Highway Department Employee Steve Bechtold Gently Pushed Into Retiring After 29 Years

When Steve Bechtold was at the podium this week at City Council for his retirement announcement, it did not seem like a moment that had a lot of former planning around it. During the speech/roast honoring him, Highway Superintendent of Streets, Michael (Micky) Manzi expressed that they were just discussing before the meeting who was going to do all of the ordering of shirts, since Steve was the one who had handled that during his 29 years of service in the department for the City of Beacon. Said City Administrator Chris White: “We're going to be lost." Micky agreed: "We will be lost. We're going to be shirtless I guess.”

At the time of his promotion to Head Mechanic in September 2020, Steve was named as lead organizer of an unsanctioned union petition on a complaint formally filed in March 2019 for harassment of Reuben Simmons, a fellow employee and former Highway Superintendent. The complaint targeted the process in which the petition was handled, which included Superintendent Manzi.

A verbal complaint was made 6 months later in September 2019 also from Reuben about Steve allegedly bringing a personal gun to work, which Steve allegedly revealed in the locker room during the work day.

Promoted to Head Mechanic of the Highway Department on what was supposed to be September 21, 2020 but was postponed due to pushback from members of the community who highlighted that the majority of the Water Department was white at the time, Steve’s promotion then was delayed for the night so that Councilmembers could feel that they had all of the information on all of the Highway Department employees positioned for promotions. Peter Delfico was up for appointment to Highway Department Auto Mechanic II and Nicholas Durso for Auto Mechanic I.

The harassment complaint against Steve was when he passed around an unsanctioned petition against Reuben, trying to prevent Reuben from being on a negotiating committee of the CSEA union for the department’s new contract at the time. However, Reuben was not on the negotiating committee. That and, the complaint alleges, Steve only circulated the petition to white employees of the department (Reuben is Black). Only later, after the union president Paula Becker (who was also an employee of the City of Beacon) was informed about the petition by Reuben, did Steve show it to two other Black employees in the department: Ed McNair and Troy Swain, who declined to sign it. Ed later resigned from his position in March 2021, citing unresolved racial tensions, making working in the Highway Department “intolerable” according to his resignation letter that ALBB has seen. At the time, there was one other Black employee in the Water and Sewer Department, Lew Swain, and an employee who is Dominican, Christian Cuello.

Reuben never filed a formal complaint about the gun, because, he says: “After I saw how the complaint went about harassment, I didn’t even try for the gun, even though it made some of us uncomfortable.” To document his discomfort, Reuben emailed Superintendent Manzi, who by then, was both Reuben and Steve’s boss (at one point, Reuben was both their bosses, but through another process initiated by department employees, was stripped of that position and further pursued by this current City Administrator Chris White for termination, who spent over $110,000 in legal fees at one point trying to fire Reuben, but lost the case).

After the email about the gun, Superintendent Manzi emailed Reuben that Steve would be told not to bring the firearm to work in the future. Reuben requested to have Superintendent Manzi’s email about the gun included in Reuben’s personnel file, but then City Administrator Anthony Ruggiero declined his request, Reuben told ALBB.

ALBB reached out to Ed McNair to ask how the alleged gun and response made him feel. Ed responded: “If it had been Reuben with a gun in the locker room, the discipline would have been harsh and made public.” Months after Steve’s 2020 promotion to Highway Department Head Mechanic, the City of Beacon’s then new HR Director, Gina Basile (she has since left), introduced a new firearms policy regulating personal guns in the workplace in December 2020, as reported by ALBB at the time.