Tuesday, November 11, 2008 5:56 AM EST
By Mark Zaretsky, Register Staff
EAST HAVEN — The town and Chief of Police Leonard Gallo have brought in former New Haven Corporation Counsel Steven Mednick as an independent mediator to try to find a resolution in the matter involving Mayor April Capone Almon’s attempt to discipline Gallo for his alleged destruction of department personnel records, sources said.
Both sides have signed a confidentiality agreement, sources said. Neither side would confirm that — or that the matter is in mediation or that Mednick is involved.
Capone Almon and Town Attorney Patricia Cofrancesco declined to comment.
Gallo’s lawyer, Frank J. Kolb Jr., would neither confirm nor deny that Mednick had been brought in as a mediator.
Mednick knows Gallo and Cofrancesco from their days in New Haven. He was Cofrancesco’s boss when she was an assistant corporation counsel in New Haven.
Gallo was a captain in the New Haven Police Department prior to retiring — after 27 years with that department — and eventually taking the job as chief in East Haven.
The hiring of Mednick as a mediator followed Capone Almon’s attempt to hold a “pre-termination hearing” on charges that Gallo took disciplinary records out of certain police personnel files and destroyed them.
While the hearing is called a pre-termination hearing, Capone Almon and Director of Administration and Management Paul Hongo Jr., who acts as the town’s labor relations director, have said that they are not looking to push Gallo out of his job and that it could result in other, unspecified discipline.
The hearing opened Sept. 24, with Gallo refusing to attend. It was to have resumed in October, but did not after Kolb informed Capone Almon that Gallo would be out of state.
Instead, the town “agreed that notice of charges will be re-served following Oct. 31, with a statutory hearing date to be set thereafter for a date in compliance with state statutes,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.”
That has yet to occur.
The charges in the previous hearing included that Gallo violated town policy and a state law concerning the retention of public records and that violating the state law represented “commission of a Class A misdemeanor.”
All are related to Gallo’s admission at an Aug. 22 Board of Police Commissioners grievance hearing that he “couldn’t be 100 percent sure” that he didn’t violate the state’s records retention law when he removed disciplinary documents from the files of several officers.
Gallo has termed the administration’s actions “total overreaction,” “a political witch hunt” and “a political vendetta with public funds.” He has said that anything he did “was what I felt was proper and in agreement” with the union. Kolb has said that “if any records were removed, that was a pre-determined, pre-negotiated union deal.”
Capone Almon and Hongo on Sept. 2 removed the Police Department’s personnel records from Gallo’s office and impounded them in Town Hall.
That followed a grievance hearing the previous week in which Sgt. Paul Liquori and a union lawyer charged that Gallo removed items of discipline from some officers’ files, but not Liquori’s. The Board of Police Commissioners upheld the grievance and ordered a letter of reprimand in Liquori’s file removed, and that it be done in accordance with state law.
Mark Zaretsky can be reached at mzaretsky@nhregister.com, or 789-5722.
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