Glenwood: Ex-art center boss Brusig faces felony over $18K of bad checks

Christina Brusig, who resigned earlier this month as executive director of the Glenwood Springs Center for the Arts, faces a felony fraud charge in Eagle County, the Post Independent learned Wednesday.

Glenwood Springs police began investigating art center finances shortly after Brusig’s resignation, the PI reported Wednesday. Police Chief Terry Wilson on Tuesday declined to say that the investigation, which is in its early stages, is linked to Brusig’s resignation — “that’s a stretch,” he said.

Brusig is scheduled to appear Monday in Eagle County on a felony charge of fraud by check, involving about $18,000. An Eagle County arrest warrant was issued in January.

In October, a couple told Eagle police that they had been renting a home to Brusig in New Castle. She had been living there since December 2014, but in July 2015 she stopped sending her rent checks, according to a police report.

“After much avoidance” and about nine months later, Brusig met with the owners in Eagle to pay her rent, and wrote eight checks totalling $17,970, the couple told police.

She wrote these checks out for different dates, to be deposited over the course of 32 days.

But when they attempted to cash one of the checks, they learned that the account had insufficient funds, they told police.

Over the next few months the owners kept trying to cash the checks, each time finding that the account had insufficient funds. The couple continued trying to cash the checks until they finally contacted law enforcement in October 2016.

Eagle police obtained records of Brusig’s account balance on the dates she had written the checks, and “at no point did Christina have sufficient funds for the checks written,” an officer wrote in his report. At one point her account was as low at $14.30 while she had written several checks for around $3,000 each.

Brusig, a single mother, told police that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was having trouble making payments. She told an officer that she had planned to secure a personal loan to cover the back payments, but she had not done so when she wrote the checks, according to a police report.

Informed by the officer that a warrant for her arrest would eventually be issued, Brusig said that she would turn herself in, according to the affidavit. She was booked into jail on Jan. 13.

She did not respond Wednesday afternoon to the Post Independent’s request for comment.

Brusig resigned from the art center on April 5, which she said on Tuesday was due to her heavy workload and the lack of support she had received from the art center board. The PI’s inquiries about Brusig’s resignation with city officials and the Center for the Arts board president were met with an unusual referral: talk to the police chief about it.

Wilson has said he cannot discuss the goings on at the art center because it is involved in an active police investigation of the organization’s finances. Brusig said Tuesday that she was stunned to hear of a police investigation involving the art center.