Homeless services provider CEO billed Sonoma County for working while she was at a Broncos game, invoices show (2024)

On Nov. 20, 2022, DEMA founder and Chief Executive Officer Michelle Patino posted a photograph to her Facebook page showing her standing in front of the Denver Broncos’ famed Mile High stadium on a bluebird Colorado day.

She posed with her wife and business co-owner, Mica Pangborn. Patino wore a Broncos jersey; Pangborn wore Las Vegas Raiders colors. Patino, a longtime Broncos fan, wrote in the post that the day was a “dream come true.”

The game, which kicked off at 1 p.m. Pacific time, went into overtime, fueling an electrifying atmosphere inside the stadium. The Raiders won, 22-16.

But Patino, in one respect, was winning that day either way. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PST, according to a federally required time sheet she filled out, she was also at work as Director of Nursing for a homeless housing site at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. The total charge to taxpayers: $375.

Pangborn, at the time the company’s chief financial officer, also worked a full day, according to the federal form Patino filled out for her.

The forms, known as 214s, were intended to substantiate her for-profit homeless services company’s billing to Sonoma County. Patino filled out 214s for all DEMA employees herself, something that has raised concern with Sonoma County auditors who reviewed aspects of the company’s books.

The 214 Patino filled out for Pangborn stated she had worked from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. that November day, for a DEMA-run housing site in Sebastopol. For Pangborn’s catchall role as a scheduler, payroll manager and administrator that day, DEMA billed the county a little more than $600.

Neither Pangborn nor Patino responded to questions about whether they were in fact at work managing housing sites for Sonoma County’s most vulnerable residents the day they attended the football game in Denver.

In both instances, they directed a Press Democrat reporter to attorneys. Neither of their attorneys responded to multiple requests for comment.

Patino also did not respond to questions about other discrepancies uncovered in a Press Democrat investigation into four months of the time she billed for her services.

DEMA: ‘No wrongdoing or fraud’

In addition to the football game, The Press Democrat found Patino billed Sonoma County for the days to follow, when she was on a family Thanksgiving trip to Denver. Patino billed 14 hours a day for weeks on end, with six or eight hour shifts on most weekends. Many of those hours were logged during a period Patino also appeared to be spending time in Texas, managing her company’s expansion into Houston.

Responding to emailed questions to Patino, DEMA’s new chief financial officer, Celeste Cramer, offered a blanket denial of any irregularities in the company’s billing. “As we have stated before, there was no wrongdoing or fraud found in DEMA's billing or services,” Cramer wrote.

For three years, DEMA was a key player in the county’s homelessness response during the pandemic. The company billed more than $27 million in that period, before collapsing, at least locally, shortly after the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors directed the Department of Health Services to end its contracts with the company. County officials still intend to charge around $23 million in DEMA’s expenses back to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the record-keeping issues between the company and the county could complicate matters.

Supervisors ended DEMA’s contracts after a financial examination failed to answer questions about millions of dollars the company charged taxpayers for. County officials began that inquiry in response to a Press Democrat investigation into DEMA’s billing in July 2023.

In March, county officials said their inquiry, conducted by Santa Rosa-based accounting firm Pisenti & Brinker, found no evidence of fraud. However Pisenti & Brinker conducted only a high-level overview to determine whether DEMA had supporting documentation for its invoices.

The firm found DEMA was unable to document $2.3 million in billing in the five months of invoices the county reviewed. It also found that DEMA did not keep timekeeping records to validate the work of its salaried employees, though officials said such records were required by the company’s contract.

Extrapolated over the life of DEMA’s contracts with the county, as much as $11 million in DEMA’s total billing could be without valid documentation, Sonoma County Auditor Erick Roeser said when he released the Pisenti & Brinker’s report.

The Press Democrat reviewed four months of federal 214 forms obtained through California Public Records Act requests, focusing on just one DEMA employee, Patino herself. In those documents, Patino marked the hours she worked and therefore billed to both the county and the federal government as Director of Nursing at Sonoma County operations.

From Aug. 1 to Nov. 26, Patino’s billing to the county for her own work amounted to $98,870.

Patino’s description of the job of Director of Nursing, which matches the language in DEMA’s contract, describes a wide array of duties which range from reviewing site residents’ medical charts and enforcing health orders to hiring and disciplining employees.

Patino also billed for another director of nursing, Tim Adams. Patino billed for Adams generally working an eight hour day on weekdays. Over the four month period, his costs to the county came to $64,600.

Previous Press Democrat reporting has documented how Patino billed for multiple directors of nursing, but employees with the company only remembered one person having the position. Patino has said that’s because she structured her company’s chain of command so that the company’s paramedics, nurses and social workers thought only one person held the role.

