The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Several Vermont sheriff departments have come under scrutiny in the past year following drastic turnover, allegations of misconduct or unusual financial activity. Two sheriffs — one former, one recently sworn in — face criminal charges.
The Legislature is considering a constitutional amendment, as a long-term measure to increase oversight. Some lawmakers are also considering a bill that would bar sheriffs from pocketing fees off private contracts.
In this episode, VTDigger reporters Tiffany Tan, Alan Keays, Ethan Weinstein and Shaun Robinson recap their reporting on recent events in five Vermont sheriffs’ departments.
Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Riley Robinson: Tell me about how you started looking into the former Bennington Sheriff Chad Schmidt.
Tiffany Tan: I started reporting in Bennington County, for the Bennington Banner, in 2018. And I noticed that after I’d met all of the local law enforcement leaders, the sheriff, Chad Schmidt, was the only one that I had not seen in town or at public events, or gotten an email or statement directly from him. And so I just really wanted to meet him.
I went to his office several times. I think this was in 2021, when people were able to move about more freely during the first year or so of the pandemic. I stopped there a few times to get some paperwork, and I always looked for him. And whenever I called for some other business, I would always make it a point to look for him. And they always said he was not there. They always said I had just missed him — that he had been there earlier, but I missed him.
Riley Robinson: How did you know to go looking in Tennessee specifically?
Tiffany Tan: Well, that was through local sources that I had.
The state government of Tennessee has a website where you can check out land records by a person’s name. And so when I went there, I found two pieces of property that were listed under the name of Sheriff Chad Schmidt and his wife.
Riley Robinson: Tiffany worked on this story for months before it published last year. What she found raised questions as to whether he still lived in Vermont. Schmidt and his wife had not only bought properties in Tennessee, but had also dissolved their businesses in Vermont. She kept investigating, and requesting public records, through 2022 and into this year.
Tiffany Tan: I asked for public records to show when he was working. For instance, I asked for a copy of his official calendar for 2022, to show when he was meeting with people or when he was doing his duties around town or meeting with the public because I just thought that as a public official, as a law enforcement leader, you do need to interact with locals — other officials, people in the community. I mean, it’s just expected. That’s the nature of the job. You’re a public servant, so you interact with the public. So I just ask for public records, and for records from 2020, 2021, 2022.
At one point, I said to him, anything you have anything, just to show me that, you know, show me when you were in Bennington, because that was the big point of contention.
And he said, I’m here, I’m working. But I don’t have public records to give you. I don’t keep track of my meetings. I don’t write them down.
So he offered me his personal records. One was the billing statement for his toll road activity in New York state. Because he said that to get in and out to get in and out of Bennington, to Tennessee. He goes through an interstate in the Albany, New York, area. And so he showed me the in and outs of, he said, his vehicle.
He basically broke down the ins and outs based on the toll road activity, writing the dates down and then adding up the days he was in Vermont and adding up the days he was in Tennessee. So for the year 2022, he had about 100, a little over 100 days in Tennessee. Like a third of the year.
Riley Robinson: Schmidt’s term as sheriff ended this month, and a new sheriff took over in Bennington County. And that might have been the end of the story.
But over the past year, there have been several other incidents at sheriffs’ departments across the state. Four of my colleagues have been reporting on events at five sheriffs’ departments. I asked them to recap their reporting.
Alan Keays: Well, the Addison County Sheriff, Peter Newton, he had been under investigation for reported domestic disturbance at his home in February.
Riley Robinson: This is Alan Keays. He’s been covering criminal justice in Vermont for about 15 years.
Alan Keays: When we reported that the police were investigating him for that domestic disturbance in Middlebury. The day after or shortly thereafter, he posted a rambling video on his Facebook page to YouTube, I guess it was posted to YouTube as well. In that video, he said he wouldn’t be seeking reelection to another term. He also, in the video, spoke of past relationships and affairs and he identified people by name. He also talked about the toll to past relationships, and his time spent working in law enforcement have had on his mental health.
He ended up getting arrested by Vermont State Police in June. And the charges against him were two counts of sexual assault, a count of domestic violence and one count of unlawful restraint at that time. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.
Riley Robinson: This is Ethan Weinstein, who covers the southeast part of the state. He’s been reporting on the Orange County sheriff’s office.
