City manager on Kyiv: I wasn’t briefed, I was texted
Reno City Manager Andrew Clinger said Thursday he did not receive a full briefing on the police chief’s plan to deploy five officers to Kyiv to help train an emerging Ukrainian police force.
Instead, Clinger said he gave his go ahead after a brief text message exchange with Chief Steve Pitts.
That contradicts what Pitts told the Reno City Council and the media in the wake of the controversial training trip that was scuttled by the council over concerns elected officials weren’t kept in the loop prior to the deployment.
“Steve and I had exchanged some text messages on this issue and then I had a conversation with him about it,” Clinger said. “It was basically, ‘Hey, we’ve got this opportunity in Kyiv, Ukraine, what do you think?’ I asked him some questions about how long is it, what’s the cost of it. It was literally half a dozen text messages back and forth.”
At a council meeting last month, in which the council voted 4-3 to bring the officers home mid-mission, Pitts took responsibility for the decision to send the officers on the eight-week trip to help stand up the first civilian police force in the former Soviet Republic.
But he also said he briefed Clinger.
In an email to the Reno Gazette-Journal after the council meeting, Pitts said: “The CM was briefed in detail and approved my recommendation to assist in this effort.”
In hindsight, Clinger said he should have requested a detailed briefing before giving the go ahead.
“Did I approve this? The answer is yes. Would I call that a detailed briefing? No. Would I do it differently? Yes, I would,” Clinger said.
After his discussion with Pitts, Clinger said he was under the impression the trip would be fully funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is in charge of the program provide community policing training to police in new democracies. While the DOJ footed the bill for the travel, the city was responsible for paying the officers’ salaries.
The total cost to the city for salaries, overtime and benefits during the trip was $71,849, according to a spreadsheet obtained by the Reno Gazette-Journal. That includes $10,070 in overtime expenses for the officers that was paid for by the police department’s forfeiture fund.
The officers also incurred another $4,833 in expenses, including $1,273 for polo shirts, $845 for passports, $2,455 in baggage charges and $260 for cell phone upgrades.
Pitts said the Department of Justice will reimburse the city for those expenses.
“I was under the impression that the cost to the city would be nothing and that the DOJ would be picking up everything,” Clinger said. “It wasn’t until later that I realized they were picking up all the costs except for salary. In that case, a detailed briefing would have been more sufficient.”
Mayor Hillary Schieve, who lead the effort to bring the officers home from Kyiv, said she was frustrated by the repeated misinformation.
“We were told the DOJ would pay for everything, that this was a grant, that they were only going for two to four weeks,” Schieve said. “Then we were told the city manager was briefed in detail and then come to find out it was all done through texts. It’s a tough position to be in with that limited kind of information.
“People have a lot of questions that weren’t answered or were answered incorrectly.”
Clinger and Pitts said they are also developing a process for briefing the City Council on such trips in the future.
“This council is looking at things differently than probably the old council looked at them,” Clinger said. “They want to make sure that they get briefed and have the opportunity to approve these sorts of requests. So, Steve is working right now on a process that will make sure in the future that that happens.”
Schieve said such a process is needed.
“We need to be able to really have a plan if we are sending officers to foreign countries or other cities,” Schieve said. “It has nothing to do with being briefed. It has everything to do with safety and our critical labor shortage.”