More than two months after Glenn Moshier was placed on leave as Ellsworth’s police chief, and two days after he was fired from that role, residents are decrying the lack of an explanation.
Members of the Ellsworth City Council have not said why they voted 6-0 to fire Moshier, pointing to laws that prevent them from releasing information about it. When the council has discussed the matter, it’s been in closed-door executive sessions, away from the eyes and ears of the public.
“Why was [he] terminated?” Abby Lee French commented on a recent Facebook post by the city. “We all want to know. You let everyone speculate but keep everything hush hush.”
That Facebook post included an official statement released after the city council voted Monday to terminate Moshier. It made no mention of him but acknowledged “some frustration” among community members with the frequency of executive sessions in recent months.
“These closed door meetings allow for discussions of sensitive information as defined by our charter, as well as state law,” the council said. “It’s important that any city council engage in executive sessions only when necessary. Yet our commitment to transparency must be balanced with the legal rights of city employees.”
Prior to Moshier’s firing, the only official detail released about the situation came from the chief himself: in late December, he confirmed that he had been placed on leave as the city conducted an investigation into an unspecified complaint. Moshier, who at the time was still serving in his second role as city manager, did not share more.
Now, Moshier is also on his way out from that second role. After announcing last summer that he would eventually step down as manager, his contract was extended to allow more time to find a replacement. But more recently, on March 4, Moshier was placed on leave from that role, with a new manager expected to start April 1.
Moshier had been serving as police chief since 2017 and additionally in the city manager role since 2021.
Now, some Ellsworth residents have grown tired of the opaque process leading up to his firing.
Ruth Moore, who unsuccessfully ran for council last fall, recently wrote an open letter questioning why Moshier had been hired for both roles and then had his manager contract extended.
“As a business member and resident in this city, I hear daily that something ‘doesn’t feel right’ about this situation,” Moore wrote. “There must be transparency rather than confidentiality to maintain public trust.”
Kristin Schlaefer, another former council candidate, also criticized the handling of the situation.
“It seems like some of the council’s decisions really don’t make sense and/or weren’t made with the best interests of the city in mind,” Schlaefer commented on Facebook. “Then, as [the council statement] points out, we as citizens don’t have any of the facts. Armed with the very little information we do have, this decision making is questionable, at best.”
The Bangor Daily News has requested documents related to Moshier’s firing under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, but the city won’t provide the records because state law considers them confidential, according to Ellsworth city attorney John Hamer.
Hamer has said that any final written decision about the firing will be considered public if Moshier doesn’t appeal it within 30 days — meaning it could be released as soon as April 11.
While Ellsworth has a formal process for complaints to be filed about municipal employees, any resulting investigation requires “absolute privacy and confidentiality,” and the waiting period for disciplinary decisions to be released must be enforced even when they’re approved in a public vote, according to the recent statement on the city’s Facebook page.
“While the lack of public information is frustrating for the rest of the city staff and the community, the employee’s right to privacy must prevail,” the statement said.
Because of those state laws around privacy, there’s often scant or no public explanation when public officials abruptly leave their jobs.
Eastport has fired two city managers in recent years, and each time councilors kept quiet about their reasons. Each manager had faced some public criticisms, but it’s not clear that they were factors in the firings.
Last year, when former Bar Harbor Town Manager Kevin Sutherland abruptly resigned after a little more than a year on the job, the only public explanation was that it was for “personal reasons.”
Yet his severance agreement — which like all municipal financial documents was considered public information — strongly suggested that the council may have wanted him to go. Sutherland was given less than 48 hours to accept before the agreement would have been withdrawn, and he was offered more pay than he would have received if he were fired.
Even after Sutherland left, some residents pressed for information about his job performance — particularly around his handling of a dispute involving a protester who scrawled political graffiti on sidewalks. Still, councilors declined to comment, citing confidentiality laws.
The issue of releasing public information about city employees has also come up before in Ellsworth.
Just last fall, councilors had a discussion about Councilor Steve O’Halloran — held in public at his request — to discuss an email that he’d forwarded to area residents with a complaint about a city employee. Hamer and other councilors told O’Halloran that he’d violated laws protecting the privacy of government workers.
Harold “Pete” Bickmore, Moshier’s predecessor as Ellsworth’s police chief, was reprimanded for disclosing information about a colleague to a local resident. When Bickmore abruptly resigned two months later, he did not give a reason, and then-City Manager David Cole declined to comment, citing confidentiality laws.
However, state law does allow for complaints against a municipal employee to be publicly disclosed if that worker agrees to it.
One example of this was when Nathan Young, Bar Harbor’s former police chief, agreed to allow his 2014 firing to be publicly discussed by councilors. During that session, then-Town Manager Dana Reed disclosed an investigation that found Young had been drunk behind the wheel of his truck the previous fall and had discouraged officers from looking into the matter.