Required federal forms

The 214 forms are required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Known as an activity log, the forms document the work of people responding to disasters. Sonoma County officials hope FEMA will eventually reimburse the county for more than $20 million paid to DEMA over the course of the pandemic response, and submitted those forms in January.

Patino filled out all of her employees’ 214 forms herself.

Roeser said Pisenti & Brinker accountants found DEMA had no way to substantiate the time claims Patino made in the 214 forms on her employees’ behalf. They rejected some documentation DEMA tried to provide, such as sheets in which employees wrote down their temperatures when they arrived on site in a COVID-19 prevention protocol.

The 214 forms are the only documentation Patino put forward to substantiate her billing.

Billing through the holiday

The Broncos game kicked off a Thanksgiving week both Patino and Pangborn spent in Denver, staying in an Airbnb with Pangborn’s family, both women have attested in court documents in a domestic violence case. Pangborn has accused Patino of domestic violence, and a judge awarded her a restraining order despite Patino’s counter-accusal against Pangborn.

Pangborn filed for a divorce from Patino on May 9.

According to her 214s, Patino billed the county for 13-hour days every weekday that week following the football game, including Thanksgiving. And for Pangborn, Patino billed eight hour days every day of the week, or more, including an eleven hour shift on Thanksgiving Day.

Neither Patino or Pangborn responded to questions about whether they worked that week or took vacation time.

A spokesperson for the county Health Services Department told The Press Democrat they were not aware of Patino and Pangborn’s travels.

“As contractors, their location and hours were up to them as long as they could perform their responsibilities remotely, provide direction to their staff and ensure our clients were well cared for,” Sheri Cardo, the Health Services spokesperson, wrote in a statement.

The Press Democrat reviewed 10 of Patino’s 214 forms for a period running from Aug. 1 through the end of November in 2022. The company began working for the county in the spring of 2020, as the health department, like public health agencies around the state, scrambled to provide housing for homeless people and people exposed to COVID-19 who lacked the resources to isolate themselves to avoid contagion.

At its peak, DEMA ran six housing sites for the county. The company, which had begun its work in August 2020 grew in its first seven months to 125 employees, Patino told The Press Democrat in a previous interview.

In the company’s beginning, “due to the lack of manpower available, the owner performed (the director of nursing) position for these sites and worked 16-18 hours a day to accomplish the necessary duties required of the position,“ Patino wrote in her response to the Pisenti & Brinker report.

”That's what you do in a disaster,“ she told The Press Democrat in a March 27 interview. ”You make it work no matter what.“

But by the fall of 2022, the frenzied earlier effort to provide housing and medical care to Sonoma County’s homeless and other vulnerable people had stabilized. While local governments remained under emergency orders, the proliferation of vaccines allowed many people to return to the rhythm of daily lives.

That fall, DEMA’s nurses, paramedics and social workers were overseeing three operations — two at former hotels in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa and one at an encampment of trailers parked at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

According to her timekeeping, Patino still maintained a grueling schedule, practically without pause, on behalf of Sonoma County.

From Aug. 1 to Sept. 3, a 34 day stretch, Patino worked every day, according to her 214s, clocking 14 hour days Monday to Friday and six hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays.

From Sept. 5 to Sept. 30, Patino billed 14 hour days Monday to Friday, with the exception of five days where she billed just six hours. She billed an eight hour shift every Saturday during that period. The next stretch of calendar, from Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, again saw unbroken work days, with 14 hours on weekdays and eight hour days on weekends.

The 214 forms ask employees to check a box indicating whether they took a meal that day or not. With few exceptions, Patino checked the box indicating that she did not stop for a meal.

Those hours would not have raised eyebrows with the county officials paying DEMA’s invoices, because there’s no record, according to the auditor, that Patino submitted any 214s to the health department to support her invoices during the vast majority of her work with the county.

For DEMA’s first three months, the company submitted 214s alongside its invoices, Roeser said. But after that, for the duration of the pandemic-era billing, a period that stretched until May 2023, there is no evidence that DEMA submitted any 214s, which Patino has held up as DEMA’s primary way to account for the billing of its salaried employees.

“Michelle (Patino) has asserted that she was providing them to Health and she doesn’t know what they did with them,” Roeser said. The health department was unable to locate the forms, he said.

The 214 forms reviewed by The Press Democrat were not collected by the county until last fall and early this year, as officials conducted their financial inquiry into DEMA. County officials were unable to determine if the forms were created contemporaneously or to comply with the financial investigation, Roeser said.

In response to a question seeking further insight into whether the health department stopped collecting DEMA’s 214 forms during the pandemic, that agency’s spokesperson, Cardo, said the agency did not “have any additional information to provide right now.”

