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Unchecked staffer let funds flow onShareThisPrint E-mail .By Rich McKay
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A modest plan to add a spa to North Georgia’s state-owned Brasstown Valley Resort became something else entirely when a career Department of Natural Resources employee took over.
.“This is going to be the best spa in North Georgia,” she wrote in an e-mail at the time.
And it may be. At a cost that ballooned 434 percent to $2.6 million, Equani spa has vaulted ceilings, waterfalls, bamboo and teak floors, doors of carved Nicaraguan mahogany and a stacked stone fireplace of imported red sandstone.
But not all of the money was spent on luxurious appointments.
To oversee the project, the state employee dined at the resort with a consultant 59 times over about 15 months, enjoying lobster and glasses of a 150-year-old liqueur the spa bought just for them, at a total cost to the state of $9,892.
The state worker and the consultant are under investigation, according to Chris Clark, commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources.
“I believe that there are potentially criminal charges for them at the end of this,” Clark said.
In a May 28 letter to Clark, the Georgia Attorney General wrote that his office is conducting civil and criminal reviews related to the North Georgia Mountains Authority, which oversees Brasstown Valley, and its former acting executive director.
The Attorney General’s Office would not elaborate. But Clark, who requested the investigation, identified the former acting director as Michele D. Bonner, who was simultaneously DNR’s chief financial officer. There is no reference to the consultant in the attorney general’s letter, but Clark says he is part of the investigation.
Bonner, 51, and consultant Robert “Dean” Langdon are named in a blistering state auditor’s special report. The report says Bonner drew on three separate state bank accounts to expand a modest renovation project at the golf resort, turning it into what she called “Michele’s Spa.”
The original director of the project was forced out of his job, although there’s dispute about the cause, and by the time Bonner was fired in 2009, Brasstown Valley, one of the state’s premier resorts, was in financial peril.
The audit report says Bonner depleted Brasstown’s reserves to a “critically low balance” of $70,658, from about $500,000.
During a crucial eight months of spending on the spa, the North Georgia Mountains Authority’s nine-member board apparently exercised no oversight, the audit says.
The 500-acre resort, in Young Harris near the North Carolina line, has a lodge, eight cabins, riding stables, a golf course, a fitness center, a helicopter landing pad and a pool. It opened in 1995 in then-Gov. Zell Miller’s hometown and averages $11 million a year in revenue.
Equani Spa, which opened in 2008, was originally planned as a $501,825 renovation of a one-story building the resort staff used for storage.
As the project expanded, so did the involvement of Langdon, owner of DaVinci Design Associates Inc, to almost $1 million in payments. The state audit says investigators could document contracts for only $50,000 of the work.
In the process, Bonner ran up $14,702 in dinner and bar tabs over 118 visits to Brasstown resort, sharing half of the meals with Langdon, the audit found.
The audit says Bonner and Langdon appeared to have an inappropriate relationship. A whistle-blower lawsuit filed in Fulton Superior Court by the original director of the project claims the two were romantically involved. E-mails recovered from Bonner’s six state-owned computers reveal playful banter between the two, including remarks about spending time together outside of work.
Clark ordered Bonner fired in March 2009 just as he took over the department.
“We needed her to part ways with the state,” Clark said.
“There were innumerable financial irregularities and she is the person who was responsible for watching over that money.”
Discharge papers in her personnel file say no reason needs to be stated to fire her because of her “at-will” classification. The papers also note she isn’t a candidate to be rehired by the state, ever.
No one answered the door at Bonner’s Atlanta home, and her telephone isn’t accepting messages. Her attorney, Matthew LaVallee, said neither he nor his client would comment.
Langdon didn’t return multiple phone calls or e-mail messages. His company’s Web site touts the work he accomplished at Brasstown, but phone calls and e-mails to his company, which lists a Flowery Branch address on spa invoices, were not returned. The state’s Division of Corporations doesn’t list any active corporation under his company’s name.
Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Mountains Authority board at the time, didn’t return messages left at his office.
When allegations began to surface in late summer 2007, Bonner was at the height of her 26-year career with the state, making $133,000 annually. She rose through the ranks from the state’s Department of Revenue, starting in 1984 as a tax auditing specialist, to become the CFO of DNR, which has an annual budget of $275 million.
At the time, Bonner was also president of the Georgia Fiscal Management Council, a nonprofit group that promotes the best accounting practices to safeguard public money. No officials with the group would talk about Bonner.
The spa project began in 2007 with a career state manager at its helm. Bob Newsome was executive director of the North Georgia Mountains Authority, a sister agency to the DNR. The authority supervises Brasstown Valley and other parks and resorts.
With an eye on its budget, the Mountains Authority board had approved an “interim” $501,825 renovation to be expanded later.
