Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the original published version to clarify the nature of the College of the Canyons governing board’s discussions about hiring a new superintendent-president. During the board’s discussion on March 13, board members did not directly refer to the college’s previous CEO, former Chancellor Dianne Van Hook. Rather, board members asked hypothetical questions about how to ensure transparency and effective communication from a future CEO.
College of the Canyons’ search for a permanent superintendent-president has narrowed, with a four-person shortlist released this past week.
COC’s governing board discussed contract terms and interviewing procedure with the college’s legal counsel and human resources personnel at a March 13 study session ahead of a forum with superintendent-president hopefuls on Monday.
Former Chancellor Dianne Van Hook was the last person to officially hold the position on a non-interim basis at the college – between 1988-2008 as superintendent-president and between 2008-2024 as chancellor.
In the weeks after the governing board was almost entirely turned over following November elections that year, Van Hook’s interim replacement David Andrus, a political science professor at the college, requested a forensic audit of the college’s past 20 years of facility contracts. Preliminary findings by the college’s legal counsel found $12 million in contracting and consulting fees that were potentially awarded illegally.
About one year later, the college announced at a September meeting that the audit had been submitted to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office – and, later that same day, that Andrus would be terminated from his position as interim superintendent-president. The college has yet to hear back from the DA’s office about the audit.
Andrus, whose departure from the position was later announced as a resignation, was replaced by Jasmine Ruys, who’s now one of the college’s four finalists for the permanent superintendent-president position.
During a presentation on what the superintendent-president contract’s terms could include, led by district legal counsel Eileen O’Hare-Anderson, board Vice President Fred Arnold asked O’Hare-Anderson whether that contract could be written to specifically guard against a superintendent-president concealing information from the board.
“I’ve been fortunate to be on a board, since I was probably 23, of different financial institutions, and I found that when you get an extremely powerful, and … one-step-faster than-the-board CEO, sometimes the information you’re getting is maybe not the information that we need to get,” Arnold said. “How do we tighten up language to make sure we’re not ever put in that position?”
O’Hare-Anderson said the selectee for the position could be required to provide trustees more reports on request, either in their contract or in their performance goals set each year.
Arnold went on to specify that past reports on bond spending have avoided raising the red flags that should’ve invited more scrutiny.
“Just an example would be, an elephant in the room a little bit, we have these really good reports that we get on our bond spending … (now) we have an investigation looking into X, Y or Z, so the two don’t balance out, right?” Arnold said. “The other part is making sure that our CEO creates an environment that allows for that type of transparency.”
Van Hook was put on leave a few months before the college officially backed out of a $22 million deal with developer Intertex for the Advanced Technology Center project – slated to be funded with money from the $230 million Measure E bond passed by voters in 2016 – after it was revealed the project would cost millions more than initial cost estimates to outfit it with appropriate equipment, as well as guarantee a $5 million profit for the developer.
The college spent $10 million to buy the Valley Center Drive land the ATC would’ve been built on, as well as easements, entitlements and architectural drawings associated with the project, and developer profit built into the contract, said Jason Hinkle, COC’s interim vice president of business services.
Board clerk Edel Alonso, the only current trustee who was on the board when Van Hook was placed on leave, said at the meeting when the project was axed in September 2024 that Van Hook’s administration was not transparent about the true cost of the project.
Bond money management came up again when trustees discussed the Santa Clarita Community College District’s annual financial report audit during its business meeting later that day on March 13.
Auditors from consulting firm Eide Bally said the district was getting an “unmodified opinion” for the cleanliness of its financial statements, meaning they’re stated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and for their compliance with state and federal law, the best grade possible.
Alonso again brought up the “elephant in the room” to ask auditor Rick Alonzo — no relation to the board member — whether anything in the school’s financial statements might have tipped off the college to potentially illegal spending.
“I feel like it’s almost an elephant in the room that I’m going to go ahead and say, because I meant to say last year and I didn’t … Everyone knows, the public knows, this district found some questionable expenditures,” Edel Alonso said. “But our fiscal services office is beyond reproach … So in hindsight, was there anything, from your point of view, that we should have been asking, or looking at, or reviewing, to have prevented that?”
Alonzo, the auditor, said the college’s internal controls, or an organization’s internal methods of accurately accounting for its finances (like segregating duties so that no one person is responsible for expenditures) are key to preventing fraud.
“I think the best way to answer that is to make sure that your internal controls are operating properly, right?” Alonzo said. “(Make sure) that everyone’s reviewing something, (and) that an individual doesn’t have the ability to purchase something, pay something, without anyone else having a second set of eyes.”
