GUILDERLAND — It isn’t just the chief of police and the head building inspector. It’s also the comptroller, the clerk to the justices, and the assessor.

The majority of managerial roles in the town of Guilderland are held by women.

Women also account for two of the town’s five board members, and one of its three justices.

There are a few exceptions to this mainly-women rule, most notably the town supervisor. The others are the heads of water management, the highway department, and parks and recreation.

We spoke to a few of the women in leadership positions in the town to find out how they got there and what have been the challenges or benefits of being a woman in their jobs.

Carol Lawlor, Chief of Police

As a child, Carol Lawlor never wanted to be anything other than a cop when she grew up. She thought it would be “interesting” and “different every day,” which it has been, she reflected recently.

She may have been inspired by television shows, she says adding that there definitely “weren’t any female police officers around, back then.”

She was not a bookish kid, she says. “I was more of an outside person, climbing trees, getting dirty.” She recalls of her childhood in the 1960s, “You’d be outside from the time you had breakfast until dark. Maybe you’d make it home for lunch.”

She was raised, along with her two sisters, by parents “who are role models for me to this day, even though they are no longer with us.” Both of Lawlor’s sisters recently retired, one as a deputy commissioner for New York State’s department of Parks and Recreation, and the other as the chief operating officer of a nursing home.

Lawlor’s father was a salesman. Her mother Ruth Lawlor, served as deputy supervisor of the town from 1974 until her death in 1995. It was a position, Lawlor points out, “they haven’t had for years.”

Her parents were both, she said, “very kind, hard-working people. Thoughtful, smart.”

At the time, Town Hall was on Willow Street, in what used to be a schoolhouse and is now the State Police barracks, and Lawlor would often spend time there after school while her mother worked. Later, Lawlor worked for years for the parks department in the summers as a day camp counselor.

She studied criminal justice at North Country Community College in Saranac Lake before learning from her mother about a dispatcher position that had opened up in Guilderland. “That’s when I started working for the police,” she said.  

Lawlor, who is now 59, then took the police officer test and was sworn in about two weeks after she turned 21.

“We were pretty progressive back then,” she recalls. “There were only six officers here, and two of them were women.”

Lawlor said she was rarely talked down to because of her gender, although many people were surprised to see a woman officer. She noted that officers always had backup, although “sometimes not that close, because there weren’t so many.”

The scariest call she ever went on as an officer was one in which she was shot at. It was a domestic-violence call where a man had taken his family hostage. “When I got out of the car,” she said, ‘he shot at us. We retreated and called for backup.”

They got lots of backup, she said.

She has never had to shoot at anyone, she said.

The most trying case she has managed as chief was, she said, a still-unsolved 2014 case in which an entire family, parents and two young children, ages 10 and 7, were killed in their Western Avenue home.

Being a quadruple homicide, she said, made the crime “just horrific,” but children victims made it “that much more difficult.” The case is now being handled by the Major Crimes Unit of the New York State Police.

Lawlor met her husband, John Tashjian, on the job. He was a senior investigator, she said.

Asked if it was a workplace romance, she replied with typical droll understatement. “I wouldn’t say we were particularly fond of each other when we first met. But we just celebrated our 30th anniversary, so it must have all worked out.”

She and Tashjian have raised three children, who now range in age from 26 to 23. The youngest, a son with special needs, lives at home and works at Living Resources, Lawlor said.

In her experience, the world of the Guilderland Police is not a “man’s world,” she said, noting, “The police officers here have pretty much all been hired by me or have been hired while I’ve been here.”

She doesn’t mentor women officers, or treat them any differently. “Everybody’s treated the same. The women who are here have both come from other departments, and did their training there.” She said that Guilderland does mostly lateral transfers, and so hires officers who come with their training already complete.

