ONE Lexington addresses Council questions on internal audit and general work

In last Tuesday’s Council Work Session, Council heard an update from Director Devine Carama on ONE Lexington, an initiative of the Mayor’s Office that aims to reduce gun violence in Lexington among youth aged 10-29. You can read more about the presentation materials here.

Councilmembers questioned Carama on the results of an audit of ONE Lexington’s financial activity. You can read the full audit here or our summary from last week here. Some of Carama’s answers to their questions are below.

Questions regarding split transactions for hoodies which exceeded the city’s daily credit card purchase limit in 2022.

• LFUCG policy limits total credit card purchases from one specific vendor or company to $2,500 per day.

• Carama responded that the program purchased hoodies at approximately $40 for 200 youth which totaled roughly $8,000.

• Carama said that he thought the policy stated individual purchases must be less than $2,500 and did not understand that it limited total purchases in a day to $2,500.

• ONE Lexington stopped splitting transactions after learning about their violations of the policy.

Questions regarding ONE Lexington Gun Violence Reduction Grants being awarded to organizations that do not have 501(c)3 status with the IRS.

• This was flagged in the audit because of an inconsistency in language with the city’s contract with Community Action Council, who managed the grants process. The inconsistency related to who was eligible to apply for the grants.

• Carama said that when the grants were announced, ONE Lexington advertised the grant applications as being open to smaller community organizations without 501(c)3 status, so long as they had a fiscal agent.

  • Having a larger 501(c)3 serve as a fiscal agent for a small community organization is very common.

  • Fiscal agents typically take a small fee to oversee use of the funds and grant use of their 501(c)3 status.

• However, the grant agreements that were part of this process did not include language permitting fiscal agencies.

• Carama says the agreement between ONE Lexington and Community Action Council has been amended to allow non-501(c)3 applicants to receive grants. In his presentation, he referred to discrepancy as a clerical error.

ONE Lexington’s and Carama’s use of a city credit card.

• The audit found an instance of Carama using ONE Lexington’s city credit card for personal purchases.

• Carama claims he mistakenly used the card, self-reported the incident, and reimbursed the City.

• Carama said that ONE Lexington has since undergone training on how to use city credit cards and has had no issues with misusing them in the last two years.

Lack of documentation for purchases.

• The audit found that there were 44 purchases that did not have documentation showing how they were related to the work of ONE Lexington.

• ONE Lexington was able to provide appropriate information for 36 of those purchases.

• Carama said that the team is now thorough in making sure there is a paper trail for every expenditure and that the audit has helped them to improve their documentation process.

Other questions from Councilmembers revolved around ONE Lexington’s operations and programs. Some key points were:

ONE Lexington’s violence intervention model

• Community Violence Intervention (CVI) models that tackle gun violence are commonly used in bigger cities. Carama said that they have adapted the model to suit Lexington’s needs.

  • While CVI was intended to target specific blocks and neighborhoods in larger cities, Lexington is unique in that the people most vulnerable to gun violence are spread out over the city.

  • ONE Lexington adapts to this by collaborating with Fayette County Public Schools to identify students who may be at-risk of being involved in youth gun violence.

• Carama also said that CVI in bigger cities was intended to address gang violence. Gangs in Lexington are much less organized and active in Lexington as compared to large US cities.

Measuring ONE Lexington’s success

• Council wanted to know how ONE Lexington collected data and measured its success. Carama explained that gun violence and the issues that surround it are a community problem, making it challenging to gather data in a centralized way.

  • For example, data would need to be collected across the public school system, the court system, and other organizations.

• However, ONE Lexington does gather information about student behavior and grades before and after participation in ONE Lexington’s mentoring programs.

  • Currently, ONE Lexington is working with the University of Kentucky to synthesize the data across their operations.