DAWSON CITY – Former Dawson mayor Glen Everitt will not go to jail, but must repay his community the $38,300 he misappropriated, a judge ruled Thursday.

In April, Everitt had pleaded guilty to one Criminal Code charge of "breach of trust by a public official by misappropriating public funds.”

The 46-year-old was the mayor from 1996 to 2004.

He admitted to submitting duplicate travel claims to the City of Dawson for:

• travel which had been covered by his wife's (Debbie's) Parks Canada benefits (($6,550);

• travel which had been covered as part of his duties with the Association of Yukon Communities ($5,300); and

• "travel which was not properly supported by documentation or did not actually occur” ($17,160).

In addition, the jointly prepared agreed statement of facts says Everitt "received funds as cash advances from the City of Dawson Visa card and used these funds either for unauthorized City of Dawson expenses or for personal use” at a cost to the town of $9,290.

It was also noted that "between 1996 and 2004, Mr. Everitt made some payments to the City of Dawson, or assigned benefits he would otherwise have received over to the City of Dawson as partial payment for various debts he had incurred to the City of Dawson.”

All told, the funds misappropriated during his terms of office amounted to $38,300.

On Wednesday, Everitt offered a dramatic and moving apology to the court, which sat in Dawson.

Late Thursday morning, Everitt faced the sentencing hearing and decision of Judge Heino Lilles.

The judge stated Everitt will serve a 12-month conditional sentence in his community with an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.

After that, he will face 12 months' probation, which the judge said was primarily to manage his restitution schedule.

The Crown had asked for a 15-month jail sentence. However, Crown prosecutor Noel Sinclair did not protest, and had only a few bookkeeping comments to make about the terms of the sentence.

Likewise, Everitt's legal aid lawyer, Emily Hall of the Community Law Clinic, had no complaints.

Everitt will begin by paying $400 a month to the City of Dawson until such time as he is able to pay more after he regains employment.

The judge noted that Everitt has been ill with a number of medical problems. Those include intense headaches and gastrointestinal ailments for the better part of a decade.

The ex-mayor is currently unemployed. He also suffers from clinical depression for which he's being treated.

"I am satisfied that he is genuinely remorseful,” Lilles told the court.

"This is not a major fraud case,” he said, though he had previously outlined for onlookers just how serious it is when elected officials betray a public trust.

Lilles said he had received victim impact statements from a number of Dawsonites in favour of jail time for the former mayor.

They cited the loss of public trust, the cost of the investigation, the impact on the town's reputation, community polarization and Everitt's failure to apologize.

The judge had also received letters of support for Everitt.

They called him a good family man, one dedicated to the well-being and promotion of the town, one dedicated to working with youth, one not seen as devious and one who has been pilloried publicly in the six years since 2004.

Lilles himself noted that Everitt has endured a "trial by innuendo” for many years, said he felt that Everitt is unlikely to reoffend, and that he had no criminal record prior to these offences.

"I am satisfied that a conditional sentence is appropriate,” he said.

There are various conditions attached to this sentence.

Those include the curfew, an instruction to "keep the peace”, to report to his probation supervisor, to make his financial and medical records available for scrutiny, to do 100 hours of community service and to abstain from "alcohol or non-prescribed drugs.”

Lilles also emphasized that Everitt's choice of a guilty plea should be seen as both an admission and an apology, and that "the community should not underestimate the value of a guilty plea in such a case.”

There are factors of time and financial costs which have been saved by avoiding weeks of a jury trial and the cost of producing hard-copy versions of all the documents connected to this case, Lilles said.

Everitt, a widower and a father, declined to speak to the media after he was sentenced.

At one point, he had attempted to represent himself in the proceedings, but the Crown objected because of the case's complexity.

Everitt was elected mayor four times, beginning with a mid-term byelection in 1996 and continuing until municipal elections in the fall of 2003.

His last two councils began to experience severe financial difficulties. They were assigned financial supervisors by the territorial governments of the day (both Liberal and Yukon Party regimes) at the town's request.

The statement of facts says the "overall finances of Dawson were in serious disarray.”

Lilles elaborated that the checks and balances that ought to have been in place to prevent anyone from doing what Everitt did were not, in fact, in place.

In the spring of 2004, matters came to a head between the Dawson council, the current financial supervisor and the Yukon Party government.

That led to the resignation of one councillor, Joanne Van Nostrand (who has recently been hired to be the town's latest senior financial officer), and the removal by the government of the remainder of the council shortly thereafter.

A trustee, Ray Hayes, was appointed to run the town's affairs for what was supposed to be a few months, an appointment which stretched out to nearly two years.

Hayes eventually resigned to force the government's hand at restoring an elected council to the town in 2006.

Not long after Hayes' appointment. a forensic audit of the town's handling of territorial loan money related to infrastructure projects was commissioned by the government.

This, too, was supposed to be of short duration but it turned out to take more than a year and in excess of $500,000 in costs before the Doddington Report was released.

It was considered to be so potentially explosive in its criticisms of town officials and of the town's auditing firm that it was released only in the legislature to save the government from potential defamation suits.

It was as a result of this report that the RCMP began an investigation into the allegations it contained.

In 2007, two years later, Everitt and former CAO Scott Coulson were charged with offences related to the conspiracy theory that Doddington had put forward in his report. Everitt faced six charges and Coulson one charge.

Doddington had also accused the town's treasurer, Dale Courtice, of being part of the conspiracy, but no charges were ever laid against him.

Charges against Coulson were eventually stayed, and both men offered testimony against Everitt.

Financial administration at the town office was at a low ebb when the offences occurred, and Lilles considered it significant that other officials had also been accused at the time.

Elected officials are part-time at those positions, said the veteran judge, and it's up to the bureaucracy to give good advice on how to behave and on what is proper conduct.