There are just three women on the force now, including Lawlor. Guilderland hired another woman a year or two ago, Lawlor said, but, before ever starting, she decided to join the State Police instead. “We do recruitment, and we hire the best candidate. But sometimes we don’t even have any women apply. Or minorities,” she said.

The percentage of women among police officers in local departments nationally rose between 1987 and 2007, from 7.6 percent to nearly 12 percent, according to statistics from the Bureau of Justice. Percentages for women in state police departments across the country were lower and rose from just 3.8 percent to 6.5 percent over the same period.

With three women on a force of 35, Guilderland has a bit under 10 percent, which Lawlor does not think is out of line with national averages.

Lawlor became chief in January 2008, at a difficult time for the force, after former chief James Murley had been suspended without pay almost a year earlier, charged by the town with sexual harassment; misconduct in connection with a vendor; violations of the town’s ethics laws; and misconduct in keeping attendance records.

The two Republicans on the town board at the time, Mark Grimm and Warren Redlich, voted against appointing Lawlor as chief, alleging that she was complicit in Murley’s corruption, and arguing for an outsider. The town board’s Democratic majority voted for Lawlor, who was acting chief at the time.

“It was a very split board,” Lawlor said this week. “I’m not sure if they wanted somebody else, or if they just wanted somebody who wasn’t what the rest of the board wanted,” she said of Redlich and Grimm.

Reached by phone in Florida, where he now lives, Redlich said, “Chief Murley was caught and ultimately removed because he was going to casinos on town time. The evidence that we had was that Lawlor knew about it, and helped him cover it up. To me, that made her unfit for the job.”

Mark Grimm, who is now an Albany County legislator, said, “We interviewed a ton of candidates, and I just picked the one I thought was the best candidate. It was nothing against Carol. I said at the vote that we would all support her, and we did. As far as I can tell, she’s doing a fine job.”

New York State has just nine female police chiefs, and one elected female sheriff, according to Janine Kava, director of public information with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services.

There are advantages, Lawlor said, to having women as police officers. “We’re a little calmer and handle situations a little differently than men might.” She noted that Guilderland is a particularly compassionate police force, and that compassion is something that she looks for in the department’s “really in-depth” hiring process.

She is proud that residents often come to her with stories about how kindly they were treated by her officers.

Lawlor is respected by everyone at the police department, she said, “not because I demand it, but because I’ve earned it.”

She has no regrets, although, as chief, she does sometimes miss “being out there in the street.”

Jean Sterling, Comptroller

Comptroller Jean Sterling has worked for the town for 30 years. She is a woman steady in her commitments. She became a widow in July after almost 60 years of marriage.

She never went to college. “I did all of my learning right here. But they were some good teachers.”

As role models, Sterling names Joan Cox and Ruth Lawlor. “They were just marvelous, marvelous women,” she said. They always tried to help anyone who needed it. They were kind, had good senses of humor, and they were just good people.”

Sterling started out as secretary to Kevin Moss, who was then the town supervisor. She also started doing some work with Joan Cox, who was then the acting comptroller and whose son, Curtis Cox, is now the deputy chief of police.

“I was kind of her assistant,” Sterling said. “Back at that time, we all did a little bit of everything.”

The work with Cox, whom Sterling refers to as “Joanie,” included paying bills and looking them over.

“We all wrote checks by hand back then,” Sterling recalled recently of the time when she started, in the 1980s. “I actually had the first computer in Town Hall.”

When Cox announced her retirement, Ruth Lawlor, then the town’s deputy supervisor and the mother of Carol Lawlor, asked if Sterling would be interested.

“I had to do an interview with the town board,” Sterling said.

People at Town Hall are generally very friendly, Sterling said. She cited the example of the time she broke her leg in the parking lot in 2000, the first year that Ken Runion was supervisor. “The people here put together a calendar and brought dinner to me and my husband every night. For a month,” she said.

