Ala. Guard colonel resigns after investigation - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Ala. Guard colonel resigns after investigation

A wing commander who used a fighter jet for personal trips and pocketed nearly $96,000 in extra pay for unauthorized compensatory time has left his job with the Alabama Air National Guard’s 187th Fighter Wing.

Col. Jeffery Smiley, who has been at the helm of the Montgomery, Ala.-based wing since January 2006, submitted his resignation June 21.

Alabama National Guard officials said Smiley resigned for strictly personal reasons, according to a news report on wsfa.com, the website of an Alabama television station. His resignation comes months after an Inspector General investigation found Smiley had violated Air Force and National Guard regulations.

National Guard Bureau officials would not say June 23 whether Smiley had been reassigned or would retire. Smiley has been in the Air Force for 31 years.

Smiley was investigated during the third year of his command after an anonymous complaint was filed with the Air Force Inspector General’s Office. After multiple investigations, four of eight allegations were deemed to have merit.

The investigation concluded Smiley accumulated excessive comp time and converted it into flight training time, for which he received nearly $96,000. The IG also found that he used government property — an F-16 — to visit family several times in 2006; neglected to conduct a semiannual climate survey of the unit for three years while he was installation commander; and improperly coerced his officers to join the National Guard Association of the United States.

In April 2010, Brig. Gen. Paul D. Brown Jr., commander of the Alabama Air National Guard, sent Smiley a letter of counseling.

Brown conducted the initial investigation of the allegations and found none to be substantiated. He referred to his own interpretation of the allegations in his letter to Smiley.

“By a ‘preponderance of the evidence standard,’ a recent Alabama Army National Guard Inspector General investigation has substantiated four allegations of apparent misconduct on your part,” Brown wrote. “While my own review of the allegations and available evidence lead me to conclude that the substantiated allegations are primarily of a technical nature, devoid of any malicious or fraudulent intent, I want to emphasize to you, a senior officer under my command, conditions can develop and/or exist which cast doubt on your overall judgment and create an appearance of impropriety.”

Brown went on to write that he considered “the totality of the circumstances leading up to this counseling” and concluded that he was confident that Smiley was capable of accomplishing his duties as wing commander.

Smiley was given the opportunity to submit additional information for the record and indicated that he would provide it to Brown. The supplemental information, however, was not included with the National Guard Bureau’s Feb. 17 response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the agency in November 2010.

Col. Scott Patten, who serves as vice commander of the 187th, will serve as interim commander of the 187th until a permanent replacement is selected.