A recent front page story in both the Lompoc Record and the Santa Maria Times reported the tragic loss of funds experienced by the Lompoc Valley Festival Association due to embezzlement.
Recently, I attended an event in Orcutt, where two prominent citizens of Santa Maria said to me, “My, you certainly seem to have a problem with embezzlement in Lompoc.” I replied, “Yes, one of our organizations recently had a problem, but have you checked the statistics in your city?” The answer, of course, was no, they had not. Had they, they would have found the following:
From 2005 through 2007, a three-year period, Lompoc had 45 embezzlement cases in excess of $400. Over the same period, Santa Barbara had 96 cases. No one knows how many cases there were in Santa Maria, because they have yet to publish their 2007 crime statistics. However, over a two-year period (2005 to 2006), Santa Maria had a whopping 117 embezzlement cases. Just for the record, the unincorporated areas in the county had 84 such cases over the same three-year period.
It would have been nice if the two newspapers had done a little research before they published the story about Lompoc to let their readers know the whole story.
One of the differences between Lompoc and other major cities in Santa Barbara County, besides having the lowest overall crime rate, is that Lompoc is not afraid to publicly address its problems.
I would hope that the Record and the Times would do a more thorough job of reportage in the future.
Ed. note: The Santa Maria Sun generally only prints cartoons by Ross Mayfield. This week, however, I thought I’d make an exception. The Sun office received this cartoon from Lompoc Mayor Dick DeWees—along with a letter to the Santa Maria Times and Lompoc Record—in response to last week’s Mayfield cartoon concerning recent embezzlement cases in Lompoc.
Ryan Miller
executive editor
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 2, 2008.