Jacqueline M. Coons, Acting Chief, Building and Zoning Inspector

Jacqueline M. Coons almost became a veterinarian. She started a pre-veterinary program at Oneonta, but quickly decided she didn’t want to be so far from home. Specifically, she didn’t want to leave the Fort Hunter Fire Department she had joined as a volunteer firefighter at age 17.

Someone pointed out to her recently, said Coons, who is now 34, that she has been with the fire department half her life.

She finished out the first semester at Oneonta, and then came back to attend Hudson Valley Community College, where she got an associate’s degree in math and science, with a concentration in engineering science.

She then did material estimating for an architectural woodwork company before beginning to work for the town.  

A past building inspector, Slavco Lenic, who was also a member of the Fort Hunter Fire Department, was leaving to take a job as a deputy sheriff, and suggested to Coons that she apply for his job. (Lenic has since returned to Guilderland, where he is now a police officer.)

She did, and then-Chief Building Inspector Donald Cropsey Jr. chose Coons as a building inspector. “He needed to choose two candidates of four. He chose me and another person who is no longer here,” Coons said. She started in 2007, at age 24.

When Cropsey left, Coons said, she was made building and zoning inspector and worked under the fire-prevention supervisor, Don Albright.

Then, after Albright left, Coons was promoted, in July 2016, to Cropsey’s former position, of acting chief building and zoning inspector. She is called an “acting” chief because she hasn’t yet taken the required Civil Service exam. She will take the test the next time it is offered, which she hopes will be in June, she said. Provided that she does well, the town board will have the option of appointing her to the permanent position.  

Coons’s background in engineering science helps with the work of a building inspector, she said, in terms of “being able to understand some of the physics, the forces on a structure, when you’re looking at a building.” Her math courses help too, she said.

Building-inspection work is helpful for firefighting, and vice versa, she said. “Good firefighters know the buildings they operate in and how construction works,” she said.

Some cities also use firefighters as fire inspectors, Coons said; in that case, those firefighters need to be certified as code-enforcement officers, which is a designation also required of building inspectors. One difference is that fire inspectors inspect only existing buildings, while building inspectors also inspect new construction.

Most of her work as acting chief building and zoning inspector, she said, involves understanding and interpreting the zoning or building codes and applying them to cases of violations and to the various development projects that come through the planning and zoning boards.

Residents are not usually opposed to the idea of a female chief building inspector, she said, although they are often surprised.

Coons is married with a young daughter.

When asked who The Enterprise should contact to find out how many female chief building inspectors there are in New York State, Coons said that she could find out, since she is the secretary of the New York State Building Officials Conference’s Capital District Chapter.

She went to a computer for a few minutes, then came back and said that, of the conference’s approximately 400 members, about 30 were female. But those would not all be chief building inspectors, she said; they include anyone in the code-enforcement field who works for either the state or a town, such as women who work for the state’s Dormitory Authority or Office of General Services. Coons said that those two agencies hire relatively large numbers of women.

The titles given to people in the field vary from one municipality to another, she said, making it hard to know exactly how many people are doing the same job. Coons was able to name two women who do the same work that she does: Melissa Cherubino, who is director of building and planning for the city of Cohoes, and B.J. Gettel, president of the statewide NYSBOC organization.

Firefighting is more challenging for women than the work of a building inspector, she said, in terms of the assumptions that other people make.

Over the years, as a smaller woman, she said, she has encountered some firefighters or instructors who say, essentially, “You’re a little girl, so you can’t do the job.”

She asks rhetorically, “Once you put on the mask and they can’t see if you’re a boy or a girl, then what does it matter?”

Coons is a member of Guilderland’s fire investigation team. Sometimes, on a scene, she said, “The cops will be like, ‘Ma’am, you have to stand back,’ and I’ll be like, ‘No, I’m part of the fire investigation team. So I get to go through.’”

Her predecessor, Cropsey, was on the job for over 30 years.

Coons may be with the town even longer.

“My intention, she said, “would be to stay here until I retire.”