The auditor added that while the annual financial statements audit report doesn’t give internal controls a grade, this year’s report includes a note on one internal control the college could stand to improve. The letter states that the college’s journal entry process for manual accounting entries, which typically come with a secondary inspection, could be reviewed more consistently.
As it stands, the ATC project is still slated for partial funding from Measure E, with the college hoping to also raise funds from the COC Foundation as well as its industry partners, Hinkle said. He added the ATC’s plans are being reviewed by the Division of the State Architect, and once those plans are returned, the college will have a better idea of where costs will land.
The project is estimated to cost $63 million in total, according to the district’s Independent Citizens Bond Oversight Committee’s annual report on the 2024-25 fiscal year.
During the presentation on the Measure E bond financial and performance audit for the 2024-2025 fiscal year directly following the audit report, and with the future of the ATC project dependent on future bond spending, Ruys touched on how the college’s bond spending procedures have changed.
The biggest Measure E expenses that year were the Valley Center Drive land purchase for $9.3 million, repairs and modernization updates to the Valencia campus for $1 million and $965,259 in ATC-related costs – some of which were from the $10 million Intertex purchase, Hinkle said.
Unspent Measure E funds sit at about $85 million in total. The district has about $60 million left from its latest bond issuance and is planning to issue more bonds in two to three months for the remaining $25 million, Hinkle said.
While presenting on Measure E bond expenditures, Jim de Bree, chair of the citizen’s bond oversight committee and a local CPA, said the Valley Center Drive land purchase was the result of an “incredibly complicated transaction,” and that the Oversight Committee spent hours at its November meeting pouring over the college’s bond spending procedures.
“I think the procedures are pretty good,” de Bree said in the board meeting. “But the system isn’t designed to question, ‘Gee, did this expense make sense in the first place?’ And that’s kind of hard for an auditor to do because it’s very qualitative, and the audits tend to be more quantitative.”
And while de Bree emphasized that the board had a responsibility to second-guess any expenses that triggered their “Spider-Man sense,” he said it appeared there was no way the board could’ve foreseen the issues with the Intertex-helmed ATC project.
“I think, in retrospect, on the Valley Center project, with 2020 hindsight, there was no way you could have thought to ask all the questions, because the procedures weren’t in place to make sure that those questions were answered before they got to you,” de Bree said. “And so I think you can rest assured that the procedures have improved.”
That prompted Arnold to ask Ruys directly whether there are new checks and balances in place, with the district looking to spend “quite a bit of money” on the ATC in the future.
Ruys said that there are, with a key difference being a new regime at the college for handling bond expenses, through both Hinkle and Erin Teague, assistant superintendent-vice president of facilities planning, operations and construction.
“Now business services and facilities have an entirely new way of working together to ensure everything is going through with multiple eyes looking at it, because they come at it from very different perspectives,” Ruys said. “Erin’s looking at it from a building perspective, and Jason’s looking at it from, is it correct on the financial side? And so we’re really in tandem.”
De Bree told The Signal in an interview Friday that the citizen’s bond oversight committee has spent the past year trying to understand how a project like the Intertex ATC comes to be – with the knowledge that the college’s past bond spending history is now a matter of legal scrutiny.
At that November oversight committee meeting, Hinkle and Teague presented on the college’s procedures for spending bond money.
“It’s the first time our committee was shown a documented set of procedures the college employs when they’re going to spend bond money on college improvements,” de Bree said, adding that with Teague on board, it appeared to him that she’s “put a lot more discipline in the process.”
The process of documenting those procedures was itself an important step in the right direction, and indexes the college is growing as an organization, de Bree said, adding that documentation invites feedback.
“I think what they did went beyond accounting. It deals with the first part of the decision to spend the money,” de Bree said. “They … documented procedures and made things more formal, which I think means there’s going to be greater accountability, and that’s a good thing.”
The nature of those early-stage decisions is what de Bree said is part of what piqued former interim-president Andrus’ scrutiny, when it came to the ATC project.
He said that Andrus thought the Valley Center Drive land was unreasonably small for an ATC. The project is now slated for somewhere on the college’s Valencia campus.
COC is scheduled to host public forums on Monday in which finalists for the superintendent/president position will address college employees and members of the community. The forums begin 9 a.m. at the Santa Clarita Performing Arts Center on the COC Valencia campus. For more information on the forums and the finalists, go to tinyurl.com/y2f4j3ae.
