Isle of Wight County’s new audit committee is a worthy creation, but supervisors undermined its credibility before it ever got started with the appointment of former Supervisor Dick Grice.

Grice has proved himself to be little more than a vindictive attention-seeker during his last term on the board and its immediate aftermath. The county’s School Board should think long and hard before agreeing to cooperate with any committee that counts Grice as a member.

The shame of it is that the committee is otherwise respectable and competent: Supervisors William McCarty and Renee Rountree as co-chairs, citizen experts Dale Baugh and Mike Stanton, County Administrator Randy Keaton, Isle of Wight Chief Financial Officer Stephanie Wells and IWCS CFO Liesl DeVary.

The committee will review financial statements and make recommendations on corrective actions. Its creation was motivated by a January audit by accounting firm Robertson Farmer Cox that found discrepancies in the county school system’s books. 

The audit showed that IWCS overspent its budgeted expenses for the 2022-23 fiscal year by over $700,000, which is more than the $603,163 Superintendent Theo Cramer had acknowledged to the School Board last year.

The county’s audits for the past two fiscal years each chided IWCS for turnover in its finance department, though only the 2022-23 audit found errors deemed a “material weakness,” the most serious classification of bookkeeping error.

Along the way, Grice became known for his cheap shots against Cramer and School Board leadership, who, to their credit after some early missteps that we noted in this space, have owned the school division’s financial problems and worked diligently to correct them.

Cheap shots are a Grice specialty, his having also publicly belittled the sincere people of Windsor and central Isle of Wight who opposed the deeply flawed Tidewater Logistics Center that a developer and county staff attempted to pluck next to a residential neighborhood.

Anybody on the audit committee who has an opinion contrary to Grice’s should watch their back.

He tried to make employment trouble for Smithfield citizen Renee Bevan, who has sincere concerns about the uncontrolled growth and development that Grice and his buddies in the ruling class have foisted on a community that doesn’t want it. Active-duty Navy man Lewis Edmonds said Grice threatened to do the same to him, but Edmonds was less intimidated and urged Grice to try.

Grice’s credibility in this community is irreparable. It’s a shame that supervisors are letting him detract from the important work of the new audit committee.