The fallout continues in Holyoke over last year’s investigation that found a former police captain sexually harassed subordinates and violated other city and departmental policies.
Newly released minutes from a February closed-door meeting of the Holyoke City Council reveal that Holyoke’s lawyers are negotiating a settlement that appears related to misconduct allegations against former police Capt. Manuel Reyes. Last March, a junior officer accused Reyes of groping and kissing her without consent and making repeated, unwanted sexual advances toward her. An outside investigator found Reyes violated rules against sexual harassment in interactions with her and another woman officer. The department also concluded Reyes unlawfully looked up the criminal background of his estranged wife’s ex-boyfriend.
Reyes was able to retire last October before the city disciplined him, walking away with a lifetime pension and a $150,222 payout for his unused paid time off. Now, City Council records show that Holyoke may pay even more in a legal settlement with one of Reyes’ alleged victims.
The City Council hasn’t yet approved funding for any settlement. But this February, councilors considered City Hall’s request to transfer $300,000 from the city’s stabilization fund to an account meant for “claims and damages.” Councilors said little about the request in open session. But they did hold a closed-door discussion around the same time, which they justified holding in executive session because it involved a “litigation update.”
Although that discussion was held privately in executive session, last month the City Council was compelled to release minutes from the meeting after a city resident, Stephen Superba, filed a complaint with the state’s attorney general over the meeting’s secrecy. Superba argued that the City Council should have specified what litigation they were discussing in executive session. The attorney general agreed and, as a remedy, mandated that the City Council disclose the meeting’s minutes.
“The timing was such that I wondered it it had to do with the sexual harassment situation in the police department,” Superba, a retired Northampton police officer, told The Shoestring. “That’s what prompted me to file the Open Meeting Law complaint because I wanted to find out if that was indeed the case.”
It was, indeed, the case. The meeting minutes that the City Council released, which included redactions, dealt exclusively with Reyes and the allegations against him. They revealed, among other details, that the city paid $25,000 for the investigative report that found Reyes had violated sexual-harassment policies.
Then, in a full City Council meeting that same month, Ward 3 Councilor David Bartley said that the request for the $300,000 transfer was related to that executive session and one held prior to it. Bartley spoke out against the transfer, which councilors ultimately voted down 11 to 2.
“It’s a department problem that the departmental members caused, now they want to take it out of stabilization?” Bartley said during that meeting. “No … This is just poor governmental administration.”
Before voting on the matter, At-large Councilor Kevin Jourdain said that he understood another proposal to fund the settlement was in the works. That other proposal appeared in June, when the City Council took up a different transfer request: moving $150,000 from several line items in the police department budget to that same “claims and damages” account.
“This is an appropriation not really for a specific settlement but to fund a claims and damages account for which there are several matters pending, one of which has been discussed extensively three times in executive session now,” one of the city’s lawyers, Michael Bissonnette, told councilors.
That was a statement that At-large Councilor Michael Sullivan challenged during the meeting. “We all know this is specifically for one settlement, not a group,” he said.
Bissonnette said he wasn’t sure if additional money transfers would be needed to complete the settlement.
“In this case, we have the potential for a settlement, the parameters have been discussed in mediation and we’re hoping to move forward soon, having determined that the likely amount of the settlement will be far less than the potential expense if this case were to go to trial,” Bissonnette said at that meeting. City Solicitor Lisa Ball, he added, “has done an extraordinary job at holding this at bay for this long.”
Nobody has filed a lawsuit against the city yet related to the allegations against Reyes, though. The Shoestring filed a public records request for any settlement agreements or demand letters related to Reyes’ misconduct case and Ball said that no such documents exist. There is a Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination complaint against the city, Ball said, but she declined to release it.
“Certainly if this matter is resolved sometime soon, there will be documents that I could release to you,” she said.
Raymond Dinsmore, the lawyer for the police officer who first levied sexual harassment allegations against Reyes, previously told The Shoestring that the officer had filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Reached by email last week, Dinsmore declined to comment for this article.
Mayor Joshua Garcia, through a spokesperson, also declined to comment. City Council President Tessa Murphy-Romboletti did not return voicemails left on her phone in recent weeks.
At times, City Council discussions of the matter have grown heated over the successful efforts of a handful of councilors to block approval of the financial transfers related to the settlement.
At the City Council’s June 27 meeting, Bartley argued that the city was prematurely attempting to settle the case when nobody had filed a lawsuit yet. Councilors who represent the more conservative faction of the body joined him in voting down the transfer: At-large Councilor Howard Greaney, Jourdain, Ward 2’s Carmen Ocasio, and Ward 5’s Linda Vacon.
“I’m on the public record and I’ve said it more than once: I will not vote for any money being transferred until the matter can be shared with the public because it is public money,” Vacon told The Shoestring in a phone interview.
Tensions ran high during the meeting when councilors argued about how many votes were required to transfer money from one city department to another account: a supermajority of the 13-member body or a simple majority. Bissonnette said that state law allowed city councils to make interdepartmental transfers by a simple majority in the last two months of the fiscal year. But Jourdain and others pointed to the city’s charter, which requires a supermajority of nine votes. Ultimately, Murphy-Romboletti conceded to that argument and the minority faction defeated the transfer.
On Oct. 2, that same faction, together with Sullivan, again voted down another transfer request to fund the claims and damages account with $108,696 from the city’s cannabis stabilization account. The same group of councilors also voted not to let Bissonnette address councilors about the matter, drawing exasperation from Murphy-Romboletti.
“We’re moving on,” she said after the votes. “I’m done.”
Superba, who filed the Open Meeting Law complaint against the City Council, said that transparency was important to him. He still has another complaint pending with the attorney general that he said could open up the minutes from another City Council executive session on the matter. More important, though, is how city leaders are running the Holyoke Police Department and addressing allegations of sexual harassment, he said. He described the department’s leadership as “terrible.”
“You need to do a comprehensive examination and hold people accountable,” he said of a department where sexual-harassment allegations have surfaced. “To root it out takes concerted effort and you need to hold people accountable … And that’s not what happened.”
The investigative report into the allegations against Reyes found that Reyes kissed and touched the subordinate officer in his office, and that during a city-paid training at the shooting range, he gave her a racy poem that “compares the act of shooting to sexual intercourse.” Reyes previously told The Shoestring that it was a “fully consensual workplace romance.” When asked if it’s possible to have a consensual relationship with a subordinate, he said it depended on context.
“Reyes called me up to his office…and I had no choice,” the report quoted the subordinate officer saying in an email to a friend shortly after her initial encounter with Reyes. “He has so much power and I hate it.”
Reyes, who served on Garcia’s transition team when he was elected mayor in 2021, worked for around a decade running the Holyoke Police Department’s internal affairs unit, which investigates allegations of officer misconduct. An NEPM investigation into civilian complaints against Holyoke police found that of the 92 times an officer was named in one of those complaints from 2010 to 2020, only three ever faced discipline.
Last month, the City Council did begin the work of funding a confidential complaint hotline for city employees who wanted to file sexual harassment allegations, for example, outside of their departments.
The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.
Dusty Christensen is The Shoestring's investigations editor. Based in western Massachusetts, his award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in newspapers and on radio stations across the region. He has reported for outlets including The Nation magazine, NPR, Haaretz, New England Public Media, The Boston Globe, The Appeal, In These Times, and PBS. He teaches journalism to future muckrakers at both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College. Send story tips to: dchristensen@theshoestring.org.
