The Independent Ethics Commission’s vote Tuesday on disgraced former state Sen. Steve King might have seemed like overkill to some, but not to Kevin King.

It was King who filed the ethics complaint against the ex-Republican lawmaker almost exactly a year ago, before Steve King pleaded guilty to embezzlement and official misconduct for submitting falsified timecards to two government employers.

The commission voted 4-0 to accept Steve King’s admission of guilt for his “breach of public trust and fiduciary duty.” Commissioner Matt Smith, a former legislator from Grand Junction, recused himself from the matter.

No additional fines or penalties were levied on King, who was sentenced in January to two years’ probation and 80 hours’ community service, as well as ordered to pay $2,431 in restitution each to Mesa County Sheriff’s Office and Mesa State University.

Kevin King, who is no relation to the former lawmaker, said afterward he knew the commission’s vote would be something of a formality.

“Nothing was going to happen to him that hadn’t already happened to him at this point,” said Kevin King. “It was more of it just being on record.”

Still, he had hoped for more. The sales director for a Grand Junction start-up, who runs the Vet the Gov watchdog blog, he was instrumental in exposing the wrongdoing, digging up the documents through Colorado Open Records Act requests that showed the overlap between Steve King’s timesheets with sheriff’s office and university.

Ideally, he said, the commission would have pursued the matter by trying to identify who had approved the timecards, saying someone should have noticed that Steve King often wasn’t where he said he was. There were also times that his hours at the sheriff’s office and the university overlapped.

“The hope was they would have investigated a little bit further the shenanigans with CMU and the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office, and that just never happened,” Kevin King said. “But at the end of the day, I was also hoping they would at least put out some sort of public admonishment.”

He said he asked the commission in an email to hand down “a very firm decision of guilt along with future suggestions that will never allow this to happen again.”

“Since now only Sen. King stands guilty before the courts as the apparent fall guy, it still leaves a bad taste that others were not implicated in this scam against the taxpayers,” he said in his email.

Asked for comment on the commission’s ruling, Steve King replied in an email, “I wish Kevin King a long and happy life.”

Their paths crossed last summer when Steve King announced he would run for Mesa County sheriff. Though Kevin King is also a Republican and describes himself as a free-market champion, he was adamantly opposed to the lawmaker’s candidacy.

“I supported no candidates in our sheriff’s race,” King said. “I just knew I didn’t want him to be my sheriff, knowing what I knew about his character, because this wasn’t the first time that he was in trouble for double-dipping. He had an ethics situation before and he got cleared of it.”

He was referring to a 2010 incident in which Steve King was accused of billing both his campaign and the state for overlapping travel expenses.

In June 2014, Steve King was dismissed from his part-time job at the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office after 15 years over what he described to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel as a $390 mistake in his billing for contractual services.

He sent a $390 check to the office “as a show of good faith until the matter is resolved.” A few weeks later, however, Kevin King began posting articles about the results of his open records inquiries on VettheGov.com, later sending the documents to the 18th Judicial District Attorney in Arapahoe County.

The case against Steve King was prosecuted in Arapahoe County in order to avoid a conflict of interest with Mesa County prosecutors.

“Really, at the end of the day, he got his hand slapped,” Kevin King said. “Yeah, he won’t be able to work in law enforcement again, and that’s a maybe, but definitely his political career’s over.”

Bringing the matter to the attention of the ethics commission gave Kevin King an opportunity “to see it all the way through the process.” Having done so, he has a piece of advice for state legislators who want to avoid ethical conflicts: Stick to careers in the private sector.

“For any future elected officials, if they want to go to work for a government position outside of the legislative calendar, I would highly discourage it, just for the fact that there’s some impropriety there,” King said. “It’s too easy at this point in time.”

– valrichardson17@gmail.com