Newsome hired Langdon’s company for a limited $10,000 consulting role at the recommendation of the resort’s management company. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsome said he became suspicious a few months into the job.
“He didn’t really seem to know what he was doing,” Newsome said, referring to Langdon. “And when I checked his references, no one seemed to have heard of him.”
By autumn, Newsome said, he told his staff neither Langdon nor his company should be given any more state work.
According to the auditor’s report, Newsome was forced to resign in October 2007.
Newsome declined to talk about the circumstances of his departure.
His personnel file shows a decade of praise for good work and merit raises. But three days before his departure, an allegation of sexual harassment was lodged against him by an unnamed employee. It was never resolved.
In a lawsuit Newsome filed in April against Bonner and DNR under the state’s whistle-blower law, he claims the charge was fabricated to force him to resign because he complained about Bonner’s spending.
After Newsome’s departure the DNR commissioner at the time, Noel Holcomb, recommended the Mountains Authority name Bonner acting executive director.
The audit report says, “We found no evidence that Ms. Bonner had any prior experience in commercial construction or resort management.”
“That was my decision,” Holcomb said in an interview with the AJC. “We thought we could save the state some money by not hiring [a director] right away. And she had an exemplary record.”
In an e-mail the state recovered from one of Bonner’s six state-issued computers, she wrote, a few days after she took over the spa project, “Since the spa project has now become ‘Michele’s Spa’ in every ones mind, that is where I am putting on ‘my money’ right now! This is going to be the best spa in North Georgia!”
While she supervised the project as Mountains Authority director, Bonner remained DNR’s chief financial officer, with additional responsibility regarding Mountains Authority’s finances. The audit report notes that combining the two roles created “the absence of internal controls in the day-to-day operations.”
“Stringent oversight” by the Mountains Authority board was needed to compensate for the lack of administrative controls, the audit says.
In the spring of 2008, Bonner reported to the Mountains Authority board that project costs had ballooned to between $1.3 million and $1.5 million. The board did not constrain her spending, the report notes.
The report says the executive director of the Mountains Authority sets the agenda for the board’s usual four meetings annually and “if there was no business to discuss, they would not meet.” During an eight-month period in 2008-09 when project costs doubled, again, to $2.6 million, the board did not meet, so there was little oversight of Bonner’s spending.
But, a whistle-blower complaint triggered an inquiry by the state Inspector General. That report, released in July 2009, was followed by a review by the Department of Audits and Accounts, completed last month. Both investigations found many irregularities in Bonner’s handling of state funds.
According to the reports, between January 2008 and March 2009:
â—� Bonner spent $1,954,483 from Brasstown Valley Resort’s capital reserve account, another $20,127 from Brasstown’s operating account and $664,796 from Mountains Authority revenues, which is the account that should have funded the original $501,000 project.
â—� Bonner ordered the resort to buy a 150-year-old bottle of Grand Marnier, and she and Langdon shared the liqueur over dinner. It cost $168.50. And, so far, the resort has had only three other orders for it, selling it at $37 a glass.
â—� Langdon’s company was paid $895,798 “related to spa construction,” work he apparently wasn’t under contract to perform, plus $50,000 worth of contracted work. His company appeared to be acting as purchasing agent for the spa, in a “circumvention of [Mountains Authority] controls.” The authority had already contracted with a management company to perform some of the services for which Langdon’s company was paid.
â—� In numerous instances, Langdon marked up the costs of items, including soap and shampoo, pottery for sale in the resort shop and hand-carved doors, often by 50 to 75 percent. The audit report identified mark-ups totaling $67,459 over “open market” prices.
And at the first Mountains Authority board meeting after Bonner was fired, chairman Tom Wheeler was told by staff that the agency’s fund balance would close the 2009 fiscal year with a $2.4 million deficit, according minutes of the meeting.
DNR Commissioner Clark said the financial mess may take years to sort out.
“We can’t let that ever happen again,” Clark said. “We will not ever have this all powerful CFO again.”
In the meantime, Georgia taxpayers can rent Brasstown’s Equani Spa’s 825-square-foot, $294,000 “private accommodation suite” with a roof deck, a vaulted ceiling, a wet bar, Wi-Fi Internet access and a kitchenette with granite counter tops. It has a “Jacuzzi tub for two opening to a 46-inch flat screen TV and fireplace, a spacious ‘Experience Shower’ providing a full-sensory experience with double-drench shower heads, steam, aroma therapy, LED lights and marine speakers with 12-head Swiss shower bars,” according to the resort’s Web site.
It typically rents for $350 a night.
According to the state report, the resort may have lost rental income for the suite because Bonner occupied it free of charge for 11 of the 24 nights it was occupied during its first six months in operation.
