An attorney representing a group of plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit in connection with the Eureka Springs City Advertising and Promotion Commission filed a second amended complaint last week, listing a litany of new allegations and adding the commission’s former executive director as a defendant.

The amended complaint filed June 2 by Eureka Springs attorney Tim Parker adds Lacey Ekberg to a list of defendants that also includes Mayor Butch Berry, his administrative assistant Kim Stryker and several current and former CAPC commissioners.

Ekberg served as the CAPC’s executive director from August 2019 to February 2020, when the commission voted to shift her role from a full-time city employee to an independent contractor on a 90-day agreement. That decision came after the Lovely County Citizen reported on a number of discrepancies between the resume Ekberg submitted to the CAPC and her actual employment history as described in several published accounts and public documents. Among those discrepancies was Ekberg’s failure to list on her resume a position she held for just over two months in Alachua County, Fla., before being fired. At the time of her employment in Alachua County, Ekberg was on a partially paid leave of absence from a similar position in Switzerland County, Ind., with sources and documentation indicating that neither employer was aware of the other.

The CAPC voted in April 2020 not to continue Ekberg’s contract and it expired the following month. But during her time as an independent contractor, Ekberg leveled an accusation that ultimately led to an ongoing police investigation linked with the civil lawsuit.

In an April 30, 2020 email to commissioner Jeff Carter, Ekberg refers to sales leads from the CAPC website being directed to three local business people.

“I discovered these in December, and could trace back 3 years,” Ekberg’s email says. “No one took responsibility for doing it. So couldn’t get a reason why. … I’m sure this was a cooperative effort by several people. I just couldn’t nail any of them with it.”

In a deposition taken Feb. 8, 2022, as part of the ongoing lawsuit, Eureka Springs City Council member Melissa Greene — a former CAPC commissioner — told Parker that Carter presented the commission with Ekberg’s email during an executive session on Feb. 24, 2021. Greene said Carter referred to Gina Rambo, who had served as the commission’s interim director since shortly after Ekberg’s role was shifted, in connection with the email. The commission voted later at that same meeting to fire Rambo, who is now one of the plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit. “In the executive session, Jeff said some

“In the executive session, Jeff said something about Gina,” Greene said. “I got the impression that — I mean, I felt like I had been sucker-punched when I read that thing. I mean, it just — it was horrible that she was aware of it.”

Before the commission went into executive session at that meeting Carter said he had filed a complaint with the other commissioners that he wanted to read into the record.

“It has come to my attention that Gina Rambo attacked me personally through a series of phone calls, messages, around town to local merchants, tax collectors and citizens in the days leading up to the Jan. 27 meeting,” Carter said. “It is my belief that these comments and messages sent out were an effort to discredit me, my business and the work of the commission. These accusations that were made are completely fabricated and false. As the weeks have progressed, I have continued to receive more confirmations that this negative campaign took place. I will cooperate in whatever manner with the commission to provide full transparency to bring this matter to a quick resolution. I appreciate your attention to this issue. It is my belief that this is the type of behavior that is very detrimental to the work of the commission and tourism in Eureka Springs. This is not a time for us to be working against each other, but a time for us to come together as a community for the best benefit of our town.”

After the executive session, the CAPC voted 5-1 to fire Rambo.

Greene said she filed a report with the Eureka Springs Police Department after a conversation with Carter.

“I think that I talked to Jeff sometime before that meeting because he asked if I would be willing to file the report and I said sure,” Greene said in her deposition.

Carroll County Newspapers has filed two separate requests for information contained in the police investigative file. Eureka Springs Police Department Chief Brian Young replied to the first request, made in December 2021, by saying the investigation remained open and active and thus the information in the case file was exempt from release under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. A second request for the same information, filed March 31 — almost 14 months after the investigation apparently began — received the same response on April 7. Parker’s amended complaint says the police department “has found no credible evidence to support the allegations.”

The amended complaint says Carter and Greene knew the allegations in the police report were false at the time it was filed, a criminal violation of state law.

In the amended complaint, Parker writes that Ekberg “is named as a defendant in this case because it has been asserted by other defendants in this case that their defamatory statements about some of the Plaintiffs stem from statements made by Ekberg including an email sent by her to those defendants. While the Plaintiffs have some doubt regarding this assertion, Ekberg is named as a defendant in this action due to these assertions.”