Ethan Weinstein: So the former Sheriff Bill Bohnyak, he received a reprimand from the Criminal Justice Council, because back in 2020, he allowed an unqualified deputy to investigate some serious crimes, including sex crimes against children. And he reached a settlement with the Criminal Justice Council. He’s said he’s going to do a little training, and he just received a written reprimand.
Riley Robinson: Did he run for office again?
Ethan Weinstein: Yes. He lost in November. He lost by about 100 votes. He asked for a recount. It confirmed the original results.
Bohnyak had lost to a part-time deputy in the department named George Contois. And according to Contois, Bohnyak wasn’t too helpful with the transition. And so in December, Contois sends an email to the entire staff. And he says, basically, I’m in charge now. Even though he’s not sworn in until Feb. 1. He said he’s taking control of the department, effective that day in December.
That little move didn’t go over too well, with Bohnyak, who suspended Contois from his company email. But at that point, Contois left for Arizona and agreed not to have contact with the staff until he was sworn in. And so in those intervening months, 17 of the department’s 21 deputies resigned or left the department, and all of the department’s administrative staff left. So when Contois took over, Feb. 1, he’s left with four deputies. No administrators.
Tiffany Tan: When the last audit was done with the Caledonia County Sheriff’s Department, the auditors — this is a private firm that the state contracts to do the audit for all the sheriffs’ departments around the state — so when they did their recent audit for Caledonia, which was in 2022, they found that the sheriff gave himself and his entire department, which was a total of 16 people, including the sheriff, he gave bonuses.
That was really notable for the auditors, because those were huge bonuses. And when they did an analysis of the bonuses, they saw that if you counted in the taxes that the people would receive, that the people would have to pay for the bonuses, that’s actually when you get to the round number like 10,000; 20,00.
That was really interesting because that’s not really the practice. You don’t consider the taxes and say, ‘We’re gonna take care of your taxes too.’
Riley Robinson: Are there rules for sheriffs on how they can give out bonuses to themselves and their staff?
Tiffany Tan: Well that’s really the one of the most interesting things about this. Because outright, the auditor’s office said there’s no allegation of misconduct here. They didn’t do anything against the rules. And the reason was because they didn’t have a policy in the first place.
So when they started giving out these huge bonuses, there was nothing that the state could do because there was no policy in the first place.
Riley Robinson: In Addison, Bennington, Caledonia and Orange counties, these incidents all involved outgoing sheriffs.
But in Franklin County, the current sheriff is now facing a criminal charge.
This is Shaun Robinson. He covers Franklin and Grand Isle Counties for VTDigger.
Shaun Robinson: So back in August of last year, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office released a couple of streams of body camera footage of a response to an incident in St. Albans town. One of those showed John Grismore, who at the time, was a captain in the department. He was basically the department’s No. 2 deputy.
Back at the sheriff’s office, the video showed him kicking a handcuffed man who had been detained there multiple times, kind of in the groin area, on to a bench, where he was being held.
So the video was released in early August, and Grismore was suspended from the department right afterward. Later that month, he was then fired from the department, after they did an internal investigation.
At that point, the state police were also investigating what happened. And then, later in the fall, the results of that state police investigation came out, Grismore was charged, criminally, with simple assault.
Grismore has very adamantly denied that he did anything wrong.
John Grismore: We’re charged with making split second decisions, right. So in that capacity in that case, where this individual has failed to receive any kind of de- escalation efforts from the deputies and results to physical violence, we have to meet that force with force.
Shaun Robinson: He’s essentially argued that he was using an appropriate and adequate amount of force to subdue this man when he was in custody at the department.
John Grismore: So when assaults are happening, or we perceive that we’re going to be assaulted, we can use force to stop that from happening. And the public doesn’t know that, they don’t want to know that, I don’t know. But that is the reality.
Shaun Robinson: And again, this is all before election day. This is in the lead up to Election Day. Grismore is still the only candidate on the ballot.
So even though Grismore went into Election Day carrying a criminal charge, he still won pretty handily. He got just shy of 9,000 votes.
Riley Robinson: So he didn’t really face consequences from Vermont voters.
Shaun Robinson: So in terms of, you know, did it affect his chances of becoming sheriff? No, I mean, he still won with a lot of the vote, and he is now the sheriff for Franklin County, as of the beginning of February.
