School panel denied access?

DES MOINES (AP) — A Des Moines accountant told a joint state legislative oversight panel Monday that the staff of an association of school boards spent months stonewalling his access to crucial financial information.

Ted Lodden, hired by the governing board of the Iowa Association of School Boards to audit its finances, told the committee that the association’s staff threatened him with a lawsuit if he took his concerns to the governing board.

“It is incomprehensible to me that the administration would not permit the outside auditor access to the board,” Lodden said. “Many of the things we now find they did to frustrate the completion of the audit.”

Lodden spoke in front of the Government Oversight Committee, a joint panel of the Iowa House and Senate that has begun a probe of the school board association. The association has come under fire after allegations of misused public money.

The association provided documentation Monday that showed its director, Maxine Kilcrease, increased her pay from $210,000 a year to $367,000 a year without obtaining board approval and took a trip to Bora Bora that was charged to the group’s credit card.

Members of the legislative panel plan to question school board association officials Tuesday and have said they will issue subpoenas if necessary. The subpoenas could include Kilcrease and other staffers who saw salaries balloon last year. At one point in 2009, eight staffers at the association earned more than $100,000 apiece.

Nolden Gentry, a lawyer hired last week to represent the school board group, says the group’s finances are in disarray. Gentry told the panel he has been contacted by the FBI because some of the allegedly misspent money came from federal funds.

One of the oversight panel’s leaders, Sen. Rich Olive, D-Story City, said the revelation of the association’s spending is particularly galling because lawmakers have spent most of the current legislative session trying to trim budgets.

“Meanwhile, we hear that the school board association has been spending taxpayer money meant for our kids and local schools on vacations to Bora Bora, handouts to for-profit organizations and padding their own ballooning salaries,” Olive said. “Taxpayers deserve to know where every penny of their money is going.”

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