Saturday, October 7, 2000 Visitor's bureau won't rule out staff changes   By John W. Cox, Staff writer LONG BEACH Executive board members of the city's convention and visitors bureau said Friday they have not ruled out making personnel changes in response to irregularities in the bureau's hotel booking records. At a 50-minute press conference, board members said they had not determined whether the number of room sales reported by the bureau was deliberately inflated, as a former employee has suggested. "There is that appearance of impropriety," said board Vice Chairman Joseph Prevratil, chief executive of the company that operates the Queen Mary. But board Chairman Chris Pook was unequivocal: "There's not malfeasance here," he said. While board members say they hope to eventually determine the cause of the errors, Pook said the board won't dwell on the misreported hotel bookings. "How productive is it to go back and dredge and dredge and dredge?" he asked. "We need to move forward." An outside audit concluded last month that employees of the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau received undue credit for 50,000 hotel room bookings during a 21-month period in fiscal years 1998-1999 and 1999-2000. As a result of these errors, auditors said, bureau employees were overpaid bonuses totaling $19,500. The board has asked CEO Linda Howell DiMario and sales Vice President Tom Dorsett to return their shares of the bonuses, which board member and chief financial officer Jim Gray said constitute a "significant portion" of the overpayments. Gray said bureau salespeople will not be asked to return unearned bonuses because the time and cost involved in collecting the money would exceed the repayments. Gray said most of the inaccurate hotel booking records were entered into bureau computers over a three-day period ending Oct. 21, 1999, the day bureau staff reported the annual sales figures to the board. He said there was no way to know whether the figures were intentionally falsified. "There is absolutely no way of determining who did it," Gray said. He added that an outside consultant who recently interviewed more than a dozen former and current employees had turned up conflicting reports on whether the errors were intentional. Sharon Thomsen, a former sales assistant at the bureau, has said she changed records dating back several months in order to credit sales people for work they had not done. She said she made the changes at Dorsett's direction and that Howell DiMario supported Dorsett's instruction. Dorsett has denied the allegation. Howell DiMario said last month she would not "contribute to this speculation" and declined further comment. Neither attended Friday's press conference, and an attempt to reach Howell DiMario late Friday was unsuccessful. On Monday, the bureau's governing board instructed Pook, Prevratil and Gray to host the press conference to announce the formation of two committees. One, led by Gray, is to come up with new financial checks and balances over the bureau. Gray said its recommendations would be ready within 30 to 45 days. The other committee, led by Prevratil, was assigned to recommend personnel policies for improving the bureau's work climate. Its findings will be announced within 60 days, Prevratil said. At the press conference, Pook emphasized that the $3.5 million the bureau received from the city last year, under a marketing contract, came from hotel room taxes and not from city residents. The contract accounted for 77 percent of the bureau's budget in fiscal year 1999-2000. Pook said the board is doing its best to find the source of the bookkeeping errors and fix it. "We're not going to sweep stuff under the carpet," he said. Prevratil agreed, saying, "If we find out there was intentional wrongdoing . . . it is our responsibility to do something about it."