This story by John Lipmann was first published in the Valley News on March 21.
WOODSTOCK — Festering tensions within the Woodstock Police Department spilled out into the open this week as the town’s police chief fought for his job at a marathon public hearing where the town manager and several department employees detailed their complaints about and lack of confidence in the chief’s leadership.
Wednesday’s nearly 14½-hour hearing was the first time since Chief Joseph Swanson was put on paid leave nearly six months ago by Municipal Manager Eric Duffy and since anyone in the town has spoken publicly about the situation.
The personnel hearing before the village trustees — who will ultimately decide Swanson’s fate — normally would be held behind closed doors, but it was conducted in public at the chief’s request. Swanson, a veteran officer who was promoted to police chief by Duffy in 2023, is challenging Duffy’s attempt to demote him to patrol officer.
The chief, who did not take the witness stand until after midnight, said he was surprised by much of the negative criticism from his subordinates he had heard over the course of the day and night.
“Everyone was friendly, usually people had a good attitude,” the chief told trustees. “On occasion there’s some ripples and bumps, but overall I felt morale was high, at least on most occasions.”
However, the testimony revealed a range of resentments with the chief, including one person who complained Swanson wore “mismatched socks” while in uniform.
Duffy, who had been on the job just six months when he promoted Swanson, told trustees toward the end of the hearing that he increasingly lost confidence in the chief’s leadership as he became aware of problems within the department.
“One of my goals is to have a functioning police department for the residents of the community,” Duffy said near the end of the hearing. “And based upon what I’ve heard the last few months that’s not possible if Chief Swanson comes back as chief.”
It’s not clear how much the public will find out about the resolution to the dispute.
The next step in the process is for attorneys for Swanson and the town to submit their “post trial” briefs to the trustees by March 28. Unlike Wednesday’s hearing, the trustees will deliberate in a closed session and “any decision will be a personnel record that the village will not disclose,” according to the trustees’ hearing officer.
Road rage origin
The path that led to the hearing that got underway at 10 a.m. in the basement of the Windsor County Building on Wednesday began with a road rage incident last October.
Swanson, who grew up in Woodstock and is a former chair of the town’s Selectboard, has been on paid administrative leave since October, when he and his husband, Nicholas Seldon, a local attorney, were involved in a motor vehicle incident on High Street.
The driver of the other vehicle filed a “citizen’s complaint” against Seldon and Swanson, which led Duffy to place Swanson on administrative leave while the Vermont State Police investigated what happened.
The state police investigation absolved Swanson of any criminal wrongdoing — his involvement was limited to preventing his husband and the other driver from a physical altercation — and a parallel investigation by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council cleared Swanson of professional misconduct.
Normally that might be expected to put matters to rest.
But while the two exonerating conduct reviews were underway, Duffy testified that he began to hear complaints from police department personnel about Swanson centered around his alleged failures to communicate, irregular work hours, poor records keeping, a messy office, unpleasant interactions with staff and habit of showing up sometimes casually dressed, among other infractions.
Those complaints led Duffy to hire an outside investigator, who conducted interviews with department personnel. In December, the investigator submitted a 17-page report of his findings. Around the same time the police union and dispatchers union issued “no confidence” votes for Swanson and called upon Duffy to hire a new chief.
In January, Duffy sent Swanson a letter detailing examples of his poor job performance during the 15 months that he had been on the job. That was followed shortly later with a second notice that Duffy had decided to bump Swanson down to patrol officer, the lowest rung in the police department, and where Swanson had begun his career with the Woodstock police nearly 20 years earlier.
As chief, Swanson is paid about $105,000 annually.
Messy office
Wednesday’s hearing featured testimony from six police department employees, including Sgt. Chris O’Keefe, the department’s No. 2 ranked employee and currently interim chief, recounting publicly their difficulties with Swanson.
At one point the hearing erupted into a shouting match between people in the audience and the hearing officer tasked with running the proceeding, Burlington lawyer Brian Monaghan. Monaghan accused Swanson’s husband of behaving inappropriately during the hearing and ordered sheriff’s deputies to remove him.
