The state ethics commission took a first-ever step Tuesday to consider whether to put back under wraps a complaint over alleged overpayments it accepted and made public last October.

That reclassification, if it happens, could make the complaint and all filings that followed confidential and raise questions about whether the commission’s minutes and records of the hearing would also be deemed outside of the public’s purview.

The ethics commission had accepted the complaint against Liane Jollon, the former San Juan Basin Public Health agency executive director, last October. The complaint alleged she received more than $215,000 in additional pay for which few records existed.

In response, Jollon maintained she documented hours exceeding the typical 40-hour work week and that the health board approved the extra pay.  

In a public hearing in February, the commission labeled the complaint as “non-frivolous” and related documents were then posted to the public website, marking a crucial step in the commission’s process.

Then in March, the commission ruled that Jollon was not a government employee as defined by the state constitution, a decision that has significant implications, as it affects anyone employed in a multi-county agency, such as the Regional Transportation District and the Denver Regional Council of Governments.

On Tuesday, the commission met in a “closed session” — the commission’s version of executive session — to decide whether to take the first-ever step of changing its original determination of the case to “frivolous.”

After the closed session, the commission said it would issue an order but did not specify how it ruled.

According to the complaint filed by Archuleta County Attorney Todd Weaver last August, Jollon was paid $215,745 in “emergency compensation” for which she approved her own time sheets and never informed the county commissioners in charge of the agency about that pay.

Jollon is now the executive director of Northern Larimer County Health District, a public health agency.

The complaint said Jollon was paid a salary and was not eligible for overtime or severance pay.

Jollon announced her resignation effective June 1. At the time, she was being paid $160,000 per year.

The agency was dissolved shortly after she resigned, effective at the end of 2023. The decision to dissolve was due to “philosophical differences” about managing the pandemic, including whether to wear masks.

Jollon asked the receiver in charge of the dissolution for sick pay, which totaled 450 hours or about $40,000, despite the clause in her contract that she would not be paid severance “under any circumstances,” according to the complaint. 

In investigating Jollon’s claim, the receiver found a separate payroll category, entitled “EC,” which, according to the health agency’s human resources department, was for “emergency compensation.”

The receiver looked at the pay stubs and realized Jollon had been paid $215,745 in addition to her regular compensation. She informed the county attorneys in Archuleta and La Plata counties, the complaint said. 

Those attorneys met with the county commissioners, who served on the public health agency’s board. They said they were unaware of this emergency compensation payment and “the magnitude of such pay.”

The receiver then launched a second investigation and said the pay was tied to the pandemic, and that, in March 2020, Jollon began receiving additional compensation. The complaint said the board did not know who received that pay or how much.

“While many of the program-level exempt staff maintained detailed descriptions of their work performed to support their EC Pay, Ms. Jollon’s documentation ‘lacked detailed descriptions and included non-specific and cryptic abbreviations…'” the complaint said.

Jollon approved her own time in the time-keeping system and solely approved the amount of the EC pay she received, the complaint said.

She logged as much as 15 hours per day for seven days a week from March 2020 to December 2020, and her EC pay was “disproportionately higher” than what was paid to other exempt employees, “with little documentation to support what she was specifically doing to support the time entered,” the complaint said. And while supervisors were required to approve EC pay for other exempt employees, the board did not review or approve the EC pay to Jollon, the complaint said.

The complaint said Jollon violated her contract and the public trust by paying herself an extra $215,745 from March 2020 through May 2023, well after the governor ended the public health emergency in Colorado.

The complaint noted Jollon provided little to no documentation to support or justify the hours she submitted for that pay: “All of those actions also allowed her to realize personal financial gain through her public office other than compensation provided by law, specifically, her employment contract.”

The complaint claimed Jollon was a government employee as defined by the state constitution, which “makes no differentiation between a county or district public health director.”

It is county governments that form those public health agencies, the complaint pointed out, adding that the state Supreme Court decided in a 1983 case, Johnson v. Jefferson County Bd. of Health, that district boards of health are a political subdivision of the state.

In her response, Jollon claimed she was designated as the “Incident Commander” over the agency’s pandemic response team. She worked “far more than 40 hours every week and submitted documentation of those hours.”

The response also claimed the board was fully aware of the EC pay and approved it for Jollon and other agency employees.

“Certain Board directors and its general counsel submitted statements to the Receiver in July 2023 acknowledging the ‘extraordinary’ efforts Ms. Jollon made, that they were aware of those efforts, that they received briefings during the pandemic of the extra costs associated with EC, and that they approved those extra costs. They also reported that they specifically intended for EC to apply to Ms. Jollon and that there was no requirement they enforced for Ms. Jollon to have her time signed off on by another individual,” her response added.

The response claimed Weaver deliberately omitted those facts from the complaint and implied it was a politically motivated.

“A (medically uninformed) policy disagreement with a public health director is an improper basis for filing an ethics complaint such as this,” her response said.

Last August, the day before the complaint was filed, the San Juan board voted to change the EC policy to require the executive director’s hours to be approved by a third party, but it chose not to take any further action against Jollon.

In that same response, Jollon’s attorney asked that the complaint be dismissed and ruled as frivolous since the commission had never determined whether employees of a multi-county agency fall under commission jurisdiction.

“In working for the multi-county SJBPH, she did not work for a ‘local government’ because she did not work for a ‘county or municipality,'” the response said.

The commission voted on March 1 to dismiss the complaint, deciding that Jollon was employee of SJBPH, not a county, and therefore was not a “government employee” within the meaning of the law and based on a 2019 Colorado Supreme Court ruling.

To Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, any move to seal what had already been made public is too late.   

Roberts also found it odd that the commission could decide to make a complaint confidential almost a year after it was filed, given that the commission accepted it as a valid complaint, held a hearing on it and posted relevant documents on its website.

“You can’t un-ring the bell,” Roberts told Colorado Politics.

Anything that’s already out in the public — because the commission decided to do so — is fair game and public information, Roberts said.

“You can’t claw that back from being in the public domain, once it’s in the public domain,” he said. 

There are at least a half-dozen multi-county agencies in Colorado. That includes four public health agencies, with the largest serving six counties in northeastern Colorado; the Regional Transportation District; and, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, which is designated in state law as a regional planning commission.