WOODSTOCK — Police Chief Joe Swanson has be demoted to patrol officer after a ruling by the Woodstock Village Trustees.

The five trustees issued a decision this week that sided with Municipal Manager Eric Duffy, who proposed the demotion last fall, according to Swanson’s attorney, Linda Fraas, of Manchester, N.H.

On Thursday morning, Swanson reported to work at the department as a patrol officer, the same entry-level position he held nearly 20 years ago, Fraas said.

“There’s no obligation for him to return to work as a patrol officer, but he’s the kind of guy that knows they are short of police officers and he’s not going to hold it against the public for what (the Trustees) have done to him. So he showed up,” she said.

The decision by the trustees appears to set the stage for a protracted legal battle. Swanson’s fight to be reinstated as police chief — or to seek redress for damages over what he claims is a breach of his employment contract — would now move to the courthouse.

“We’ll be filing a lawsuit in Windsor Superior Court next week,” Fraas said on Thursday, confirming news first reported in the Vermont Standard this week.

The decision by the trustees came out of a marathon 14-hour public hearing last month where several police department employees aired grievances over Swanson’s leadership.

Trustees have maintained they would not disclose their decision to the public, asserting that Swanson’s demotion was a “personnel matter.” (It was Swanson who insisted that last month’s hearing be open to the public, otherwise the trustees would have held it behind closed doors.)

Swanson, 45, was promoted to chief by Duffy in 2023 after decades with the Woodstock department.

He was placed on paid administrative leave last fall following a traffic incident during which his husband, who was driving, got into a verbal altercation with another driver.

Swanson was absolved of any wrongdoing in the traffic incident by two separate investigations. But the inquiries brought to the surface simmering tensions within Woodstock’s police department.

The department is currently being run by Sgt. Chris O’Keefe, who was the department’s No. 2 ranked employee under Swanson and is now interim chief.

Neither trustees nor Duffy responded to a Valley News request for comment this week.

Fraas said she is waiting to consult with Swanson before releasing the trustees’ 47-page decision to the public.

Fraas said the ruling was “really hard to grasp because it’s filled with so many insults and attacks on (Swanson’s) character, so many characterizations that are gratuitous, mean-spirited and hateful.”

Fraas contended that it is unlawful for the town to demote Swanson because there is nothing in his contract that allows it.

“They’re making up some statutory authority that doesn’t exist,” she said.

Any claim of “just cause is equally ludicrous based on the evidence” that was contained in an investigator’s report of Swanson’s leadership and the testimony of several department employees in a public hearing last month, she said.

Fraas ticked off a list of causes of action that she said would be included in Swanson’s lawsuit against the town, including “breach of contract, wrongful termination, intentional infliction of emotional distress and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

In addition to the lawsuit, Fraas said she expects to appeal the trustees’ decision to Superior Court for review, which is allowed under state municipal law.

Fraas said it is possible that at some point she may seek to have Swanson’s lawsuit against the town moved to another venue. She cited potential conflicts could that arise from among the various parties, ranging from their prior business before the court, the close contact between town officials and local residents and the wide media coverage of Swanson’s situation.

Swanson grew up in Woodstock and has previously served on the Selectboard. The town’s police, emergency and fire building is named after his father, the late Phil Swanson, who was the longtime town manager.

The current morass began in October when Swanson was a passenger in a vehicle driven by his husband, Nicholas Seldon, a Woodstock attorney. Seldon got into a heated encounter with the driver of other vehicle.

The other driver filed a “citizen’s complaint” against Seldon and Swanson, which led Duffy to place Swanson on administrative leave while Vermont State Police investigated the incident.

The investigation absolved Swanson of any criminal wrongdoing. At the same time, a parallel investigation by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council cleared Swanson of any professional misconduct.

During the investigations, Duffy — who had promoted Swanson to chief only 15 months earlier — began getting reports from police department personnel about Swanson’s job performance. The complaints centered on poor communication, irregular work hours, poor recordkeeping, a messy office, uncomfortable interactions with staff and a habit of showing up out of uniform.

The complaints led Duffy to hire an outside investigator, who delivered a report of his findings detailing Swanson’s supposed shortcomings. Around the same time, the police union and dispatchers union — each of which has a handful of members — issued “no confidence” votes of Swanson and called upon Duffy to hire a new chief.

Duffy, testifying at the Trustees’ hearing last month, said the subsequent knowledge led him to change his mind about Swanson’s management skills.

Duffy believed nonetheless that Swanson was a capable patrol officer and concluded that bumping him down to the bottom rung on the ladder in the department was the appropriate response.

In the “quasi-judicial” hearing where the five trustees sat as “jurors” in a trial-like setting run by a “hearing officer” who was hired by the village, Swanson finally took the stand after midnight, some 14 hours into the proceeding.

Swanson acknowledged he sometimes showed up at the office not dressed in full uniform, typically when he had an appointment with a physical therapist due to a gunshot wound he received in the line of duty in 2022.

He said he believed his relationship and interactions with officers and dispatchers “felt very good.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.