Travel receipts from Mott Community College show the institution paid tens of thousands of dollars for former president Beverly Walker-Griffea to travel back and forth between her home in Virginia and the campus in Michigan, MLive Media Group reported.

The college spent more than $78,000 on Walker-Griffea’s travel between the two states in 2022 and 2023, including on her stays in Michigan hotels, car rentals and per diems for meals, the publication found. Her contract required her to live within 20 miles of the “nearest college district boundary.”

Anne Figueroa, former chair of the Board of Trustees in 2021 and 2022, told MLive the president’s residence in Michigan was undergoing a renovation and Walker-Griffea was attending to health concerns with doctors on the East Coast. (Walker-Griffea owned a home in Virginia from her time working at Thomas Hampton Community College.) Figueroa said there was “no decline in her performance” during that period.

Board members expressed mixed feelings about the unusual arrangement in her last years at the college.

“One of the key roles the president does is to be the representative of the college in the community,” trustee John Daly told MLive, “and, from my perspective, that’s difficult to do if you’re gone a significant amount of the time.”

Walker-Griffea, who left Mott in spring 2024, now directs the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential, launched by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in December 2023. A department official told MLive that Walker-Griffea was living in Michigan again by the time she left the college.