Commission calls on Pinkston to explain payroll
Hamilton County commissioners on Wednesday again called for District Attorney Neal Pinkston to appear before the board and explain the payment of his relatives employed in the DA’s office.
Pinkston, who was first elected DA in 2014, married an employee, Melydia Clewell, in 2019, although the union in a neighboring county was not widely known until the Times Free Press reported it in May. He later appointed her brother, Kerry Clewell, as an investigator for the office.
Commissioner Tim Boyd asked about potential relatives on the DA’s staff during a budget hearing in May and was told there were none. He said at a meeting on Wednesday that Pinkston has been withholding information from the commission about who pays the Clewells.
“There seems to be some not fully disclosed information as it pertains to the DA’s office in our current approved budget,” Boyd said during announcements at the end of Wednesday’s regular commission meeting. “Looking back two years on our budget, it’s been a pattern.”
Earlier this month, the Times
Free Press reported that Pinkston planned to move the Clewells — both of whom are legally state employees — to the county payroll to settle nepotism concerns raised by a state senator.
Then, Boyd and Commission Chair Chip Baker decided to ask Pinkston to appear before the commission and explain the plan. Pinkston said he was unavailable during both of the two proposed dates.
Since then, state records obtained by the newspaper have shown that Kerry Clewell had already been receiving $14,000 of his $48,000 salary from the county through a county supplement.
Boyd says the DA was “disingenuous” by not sharing that information.
“Netiher one of his relatives are named as employees being supplemented by county funds,” Boyd said Wednesday, noting a $31,000 line item in the FY2022 budget under the DA’s office, which reads “Z-Supplemental pay,” and represented monies spent on salaries through a reimbursement to the state at the DA’s discretion. It does not name which employees receive the money.
“Our funds are, in fact, supplementing pay to his relatives without clear and full disclosure to this body,” Boyd said.
Boyd then called for the commission to require Pinkston to come before the board and explain the situation and to consider amending the budget to prevent the county from paying the relatives.
“We have the option to amend the budget when the request comes through to remove any of those people we want to, put a cap on how much we’re going to supplement his department, based on information that we did or didn’t receive at the time of the initial budget,” Boyd said.
Baker said he supported the request for Pinkston to come in for a “question and answer” with the commission.
“Obviously, I’ve read what’s going on and the reason why I’ve asked his attendance last week, as well as this week, was just to clarify. Just to be open and honest with us,” Baker said. “It’s not anything more than just a question and answer session, and I was told that he was not available. So I look forward to clarifying everything.”
No other commissioners joined the request for Pinkston to appear.
Commissioner David Sharpe asked a series of unanswered questions about the line item and ultimately concluded, “I guess the answer is we don’t really know.”
“It’s probably best stated that we don’t really know, so we’d like to know,” Baker said. “It’s nothing more than a question and answer session, and it’ll clarify everything for us as well as others.”
Neither Pinkston nor Communications Director Bruce Garner responded to a request for comment on Wednesday.
In a previous statement, Pinkston said that his employment of the relatives was both ethical and legal.
Pinkston — who brought an extortion charge against Boyd for allegedly threatening a political opponent with damaging information if he didn’t drop out of the race that was later dropped last year — said in that statement that he believes the inquiry is a result of his past with Boyd.