ALTAMONT — Former Altamont police chief Todd Pucci had been enjoying a rather nice retirement — traveling all over the world, from Europe to Alaska, Mexico, and the Caribbean — when he got a call from then-chief Jason Johnston, who told him that he would be taking a job with the state attorney general’s office and hoped that Pucci would be able to step back in to fill the gap. 

“I told him yes, I would consider it,” Pucci told The Enterprise this week. “My wife, at this time, is still employed … so it wasn’t a big deal for me to come back.”

On Tuesday, Pucci learned through The Enterprise that Altamont’s mayor expects the part-time post to be a permanent appointment.

Johnston had resigned on July 5 this year, almost exactly two years after he had been named as Pucci’s successor. Before his retirement, Pucci had been chief for more than a decade, beginning in December 2010. He had been with the Altamont Police Department since 1997, working part-time while also holding a full-time police job in Cohoes. 

Pucci and Johnston had a long professional and personal relationship, having worked four jobs together — Johnston also policed in Cohoes, while serving part-time in Altamont — including non-police positions at Sears and a mall arcade. 

“We were friends for a long time,” Pucci said. 

Because it has been just two years since he originally retired, Pucci said that the job didn’t take much getting used to. All the officers on the squad — save for one, who resigned last month anyway — were people he had hired, he said, so the old rapport is still there. 

Whoever might come in to replace him as chief, Pucci said, will have to build those relationships, if they’re not an internal hire, as well as develop bonds with the community, which he called the “most important thing” about the job. 

When asked if that’s a difficult trait to come by in typical police chief candidates, Pucci said he wasn’t sure, but that “you have to be fortunate enough to find the right person.”

“In this day and age, it’s kind of tough to get police officers,” he said. “We got a bad rap there for a while, and the profession as a whole took a major hit. I know a lot of agencies were having problems retaining officers and getting new officers.”

Due to the national outrage over police killings and other excessive uses of force over the last few years, the candidate pool has shrunk, Pucci said.

 “So, yeah, I guess it’d be a little harder right now to get somebody who has exactly what you’re looking for,” he said. 

Plus, to become a police chief, there are Civil Service and psychological, physical, and training requirements, he said. 

But, his speculation is just that, since, for all his experience policing the Altamont community, Pucci hasn’t been asked, yet, for any recommendations or advice on a replacement. He also was not consulted when Johnston was chosen to replace him, though he said at the time that Johnston would have been his recommendation anyway. 

Pucci isn’t even sure whether the next chief will be a chief; it’s possible, he said, that the village will decide to hire a public safety commissioner, which affects the requirements he had mentioned, and advertising for a part-time position would net different candidates than a full-time one. 

Before Pucci, the department was led by Anthony Salerno, who was considered a commissioner until he was forced to resign by the state Civil Service Commission because he did not meet that position’s requirements. He was re-hired by the board of trustees as a “team leader,” which included a 50-percent pay raise and no exam requirements, with the mayor overseeing the supervisory requirements of the commissioner role.

Mayor Kerry Dineen, who was a member of the board of trustees that had enacted the workaround for Salerno, told The Enterprise after it had interviewed Pucci that there are “no plans to recruit to replace” him.

“The part time Chief model is working well for both the Village Police Department and our residents,” she wrote in an email. “We feel very lucky to have Chief Pucci back working in our community — his professionalism and expertise with community policing is a benefit to the entire Village.”

Reached for a response, Pucci said that there had been a general agreement that he would stay on through the end of the year, covering some of the village’s larger events, like the Altamont Fair and (though it’s since been canceled) the Capital Holiday Lights display.

“I don’t see it being a years type of thing, but we really haven’t discussed a length of time,” Pucci said. 

Asked if he was agreeable to an indefinite appointment, Pucci said that it “doesn’t really affect my long-term plans, because my wife is still working. So, as long as she’s still working full-time, any plans we had of going anywhere were dependent upon her getting vacation anyway.”

“The bottom line, for me, is I love the village,” he said. “I like the people here, I like the people I work with, I like the people I work for. It’s just a good fit for now. For everybody, I’d like to think.”

So, until a replacement is found, Pucci said it’s business as usual — though he looks forward to getting back to his travels.