Pleasanton police chief resigns post, will stay on as part-time officer
By Roger Sims, Journal staff
PLEASANTON – Pleasanton Police Chief Tristan Snyder in an email to Pleasanton Mayor Mathew Young has indicated he will step down from his post.
Morgan Watts, acting city clerk for the city of Pleasanton, confirmed on Tuesday, Sept. 22, that Snyder has offered to take a part-time position with the department instead.
Watts said that Snyder sent the notification on Sept. 15.
She said he plans to continue to serve as police chief until a replacement can be hired. He has served on Pleasanton’s police force for more than 12 years and was sworn in as police chief in 2017.
Snyder has come under fire over the past couple of years as the Pleasanton City Council has wrestled with his department’s budget as costs have soared. At one time last year the police force included Snyder and three other full-time officers, and he maintained that was the size of force necessary to effectively patrol Pleasanton.
Earlier this year the city council refused on a 3-2 vote to confirm Snyder’s reappointment as police chief. In order for the appointment to fail, the council would have been forced to vote that he was unqualified or unable to do his job. The council eventually relented and approved his nomination, but the damage to the relationship may have been a deciding factor in his decision to pull back from the chief’s post.
However, criticism by the council has eventually led to officers leaving the force, and this summer had only one other officer before that officer left as well.
He was also criticized earlier this year because two of his officers lived in Fort Scott and were too far away to respond to emergency calls. He said that those officers likely would have been willing to move to the Pleasanton area, but rental property was either unavailable or priced too high for officers to afford it.
He blamed the Section 8 rent subsidization program through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for making rent in Pleasanton for people who don’t qualify for subsidies cost-prohibitive.
Because officers lived beyond the 10 minute response time, he frequently was on call and built up substantial overtime pay, which again brought public criticism. At the same time he said that the overtime negatively affected his family life and that he needed to spend more time with his wife and children.
Watts said that Snyder indicated he was going to work for the city of Osawatomie’s police department.
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