MILLFIELD, Ohio — Athens County Jobs and Family Services owes the state an estimated $2.5 million in repayments.
The county is working with the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services on a repayment plan. The commissioners briefly mentioned the subject at their meeting Tuesday.
Athens County Commissioners Chris Chmiel and Lenny Eliason both told the Independent Wednesday that they are awaiting details from the state about how it arrived at that figure.
“We are checking with the state on some stuff, and the amount was $2.5 million,” Chmiel said. “It’s a significant amount of money — that’s a lot of taxpayer dollars.”
In December 2025, Eliason told the Independent that the state had flagged errors in the agency’s reporting of reimbursements, referring to random moment sampling, the way in which JFS codes its services for billable hours for reimbursement from state and federal government funds.
The state has proposed “quarterly payments over … either 10 or 15 years,” Chmiel said.
Eliason said the state proposal calls for the county to send $43,000 each quarter. At that rate, JFS would need about 13 years to pay off the debt.
“There’s really not much else to say till we get the report and get a chance to look at it,” Eliason said.
Athens County JFS Director Jean Demosky declined to comment Wednesday on the state’s proposed repayment plan, because it is “in the negotiation stages.”
Chmiel said the state estimated that the financial mismanagement “started in 2024 and went on into 2025, but it’s like, who was not paying attention along the way?” Chmiel said.
Demosky became director in 2018.
The agency’s looming fiscal crisis emerged last fall, when employees agreed to take a 10% pay cut by reducing work hours. Union staff resumed contractually agreed hours at the end of January, but the reduction remains in place for non-union staff.
The commissioners also voted to eliminate seven positions in December 2025. Five positions, all union jobs, were eliminated effective Feb. 6.
At Tuesday’s commissioners meeting, Demosky proposed staffing changes in the agency’s fiscal office to “provide overall savings to both our shared cost pool and our bottom line,” she said.
One employee would move laterally by combining two positional duties, while another would receive a raise.
“I’m recommending that we … that we promote Angie Hayes to fiscal manager, she’s currently the fiscal officer,” Demosky said. “And I would like to promote the human resource officer to fiscal officer … And then we organize Georgi Wolf’s duties as PR [public relations] specialist to include the HR [human resources] officer duties.”
Hayes’ fiscal officer position would remain vacated. The agency also had another exit in the fiscal office, as a fiscal specialist left, Demosky said. “It would be a lateral for Georgie and the fiscal officer and this and HR-01 would get an increase.”
The changes would “reorganize that department,” Demosky said. Chmiel asked Demosky for updated financial projections related to the proposed staffing change.
The Independent has requested those projections, as well as records of the commissioners’ communications with the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services.
Real estate sales
In addition to reducing the agency’s payroll, the county is also working on selling the JFS building at 510 W. Union St. in Athens to Integrated Services for Behavioral Health for $975,000, the Athens Messenger reported.
Both Demosky and Eliason said the sale of the building should help JFS’s finances, though “we still have an outstanding bond to repay with the proceeds,” Demosky said.
“There should be some kind of [impact] — we have to wait till we get the note paid off, and see how much money is left over after that,” Eliason said. “There’ll be a few $100,000.”
As the Independent previously reported, the county bought the West Union Street building in 2019 for around $1.4 million and spent an additional $100,000 on renovations. The agency borrowed $1.5 million through a 10-year bond, on which it owes about $170,000 for the next five years, Demosky previously said in a January 2025 email.
The Independent has reached out about clarification for exactly how much bond payments on the building currently are, but did not hear back prior to publication.
Demosky said the sale is underway and looks promising.
Late last year, the county also was considering selling the agency’s building at 10 W. Washington St. in Nelsonville, which houses the Athens County Community Cares Resource Center.
In a separate interview for a different Independent article, Chmiel said Wednesday the future of the building is uncertain, but talk of selling the building has slowed.
Update: Initially this story stated that JFS’s debt issues began accruing in 2020; it has since been corrected to 2024, per a clarification from Chmiel.
