Info Release About Firings of Fire Chief and Lieutenant
Has privacy been violated?
On July 5 the town released to the public documents associated with the firings of Fire Chief Jaye Vilchock and Fire Lieutenant Sandra Vilchock under provisions NH’s Right-to-Know law.
Public employees have a right to privacy regarding personnel matters; however, they are free to waive these rights, causing documents to become public. Former Fire Department Lieutenant Sandra Vilchock sent a letter (previously published) to the town waiving her privacy rights and requesting several documents be made public.
For most of these requests, the response from the town was either that there were no such documents, or that the documents were protected attorney-client communications, or that anything discussed or documented specifically for a non-public session of the Board of Selectmen was not subject to disclosure.
Two of the requests were fulfilled. I received redacted copies of:
The investigator’s report, which is a single document for the investigations of both former employees.
All correspondence between the Town Administrator and the Interim Fire Chief.
In addition to what Sandra Vilchock requested, I requested copies of the termination letters sent to Sandra Vilchock and Jaye Vilchock. I received redacted copies of these.
I have now read all of these documents. I will be publishing several articles about their contents.
What I found most surprising was what was and was not redacted. Sandra Vilchock waived her privacy rights with regard to the investigator’s report. Jaye Vilchock has not waived his privacy rights. However, the redacted copy of the investigator’s report contains no redactions whatsoever about anything associated with Jaye Vilchock. Instead, Sandra Vilchock’s name is consistently redacted throughout the report.
It appears to me that whoever was responsible for redacting the report - presumably the town’s attorney - erred about who waived their privacy rights.
These were not the only redaction issues.
The report redacts the names but not the titles of the three Fire Department lieutenants. The lieutenants’ names differ in length such that it is obvious which lieutenant is being referred to despite redaction.
The only thing redacted on the termination letters was the Vilchocks’ mailing address - which anyone can discover using a search engine. As the termination letters contain personnel matters - and the Board of Selectmen has been so adamant about not being able to disclose personnel matters - I was expecting heavily redacted texts.
