Cass Township says it’ll stick with coverage provided by Pennsylvania State Police instead of hiring a new police chief of its own.
Supervisors Chairwoman Brenda Helt announced Thursday that the police chief candidate the township had selected and believed was going to take the job backed out in the last week or so due to “personal reasons.” Those personal reasons weren’t with the township itself, Helt said.
“We were planning on the one. He was taking the job but then he had family issues that he had to take care of,” Helt said.
Helt added that supervisors had narrowed their search for a new police chief down to 4 candidates before arriving at their selection. Those 4 candidates came from a field of 16 that applied several months ago when Cass Township decided to reassemble its own municipal police force after disbanding it earlier this year.
When asked why the township isn’t going to approach the other 3 finalists, Helt indicated that it’s a possibility but said, “We’d have to bring them back in. We don’t even know if they’re interested because we told them we had chosen someone else.”
The Cass Township police department was disbanded after it was originally suspended back near the start of 2024. Cass officials pointed blame at bad management of the police force as it was assembled and mentioned a form that was filled out and submitted to the state by an officer that was believed to have resigned from their position.
Cass then tried to implicate its former police chief, Ger Daley, in a case of missing money from the evidence room. The township said it was conducting an investigation into the form issue but nothing has ever been made public about the results of that alleged investigation.
As for the missing money from the evidence room, it was found by an investigator from the Schuylkill County District Attorney’s Office the day after Cass Township officially disbanded the previous police department in the evidence room.
The township decided to reform the local police department after, as it said, the public expressed concerns about not having a police force in Cass.
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