Former Bradley Beach Chief of Police Leonard Guida has gone to court, trying to stop disciplinary proceedings initiated against him by the Borough Council.
State Superior Court Judge Owen McCarthy issued an order delaying any disciplinary action until the judge can rule on Guida’s complaint.
McCarthy is scheduled to hear arguments in the case at 9 a.m. on Tues., March 26.
Guida’s attorney, Charles Uliano, asked the judge to order a halt to the disciplinary procedure.
“Defendants took this improper action in order to delay plaintiff’s entitlement to his retirement benefits,” Uliano said in the complaint.
The council met in executive session on Sun., March 3 before voting to initiate disciplinary action against a borough employee who was not publicly named.
By filing the complaint, Uliano confirmed that Guida was the employee in question.
Uliano said Guida was not notified of the meeting in advance, and that he received notice of the council’s action the next day.
“Plaintiff retired prior to the issuance of the disciplinary notice, and therefore the notice is moot,” the attorney said in his filing. “There was no emergency, urgency or importance to warrant a special meeting without the required notice since plaintiff had retired prior to the special meeting.”
At the time of the meeting, Borough Attorney Greg Cannon said the unusual Sunday session was needed to comply with time requirements which had to be met if disciplinary action were to be taken.
Cannon and the council said borough ordinances give disciplinary authority for police activity to the entire council and not just the mayor.
Before the council could review the Guida matter, Mayor Larry Fox announced to reporters that Guida was retiring six months ahead of schedule and that the chief would receive payouts from the borough over the next three years for accrued time due to him by contract. Those payments are in addition to the pension he is scheduled to receive after working in the borough for more than 40 years.
Named in the legal action filed by Uliano were the borough itself, Council President Jane DeNoble, and two members of the council, Al Gubitosi and John Weber.
Councilwoman Kristen Mahoney and Fox were not present at the special meeting, which was attended by at least a dozen members of the public and several members of the borough police department. Others watched online via streaming video.
The resolution approved by the council set Wed., March 27 at 11 a.m. as the date and time for a hearing on the charges against the employee.
Uliano said in his filing that according to state law, the person conducting the hearing “must be a neutral party and not the same group that filed the charges.”
Included in the court paperwork is a printout from a state database indicating that Guida applied for retirement on Jan. 29, 2024 with a retirement date of March 1.
The resolution approved by the council cited a number of incidents detailed in a report by Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond Santiago. The report was dated Jan. 18 and was addressed to Fox and acting borough administrator Meredith DeMarco.
Gubitosi said Fox withheld the report from the council and borough attorney Cannon for six weeks.
More than two dozen findings were sustained against Guida, according to the prosecutor.
“The findings outlined in this report illustrate unmistakably that over the previous year and a half, Chief Guida has been an active hindrance to the very law enforcement agency he was entrusted to lead,” Santiago said in a statement. “The picture the report paints is not pretty, but that is precisely why we felt that it was so vitally important to publicly release it. Transparency is rendered meaningless if ugliness is kept opaque.”