The lawsuit, filed June 15 in Anchorage Superior Court, charges that 41-year-old Lori Ann Johnson removed the money over the past two years with no explanation of where it went and accuses her of theft and embezzlement.
"We believe it's in her personal account," said David Totemoff, Johnson's replacement. "The community could not have spent that much money, as what she did. No way."
Johnson's lawyer, Lance Wells, says that's not true. All the money is accounted for, Wells wrote in a reply this week that denies the accusations and demands a jury trial.
"All funds expended were authorized, legitimate and spent on behalf of the village of Tatitlek," Wells wrote. "Copies of all canceled checks from each bank account will reflect each and every one of these expenditures and their amounts."
Until recently, Johnson was also president of the Chugach school board. With about 240 students, the Anchorage-based district serves schools in Tatitlek, Whittier and Chenega Bay .
The school board voted last week to declare Johnson's seat vacant -- effectively removing her from the board, said district superintendent Bob Crumley. "There was a lot of community input and concern about whether or not (she) was acting as a positive role model for the students," he said.
The vote came after the district received paperwork showing Johnson pleaded no contest to a recent drug charge, he said.
Johnson couldn't be reached for comment last week or on Monday, and didn't return messages left at numbers listed for her in court records.
The village held a special election in May 2008, voting to replace Johnson as IRA council president, the lawsuit says. But she didn't recognize the election, in which Totemoff said "twenty-some" people voted, as valid.
She "refused to give us the keys to the office" and still had access to village bank accounts, Totemoff said. He didn't take over until nearly a year later, according to the lawsuit, shortly after troopers arrested Johnson at Merrill Field in March for illegal possession of prescription painkillers.
Johnson pleaded no contest to a felony drug charge and received a suspended imposition of sentence. She is currently on probation.
Tatitlek is an Alutiiq village of 100 people about 30 miles northwest of Cordova. The village president is the equivalent of the mayor in larger cities, Totemoff said. You manage the budget, he said. Hire and fire people.
Johnson won the job in October of 2007, beating Totemoff. The lawsuit claims that over the next two years, village bank accounts dwindled.
The suit claims:
• By March, all but about $600 disappeared from an account that had $281,400 in December.
• An account that had $274,300 in early 2008 shrank to less than $12,000 by April.
• A third account contained $28,000 in December but fell to zero by spring.
Johnson's reply to the lawsuit denies that she took control of the bank accounts without authorization from the village.
The largest account pays for general government services in Tatitlek, Totemoff said. Another account held leftover grant money from agencies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs; one paid for things like running the village water plant or buying fuel, he said.
On March 2, acting on a tip, troopers searched Johnson, who was still president, just before she was to leave Merrill Field on a plane to Tatitlek.
A trooper affidavit says someone accused her of bringing drugs to the villages last summer, but investigators didn't find anything that time. At the airport in March, Johnson immediately agreed to a search, which she called the "same old, same old," according to troopers.
This was all just "political stuff" she said -- she didn't have any drugs and was tired of being harassed, wrote trooper investigator Charles Cross.
But in the pocket of her sweatshirt Cross found capsules and tablets that turned out to be the painkillers Oxycodone and Hydrocodone. Johnson said the medication belonged to a friend. Troopers charged her with two counts of drug possession.
She pleaded no contest to a lesser charge in June. The judge said the felony can be wiped from her record if she complies with probation rules for 30 months, according to her lawyer in that case.
Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334.
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