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Oxnard staff asks council to approve $49,531 transfer to correct landscape maintenance district charges
Summary
City staff recommended transfers totaling $49,531.62 from the General Fund to seven landscape maintenance districts and additional inter-district transfers to correct service-charge billing errors identified in a multi-year invoice review; staff also reported prior reimbursements and ongoing review of utility charges.
Anthony Miller, Special Districts Manager for the City of Oxnard, told the City Council that staff recommends the council approve transfers totaling $49,531.62 from the General Fund (101) to seven Landscape Maintenance Districts (Fund 120) to reimburse service charges, including interest, and approve a second set of inter-district transfers detailed in staff tables to correct general-benefit allocations.
The recommendation follows a multi-year invoice review by the Special Districts Division of the Public Works Department, which manages about 50 special districts including bonded and non‑bonded community facilities districts, landscape maintenance districts (LMDs), waterway maintenance assessment districts, and a maintenance assessment district. Staff said the review covered invoices for work such as monthly landscape maintenance, tree trimming and removal, pest control, fence repair and replacement, lighting repairs and sidewalk displacement grinding.
Staff recalled a prior City Council reimbursement approved on March 19, 2024, that returned $168,247.67 to various LMDs after earlier identified billing errors. City Manager's Office staff then performed spot checks for additional discrepancies for services billed to LMDs from fiscal year 2018‑19 through fiscal year 2021‑22. That analysis identified $40,455.54 in amounts that staff concluded were incorrectly allocated or were sufficiently unclear to merit reimbursement. The report notes a $570 difference between the memo from the City Manager's Office and the current staff report, which staff attributed to initially including an entire invoice rather than a partially applicable charge.
Methodology cited by staff included verifying that services were performed within the correct district using the city's geographic information system, confirming services matched each fiscal year's LMD engineer's report, and checking finance account codes. For charges the auditor could not validate, staff recommended reimbursing the disputed amounts. Interest on reimbursements was calculated assuming each invoice was paid within 30 days and applying Local Agency Investment Fund (LAIF) rates by quarter through Dec. 31, 2024; the March 31, 2025 LAIF rate was estimated using a trailing four‑quarter average.
Staff said the transfers and corresponding budget appropriation adjustments — including interest and changes to general benefit contributions — are detailed in two tables in the financial impact section of the report. Staff also said the adjustments will be reflected in each LMD subfund and included in the consolidated engineer's report for the fiscal year 2025‑26 assessment process. Staff noted they do not expect further reimbursements for general service charges but are reviewing LMD utility charges and expect additional corrections to be brought to the council after that analysis.
The presentation in the transcript was a staff recommendation; the transcript does not record a City Council vote or final action on the recommended transfers. Any council approval would implement the transfers and the budget adjustments outlined in staff tables and would be incorporated into the engineer's report for the next assessment cycle.