Unchecked staffer let funds flow onShareThisPrint E-mail .By Rich McKay
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A modest plan to add a spa to North Georgia’s state-owned Brasstown Valley Resort became something else entirely when a career Department of Natural Resources employee took over.
.“This is going to be the best spa in North Georgia,” she wrote in an e-mail at the time.
And it may be. At a cost that ballooned 434 percent to $2.6 million, Equani spa has vaulted ceilings, waterfalls, bamboo and teak floors, doors of carved Nicaraguan mahogany and a stacked stone fireplace of imported red sandstone.
But not all of the money was spent on luxurious appointments.
To oversee the project, the state employee dined at the resort with a consultant 59 times over about 15 months, enjoying lobster and glasses of a 150-year-old liqueur the spa bought just for them, at a total cost to the state of $9,892.
The state worker and the consultant are under investigation, according to Chris Clark, commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources.
“I believe that there are potentially criminal charges for them at the end of this,” Clark said.
In a May 28 letter to Clark, the Georgia Attorney General wrote that his office is conducting civil and criminal reviews related to the North Georgia Mountains Authority, which oversees Brasstown Valley, and its former acting executive director.
The Attorney General’s Office would not elaborate. But Clark, who requested the investigation, identified the former acting director as Michele D. Bonner, who was simultaneously DNR’s chief financial officer. There is no reference to the consultant in the attorney general’s letter, but Clark says he is part of the investigation.
Bonner, 51, and consultant Robert “Dean” Langdon are named in a blistering state auditor’s special report. The report says Bonner drew on three separate state bank accounts to expand a modest renovation project at the golf resort, turning it into what she called “Michele’s Spa.”
The original director of the project was forced out of his job, although there’s dispute about the cause, and by the time Bonner was fired in 2009, Brasstown Valley, one of the state’s premier resorts, was in financial peril.
The audit report says Bonner depleted Brasstown’s reserves to a “critically low balance” of $70,658, from about $500,000.
During a crucial eight months of spending on the spa, the North Georgia Mountains Authority’s nine-member board apparently exercised no oversight, the audit says.
The 500-acre resort, in Young Harris near the North Carolina line, has a lodge, eight cabins, riding stables, a golf course, a fitness center, a helicopter landing pad and a pool. It opened in 1995 in then-Gov. Zell Miller’s hometown and averages $11 million a year in revenue.
Equani Spa, which opened in 2008, was originally planned as a $501,825 renovation of a one-story building the resort staff used for storage.
As the project expanded, so did the involvement of Langdon, owner of DaVinci Design Associates Inc, to almost $1 million in payments. The state audit says investigators could document contracts for only $50,000 of the work.
In the process, Bonner ran up $14,702 in dinner and bar tabs over 118 visits to Brasstown resort, sharing half of the meals with Langdon, the audit found.
The audit says Bonner and Langdon appeared to have an inappropriate relationship. A whistle-blower lawsuit filed in Fulton Superior Court by the original director of the project claims the two were romantically involved. E-mails recovered from Bonner’s six state-owned computers reveal playful banter between the two, including remarks about spending time together outside of work.
Clark ordered Bonner fired in March 2009 just as he took over the department.
“We needed her to part ways with the state,” Clark said.
“There were innumerable financial irregularities and she is the person who was responsible for watching over that money.”
Discharge papers in her personnel file say no reason needs to be stated to fire her because of her “at-will” classification. The papers also note she isn’t a candidate to be rehired by the state, ever.
No one answered the door at Bonner’s Atlanta home, and her telephone isn’t accepting messages. Her attorney, Matthew LaVallee, said neither he nor his client would comment.
Langdon didn’t return multiple phone calls or e-mail messages. His company’s Web site touts the work he accomplished at Brasstown, but phone calls and e-mails to his company, which lists a Flowery Branch address on spa invoices, were not returned. The state’s Division of Corporations doesn’t list any active corporation under his company’s name.
Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Mountains Authority board at the time, didn’t return messages left at his office.
When allegations began to surface in late summer 2007, Bonner was at the height of her 26-year career with the state, making $133,000 annually. She rose through the ranks from the state’s Department of Revenue, starting in 1984 as a tax auditing specialist, to become the CFO of DNR, which has an annual budget of $275 million.
At the time, Bonner was also president of the Georgia Fiscal Management Council, a nonprofit group that promotes the best accounting practices to safeguard public money. No officials with the group would talk about Bonner.
The spa project began in 2007 with a career state manager at its helm. Bob Newsome was executive director of the North Georgia Mountains Authority, a sister agency to the DNR. The authority supervises Brasstown Valley and other parks and resorts.
With an eye on its budget, the Mountains Authority board had approved an “interim” $501,825 renovation to be expanded later.
