EXCLUSIVE: Township Manager Did Not Report Allegedly Intoxicated Workers To Police

Bristol Township Manager William “Bill” McCauley has worked hard to get where he is today.

The 58-year-old veteran of municipal government has worked his way from small New England towns after graduating from the University of Maine in the late 1970s to leading one of Pennsylvania’s largest townships. He was hired by the current council majority in 2012 to help reform a broken local government.

Since joining Bristol Township, McCauley, a Bensalem resident, has made a lasting impression in the Bath Road municipal complex where criminal investigations into employees and elected officials are not uncommon. A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter once wrote that Bristol Township’s “path from public service to penal servitude is getting as busy as nearby I-95.”

Along with the council, McCauley has led the township’s effort to improve infrastructure, bring more tax revenues to the township and restore trust in local government. So far, he has cut the staff, led a massive road resurfacing project that has fixed deteriorating streets, battled with township unions, defended himself after a local veterans group that accused him of insulting them, spearheaded an effort to replace all the streetlights with energy-efficient bulbs and took center stage in a scathing grand jury report that his taxpayer-hired attorney says is unfair.

In lawsuits, grand jury testimony and union grievances, McCauley can end up looking like the bad guy.

While Bristol Township Council President Craig Bowen, a local business owner and relative newbie to politics, and solicitor Randy Flager, a personal injury attorney and former New Hope Council member, have voiced their support for McCauley, his tenure leading the township has led to a number of employee complaints and incidents, including some that could call his judgement into question.

According to employees from two different township departments, McCauley’s leadership style is known to make some employees uncomfortable. He also is thought to pick favorites in the township that he knows will support him and carry out his orders.

“It can be a toxic place to work,” a former township employee said. The employee did not want to give their name, hoping they wouldn’t be “caught up in the stage show.”

During a grand jury last winter that investigated the crash of off-duty police Sgt. Kevin Burns, now-retired police Lt. Guy Sava testified that he has never seen bullying to the magnitude of what had happened with McCauley. “Today I was worried about getting seen … about sitting up here, about testifying, and about it getting back to the manager,” Sava told the grand jury. Sava testified about the unpleasantness of the work environment after McCauley launched an investigation into Burn’s crash, which McCauley suspected was related to alcohol and not exhaustion, as Burns had claimed.

In an ongoing lawsuit filed by former Bristol Township sewer plant operator John Cichonke, the Croydon resident claims the township manager used government resources to harass him. He claims in the suit that McCauley did not initially believe blood clots in his chest were a serious medical condition and asked for a second medical certification. The township manager also allegedly directed a township employee to visit the Croydon VFW, where Chichnoke is a past president, under false pretenses to make sure the sewer worker was not drinking on a day he called out of work due to a flare-up on a painful condition he was diagnosed with. In addition, Cichonke said he was embarrassed after a township employee not trained on how to properly give a breath test administered using a breathalyzer, which registered negative, after believing he was drinking on the job. Chichonke is suing for violations to the Family Medical Leave Act and a violation of his Forth Amendment right.

In an age discrimination lawsuit filed and lost by former township Human Resources Director Paula Kearns, who did not wish to speak for this article, she claims that she told McCauley during a meeting that he “does not ever thank anyone for doing a good job and that she has done everything he has asked of her, even if she does not agree with it.”

The grand jury that investigated Burns wrote in their report, which is currently being contested by McCauley’s township-hired attorney, that testimony by more than a dozen officials, including McCauley, showed he “shamefully discredited” the officers involved. The township manager claims that he was doing his job to make sure there was no cover-up in the police department.

When asked about the complaints by former and current township employees, Flager deflected and cited how McCauley has tackled the township’s financial situation, which left the local government teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and improved service to taxpayers while cutting down the size of the staff.

Bowen told LevittownNow.com the claims by former and current Bristol Township staffers were mostly just complaints from “disgruntled employees.” “He can be rough and crude but he holds people accountable,” the council president said.

Court records appear to show McCauley, who himself was previously found guilty of a 2007 hit-and-run that happened while he was intoxicated, doesn’t appear to hold all employees accountable.

