Rehiring of Fired College Official Backed

The Oxnard College bookstore manager, fired in June for shoddy record-keeping, could win back her $60,000-a-year job under a ruling proposed by the district’s personnel commission.

Commissioners said Ventura County Community College District trustees acted too harshly in firing Sharon Davies, a 22-year employee dismissed after an independent audit uncovered numerous accounting errors and losses of $40,000 or more in 1993.

The proposal is expected to be approved tonight at a meeting of the three-member commission, which is appointed by the governing board. Trustees could then accept the ruling or fight it in court.

The commission recommends that Davies, 52, return to work Tuesday, four months after she was informed by letter that she had been fired. It also suggests that she be placed on six months probation.

“The punishment was too severe for the negligence,” said Commissioner James G. McDonald, who signed the ruling released by the district Wednesday.

“She was quite delinquent in handling the bookkeeping, but very good at everything else,” he said. “It just seemed to us that terminating her was a little more than what should have been done.”

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Commissioner James D. Faulconer agreed.

“Certainly Ms. Davies had some shortcomings that need to be corrected,” Faulconer said. “But it seemed like the action taken was a little too severe given the information presented.”

Trustees and district officials contacted Wednesday declined to comment on the ruling. But David C. Bernstein, who represented Davies at the administrative hearing, praised commission members for their decision.

“We are very pleased the system worked the way it’s supposed to,” he said. “The commission did the right thing.”

Attorney Stuart W. Rudnick, who represented the three-campus district in the hearings, also declined to discuss the ruling Wednesday.

But he argued last week that Davies’ accounting practices were “filled with errors and inaccuracies.”

“There was no alternative but to terminate the employee relationship,” Rudnick told commissioners.

Bernstein argued at the two-day hearing that his client was never warned that she may be fired, and was promoted and told that she was doing good work as recently as last year.

Trustees voted in private in June to fire Davies after an April audit turned up serious flaws in the record-keeping system at the Oxnard College bookstore, which sells nearly $1 million in books and goods each year.

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But the personnel commission ruled that although Davies failed to maintain adequate financial records, the district acted unfairly in firing her without providing further training in accounting.

“Given the district’s often-stated grave concern for the financial controls needed in the bookstore, the commission finds it surprising that this subject apparently was never specifically addressed during any of Ms. Davies’ performance reviews,” the ruling states.

The order also stipulates that both Davies and the district take responsibility for their own attorney fees, and that Davies not be compensated for lost wages.

“It cost her quite a bit of money,” McDonald said. “She was in effect suspended without pay until Nov. 1.”

The audit was ordered in April after district accountants working to centralize bookkeeping were unable to make sense of the records that Davies submitted.

It concluded that cash registers were not closed out each day, records were not properly maintained and internal controls over cash receipts were insufficient.

Despite the sharp criticism of Davies’ record-keeping abilities, auditors and commission members said there was no evidence that Davies was responsible for bookstore losses of $40,000 or more over the last six months of 1993.

The trustees will meet Tuesday and are expected to discuss the matter in closed session.