BOURNE – Bourne police believe the non-profit Hoxie Center at Sagamore Beach for Art, Science, Education and Culture falsified invoices seeking reimbursement from Community Preservation Act funds.
The group is renovating the former Ella F. Hoxie School into a cultural arts center. Hoxie Center officials were hoping to open the center this summer which seems unlikely as work on the center has halted.
Chief Dennis Woodside said his department was asked to “look into some accounting matters” as they relate to the Community Preservation Act.
The center had been awarded over $213,000 in Community Preservation Act funds in 2014, along with over $226,000 last spring.
Woodside said the police department conducted an exhaustive investigation.
“We first started with verifying their veracity of invoices and that right away started to tell us that we had some false invoices being submitted,” he said. “Some of the invoices that we were looking at were completely fabricated. Some of them were from companies that had no affiliation with the project and these were being submitted to the town for reimbursement by one of the members of the Hoxie Group.”
Woodside said investigators found numerous attempts at submitting false invoices.
“We found one of the volunteers attempted to have one of the contractors inflate a written invoice by $30,000. Fortunately that contractor told them they wouldn’t do it,” Woodside said.
No criminal charges have been filed yet but Woodside said they would be capable of sending it to a magistrate hearing for a probable cause determination but says the investing right now is lacking.
The town of Bourne had stopped the payments from the second grant from the CPA funds as the checks were written but never left Town Hall.
Woodside said the focus of the investigation was on the second grant but that his department did find some minor discrepancies and false invoices with the funds from the first grant.
The town also hired an outside auditing group which Woodside said also found other areas of concern.
The attorney for the Hoxie Center, J. Ford O’Connor, said the invoices were written incorrectly.
“I think what happened, quite simply, was documents were put in for funding requests for amounts that were due and owed but were not the actual final invoice,” O’Connor said. “I think what everyone will find at the end of all this is that the funding requests correctly reflect the amount of money that was owed to vendors for work that was done.”
The Hoxie center had its own audit conducted and said all of the CPA funds had been accounted for.
“I think that the Hoxie center has been put in all the controls that anybody could request and we have said to the town if there are other controls that you want please just tell us what they are,” he said. “We want to work and get this thing going again.”
The center’s mission is to foster awareness, participation, appreciation and celebration of art, science and culture for all residents and visitors.
Renovating the facility was a grassroots effort to save and historically preserve the Ella F. Hoxie School building.
The town of Bourne sold the former school to organizers for $1 and the purchase and sales agreement was predicated on a list of contingencies including a historic restoration.
Vice President Scott Fitzmaurice previously said almost $750,000 has been raised in total towards the $2.7 million budget.
By BRIAN MERCHANT, CapeCod.com NewsCenter
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