Pulaski town councilman charged with ethics and conflict of interest law violations

A member of the Pulaski Town Council was charged with three class 1 misdemeanors and one class 3 misdemeanor last week relating to alleged ethics and conflict of interest law violations in his role as a public official between January 2021 and April 2024.

The charges against Michael Reis, an attorney from Pulaski who was first elected to the council in 2020, stem from his role in facilitating the appropriation of public funds to benefit the renovation of the Calfee Community & Cultural Center, a local institution that came to be known as the Calfee Training School when it first was a school for Black children in 1894, and Wide Angle Strategies LLC, a consulting firm with a vested interest in the center.

Kati Asbury, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Tazewell County, has been tapped as a special prosecutor for this case. She confirmed in an email Wednesday that Reis, who is a registered agent for Calfee CCC and Wide Angle Strategies, is accused of violating several subsections of the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Act , or COIA, after failing to disclose his role and that of his wife, Jill Williams, who has served as the Calfee CCC’s acting co-executive director since 2020 and as the principal consultant to Wide Angle Strategies since 2013, according to a resume posted on Wide Angle’s website.

Asbury added that her office did not have any further statement on the case.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Reis denied any intentional wrongdoing. “I could see somebody say I may have made some sort of technical violation, but to spend the amount of time and money that the prosecution has spent on this is ludicrous,” he said.

“Prosecutors have discretion for a reason. Could I have made a mistake in filing? I don’t think I did anything wrong personally. COIA is a confusing statute, even for attorneys. It’s got definitions that don’t always make sense, they are very hypertechnical.”

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for Virginia State Police, said in an email that the official investigation into Reis began in October 2023 upon authorization by the attorney general’s office.

“The state police investigation focused on allegations of wrongdoing and conflict of interest by Reis in his capacity as a Town of Pulaski councilmember and his personal business connections with a private contractor and a local community center. The investigation remains ongoing at this time,” Geller said.

Reis said that he turned himself in at the magistrate’s office on Friday after state police contacted his attorney. He was served and released on his own recognizance.

Allegations of wrongdoing first emerged in a video that was uploaded to YouTube last summer showing an edited clip of a Pulaski Town Council meeting from Sept. 22, 2022. In it, Reis can be heard presenting a request on behalf of the Calfee CCC to consider applying for a federal grant. Reis said in an email Thursday that he was “simply raising that the request had been made” and that he specifically stated he was not making a motion — a part that he said had been cut from the video.

“We got a request from the Calfee Community and Cultural Center for money in order to match an EDA grant of up to a million dollars,” Reis said in the meeting. “The United States Economic Development Agency has a program where they will grant a million dollars, as long as there is a 20% match.”

Reis suggested the town make a $100,000 contribution, while the county would provide the other $100,000 for the match, “which would put them much, much closer to having enough funds to get a contract and start construction.”

The council approved the funding request in a subsequent meeting. While Reis abstained from voting on the motion after his wife gave a presentation, he did not publicly disclose his role as a registered agent for both Calfee CCC and Wide Angle Strategies. In the interview Wednesday, Reis said that his work in this instance was very minor and “more trouble than it’s worth.”

On Nov. 1, 2022, Pulaski County Administrator Jonathan Sweet informed Williams, Reis’ wife, that the county board of supervisors had approved $100,000 in funding to match the EDA grant. In an email to Williams obtained through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, Sweet said that the money could only be used “for its stated and intended purpose and applied exclusively to the renovation and construction of the CCCC facility, and that it not be used in any way for salaries, payroll, contract labor, reimbursements, etc.”

In her response the next day, Williams told Sweet that because of the county’s stipulation, she would not request “the up-to 10% grant admin[istration] fees” allowed with the EDA request.

“We were originally planning to request 3-5% to pay a firm (perhaps mine, if selected in a competitive procurement process) to do the hundreds of hours of coordination with contractors, CCCC Board and stakeholders and the EDA engineers, federal labor compliance interviews and documentation, bookkeeping and preparing/submitting remittance requests, and copious reporting that I know you understand are included in these grant projects,” Williams said in the email.

