Holy Guacamole: Something’s Rotten with the California Avocado Board

California has been hawking avocados for decades as this commercial from the the 1980s featuring sultry alligator pear advocate Angie Dickinson shows. The ad was created and paid for by the California Avocado Commission, an Irvine-based, quasi-governmental board overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and bankrolled by mandatory fees–2.6% of sales–collected from the state’s 6,000 avocado growers. The fees fund much of the commission’s $11.8-million annual budget.

The commission is charged with raising and maintaining the profile the iconic California fruit which faces competition with the lifting of  the ban on Peruvian imports of the Hass variety. The Hass, with its thick sturdy skin and long shelf life accounts for 95% of the state’s total commercial crop.  Much to the dismay of California growers, in 2004 President Bush lifted the 83-year long ban on Mexican avocados which began entering the US three years later.

But for several years, some members of the commission seem to have been busier pillaging the commission’s funds and than singing the praises of this strange fruit. According to the Los Angeles Times:

During the three-year audit period, the commission’s 18 employees used commission credit cards to run up more than $1.5 million in charges for "a significant amount of discretionary expenses that appeared questionable at best and even personal at times"

Along with $17,000 spent on gifts, meals and flowers to celebrate employees’ birthdays, employment anniversaries and other special occasions–plus massages, nail service, facials and body treatments for commission members and their families (shades of AIG!) during meetings at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel and at luxury spas in La Jolla and Del Mar in San Diego County –there’s this rather questionable expense:

An additional $39,000 purchased clothes at Nordstrom, Talbots, Ann Taylor and other stores that the commission dubbed "uniforms" after spending $8,700 to embroider the commission’s name and logo onto them.

Mark Affleck, the former president of the commission, spent  $17,000 of commission funds on permanent improvements listed on the commission books as "home office expenses."  The board currently is negotiating with Affleck to repay the commission money, commission board chairman Rick Shade told the LA Times.

Affleck resigned resigned from his $300,000-plus-a year as commission president last May after 20 years so he could "devote more time to his church."  You can read his essay here, on Saddleback Church’s site, where he has been a member since 1991.

Mike Reardon, who has 140 avocado trees in Fallbrook, a town in northern San Diego County told the Times:

It’s incredibly blatant. They’re supposed to be working for us and doing it with integrity and reasonable fees and costs.

Chairman Shade admits:

There’s going to be entertainment going on when anybody does marketing or sales. But massages and body treatments might be taking things too far.