He does have a Brady letter issued against him now, though. That’s based on statements that he made about the alleged assault.
So Vermont state’s attorneys issue Brady letters, which are also known as Giglio letters, to basically flag law enforcement officers with known credibility issues, such as lying or exhibiting bias.
The Brady letter from the state’s attorney in Franklin County says that statements made by Grismore to investigators, and public statements made by him to the media, characterize the blow struck to the prisoner as “pushes with his foot”. So again, this is him saying “pushes with his foot” instead of kicks. And it says the statements are at odds with the affidavits of two deputy sheriffs, present at the time, who characterize the blows as kicks.
So again, the state’s attorney is really calling into question Grismore’s credibility in describing the way that this incident went down. And of course, that’s, you know, a fundamental part of their relationship, right, is the prosecutor relying on the credibility of police in their jurisdiction. So in that case, the sheriff’s department here.
Shaun Robinson: So late last month, there’s yet another development in this story. So every two years, under state law, sheriffs’ departments are required to be audited. So the state auditor oversees that process. They generally contracted out to individual auditing firms to do it. So it was a fairly routine audit that this firm was doing of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. And at some point in that process earlier this year, they found what the State Auditor Doug Hoffer has described as “questionable” financial records or questionable finances.
The auditor’s office hasn’t said publicly what those questions are, what those records are necessarily. But it was certainly enough that it raised the eyebrows of the auditing firm. And then they kind of went up the chain to the state auditor.
So they’re investigating both financial records at the office in general, and they’re also investigating Grismore specifically. They actually drew that distinction in the state police statement: We’re investigating the sheriff’s office’s finances, and we’re also investigating Grismore.
Riley Robinson: I remember when you were writing about Grismore around and after the election in November, there was some chatter with Franklin County lawmakers, and some folks had mentioned the possibility of impeachment. And it turns out that impeachment is legal in Vermont, but it’s kind of rare. Can you tell me more about what you learned?
Shaun Robinson: Yeah, so impeachment has a limited but kind of colorful history in Vermont.
According to the secretary of state, there have been four efforts to impeach state officials since 1800. Only one of those actually led to a trial. And interestingly enough, that was a county sheriff.
Riley Robinson: Hey, sidebar here – state-level impeachment is a pretty similar process to a presidential impeachment in Congress. The Vermont House votes to impeach, and the state senate votes whether or not to convict. Both require a two-thirds vote.
Shaun Robinson: So this was 1976. This guy named Malcolm Mayo, or Mike Mayo, who was the sheriff of Washington County, had been accused of basically abusing his office in a few different ways. The House ended up bringing three articles of impeachment against Mayo. They alleged that he had falsified documents and reports that he had basically ordered deputies not to do their jobs. And maybe most interestingly, that he himself had actually assaulted or threatened people at bars in Stowe and Montpelier, so local bars in Washington County.
So these three articles of impeachment happened in the House. But the Senate actually ends up voting to acquit Mayo.
Riley Robinson: So it sounds like maybe just like a presidential impeachment, it is extremely unlikely for anyone to actually be removed from office that way.
Shaun Robinson: It is. Yeah. And in fact, the last time in Vermont, the last time that an official was impeached and convicted was 1785. So it’s been a while.
Riley Robinson: What happened in 1785? Why was that person impeached?
Shaun Robinson: I do have some of the story, yeah. So there was this state representative from Arlington named Matthew Lyon. He was impeached for refusing to release records related to the confiscation of people’s property from British sympathizers. Some people at the time suspected that Lyon was profiting from the seizure of property. And again, you gotta remember, this is 1785, right. So British sympathizers are still a concern for folks, for sure. Lyon actually married the niece of Ethan Allen and helped found the town of Fair Haven.
He’s got a fairly, you know, prominent place in Vermont history. He’s actually probably best remembered though as a representative of Vermont in the U.S. House.
Riley Robinson: I’m sorry, I’m just gonna ask a question here. So he was impeached and removed from his office as a state representative in Vermont. And then he went on to be elected to the U.S. House after that?
Shaun Robinson: He did. Yeah. So he was elected to the U.S. House after that. He served in Congress. And he’s probably best remembered in history for brawling with a Connecticut congressman on the floor of the U.S. House.
