than one person have to sign off before someone in the organization cuts a check? The answer should be “Yes.”

Actually, it appears the City wanted to minimize its risk in agreeing to work with the Arts Council. A Risk Assessment form that the Arts Council was required to complete asked two important questions: 1) Have your agency’s annual financial statements been audited by an independent audit firm? If yes, provide a copy of the statement from the last fiscal year. 2) Were there any findings or questioned costs in the last two fiscal years? If so, please explain.

Here’s the problem: That Risk Assessment form (Exhibit B in the City-Arts Council agreement) is blank on the city’s website. As I asked in my email to you: If the form was completed, which City department has it? (Please remember that I cited the Public Records Act in requesting a copy of the completed form if it exists.) If the form wasn’t completed, why did the City sign the agreement?

These are easy questions to answer. How does ignoring them square with your declaration that the City now wants transparency?

Answering legitimate questions about the past seems a good place to start.

Georgeanne, I’ll close this letter with how I began my email of March 4: “I’m reaching out to you directly, and I respectfully ask you to answer my questions. The questions are detailed in an attempt to help taxpayers understand a complex process involving their money.”

Two of those words are most important: “their money.”

Sincerely,
Doug Hoagland

Tonight’s meeting

The Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission is scheduled to meet at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, March 16, at Fresno City Hall.

The agenda includes:

• Recommending the city’s parks department hire three employees to oversee the Measure P arts grants program. If approved, the recommendation is scheduled to go to the Fresno City Council for final authorization on March 26. The positions are a Project Liaison/Program Administrator, Community Outreach Specialist and Community Coordinator.

• Creating a Cultural Arts Subcommittee, composed of no more than  four members from the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission. In past funding cycles, the Subcommittee has played a key role in disbursing Measure P grants to nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists with qualified fiscal sponsors.