More than two years after a state ethics panel recommended a former Temple Terrace Mayor be fined $10,000 for exaggerating her education credentials on the city website, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declined to levy any penalty.

In an executive order signed July 22, DeSantis accepted the findings of the Florida Commission on Ethics, which found that Mel Jurado violated state law by directing city staff to post embellished educational credentials on her official bio on the city website.

But DeSantis ignored the commission’s recommendation that a $10,000 be imposed on Jurado, who resigned as mayor in March 2020. Instead, his order states that “no penalty shall be imposed in this matter.”

The ethics order recommending the fine had been in DeSantis’ inbox since June 2023, records show. His office did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Jurado could not immediately be reached for comment. Mark Levine, her former attorney who represented her through some of the ethics board’s proceedings, said he was not surprised by the governor’s decision.

“She’s a big-time Republican and one of his supporters,” he said.

For almost a year after her swearing-in as mayor in 2017, a page on the Temple Terrace website stated that Jurado earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. But a 2018 Tampa Bay Times investigation revealed that it was from LaSalle University, a notorious diploma mill in Mandeville, Louisiana, closed down by the FBI in 1996.

It also found that on two applications for government positions, Jurado claimed to have two master’s degrees — in psychology and sports medicine — from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The school had no record of her sports medicine master’s degree.

Jurado told reporters that she was not aware the correspondence school was a diploma mill. She completed her Ph.D. by mail, including a 460-page dissertation that she showed reporters but would not let them photocopy.

Her diploma was awarded in 1996, just months before the FBI indicted the owner of LaSalle University on charges of fraud and tax evasion. Investigators found that the correspondence school had upward of 6,000 students even though there were never more than 10 people grading papers. Some of those were not qualified to do so.

The investigation led to 21 citizens complaining to the state ethics agency that the public had been misled and questioning whether the inflated biography had benefited Jurado’s career running a human resources, training and consulting firm.

Commission documents state that Jurado offered to accept the findings and settle the case with a $5,000 fine in 2021, but the commission rejected that as inadequate.

Levine, Jurado’s former attorney and former chairperson of the ethics commission, said the state agency’s decision was wrong.

“I don’t think that was an issue the commission should have been considering,” he said.

The Florida Department of Health in January 2019 also sanctioned Jurado. It ordered her to stop referring to herself as a psychologist and fined her $700 after an investigation found she is not a licensed health professional.

Jurado likened the fine to a traffic citation during a 2019 Temple Terrace City Council meeting and said that work was in industrial and organizational psychology and she provided training and development activities for businesses.

Contact Christopher O’Donnell at codonnell@tampabay.com or 813-226-3446. Follow @codonnell_Times.