Grapevine Residents Furious Over 2 Employees Found To Have Used Taxpayer Money For Themselves

By Alexis Wainwright

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    GRAPEVINE, Texas (KTVT) — People in Grapevine are in shocked and trying to figure out how two city employees were able to use thousands of dollars in city funds for their own personal gain.

More than a dozen people who live in town are furious about what happened and waited three hours just to tell city council members how they feel.

“I don’t understand how that happens and to me as a resident and taxpayer of Grapevine, that’s a real slap in the face,” lives in Grapevine, Marsha Wesley said.

People are sharing their thoughts after two independent investigations concluded former Director of Parks and Recreation Kevin Mitchell and former Director of Libraries Ruth Chiego used more than $58,000 of city funds for “personal use.”

“If we don’t keep pushing it and get some answers then it going to happen again,” resident Dave Custable said. “We’ll have a lot of people applying for the city of Grapevine because they know they can get away with a lot of stuff, so it’s got to stop.”

It was a packed house for Grapevine’s City Council meeting Tuesday, to hear the latest break down of how this could have happened.

“What I heard today was that these audits that we do are not fully comprehensive, what I heard today is that the checks and balances is mostly based on trust, and I think the citizens of grapevine deserve a lot more than a trust policy,” resident Danielle Kaufman said.

An internal investigation using a third-party firm, said Mitchell used $33,359 of the city’s money and Chiego used $24,916.

The investigation first reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram found Mitchell bough football tickets and Apple products. Chiego bought furniture and thousands of dollars on Amazon purchases.

The city released this statement nearly two weeks ago, saying:

“The City of Grapevine takes its responsibility as a fiduciary of taxpayer dollars seriously. As such, we employ both internal and external auditing of expenditures to insure compliance with city policy, generally accepted accounting practices and State law. Recently, a member of our finance staff raised a question about two department heads and purchases they made on their Purchasing Card (P-Card) that appeared to be personal. Of course, personal expenses on a City P-Card are not and have never been allowed by any City employee.”

Upon being informed of the concern, the City Manager’s office took the following steps:

• Retained an outside forensic auditor to review the P-Card purchases for both employees whose spending was questioned, and further tasked them with reviewing a significant number of other P-Card purchases to assess citywide compliance.

• The outside forensic audit report completed in mid-January, was provided to the City’s external auditor.

• The report made recommendations for internal control improvements which were immediately instituted. Further, the auditor identified the personal purchase transactions made by the two department heads.

• Both department heads resigned and are required to pay back the funds spent for personal use as recommended by the audit firm.”

Following that audit in February Chiego resigned and Mitchell went into retirement.

“We have a very competent city manager here and we have city councils that want to do the right thing, so when we hear that someone resigns after embezzling money, my question is why weren’t they just fired for misconduct,” Custable said.

City council was not told about the investigation until the two employees left, they too trying to figure out how they missed this and now city leaders are introducing an update process for employees using city funding.

Those new procedures according to the city manager include:

-Every department head transaction approved by finance

-Staff level transactions are approved by department supervisor and finance

-Any questionable transactions are forwarded to City Manager’s office

Both former employees agreed to pay back the amount that was tied to personal use within nine months. The city said Mitchell has already paid in full.

The city manager admits there is a possibility that they could’ve gotten the amount of money spent wrong it could be more than what the report found.

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