GONZALES, CALIF. — Melanie Horwath phoned the California Tomato Board with what she assumed was a simple request. She needed promotional materials that her family's tomato packing company could display at a Salinas Valley agricultural event called Taste of the Valley.
Do you have posters or recipes? she asked.
We don't have that.
What kind of promotion do you guys do?
We don't do that kind of promotion.
That's odd, Horwath thought. Her company paid thousands of dollars a month in mandatory dues to finance the board's research and marketing efforts: its legal purpose. She started digging into the board's business to find out how it was spending her money.
More than a decade later, the tomato commission has shut down after her findings prompted a state audit.
The commission misspent members' dues on lavish conferences in Arizona and Mexico, where its families traveled free, according to the audit. It bought perks for directors and employees -- thousand-dollar dinners, a $653 Hummer stretch limousine ride, $190 bottles of wine -- and made other questionable expenditures.
The audit also detailed how the commission abetted a group of Horwath's competitors intent on setting the prices and rules for California's $505-million tomato market.
"They ran it like it was . . . their own little fiefdom," said Brian C. Leighton, the attorney for Horwath's company, Gonzales Packing Co.
The attorney general's office is investigating. Meanwhile, audits of other marketing programs within the Department of Food and Agriculture have also revealed conflicts of interest, sloppy accounting, possible Internal Revenue Service violations and activities beyond the authority the state granted them.
These 54 obscure programs, which collect a combined $200 million a year from farmers and shippers of crops and livestock, can have great sway over the price, availability, variety and quality of produce, meat and nuts that Californians buy.
The first boards were created in 1937 to help farmers survive the Great Depression by controlling the supply and price of their crops. Alfalfa seeds, almonds, beef, cling peaches, dried plums, figs, garlic, sea urchins, sheep and wine grapes are some of the food industries with marketing boards or commissions that are established by lawmakers but financed and run by the industries.
