Former Hocking prez and wife hit with misdemeanors... finally

After an investigation of Hocking College officials that has dragged on for around four years, the state of Ohio has now filed minor criminal charges against former college President John Light and his wife, a former college administrator – a total of five first-degree misdemeanors.

A prosecutor with the Ohio Ethics Commission said Thursday that the agency expects Light and his wife Roxanne DuVivier to take a plea bargain when the case comes to Athens County Municipal Court July 15. The deal will probably involve DuVivier's paying combined restitution of around $19,000 to Hocking and the OEC, and no jail time for either defendant, according to Julie M. Korte, chief investigating attorney for the OEC.

"It's a resolution," Korte said. "I can't really say one way or the other if we're satisfied with it."

The charges were filed through the Nelsonville city prosecutor's office.

Korte confirmed that the plea bargain, if it happens as expected, will finally put an end, as far as the state is concerned, to the years of investigation of the last several years of Light's tenure as president of Hocking College.

Korte was one of two special prosecutors who looked into spending irregularities at Hocking under Light's administration, as part of a joint investigation by the OEC and the Ohio Attorney General's office.

The charges against Light and DuVivier, who was a top Hocking official during her husband's term as president, allege that DuVivier improperly paid herself for working on a state-funded grant project while she was taking a salary as a college administrator, and that Light drastically under-reported the amount of his travel expenses the college paid for from 2002-2007.

The single charge against Light is for allegedly filing a false financial disclosure statement. The criminal complaint states that in state financial disclosure statements, Light consistently understated the amount that the college paid for his travel expenses for six years, by a total of more than $46,000.

Korte noted that the state isn't alleging that the travel expenses were illegitimate, only that Light should have reported them.

The charges against DuVivier, while apparently more serious, are also all first-degree misdemeanors. She is charged with one count of having an unlawful interest in a public contract, and three counts of conflict-of-interest as a public official.

The complaint says that while DuVivier was senior vice president of student affairs at Hocking, the college won a state technology grant of nearly $300,000 to develop student-advising software. DuVivier allegedly authorized payment from the grant funds of $9,224 in salary to herself, and to two other Hocking administrators, despite the fact that they were full-time salaried employees on the Hocking payroll, and their work in the grant project was part of their regular duties.

These payments have already been cited by the Ohio Auditor of State in a special audit issued in November 2009.

Also in connection with this grant-funded project, the complaint alleges, DuVivier earned more than $40,000 between 1999 and 2007 for consulting work with a private firm, Noel Levitz. In 2002, it says, she authorized a contract with the firm for more than $25,000, and also used her college staff, resources and email to carry out her business dealings with the firm.

In addition, the complaint says, between 2004 and 2007 DuVivier was paid $14,000 by a company called Athens Analytica, for work she did on the software that was developed with the grant. In 2003, the complaint alleges, Hocking contracted with the company to turn the software, originally developed at taxpayer expense, into a commercial product.

The Athens NEWS interviewed Light and DuVivier in 2007 about this project and its legitimacy. At that time, they said that to the best of their knowledge, the college was not violating any terms of the state grant by selling the commercial product, and no college officials were seeing any direct personal financial gain from its sales.

Acknowledging that she had been questioned by state investigators about the grant program, Duvivier told The NEWS, "What they asked me was (regarding the software program) we developed as part of the Hocking College grant, did I make any money from that?... And the answer is, no."