Solvang City Attorney Chip Wullbrandt wore a bowling shirt to the last City Council meeting, explaining that it had been a long day.
“First, I’ll apologize for not having more formal wear this evening. I’ve actually been here at City Hall all day,” Wullbrandt said during the Oct. 28 meeting. “We’ve been working on trying to finish off asset recovery from the SCVB.”
That’s the Solvang Conference and Visitors Bureau, the city’s excised tourism arm. It’s held on to the city’s property, Wullbrandt said, including cash, an internet account, and even a phone.
The city and the SCVB have been locked in a rancorous divorce since the summer, and the divided parties haven’t been able to agree on who owns what.
But recent threats of legal action from the city broke the dam, and Wullbrandt said some of those assets are now in the city’s hands.
Solvang is also demanding the return of computers and other hardware, but the SCVB is refusing.
The dispute started over the SCVB’s contract and, after several attempts to reconcile, both agreed it wasn’t going to happen. When it became clear the future relationship between the two was over, Wullbrandt said the city had decided to try to keep the partnership through the end of the year.
“The city needed the SCVB to cooperate with the audit effort that the special city auditor was trying to carry out of past SCVB spending activities,” he said.
Wullbrandt described an Aug. 13 meeting he attended with the city’s efficiency consultant Tom Widroe, City Councilmember Daniel Johnson, and Kim Jensen, the president of the SCVB.
“We also worked in a cooperative fashion to make sure the assets that had been paid for by the city and developed by the SCVB would be returned to the city,” he said.
Wullbrandt called the results of that meeting a “tentative agreement.” He said it included the return of some cash—at least $32,000 in a money market account and $10,000 in a checking account.
But by Aug. 26, Wullbrandt said, the money hadn’t been returned, and shortly after that, the visitor center stopped operating.
“When we got it open, we discovered it had been stripped of the phones and the modem,” Wullbrandt said.
The SCVB kept the phone number and internet account too.
“We were essentially left with the investments the city had made taken,” he said.
A formal demand for the return of the assets followed, asking for them to be turned in by Sept. 30.
Solvang didn’t get a response.
After a closed session City Council meeting on Oct. 14, Wullbrandt and the council prepared to make the fight legal.
That’s when the city got a response from those who remained at the SCVB. They helped the city secure its digital assets, including social media and video. Solvang also got control of the visitor center phone number.
But the city’s still looking for the money.
Wullbrandt read a letter that Jensen wrote to the Central Coast Film Society on Sept. 30, giving the nonprofit a $16,000 donation and four iMac computers.
Wullbrandt said he got the money back from the Film Society and another $4,000 from an SCVB account.
But not everything is back, Wullbrandt said, there’s still a storage unit out there somewhere with more of the city’s stuff.
Now, he’s just looking for the key.
—William D’Urso
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2019.