Grapevine residents should be livid about city workers’ theft, secret investigation

You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “The truth will set you free, but first, it will tick you off.”

That certainly applies to the residents of Grapevine who gathered inside the City Council chambers Tuesday to hear City Manager Bruce Rumbelow describe just how, according to two audits, employees improperly used the city’s credit cards, defrauding taxpayers out of about $250,000 for personal use.

The debacle has now led the Tarrant County district attorney’s office to seek a grand jury investigation of Kevin Mitchell and Ruth Chiego, two former Grapevine department heads who left their jobs in late February.

It shouldn’t have taken this long for a criminal case to develop. If not for investigative reporting by the Star-Telegram’s Nichole Manna it might not have at all. If not for her original report on the thefts and residents’ subsequent outrage, it seems Mitchell and Chiego might have gotten a quiet and cushy exit.

It’s also unfortunate that, as detailed in Tuesday’s meeting, auditors haven’t been able to nail down the exact amounts of personal purchases. The auditors classified nearly $140,000 of the spending as inconclusive, and almost $60,000 of that has no documentation.

So far, the audits contend that Mitchell, who started working for the city in 1999, spent up to $186,591 on a city credit card on what appeared to be “personal hotel stays, flights, tickets to football games and more than $23,000 in Apple products.” Mitchell was intentionally devious about his spending abuse, according to the auditors, and told investigators he would “sometimes split the transactions to keep them below $3,000, which would circumvent the city’s expense approval process.”

In 2020, Mitchell spent $10,137 at Restoration Hardware but broke the purchases into four transactions, the audits reported. Expenditures that don’t even seem work related should have alarmed other city employees even before an audit, were anyone else so much as glancing at credit card statements.

Chiego, who was hired in 2019, spent up to $69,694 on things like lawn furniture for her house and Amazon purchases, auditors reported. On Tuesday, when Grapevine council member Leon Leal asked Rumbelow why the spending wasn’t caught earlier, the city manager replied: “Because we trusted them.”

The crowd groaned, and understandably so.

Rumbelow has hurt Grapevine residents’ trust by handling the problem in a secretive manner. He opened an internal investigation and hired a third party for the audits, but he let the employees in question stay until the investigation was over and didn’t tell the City Council about it until it was done.

The city manager and council should have insisted on more oversight and tighter spending guidelines that would have prevented unfettered access to credit cards with obviously high limits. Documentation for every purchase on the city’s credit cards should have been expected and required to file on a quarterly basis.

Theft is a serious crime, and it’s not clear why, upon discovery, the city did not at least notify the Tarrant County district attorney.

“A simple Google search turns up that theft in Texas of an amount between $30,000 and $150,000 is a felony in the third degree,” resident Anne Lapkin told the council. “How is it that the thieves were not referred to the district attorney?”

Rumbelow has said that Mitchell and Cheigo agree to pay back the funds that have so far been determined to have gone toward personal enrichment. So far, it’s not near the $250,000 in question.

Grapevine residents have a right to be angry. It should not take a reader’s tip and an expose for rampant theft to bring a criminal investigation.

The Grapevine City Council needs to insist on better policies for oversight of city employees. It should consider whether Rumbelow’s handling of the case merits discipline or even firing.

The entire catastrophe brings to mind another age-old adage: “Trust, but verify.”