Two Bristol Township employees were reportedly found with intoxicating substances in their systems while at their jobs and in possession of township vehicles.

In one incident, an employee driving a township vehicle was rear-ended while at a stop sign in 2012. A subsequent drug test showed the employee had marijuana in their system at the time. McCauley said during depositions for Kearns’ case that he did not report the drug test findings to police and he determined the drug test violated township policy and put Bristol Township in ” jeopardy of litigation.” He also stated he took the employee’s drug test reviews out of his personnel file. “I don’t want the township getting sued,” McCauley said when asked by an attorney if he felt the test results should be part of the employee file. The employee no longer works for Bristol Township.

The second incident involved a township worker who had received a breathalyzer test that indicated he was drunk. The employee, who was in charge of a township vehicle, was allowed to retire and police were not notified of the incident. “I chose to exercise some compassion. I offered [the employee] the opportunity to retire and maintain his pension and continue to support his family,” McCauley said during the deposition.

Bowen said he did not wish to talk about the two incidents and questioned whether the motives for LevittownNow.com’s article were political.

The council president said McCauley is much needed to keep the township on the right financial path. He said without McCauley, Bristol Township’s tens of millions in unfunded liabilities would have sank the local government and cause tax increases that would hurt senior citizens living in the community of roughly 54,000 residents. “Who else would want to do the job and who is competent?” he questioned.

Bowen said the township has gotten rid of employees who were political hires or were wasting taxpayers money.

“Bristol Township has been a political cesspool for at least 40 years. I accepted the job of trying to clean-up the mess of corruption, incompetence, and mismanagement in January 2012. The most amazing thing I have observed and experienced is the amount of resistance to my instilling integrity and ethics into the local government and complete lack of support from so many varied parties,” McCauley wrote in a response to the Burn’s grand jury report.

McCauley, according to Bowen, is upset that the grand jury investigation designed to look into whether a police cover-up followed Burns’ crash turned into a scathing report on his management style. It’s an issue that Philadelphia-based attorney Harvey Sernovitz is arguing before a county judge in an attempt to get the report dismissed. He wrote in a court filing that the 37-page grand jury report is “poisoned by bias and improper motives on the part of the District Attorney, improper manipulation of the grand jury, a failure to properly instruct the grand jury on the law applicable to the facts of this matter, and the failure to present to the grand jury exculpatory evidence.”

With more than $60,000 spent on the Burns matter and fighting the grand jury report, the township continues to rack up legal bills related to the case.

Bowen said the investigation into McCauley is related to politics and him upsetting the order of things in the township. He cited previous cases involving corruption and alleged corruption in Bristol Township when explaining his theory.

“The grand jury Report is, itself, a cover up of the cover up. Its object is to protect certain Bristol Township police officers and to do so at the expense of the reputation, character and career of William J. McCauley, III. This is a grand jury that was totally dominated by the district attorney’s office and deliberately led into unauthorized areas of investigation without proper instruction on the law and without full access to all of the relevant evidence in possession of the prosecutor,” Sernovitz response to the grand jury reads.

Flager said it is unprecedented that a judge would allow a response to a grand jury report. He notes the township manager has spared with some powerful unions that don’t like that he is a “no nonsense, honest guy.”

The township has also recently sought input on grand jury investigations from former Assistant U.S. Prosecutor Steve Britt, who believes Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler’s “‘grand jury’ is a canard and a fraud.” He said in an email circulated to council members and obtained by LevittownNow.com that Bucks County’s “grand jury is used exclusively to give political cover to some sort of nefarious plot or cover-up by the district attorney.”

Assistant District Attorney Robert James said in summer he stands by the report and disputes the alleged flaws McCauley and his legal counsel find with it.

Despite the issues that have cropped up, the majority of council have continued to support McCauley, who did not respond to LevittownNow.com’s multiple request for comment.

“I’ve had personal failings,” McCauley told the council when he was hired in 2012. “I have read that when you make a mistake the best thing to do is to acknowledge the mistake, learn the experience and move on with your life.”