A special prosecutor named Thursday to take over the investigation of Adams County Commissioner Alice Nichol’s relationship with a paving company will have access to more than 80,000 pages of records and the power to expand the probe if it’s warranted.
There is no timetable for a decision from Jefferson County District Attorney Scott Storey on whether criminal charges are warranted in the wake of disclosures about Nichol’s ties to Quality Paving and its former owner, Jerry Rhea.
The company is at the center of an ongoing criminal investigation that has so far led to felony charges against six people.
Adams County District Attorney Don Quick decided to, in effect, recuse himself from the case because he and Nichol are both elected officials in Adams County.
“We are giving them complete independence and unfettered access to the documents,” Quick said.
That includes not only a 711-page report detailing the findings so far of the investigation into Nichol but more than 80,000 pages of documents obtained during the ongoing Quality Paving investigation.
Quick’s office and Adams County sheriff’s investigators first began looking into Nichol’s ties to Quality Paving after The Denver Post discovered the company had done a $10,000 paving job at her home just after its then-president, Rhea, had cast the deciding vote to give the commissioner’s son-in-law a high- paying Adams County job.
Despite a well-publicized investigation that began in 2008, Nichol had never disclosed to investigators that the company did work at her home.
Prosecutors have alleged that four former Quality Paving officials and two Adams County employees were part of an elaborate scheme that saw Adams County taxpayers billed for $1.8 million in paving work that was never done.
Quality Paving and Quality Resurfacing received multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts over a series of years, each one approved by the Adams County commissioners. And on dozens of occasions, the county commissioners approved “change orders” that increased the price of particular jobs.
But investigators found numerous problems with work between 2004 and 2007, from one bill for more than 15 miles of pavement on a section of road that was 10 miles long to another for a project at a nonexistent location.
After questions from The Post, Nichol acknowledged the Quality Paving job at her home and said her husband, former county Commissioner Ron Nichol, arranged for the work and paid for it. In a separate interview, Ron Nichol provided a photocopy of a $10,000 check made out to Quality Paving — money he said he paid the company even after an employee offered to do the job for free.
Alice Nichol did not respond to a request for comment from The Post. However, in a letter posted recently on her website, she insisted she had “done nothing improper, illegal or immoral.”
She said in the statement that the work done at her home was proper, that the price was fair and that it was not tied to her son-in-law’s hiring, and she defended the county’s purchase of her mother’s home for a road-widening project.
“I am not guilty of any wrongdoing,” she wrote.
