More than just a missing firetruck in Mora County
Where’s the firetruck? That’s one of the big issues raised by an audit of the Mora County Volunteer Fire Department released recently by the State Auditor’s Office.
Investigators found $335,000 in unsubstantiated purchases and numerous violations committed by employees of the county, including potential embezzlement and fraud.
Among the problems is a missing county fire truck, valued at $81,000 and which investigators say disappeared years ago. State Auditor Brian Colón says it possibly was auctioned off at some point, but there’s no record of any sale.
He adds that the entire investigation — prompted by an initial probe by County Attorney Michael Aragon — was difficult because so few records existed.
But the audit reports additional information that is much more damning than mere missing records.
Many of the allegations concern the department’s former chief, Dennis Romero, and his daughter, Denise Duran, who served as the county’s payroll and payments clerk.
The audit says Duran used county money to purchase clothing for herself, spent $18,000 on boots that were never included in any inventory, inflated hours for family members who worked for the county and didn’t submit tax forms for family members receiving county money.
She also gave herself a firefighter’s salary — twice her normal pay — despite never working as one, the report says. Romero admitted allowing family members to claim 20 hours of work, despite working only one.
Many family members were employed and paid by the department, but there’s little evidence some of them actually worked, the report says.
In a small community such as Mora — the county’s population is about 4,000 — it’s inevitable there will be family connections in many public entity workplaces. But forget about nepotism in this case — the audit maintains people were getting paid from public coffers for not working at all.
The report also says thousands of dollars were spent on landscaping and new floors the county never received. There are allegations of kickbacks from propane purchases.
As Colón noted, the $335,000 in apparent misspent funds goes a long way in a place like Mora County, which reported just $2.4 million in general fund revenue in the 2018 fiscal year.
Thanks to the county attorney’s own investigation in 2019, several people already have been fired from their county jobs, including ex-chief Romero.
That’s a start. The State Police are investigating. If the evidence is as strong as the State Auditor’s Office makes it sound, criminal charges should follow.
This is the same community where a politically connected educator used faked credentials to obtain the $100,000 Mora school superintendent’s job a few years ago. When he was caught and charged, he got off with a slap on the wrist — probation and return of retirement benefits he received while serving in a job that was fraudulently obtained.
This time around, someone in the criminal justice system should take a stronger stand against misuse of taxpayer dollars in a county that can ill afford it.