VIRGINIA BEACH – The City Council has spent more than half a million dollars since 2002 on an oyster restoration plan that does not exist, according to an audit.
City Auditor Lyndon Remias called the discovery “jaw-dropping.” It came out in an unscheduled audit that was released to the public Monday.
“We were all kind of dumbfounded,” Remias said.
The city has placed nearly $650,000 in its “Oyster Heritage Program Fund,” which was created in 2002 with the goal of restoring and growing oyster habitats, reefs and beds across the city, according to the audit. Most of the funds were paid to the nonprofit Lynnhaven River NOW for services that were performed, including the collection of oysters for the recycling program “Save Oyster Shells,” and educational programs, the audit said.
About $56,000 remains in the fund, according to the audit.
Each time the City Council released money from the fund, it did so by passing an ordinance that referenced the city’s oyster heritage plan, Remias wrote in his report. Southside Daily confirmed the references in a records search.
References to the plan, from the council ordinances and on responses to records requests under the Freedom of Information Act, said the plan was developed with the help of the state, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Lynnhaven River NOW and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
A local oysterman’s public records request for the plan earlier this spring triggered the revelation that it did not exist. To comply with the oysterman’s request, city staff asked for the document from Virginia Beach’s Environment and Sustainability Office administrator, Clay Bernick. He was unable to produce it and later admitted no written copy exists, according to the audit and Remias.
“Thus, in essence Planning (Clay Bernick) has mislead (or lied) to Council about having an Oyster Heritage Plan,” Remias wrote in an email.
Reach by phone Monday, Bernick acknowledged there had been a “misrepresentation” but said other documents had given a general idea of such a plan, and that expenditures always followed a lengthy discussion among city staff members. He deferred many questions to city spokeswoman Julie Hill.
Deputy City Manager Doug Smith, speaking on a conference call with Hill and Southside Daily, declined to say if Bernick would be disciplined. Smith said a plan had been described verbally to the City Council before it was asked to vote to spend money.
“But that is unacceptable,” Smith said.
He added the Council and public need a written plan that can be seen, touched and critiqued.
Smith said the oyster work the city paid for was appropriate, but the city lacked the proper safeguards to ensure that is the case. The city is working to establish those safeguards, he said.
Remias said Lynnhaven River NOW performed the work that the city paid it to do with the funds, which included collecting oyster shells under the recycling plan for future use in the river. The audit “is not an indictment” of the nonprofit but a revelation about the city’s operations, Remias said.
When Lynnhaven River NOW turned over the shells to the city for the recycling initiative, the city did not know what to do with them, according to Remias and the audit.
“The shells are simply being stored at the city dump,” Remias wrote in an email to Southside Daily. “With no Oyster Heritage Plan in place there is no short term or long term plan to use these oyster shells.”
Karen Forget, Lynnhaven River NOW executive director, said not all the shells that have been transferred to the dump have gone unused.
The group allows the shells to “cure” in storage at the site for a year to 18 months until germs are dead before they are re-sued for restoration projects, she said.
Lynnhaven River NOW has been collecting the shells since 2007 for the city and has used them in projects periodically since then, Forget said. The group also plans to build a large oyster reef in the river with the shells in each of the next two years.
“It’s not a simple in and out process for these shells,” Forget said.
She could not say how many shells the nonprofit has in storage at the dump. The number is calculable, but no one has been asked to find out in a long time, she said, adding she has “a general idea.”
“But it’s not like they’re there and forgotten,” she said.
The shell recycling program has cost the city about $254,000, according to a November 2015 email from then-City Manager Jim Spore to Donald Edwards, the oysterman who was requesting information about the program.
Remias said the city can’t place the shells, which oysters would live and grow on, just anywhere in the river because much of the river bottom is private property. The city needs a designated area spelled out in a plan to know where to send them, he said.
That plan does not exist, and the uncounted shells, largely collected from restaurants, have instead been stored in a mammoth pile at the dump for more than six years, Remias said.
Spore wrote in his email to Edwards that the rest of the expenditures from the Oyster Heritage Trust Fund since 2002 — about $343,000 — “has been spent on completion of the oyster heritage plan, undertaking annual surveys of oyster populations on sanctuary reefs, and cost-sharing for construction and seeding of sanctuary oyster habitat.”
Spore added in the email that the recycling program has collected about 16,651 bushels of oyster shells, “the vast majority of which has been placed on sanctuary reefs in the Lynnhaven watershed” as a partial match for reef construction by the state and Army Corps of Engineers.
Spore said Monday that information would likely have come from Bernick.
The stockpiling of shells has frustrated oystermen who would like to use the shells to give live oysters a place to grow along the parts of the river bottom they lease from the state, Remias said. Those oystermen include Edwards, whose questions ultimately led to the audit.
They were “basic questions about the fund and the plan,” Smith said. “It became apparent we didn’t have good answers.”
That’s when Smith and the city’s planning director asked Remias, the city auditor, for help.
In its investigation, Remias’ team also found the city gave the work to Lynnhaven River NOW without a contract or competitive bid process.
The audit made the following recommendations to the city:
- Stop paying the nonprofit until such contracts are finalized.
- Stop mentioning the oyster restoration plan in documents until one is created.
- Develop a restoration plan.
- Scrutinize the oyster heritage fund each month to document expenses, as no record had previously been kept.
Have a story idea or news tip? Contact City Hall reporter Judah Taylor at [email protected] or 757-490-2750.
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