City gets its lousy 11 cents

ROBERT GARDNER

* EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daily Pilot has agreed to republish The Verdict,

the ever popular column written for many years by retired Corona del

Mar jurist and historian Robert Gardner, in exchange for donations to

the Surfrider Foundation. This particular column was originally

published Jan. 23, 1993.

During the Depression, when cities were going belly up with

alarming regularity, the income derived from the Police Department

City Court was of vital importance to the struggling city of Newport

Beach.

It added up to many, many thousands of dollars. Balboa, as a

resort town, was the source of most of that income. For instance,

Balboa would furnish 50 to 75 drunks to our jail on a busy Saturday

night. Multiply that by $20 a drunk and you come out with big bucks

-- Depression style big bucks, that is. With no public parking, even

parking tickets at 50 cents a ticket added up. Every little bit

helped.

When I became city judge in 1938, I became an integral, if

nervous, part of this arrangement. Each morning I would pick up an

armload of envelopes from the Police Department and carry them

upstairs to the courtroom in the old City Hall. These envelopes

contained money collected by the Police Department for various

traffic fines, drunk fines and parking tickets. These being

Depression times, the envelopes were full of nickels, dimes and

pennies as well as folding money. In the courtroom, I would enter all

this into various dockets, ledgers, record books, then carry the

money across the hall and deliver it to Jim Gant, our city treasurer.

I say that I was a nervous part of the procedure because

arithmetic was never one of my strong points. Long ago, I had given

up trying to reconcile my checking account with the bank’s records. I

just accepted the bank’s statement. Saved wear and tear on the

nervous system.

And so it was that at the end of my first year, I waited with some

trepidation the appearance of the independent auditor who was going

to go through all the city’s books and records to ascertain whether

there had been any official hanky-panky.

The independent auditor was a man everyone called Robbie. As I

remember, that was short for Robinson or Robertson. Robbie was bald,

nice, polite and smiled a lot. He would sit there day after day,

going through the Police Department records and my records, making

little check marks with a red pencil.

Finally, the audit was over. Robbie came to me. He was no longer

smiling. “Bob, the books don’t balance.”

I can’t say I was surprised. So I asked a logical question.

“How much?’’

“You are off 11 cents,” said the still-not-smiling Robbie.

“Only 11 cents! Wow! That’s great! That’s closer than I have ever

come on my checking account.”

“Bob, this is serious. You are short 11 cents. You owe the city

that much. You have 11 cents of the city’s money that doesn’t belong

to you. That’s embezzlement.”

Embezzlement! My whole life flashed before my eyes. All that work!

All that study! Down the drain! Disgraced! Disbarred! San Quentin,

here I come!

“What can I do?” I cried piteously.

“Pay Jim Gant the 11 cents.”

I dashed across the hall, paid Jim the 11 cents, secured a receipt

and handed it to Robbie. He entered a check mark in his books, smiled

again and the whole awful ordeal was over.

What with all those nickels, dimes and pennies, the next year we

were off a dollar and a half. This time the city owed me that much

and Jim Gant wrote out a check to me for that amount. I was so

relieved that I didn’t inquire as to whether the city had embezzled

from me.

The whole point of this somewhat tawdry confession is that if

Robbie could catch me for a lousy 11 cents, how come the independent

auditors hired by the city and the school board couldn’t catch our

current embezzlers before they tapped the till for their millions?

The only answer that comes to mind is that they just don’t make

independent auditors like Robbie anymore.

* ROBERT GARDNER, a Corona del Mar resident, is a retired judge

and longtime observer of life in Newport Beach.