Newsome hired Langdon’s company for a limited $10,000 consulting role at the recommendation of the resort’s management company. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsome said he became suspicious a few months into the job.
“He didn’t really seem to know what he was doing,” Newsome said, referring to Langdon. “And when I checked his references, no one seemed to have heard of him.”
By autumn, Newsome said, he told his staff neither Langdon nor his company should be given any more state work.
According to the auditor’s report, Newsome was forced to resign in October 2007.
Newsome declined to talk about the circumstances of his departure.
His personnel file shows a decade of praise for good work and merit raises. But three days before his departure, an allegation of sexual harassment was lodged against him by an unnamed employee. It was never resolved.
In a lawsuit Newsome filed in April against Bonner and DNR under the state’s whistle-blower law, he claims the charge was fabricated to force him to resign because he complained about Bonner’s spending.
After Newsome’s departure the DNR commissioner at the time, Noel Holcomb, recommended the Mountains Authority name Bonner acting executive director.
The audit report says, “We found no evidence that Ms. Bonner had any prior experience in commercial construction or resort management.”
“That was my decision,” Holcomb said in an interview with the AJC. “We thought we could save the state some money by not hiring [a director] right away. And she had an exemplary record.”
In an e-mail the state recovered from one of Bonner’s six state-issued computers, she wrote, a few days after she took over the spa project, “Since the spa project has now become ‘Michele’s Spa’ in every ones mind, that is where I am putting on ‘my money’ right now! This is going to be the best spa in North Georgia!”
While she supervised the project as Mountains Authority director, Bonner remained DNR’s chief financial officer, with additional responsibility regarding Mountains Authority’s finances. The audit report notes that combining the two roles created “the absence of internal controls in the day-to-day operations.”
“Stringent oversight” by the Mountains Authority board was needed to compensate for the lack of administrative controls, the audit says.
In the spring of 2008, Bonner reported to the Mountains Authority board that project costs had ballooned to between $1.3 million and $1.5 million. The board did not constrain her spending, the report notes.
The report says the executive director of the Mountains Authority sets the agenda for the board’s usual four meetings annually and “if there was no business to discuss, they would not meet.” During an eight-month period in 2008-09 when project costs doubled, again, to $2.6 million, the board did not meet, so there was little oversight of Bonner’s spending.
But, a whistle-blower complaint triggered an inquiry by the state Inspector General. That report, released in July 2009, was followed by a review by the Department of Audits and Accounts, completed last month. Both investigations found many irregularities in Bonner’s handling of state funds.
According to the reports, between January 2008 and March 2009:
â—� Bonner spent $1,954,483 from Brasstown Valley Resort’s capital reserve account, another $20,127 from Brasstown’s operating account and $664,796 from Mountains Authority revenues, which is the account that should have funded the original $501,000 project.
â—� Bonner ordered the resort to buy a 150-year-old bottle of Grand Marnier, and she and Langdon shared the liqueur over dinner. It cost $168.50. And, so far, the resort has had only three other orders for it, selling it at $37 a glass.
â—� Langdon’s company was paid $895,798 “related to spa construction,” work he apparently wasn’t under contract to perform, plus $50,000 worth of contracted work. His company appeared to be acting as purchasing agent for the spa, in a “circumvention of [Mountains Authority] controls.” The authority had already contracted with a management company to perform some of the services for which Langdon’s company was paid.
â—� In numerous instances, Langdon marked up the costs of items, including soap and shampoo, pottery for sale in the resort shop and hand-carved doors, often by 50 to 75 percent. The audit report identified mark-ups totaling $67,459 over “open market” prices.
And at the first Mountains Authority board meeting after Bonner was fired, chairman Tom Wheeler was told by staff that the agency’s fund balance would close the 2009 fiscal year with a $2.4 million deficit, according minutes of the meeting.
DNR Commissioner Clark said the financial mess may take years to sort out.
“We can’t let that ever happen again,” Clark said. “We will not ever have this all powerful CFO again.”
In the meantime, Georgia taxpayers can rent Brasstown’s Equani Spa’s 825-square-foot, $294,000 “private accommodation suite” with a roof deck, a vaulted ceiling, a wet bar, Wi-Fi Internet access and a kitchenette with granite counter tops. It has a “Jacuzzi tub for two opening to a 46-inch flat screen TV and fireplace, a spacious ‘Experience Shower’ providing a full-sensory experience with double-drench shower heads, steam, aroma therapy, LED lights and marine speakers with 12-head Swiss shower bars,” according to the resort’s Web site.
It typically rents for $350 a night.
According to the state report, the resort may have lost rental income for the suite because Bonner occupied it free of charge for 11 of the 24 nights it was occupied during its first six months in operation.