Seldon vehemently denied he had done anything to warrant the eviction as he was escorted out of the room, followed by a group of Swanson’s supporters.
Pressed in each case by Woodstock’s attorney John Klesch to say what they would do if Swanson was to be reinstated as chief, all of the employees said they would leave the department.
Michelle Sutherland, the police administrative supervisor who has worked for the department for 40 years and said her responsibilities include “all the paperwork.” She testified that Swanson appeared to keep irregular work hours and she was often left wondering where her boss was. Swanson also failed to keep his status current in the department’s computer log system, Sutherland testified, and she overheard him several times conducting “personal business” from his office phone.
Sutherland also said she received complaints that the chief did not return phone calls and that his office was unkempt.
“If he doesn’t pick up the trash, why should we?” Sutherland said from the witness stand.
One of the most unnerving things Swanson did was enter her office uninvited, Sutherland testified.
On Feb. 20 Swanson, who could only enter police offices with permission while on leave, was scheduled to come to his office to retrieve training records, she said. During his visit, Swanson came into Sutherland’s office to show her the exoneration letter from the Vermont Criminal Justice Center with specific passages highlighted.
“I did not need a copy” of the letter, Sutherland said, explaining his uninvited presence made her feel “uncomfortable” and intimidated.
Chief dispatcher Beth Therrien, who said she often was not kept abreast by the chief as to his whereabouts, testified she felt intimidated too when Swanson similarly showed her the letter and announced, “I’ll be back.”
Duffy said the Feb. 20 incident in particular was one of the reasons that led him to have second thoughts about the police chief.
O’Keefe, the sergeant and interim chief, testified that Swanson “wasn’t always there the full eight hours during the day. He kind of came and went when he wanted, not in uniform all the time.”
One incident that he found particularly “unprofessional” was a meeting with federal Homeland Security agents. O’Keefe said he had asked them to come to Woodstock to consult on how the police should proceed in regard to investigating a student who they worried might be planning a school shooting (The situation was later determined to pose no threat).
The federal agents drove down from Burlington and briefly met Swanson, who then left to go to the courthouse to watch a case argued by his husband. The agents, O’Keefe said, were “a little miffed” and O’Keefe admitted he had been somewhat embarrassed.
“We didn’t really know what we had yet at that time. It felt serious enough to bring two agents down to assist us with it. I felt like it should have been maybe more of a all-hands-on-deck-situation,” O’Keefe said.
Not all of the complaints against Swanson were as serious and some seemed to border on petty.
The complaint about mismatched socks by Sutherland, the administrative supervisor, triggered laughter in the room, leading Monaghan to furiously chastise the audience, warning that any such behavior would make him eject offenders from the meeting. He similarly rebuked Swanson and his lawyer, Linda Fraas of Manchester, N.H., when they exchanged laughter during a witness’s testimony.
For his part, Swason, who took the stand after midnight, testified his relationship with officers and dispatchers “felt very good.”
Swanson acknowledged he sometimes showed up at the office not dressed in full uniform, but said that was usually because he was on the way or returning from physical therapy he needed due to a gunshot wound he suffered responding to a 2022 murder-suicide incident.
Swanson called the casual dress complaints “something that has taken on a life of its own … I didn’t certainly consider it an everyday occurrence. I considered an occasional occurrence,” adding nonetheless that it is “certainly something easy to address”
And contrary to complaints that he appeared to be AWOL at times, Swanson countered he in fact was always available when needed.
He submitted documentation that showed during the 15 months he was chief, he made or received more than 900 phone calls related to police business during off-duty hours, including nights, weekends and holidays, as evidence that he had not been aloof from work.
Swanson did say he “pleads guilty” to having a messy desk.
Asked how if he were to return as police chief he might interact with people in his department who have been critical of his leadership, Swanson, whose father, Phil Swanson, served as Woodstock town manager for 24 years, replied it would require putting “on our grown up pants and have some hard conversations.
“I’ve always been able to work with someone regardless of my opinion of their belief system or their opinion of my lifestyle,” he said. “So I think that I would be able to manage it.”