Lyon was actually imprisoned in Vermont at one point. He was imprisoned under the Sedition Act, which was passed by the Federalist government at the time. And he actually won reelection to Congress from his jail cell in Vermont.
So yeah. A pretty colorful life story from Matthew Lyon. And again, this is the most recent impeachment and conviction in Vermont, so it’s been a while.
Riley Robinson: The state Legislature has not started an impeachment proceeding against Grismore. Sen. Randy Brock, from Franklin County, said lawmakers probably wouldn’t consider impeachment before Grismore’s criminal charge is resolved.
But they have started looking at other ways to increase oversight of county sheriffs. This is Tiffany again.
Tiffany Tan: Some senators have sponsored a bill to try to make some changes with the way the sheriff’s departments function. But it’s really very limited because the Vermont Constitution basically has separation of powers. The sheriffs, which are within the executive branch, are separate from the lawmakers. And there’s really not much that lawmakers can do right now, unless they change the constitution, which is the other thing that they’re trying to do.
So besides the bill — which sponsors have told me is the way they want to cope with some of the issues they’ve seen short term — longer term, they want to resolve some of these problems by changing the constitution. By, for instance, by adding qualifications for sheriffs, residency requirements.
Riley Robinson: There’s no rule about who can be sheriff? Are there any rules about who can be sheriff in Vermont?
Tiffany Tan: That is really interesting because according to a constitutional expert that I spoke to, and some state officials, the Constitution does not explicitly require sheriffs and state’s attorneys to be residents of the county where they serve, that elects them.
Riley Robinson: Local sheriffs are explicitly mentioned in the state Constitution as a form of government? Like they’re written into the state Constitution?
Tiffany Tan: Yes, they are. The backstory is that before the Vermont State Police was created, essentially, the sheriffs had a lot of power. And that was like the main law enforcement authority that you’d go to.
Riley Robinson: What do the sheriffs do? Can you tell me what sheriffs do in Vermont?
Tiffany Tan: Most people probably think of them as having their law enforcement responsibilities, which they do. They help enforce traffic and they can investigate certain crimes. But a part of it is also just doing civil processes, like serving notices, serving court records to people who need to receive them.
And of course, as part of the setup here in Vermont, a big part of the sheriff’s department budget comes from the contracts they do with towns, businesses, so they can provide security. Some towns that don’t have their own police, they do patrol work for the towns.
A chunk of their budget comes from the county. Like for the Bennington Sheriff’s Department, for example, the money they get is at least $300,000 in recent years comes from the county, and that’s public funds. And then at least a million, in recent years, they earn that from contracts.
And out of that, sheriffs, by law, are allowed to add 5% to the cost of the contracts that they have. They can take that 5% and are allowed to take the entire amount, if they wanted to, for themselves, to add to their salaries.
Riley Robinson: The sheriff personally? Like not just for their department, but to their own personal paycheck?
Tiffany Tan: Yes. That’s the law.
There’s a bill right now in the Legislature, where some senators are proposing removing that 5% option, because they’re saying, in no other government position do you have that option for that extra money — only the sheriffs.
I guess this can be expected, but the Vermont Sheriffs Association said that, right now, they’re against the bill. They’re saying they’re against S.17, the way it’s written. But they agree that reforms are needed, and they want to work with legislators to make reforms. The Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs also said that they also don’t like the idea of removing the 5% administration fee, because it looks like you’re punishing all 14 sheriffs for the problems of a few of them.
They’re saying, and it’s true, that some sheriffs have not taken the entire five percent. It’s up to them to decide what percent they can take the entire five percent home. That’s their right. But some of them have not taken the full amount — they send the rest back to their departments, and some even just roll in the entire amount back to their departments. And their representatives, the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, are saying that the money helps fund vehicles, training, uniforms — that that money is going to good use.
Riley Robinson: It seems like they took up this sheriff-related bill pretty early in the session. Do you get the read that this is a real priority for lawmakers this year?
Tiffany Tan: I really do. The co-sponsors include the chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee and the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as the President Pro Tem. So these are very powerful positions.
Riley Robinson: So it already has buy-in essentially, from the key committees that would need to support it, or at least from the chairs of those committees.
Tiffany Tan: Yeah, that’s what I see, that because of the sponsors being really key legislators, that it’s moving pretty fast.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Bill Bohnyak’s last name.