Asked if the health department had any documentation that would support the idea Patino worked the long hours she billed for, Cardo said the agency did not. “We are only aware of hours submitted for payment,” she wrote.

But court records and interviews with former employees show Patino was also involved in the company’s operations in Houston, Texas. DEMA began working in Texas in June 2021, on a no-bid contract awarded to them by the Harris County Health Department. That contract came after former Sonoma County Health Services director Barbie Robinson took over the Texas health agency.

In January 2022, DEMA earned a larger contract in Texas in a new field — staffing Harris County’s emergency response for people in the grips of mental health crises. Three employees who were with the company in the fall of 2022 said they remembered Patino traveling often to Texas during that time.

Patino was there frequently enough that in November 2022, Patino and Pangborn purchased a condo unit for her to stay in while working there. In a court filing responding to domestic violence allegations submitted by Pangborn, Patino described that purchase as a place for her to stay while working in Texas.

Roeser told The Press Democrat his office is investigating the possibility Patino was double billing both Sonoma County and Harris County for employees who worked in both places. Patino is one employee the auditors suspect could have been double billed.

Texas officials are also investigating the company.

There, officials have held back $669,000 in payments after auditors discovered initial evidence DEMA billed for employees working for both Harris and Sonoma counties on the same day.

It was unclear if Harris County officials have received the 214 forms collected by Sonoma County. Officials in the Harris County attorney’s office have not responded to Press Democrat requests for comment, and the Harris County auditor declined to comment on his own investigation.

On Friday, May 24, Auditor Mike Post issued initial findings from his own investigation in an internal emailed report to the Harris County commissioners. The Press Democrat obtained that email. In it, Post wrote that he found double billing for six positions across two separate time periods, one in 2023 and the other in August of 2022 ‒ one of the months reviewed by The Press Democrat.

Post did not name the DEMA employees occupying the position that was double billed, but at least one of them corresponds with billing for the director of nursing, whether for Adams or Patino. From Aug. 1 to Sept. 3, DEMA billed Sonoma County $19,000 for 200 hours by the director of nursing, and billed Harris County $17,191.50 for 235.5 hours. That employee would have had to work twelve hour days, every day of the 34 day billing period, to make those hours.

The Texas auditor found additional double billing across three other positions, he wrote. In each case, the employee was working 200 hours or more on behalf of each county. The billing in question to Sonoma County across the other three positions totaled more than $35,600, and for Harris County, more than $47,800.

Post wrote he could not conclude whether the billing aligned with actual work. “For these employees there is a lack of detailed documentation to support the billings to Harris and Sonoma counties,“ Post wrote.

DEMA’s future in Texas is now in doubt. During a heated debate last week, the Harris County Commissioners’ Court voted to withhold a second payment of roughly $270,000. Patino told The Houston Chronicle that without that money, her employees could go unpaid.

In Sonoma County, weeks after the company’s collapse a red Dodge with a decal still carrying the company’s logo — a heart around a caduceus above the red line of a cardiogram — remained parked outside the tent shelter site on Ventura Avenue.

Beneath the DEMA decal, duct tape hid a broken window.

Today, the abandoned car is all that remains of the for-profit company on Sonoma County headquarters.

In early May, around a dozen of DEMA’s Sonoma County employees resigned after going unpaid for a month. Patino then ordered the layoff of the DEMA employees left at the company’s two remaining sites ‒ Mickey Zane Place, a former hotel, and the managed tent shelter site on the county’s administrative site. The health department largely took over running those sites itself.

Though county supervisors severed ties with DEMA after the release of the Pisenti & Brinker report, they did not order further investigation into the questionable billing. That’s in large part because the lack of record keeping would make any inquiry time consuming and expensive, officials said.

Roeser said the county has heard from an auditing division of FEMA in the wake of The Press Democrat’s initial investigation, and some county supervisors expressed hope that federal agency, or some other outside entity, will soon dig deeper into the company.

“I look forward to FEMA exercising their authority to truly audit the hell out of DEMA to get to the bottom of it,” Board Chairman David Rabbitt told The Press Democrat Friday. “I think we all welcome that, and that would be the responsible thing to do.”

It remains unclear whether any law enforcement agency has opened an investigation into the company’s billing. Sonoma County District Attorney Carla Rodriguez told The Press Democrat Friday her agency was not investigating.

Meanwhile, the county continues to pay DEMA’s invoices. The county has paid DEMA around $700,000 as it resolves the company’s invoices from February, March and April. The health department has scheduled two additional payments totaling $266,153, agency spokesperson Sheri Cardo told The Press Democrat this week.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88