County jail’s $1 million inmate fund has new oversight.

Jail food doesn’t have a reputation for being wholesome or plentiful. Inmates can supplement those calories by shopping at the Monterey County Jail’s commissary. They pay an extra tax on the food there that generates some $500,000 a year, which goes into a special fund.

Inmates also pay extra fees for outgoing phone calls, totaling about another $500,000 a year. Together, these two sources make up the $1 million a year Inmate Welfare Fund, designated to be spent on improving life at the jail. It gets spent on goods like TVs, playing cards and toothbrushes. Historically, it also got spent on salaries and contracts, but after revelations about a lack of oversight over those expenditures, there’s a new governance structure in place.

Corrections Program Manager Charles DaSilva raised a red flag in a budget report on the fund in December 2014. Jail Chaplain Cynthia Montague and Addiction Recovery Counselor Brian Thomae, DaSilva noted, were both voting members of the Inmate Welfare Fund Committee – and also contractors getting paid from the fund.

“This creates an obvious conflict of interest,” DaSilva wrote.

That report came out just weeks before Sheriff Steve Bernal was sworn in. Bernal’s management team decided to immediately dissolve the oversight committee, County Auditor Mike Miller undertook an audit of the fund and the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury investigated the fund along with a slew of other concerns about the jail.

Now, a year after the Weekly first reported on the concerns with the fund and the audit is complete, there’s a new oversight committee and changes to how it’s being managed.

“We disbanded the old committee just to make sure there was no perception of a conflict,” says Undersheriff Mike Moore, formerly the jail chief. “We were concerned with [asking], ‘Are we doing the right thing?’”

According to two audit reports, there were no substantiated conflicts of interest, but the sheriff’s office decided to restructure the committee anyway. The new board, appointed Oct. 1, 2015, includes four members of the public: pastor Jim Micheletti; Soledad real estate agent Mia Mirassou; Vicki Nohrden, who served on the civil grand jury that investigated the fund and reported on oversight problems; and Salinas activist and educator Rachel Torres. They’ll meet again this quarter, on a date to be determined.

Besides flagging governance questions, the grand jury questioned whether most of that $1 million fund was actually going toward improving inmate welfare. More than $3,000 was spent on mail handling and another $7,100 to postage in 2013-14, while $2,100 went to building maintenance and $24,000 to equipment maintenance.

The mailroom clerk – who also formerly served as a committee member – was long paid out of the inmate welfare fund, a practice that ended July 1.

Instead, Moore says they’re now trying to pay for things that really improve inmate welfare. The fund covered costs for a job fair Jan. 24 at the jail, and officials just got a letter from Stahl Motor Company in Monterey, saying they’d hired a former inmate from the fair.

There are about 10 inmates enrolled in a new high school equivalency program, and the first two just celebrated passing the GED in February.