Holyoke Mayor Elaine Pluta withholds names of police chief candidates

The state supervisor of public records has said finalists' names must be made public.

Holyoke Mayor Elaine A. Pluta

HOLYOKE – Mayor Elaine A. Pluta Thursday refused to release the names of the three finalists for police chief, even though state rulings dating at least to 1976 generally have determined finalists’ names must be made public.

Pluta said that though the search process has narrowed the field from 39 candidates to three, those three haven’t been designated the official finalists for police chief.

A search committee Pluta appointed is meeting Saturday and might add two candidates to the three remaining. After those five candidates are put through an evaluation known as an assessment center June 18, three finalists will be designated and their identifies revealed publicly, Pluta said.

“We’re in a state of flux. These are not finalists. We’re still going to have the assessment center,” Pluta said.

A search is underway to replace Anthony R. Scott, who retired April 30 after having been police chief since 2001. His yearly salary was $133,164.

Pluta appointed an advisory committee in November that has limited its search for chief candidates to New England and New York.

Pluta’s refusal to disclose the identities of the three remaining police chief candidates comes six months after she decided that meetings of the search committee wouldn’t be public.

Alan N. Cote, the supervisor of public records, in the past has made reference to a 1978 Supreme Judicial Court decision to say finalists’ names must be public. In that case, the Northampton School Committee reviewed 90 candidates for school superintendent and narrowed the list to 16 and then to five.

The supervisor of public records at the time ruled the 16 names should have been public. The School Committee continued to refuse and the state attorney general took the committee to court and prevailed.

Also, former Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, in his “Open Meeting Law guidelines” in 2006, said a candidate’s right to privacy naturally recedes as he or she is screened out from other applicants.

City Solicitor Lisa A. Ball said under the city charter, the mayor has exclusive authority to appoint the police chief. Because the mayor is not a governmental body, the Open Meeting Law doesn’t apply to the mayor or to the mayor’s appointment of the police chief, she said.

Also, Pluta’s police chief search committee also falls outside the Open Meeting Law’s public-disclosure requirements because it is not a committee of the city, but a committee of the mayor, Ball said.

Court cases in the state have said that public employees have diminished expectation of privacy in matters relating to their public employment, Ball wrote in an email, but “an applicant for Chief of Police is not yet a public employee and therefore does not possess the same diminished expectation of privacy that he would otherwise have as an employee of the City of Holyoke.”

“For these reasons, the names of any potential finalists for the position of Chief of Police will not be disclosed at this time,” Ball wrote.