She added that since August 2022, she had “logged 56.75 hours” just on preparing the EDA grant, including securing the required local matches, that she was not being paid for. “I get paid up to $2,000 a month for the work I do with Calfee and always log over $6,000 hours of work as in-kind donations of my time. And since we can’t request funding for grant administration work for this EDA grant, I will end up doing the hundreds of hours of grant management work with no compensation either.”

Sweet responded that it is the county’s “fiduciary responsibility to protect our community” from possible Conflict of Interest Act violations, or the perception of violations.

“Everyone watched and heard the council meeting where your husband broached the subject and communicated he was willing to make the motion to appropriate funds to the Calfee-CCC project. He was stopped from doing that and later advised that it was a potential COIA issue,” Sweet wrote.

Reis excused himself from voting on the matter at the next council meeting because he was aware of this, Sweet continued.

“He did this to avoid a potential conflict. Being familiar with COIA, your husband did not abstain from the issue, as an abstention is to refrain from participating in the issue all together and to not influence decisions of the council in any way regardless of voting on it or not. Since he wanted to tie the town’s funding commitment contingently on the county’s funding commitment (as congruently communicated within Calfee CCC’s written communications to the county), it had potential to pull the county and the Board of Supervisors into your husband’s potential conflict of interest issue.”

In the phone interview Wednesday, Reis said that he did not see the need to disclose his personal relationship to Calfee CCC and his wife’s consulting firm because it had been widely known in the community for years that the couple had aided with the town’s acquisition of the property to help the local YMCA find additional space for child care.

“Back in 2017, we went down to look at [the building] and my wife and some people who worked on the project figured out that this was not only a former African American school, but it is historically significant and connected to the civil rights movement,” Reis said. “We thought this was great, there’s the history and this big space, so at the time I was helping out and figured out who owned it, and sort of assisted in getting that property donated to the town.”

His wife’s involvement with the Calfee project, Reis added, has been indirectly through consulting for the nonprofit organization that is going to run the center once construction is complete.

“All the things that have happened since then, everybody knew what was going on, it wasn’t hidden,” he said.

The couple never received compensation for their work on the EDA grant application, because the agency denied the grant for reasons unrelated to the charges against him, Reis said. “That transaction was explicitly designed to not have my wife receive any money from that, or her business. That money was going to renovate the building that the town owns.”

Reis said that no town money, “except for a small amount before I was on the council,” has gone into his wife’s business. “Not just the town but the county was well aware of this, it was known at all levels,” he said. “When the county and town allocated $100,000 [each] for construction, everybody knew what was going on at that point.”

Reis, in an economic interest statement required of candidates holding public office, checked a box indicating that Wide Angle Strategies had received a taxable gross income between $50,001 and $250,000. But he underscored Wednesday that none of that included town money but comprised funds raised by Calfee within the community.

“Being a careful attorney, I’m always going to estimate high,” he said. “There are other contractors who are also covered by that. If anything, my wife has worked full-time on this and she has been paid about $2,000 a month. It boggles the mind to think that we are benefiting from this.”

Reis said he believes that the charges against him may be the result of the couple’s yearslong work as community activists, and holding town and county officials accountable.

“Starting in 2017, along with a lot of other people, we were involved in an effort to get a new middle school built, and as part of that I started a blog,” Reis said. “We focused on local issues, especially on the middle school, because I felt like there was a lot of misinformation coming out about it, especially coming from parts of the county administration. I know that raised the ire of some folks.”

Reis said that since nobody has explained to him the details of the charges against him, his attorney’s next step will be to enter the discovery phase in the case.

“This is a story of cowardice, a story of people who are elected to do their job and who are not doing their job and are allowing my name to get dragged through the mud. I had to tell my kids that I might go to jail,” Reis said.

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