Arizona School Facilities Board—Building Renewal Grant Fund—Board can better ensure timely project completion and payments to districts, Board member compliance with conflict-of-interest laws, and district compliance with State procurement requirements

The Board administers the Building Renewal Grant (BRG) Fund to help public school districts (districts) complete school facility renovation and repair projects (BRG projects). The Board has established processes for approving BRG projects and distributing BRG Fund monies and has improved some of these processes. Improvements include more timely distributing BRG Fund monies for some projects, closing several BRG projects and making available unspent monies for other BRG projects, and adopting several new policies to guide districts and vendors on BRG project scope-of-work development. However, we found that the Board lacks processes for monitoring BRG project progress to help ensure districts timely complete BRG projects and it should improve the use of its information technology (IT) systems to help ensure all payments to districts are timely. We also found that most Board members failed to fully disclose interests related to Board decisions. Finally, we found that Board staff and vendor actions and Board procurement policies could confuse districts and lead to compliance issues with State procurement requirements, and some districts we reviewed did not always comply with these requirements.