Mills lost sight of who she worked for

In his defense of Michelle M. Mills last week, Columbus attorney Larry James posed a few rhetorical questions designed to cast her questionable spending of a nonprofit agency’s money into an ethically ambiguous limbo.

Mills has agreed to repay up to $44,000 worth of expenses to St. Stephen’s Community House, the venerable agency that has helped the city’s poor since 1919 and that Mills ran for 10 years as its president and CEO.

James suggested that if Mills had erred in her spending of agency money, related mostly to travel, her mistakes were a matter of degree. In a world of shifting gray haze, even the mostupstanding citizen could lose her way.

“Should it be first class, business class, or do you fly coach?” he asked. “Do you stay at Motel 6 or do you stay at the Ritz?”

He added, “There were situations that were upgraded.”

That isn’t the right answer, and he knows it. So does his client. And so would any of the thousands of the city’s poor who for generations have sought a helping hand at St. Stephen’s.

The correct answers to James’ questions, given the

options provided, are:

1. You fly coach.

2. You stay at Motel 6, although few people would begrudge you a Best Western.

These questions are even easier to answer when your sole purpose is to help central Ohio’s poorest citizens.

Mills’ background would suggest that she has long known the right answers. The daughter of a nurse and a union leader with the transit authority in Cleveland, Mills earned her undergraduate degree in social work at Cleveland State University. She added a master’s degree in social administration from Case Western Reserve University.

She joined St. Stephen’s in 2006 and the Columbus City Council in 2011. During her first two months on council, she abstained 26 times in 336 votes to avoid potential conflicts of interest, triple the rate of her colleagues.

“I just think it’s better to err on the side of caution,” she said at the time.

Four years later, she threw caution to the wind.

She resigned from council in the face of ethics allegations and questions about a trip she and other elected officials took to the 2014 Big Ten championship football game with lobbyist John Raphael, who currently is finishing his incarceration in a halfway house. Mills pleaded guilty to a first-degree misdemeanor ethics violation in February for not properly disclosing the value of the trip.

A few months later, she was placed on leave at St. Stephen’s. She resigned in June amid a review of creditcard transactions that lacked documentation or couldn’t be verified as legitimate agency expenses.

Board member James Ervin Jr. told Dispatch Reporter Rita Price on Thursday that nothing criminal was uncovered. James said Mills did not hide any of the expenses because she felt she had the authority to incur them.

“We get seduced sometimes in certain surroundings,” James said.

We do get seduced sometimes in certain surroundings. And, perhaps, as her professional and political stars rose, Mills grew bewitched while hobnobbing with central Ohio’s movers and shakers. She wouldn’t be the first head of a nonprofit to start acting like the head of a Fortune 500 company.

But Mills couldn’t have forgotten that the “certain surroundings” that mattered were the streets and homes of Linden, where every cent of the $44,000 she says she’ll repay is vital to further

the mission begun by St. Stephen’s nearly 100 years ago.

Mills made that mission her own long before she joined council or St. Stephen’s. It is a mission summed up by a quote from John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, which can be found in the St. Stephen’s Community House annual report released in 2014:

“Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind?

“How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?”