The lawsuit also makes several new allegations based on audio recordings of Berry and other defendants discussing Rambo and former CAPC events director Tracy Johnson. In a recorded telephone conversation between Berry and city council member Autumn Slane on April 5, 2021, Slane expressed her concerns about the CAPC. “There’s just talk of embezzlement,” Slane says. “And then all of a sudden we’re spending half a million dollars. It’s just a little alarming.”

“The embezzlement was — Tracy,” Berry replies, pausing briefly. “I mean, that wasn’t anything about us, because the state auditors that audit us, they came up and they would have found it. They’re aware of our concerns about Tracy.”

In a deposition taken Feb. 8, 2022, Berry told Parker that he had never told anyone that Johnson had embezzled city money or property. After the Citizen reported on the recording of his conversation with Slane on April 14, Berry said at the city council’s next meeting that he does not believe he lied in his deposition.

On May 12, the Citizen reported that an accountant with Arkansas Legislative Audit wrote in an internal email in February 2021 that Berry had contacted him about “possible overpayments” to Johnson as well as “other ethical concerns.”

The accountant wrote in the email that he advised Berry to contact the local prosecutor’s office and that he documented Berry’s concerns for Legislative Audit’s 2020 audit of Eureka Springs city finances. That audit led to a number of findings, but none of those findings were connected to the CAPC.

Parker’s amended complaint accuses Berry of making “false and malicious statements about Tracy Johnson to a third party.”

The amended complaint, which runs 113 pages and was filed along with 42 exhibits, outlines a total of 25 causes of action by the defendants. In addition to Ekberg, Berry, Stryker and Carter, other defendants in the suit are CAPC commissioners Patrick Burnett, James DeVito and Carol Wright, along with former commissioners and current city council members Greene and Harry Meyer; the city and an insurance company that provides a policy to the city.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Rambo, Johnson, former CAPC finance director Rick Bright, former CAPC group sales coordinator Karen Pryor and former CAPC commissioner Greg Moon.

The amended complaint makes several new allegations related to the audio recordings made by Autumn Slane and her husband, Rodney, who has acknowledged that the couple recorded conversations with Berry, Carter, Stryker and Greene.

One of those recorded conversations occurred during a meeting between Carter and a group of citizens on Feb. 5, 2021. In that meeting, Carter alluded to Rambo being fired, saying that the number one topic of discussion at the commission’s next meeting would be hiring a permanent director.

After being asked what would happen to Rambo after a permanent director was hired, Carter replied: “Well, she can go back to her original position, if the commission decides she should just do marketing. Or, she can be fired.”

Rambo’s employment was terminated less than three weeks later.

Carter also told the group that he didn’t want an audit of CAPC finances, “because we’ll find information that we don’t want to know. There’s some things that I don’t want to know. And believe me, Tracy and that group, they’ve covered their tracks. They’ve deleted almost everything.”

In another recorded conversation, on Jan. 27, 2021, Carter accused Rambo of creating “a whole new line, budget line (that) didn’t exist,” and spending money without commission approval to fund an overhead music series in 2020. He also said Rambo had allowed Damon Henke, a former CAPC commissioner, to come into the CAPC office and access the commission’s computers, rerouting leads generated through the CAPC website to certain local businesses — an allegation that Henke has denied.

“These were total lies by Carter designed to harm the reputation of Gina Rambo and the other CAPC staff which includes the other Plaintiffs in this case,” the amended complaint says. “Carter and Green(e) subsequently filed a false report against Rambo and the CAPC staff regarding these allegations.”

In a recorded conversation with Rodney Slane on Feb. 17, 2021, Greene said she received a text message telling her that Johnson was “legally double-dipping” by using her own company to book acts and then “rebooking” them through the CAPC.

“From what I’m hearing, the artists were giving her kickbacks because they were getting double paid through this,” Greene said in the recorded conversation. “Now, whether that’s true or not, I have no idea.”

Greene said she believed CAPC employees “all got caught up in something that they didn’t have any control over and they got a hold of, as I affectionately call it, a slush fund. And they just wrote themselves a check on the slush fund.”

“Green(e)’s statements implied that the CAPC employees Rambo, Johnson, Bright and Pryor were illegally taking money or involved in improper or illegal activities that enabled them to get at or obtain CAPC money or property,” Parker’s amended complaint says.

The amended complaint seeks a total of $37 million in compensatory and punitive damages. It also asks that Rambo and Johnson be reinstated to their positions with the CAPC.