Gloucester, VA School Board, Animal Control and Buying It Used Connections?

In the above picture we see a vehicle that is being used by a school board employee and it's parked at McDonald's in the Courthouse area.

License plate number so that there are no questions as to who has it.  This was early Tuesday morning, April 28th, 2014.   The employee, a female, parked at McDonald's and went inside.

About 25 minutes after seeing this same vehicle and employee at McDonald's, we see her car as we are driving down to the other end of the county.  We made a U-turn to see if in fact this was the same car.  It was.  This woman was in Buying It Used.  We do not know if she was just stopping to do some personal shopping or if she may have been conducting county business.

  Why this question is important.  Buying It Used, when they opened up, looked a lot like a Gloucester County school board outlet store.  We have found and reported with photo evidence that Buying It Used has sold Gloucester County School Board property in the past.  Why is this an issue?  Buying It Used is owned by a county employee who works for Animal Control here in Gloucester.  Some facts and issues that come to mind.  County excess and old goods must be either dis-guarded properly or sold via auction.  When goods are sold via auction, Gloucester County employees and their families are prohibited from purchasing any goods through auctions.  Most of the items found at Buying It Used come from local auctions but are not to say that they are from local government auctions.

  With the fact that Buying It Used has sold Gloucester County school board property in the past, it makes us wonder if the woman pictured above may have been doing a pickup for school board items that may have been sold through that store?  It's a question that we do not have an answer for and can only ask about.  Either way, what was she doing there that could possibly be considered school board business for either being at McDonald's or Buying It Used?

  And all of this on top of our last report showing all of the other county vehicles in places that are not being used for county purposes.

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Gloucester, VA Local Government Employees Shot

We shot these pictures in early morning within several hours over two days.  Monday and Tuesday.  And these are the ones we were able to photograph.  There were others we did not get our cameras out in time to catch.  (No one was shot with a gun and no one was hurt during our own shooting with cameras).  What these pictures show and other concerns we saw and will be showing with the video clip below is that Gloucester County employees use government vehicles for all kinds of personal use all the time for every conceivable issue.

  Why should anyone care?  For one, it's against the Gloucester County employee rules handbook.  It's also against state law.  It's also at a cost to all taxpayers in Gloucester.  Since it's a violation of the employee code of conduct and the employees are blatantly ignoring such, how can the county expect to enforce any other policies if they can not even enforce something this simple?  If the county has no issues with any of these actions, then the county should change the policy and the state law to boot.

  Now we will say that Brenda Garton; Gloucester County administrator,  has done a pretty decent job of getting the word out to the one side of the county employees although there are still a few rouges we catch here and there.  But overall, this side of the county government has rained in a number of abuses.   What we are finding most of these days are School Board employees abusing this system and rather extensively.  We are finding these employees shopping, eating inside of the fast food restaurants, pulling off to the side after getting food inside and eating in parking lots, banking and more, on your tax dollars.  According to a past email from The Kiser, he sees nothing wrong with your money being wasted.

The above video clip is a little tour of some of the photos in our collection over the past year that gives an idea of how pervasive the issue is.  This was not even half of our collection and we did not use any photos more than once.  A comment made recently from one Board of Supervisor member said he didn't care if someone stopped for coffee.  The expression given back was to then change the county code.  We think that employees who do not have access to a county vehicle should get special considerations because they do not have access to these same privileges and it would seem a violation to not give them such consideration since the same has to be done when it comes to breaks and health care insurance and pay grades.  That is only fair now isn't it?

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Gloucester, VA Student Activity Funds, Fraud (Part 5 of 10)

Armand A. Fusco, Ed.D.

About the Yankee Institute for Public Policy

The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization
founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute’s mission is to “promote
economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut.”

Question 5: Student Activity Funds:

How are student activity funds and other cash collections monitored? Who 

monitors such funds? Are income and disbursements verified for accuracy, and 

proper usage? Are bank statements reviewed on a monthly basis? Who conducts 

the review? 

 

Background: Student activity accounts and other cash-collection 

activities are extremely common sources of embezzlement and misuse. These 

accounts do not typically involve taxpayer dollars, thus the monitoring of such 

funds leaves much to be desired. Consider that school administrators have 

stolen children’s candy money, and one secretary responsible for a student 

activity fund embezzled $483,000. 

 

Proposed Solution: Although such funds are not part of the school 

budget, each fund should be listed along with its income, expenses, and 

balances during budget presentations. The grand total of such funds would be 

very revealing. 

 

Because theft and misuse of such funds is so common, an independent 

source must be available to provide proper oversight. For example, practically 

all such funds are controlled at the school level only. The central-office finance 

department should be required to oversee income and disbursements. The 

town treasurer or a volunteer FAC committee or taxpayer group could also do 

it. 

Part 5 in our 10 part series to prevent future corruption in Gloucester County.  These plans must be enacted by the school board or we are open to wide abuses and theft which costs all of us a great deal of hard earned money.

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Gloucester, VA Property Tax Abuses?

Are there abuses going on in the Gloucester County Tax offices?  We are starting to ask that question right now.  In our last story about Jeff Stillman and his questionable involvement in an animal cremation business, we started looking at property maps and taxes.  The cremation business is not listed with an address.  We had our Arizona staff look up and cross reference records.  They were surprised that a personal property with a new business such as this has had it's property taxes lowered.  With a large percentage of county residents mostly seeing tax increases on their properties over the last few years, how could this location have it's property taxes lowered?

  I asked them to dig deeper.  Once again, the property that Jeff and Crystal Wilkinson Stillman are on is owned by one John Wilkinson.  Crystal's father.  The Arizona team looked at the properties around 6464 Ark road to look at the tax structures there as well.  Properties owned there by John Wilkinson went down in the most recent tax assessments while neighbors had their taxes raised for the most part.  Not in every situation, but in the majority.


  So we asked them to dig some more.  Since Holli M Cohoon has recently been in our spotlight, we asked them to see what they could turn up there.  More very disturbing news.  Holli's husband is one Christopher Ellis Cohoon.  They live on Bellamy Lane in Gloucester.  Here is what our Arizona staff gave us.  The Cohoon's tax liability has gone down $47,000.00 on the last tax assessment.  Let's look at some other issues on this.  What we also have learned is that the Cohoon family did some extensive renovations and additions to their home before the tax reassessments.  The old assessment was 409,600.00 dollars and the new assessment after renovations is now 362,400.00 dollars.  Over a 47,000.00 dollars drop.  



View Larger Map  Location of the Cohoon residence.  


All of this is a matter of public records.  So we are not reporting anything at all a secret at any level.  This is a neighborhood where property values should be up, not down.  Now of course this has given us a whole new area of further investigations.  Our next person to look at was Steve Baraneck.  10377 West View Hills Road.  His property taxes went up.  From 269,000.00 to 302,800.00 dollars.  That's over 33,000.00 dollars in an increase.  We are wondering who he ticked off.  His neighbors did not see this type of a dramatic increase in tax value assessments.  Not even close.


  Now here is yet another question.  How can someone who works for Animal Control, a notoriously low paying job, afford a house valued in this price range?  Sugar momma or income from undisclosed sources?  Either way, our team in Arizona now have a list of more properties to start investigating and a lot of questions to start asking.  

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