By Mike Donoghue, Senior Correspondent
The Woodstock Village Trustees have sided with Municipal Manager Eric Duffy in his efforts to demote Police Chief Joe Swanson to patrol officer, according to his defense lawyer.
Duffy and the five Village Trustees have remained silent about the decision and have yet to confirm the findings.
“The trustee’s written findings contain inflammatory, malicious, insulting attacks on Chief Swanson’s character consistent with the bad faith motives of Mr. Duffy and the Village in their extraordinary unlawful attempts to remove Chief Swanson from his contracted position,” his attorney Linda Fraas told the Vermont Standard.
Fraas said she expects a civil lawsuit seeking monetary damages will be filed this month against Duffy, the Village and Town of Woodstock, and other defendants.
The causes of action in the civil lawsuit will include “breach of contract, wrongful discharge, intentional infliction of emotional distress, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and tortious interference with contract,” she said.
Fraas also said the trustee’s decision upholding the demotion will be appealed within 30 days to the Vermont Superior Court in Woodstock as required by law.
The Manchester, N.H. lawyer said she told Swanson the outcome and shared a copy of the 47-page decision, but has not had a chance to meet with her client to fully discuss it. She said until she meets with Swanson she was inclined to withhold the report.
She said the Village Trustees and Duffy are free to release the public document. Fraas said there is nothing under Vermont’s Public Records Law that mandates that they withhold the report from taxpayers.
Attempts by the Vermont Standard to obtain the public report from Duffy and the five Village Trustees, including chair Seton McIlroy were unsuccessful in recent days using the Vermont Public Records Law.
McIlroy responded with an email that Duffy would answer for her. The Standard reminded her there is no provision in Vermont law for recipients of requests for public records to pass that legal responsibility to somebody else.
Fraas said Swanson has been told to report for duty as a patrol officer at 7:30 a.m. Thursday and she said the veteran officer intends to follow the directive.
The order came from one of two lawyers representing Duffy, John Klesch in Burlington, she said.
“In the meantime, while this matter makes its way through the legal system, Chief Swanson intends to continue to serve Woodstock in the capacity of patrol officer to assist the Town with the shortage of police officers,” Fraas said.
Sgt. Chris O’Keeffe, the acting chief since last October, confirmed this week that Swanson has been told to report for patrol work Thursday morning. He said he expects he will assign Swanson to work a combination of evening (2 p.m. to 10 p.m.) shifts and overnight (10 p.m. to 6 a.m.) shifts.
Swanson will be filling the work shifts covered recently by Officer Owen Tarleton, who resigned from the department earlier this month.
Duffy, who hired Swanson as chief after a nationwide search in 2023, placed him on paid administrative leave in October 2024 for an unrelated matter. Duffy later announced this spring that he wanted to demote Swanson after losing faith in the chief’s work.
The decision by the trustees to affirm Duffy follows a 14½ -hour marathon hearing on March 19 and into the early morning of March 20.
At times during the hearing, it appeared as if Duffy was more on trial. The manager, who had been on the job just over two years, was on the witness stand for 4½ hours. Swanson, a hometown native, testified for about 45 minutes as the final witness.
It is unclear how much of a pay cut that the Village expects Swanson to take. Swanson continued to draw his $2,030 weekly salary during his 28 weeks of paid leave as chief.
O’Keeffe said Swanson will be placed on the union wage scale to reflect the roughly 18 years of police experience. He said Tuesday afternoon he did not have the union scale readily available.
O’Keeffe, as head of the police department, said this week he was not provided with the trustees’ written decision. In response to a Vermont Public Records request filed with him by the Standard for the Swanson report, O’Keeffe said nobody provided him with a copy and he was never given a chance to read it.
Fraas said the fight to make things right will continue.
“We remain confident that justice will prevail when reasonable analysis and proper law is applied by a jury and/or judge,” she said.
Fraas said Swanson had to go through the hearing with the trustees in order to have his case heard in Vermont Superior Court by a neutral judge.
Swanson was aware the deck was stacked against him at the municipal level, including the attempts to put the hearing behind closed doors, efforts to limit both public attendance and media coverage, and the refusal of McIlroy and vice chair Jeffrey Kahn to recuse themselves due to potential conflicts of interest, Fraas has said.
In an ironic twist, Swanson, as a patrol officer, will be eligible to rejoin — and get protection from — the police union, which helped get the chief demoted, Fraas confirmed. The police union issued a no confidence vote in Swanson once Duffy sought comments from employees about the chief’s performance.
“Joe is interested in continuing to serve the community,” she said in a phone interview.
Fraas said the Village Trustees made several factual errors throughout their signed report and put things into the report that were without testimony at the hearing. Some were simple facts, like including the wrong date for Swanson being placed on paid leave or misidentifying Michelle Sutherland multiple times throughout the report as being employed as an emergency dispatcher.
Sutherland, who has worked for Woodstock for about four decades, testified that she was the administrative assistant and was in the police union — not the dispatchers union.
Fraas said when the general public sees small facts are wrong in a report, it will be easy to lack faith for the bigger fact-finding issues in the document.
Kahn and trustees Brenda Blakeman and Lisa Lawlor, who were both re-elected in March and trustee Frank Horneck had all failed to respond by Tuesday night to the public records request addressed to each individually by the Vermont Standard.
The Trustees also did not offer any requested comments about their report on Swanson.
It was unclear how much time the trustees spent on writing, editing and proofreading their own report. The trustees never posted any known meetings with possible executive sessions to consider their deliberations.
The Village Trustees had hired Burlington lawyer Brian Monaghan to serve as their legal counsel for the Swanson case and to be the Hearing Officer to help with legal rulings.
Monaghan also was expected to help draft the final report. Both sides were given until March 28 to provide proposed Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law to the trustees.
Until the final report is released to the general public, it will be unknown how many offerings from each side were woven into the final draft by the Trustees.
Village lawyers John Klesch and Matt Bloomer, on behalf of Duffy, submitted a 34-page memorandum outlining their theory in support of the proposed demotion. It contained 151 separate factual claims based on the testimony at the marathon hearing.
Fraas, the chief’s defense lawyer, countered with a 22-page memorandum that poked holes in Duffy’s claims. It had 212 factual claims that she asked the board to adopt.
The main issue at the demotion hearing appeared to be whether Swanson did things that warranted his removal as police chief by Duffy with no warning. Swanson appeared to question why progressive discipline and corrective action orders weren’t used by Duffy.
Some of the complaints from the witnesses appeared minor: the chief was not always in uniform, he maintained a messy office, he wore mismatched socks, and he did not always tell employees where he was going, or did not always answer their phone calls.
The employees complained Swanson got haircuts while at work, also went to rehab for injuries received when he was shot in the line of duty. The trustees were never told how often those items happened. Most of the complaints at the hearing were generalities without times, dates and backup documentation.
Duffy had provided Swanson a positive annual evaluation in July 2024 that said the department was running smoothly and there were no employee problems or concerns.
Three months later, Duffy reversed himself after he hired a private detective to interview employees about complaints they had started to make about the chief.
After the investigation Duffy said he had contemplated firing the police chief, but in his final analysis a demotion was proper because he believed Swanson was still a good officer.
During the demotion hearing some employees claimed they would quit — and others would also — if Swanson was allowed to return as police chief. Duffy testified his decision was whether to lose the department or Swanson as chief.
After the marathon hearing ended, Village Trustees were later provided letters from at least four village police officers and one town emergency dispatcher that contradicted the hearsay testimony that they were among those that planned to walk off the job if Swanson was re-instated as chief.
It is unknown if the Village Trustees considered or discarded the five new letters.