Hiring delay sought

Red Bank’s law enforcement saga continued Tuesday night as Mayor Joe Glasscock asked City Manager Chris Dorsey to delay the hiring of a permanent police chief.

The request came about eight weeks after Dorsey dismissed former police chief Larry Sneed, and Glasscock, standing as he spoke, used the controversy surrounding the firing as his primary argument.

“We are faced with a lawsuit concerning the dismissal of our former chief which contains questions concerning [possible] violations of the Tennessee Open Meetings Law,” Glasscock said from a written statement. “However small you believe the outcome of our defense to be with regard to this charge, I personally believe common sense would dictate we take a second look.”

Sneed recently sued the city and three of its commissioners for $1.5 million, claiming political conspiracy and retaliatory discharge based on Vice Mayor Monty Millard’s two arrests by the Red Bank Police Department.

The mayor also said November’s election could bring new commissioners and “corrections to city policy” with it.

“We could find ourselves dealing with two chiefs with settlement or buyout issues at stake,” Glasscock said.

When he concluded, Glasscock handed his statement to Dorsey, who smiled, put the letter aside and moved on with the rest of the meeting.

“I don’t know what the ‘corrections to city policy’ are,” Dorsey said afterward. “If it’s perceived as a threat to fire me, that’s no better than the implied, supposed accusation that I was forced to fire the police chief to begin with.”

When asked if he thought the mayor was playing politics, Dorsey said, “I don’t get involved in the politics.”

Interim Chief Dan Knight has been filling in, and Dorsey recently posted a job advertisement in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

“We have no idea how long the lawsuit will take to go through the system, whatever the final decisions will be on it,” Dorsey said after the meeting. “I can’t hold the city in limbo all that time.”