The head of Colorado’s COVID-19 response resigned two days after the state put him on leave this summer while it investigated an apparent sexual harassment allegation.
The didn’t publicly announce the departure of Scott Bookman, one of the agency’s top-ranking officials.
An from July 17 listed him as senior director for public health readiness and response, one of nine core officials working under Executive Director Jill Hunsaker Ryan. The page in that role.
A letter that the state health department provided to The Denver Post under a request showed Ryan informed Bookman that he had been placed on paid administrative leave July 23 pending completion of an investigation.
The health department redacted a portion of the letter that placed Bookman on leave, obscuring any explanation of what officials were investigating.
Bookman resigned July 25, with a four-sentence email to Ryan saying he needed to focus on unspecified challenges facing his family.
“It has been an absolute honor to work for the Polis administration and I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did throughout the pandemic,” he wrote.
When asked on what grounds they redacted that information, the health department officials cited an exemption in the state’s open records law that allows agencies to withhold complaints and investigations related to sexual harassment.
The public records staff confirmed they intended to use that exemption, which doesn’t apply to situations that don’t include an allegation of sexual misconduct.
The department’s records unit also confirmed that the state had completed the investigation, but declined to release any information about the allegations or whether the probe found any wrongdoing. Officials haven’t commented on Bookman’s departure, describing it as a personnel matter.
“We are committed to a safe, respectful workplace, and we take all concerns seriously, reviewing them and then acting under our policies and applicable state law,” Department of Public Health and Environment spokeswoman Gabi Johnston said in a statement.
Bookman, who had worked at the health department for six years, didn’t respond to a message left on a phone number listed as his or a note left at his residence. No one answered a message to his former state email address, which didn’t yield a bounceback or information about other ways to contact him.
In a in May 2023, Bookman said he had worked as a paramedic in Denver before earning a master’s degree in emergency management from and briefly running a federally qualified health center in the southwest corner of the state.
He joined the state government in mid-2019 as director of the public health lab and became COVID-19 incident commander in January 2020, he told the ethics forum. The state government’s first online mention of him in that role was in .
The incident commander was one of the public faces of the state’s COVID-19 response, with responsibilities that included setting up testing early in the pandemic and monitoring hospital capacity during surges. Bookman regularly appeared at media briefings alongside Gov. Jared Polis and other top public health officials.
