SEQUIM — After eight hours of surgery to remove a tumor next to his brain, and following seven months as city manager, Bob Spinks is returning next Monday to his big, old job: chief of the Sequim Police Department.
On Dec. 2 Spinks — who’d turned 50 the previous day — underwent surgery on an acoustic neuroma at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. The tumor, a mass wrapped around his auditory nerve, was benign, but doctors told Spinks it would kill him if left untreated.
When he re-enters his office, Spinks will face a full plate, including possible discipline of more than one of his officers.
Lt. Sheri Crain, the department’s acting chief, said on Monday that she’s finishing an investigation of public property taken, and in some cases sold, by Sequim Police Department employees.
Reserve Officer Jim Whitaker, a former full-time officer who’s now a firefighter with Clallam County Fire District 3, took several pieces of city property in September and said he’d been told it was “junk.”
Some of the gear — police radios, light bars — Whitaker said he later returned to the department, but he had also sold two sirens on eBay for $115 each.
Crain said more police property — bicycles, patrol-car gear and old, now useless evidence — was taken and then brought back.
The acting chief said she’ll give Spinks her complete investigative package soon after he returns.
Ongoing investigations
She’ll also give her boss her cover memo on the Port Angeles Police Department’s investigation of another incident: an officer’s leaving of a military-flare-like explosive on a desk at the Sequim Police Department.
That December incident prompted the Sequim Police to call the Washington State Patrol Bomb Squad. After the squad destroyed the device, Crain declined to name the officer who left it on his or her desk.
Calling the flare and property cases personnel issues, she has said only that Spinks will be the one to take disciplinary action.
In an interview at his Sequim home on Friday, Spinks called the incidents “incredibly disappointing.”
Of the police property that was taken, he said: “That doesn’t pass a test of common sense . . . It’s not acceptable.”
“I pay people for their common sense and their ability to follow the law,” Spinks said, adding that Crain has updated him weekly on her investigation. “We’ve had to spend a lot of time and effort to deal with issues of common sense,” he said.
Spinks believes his 18 sworn officers and three civilian support staffers do excellent work as servants in the community.
“How can we allow ourselves to really trip, in public opinion, on this garbage?” he said.
“We’re better than that.”
When he’s back at his desk, Spinks plans to review the investigation documents and possibly hold predisciplinary hearings.
Spinks, a gregarious, upbeat man who often describes himself as an Irish cop, also plans to live his life differently in the wake of all that happened in the second half of 2008.
On May 5 his boss, City Manager Bill Elliott, was fired for what a City Council majority called a management style that was no longer good for Sequim.
Immediately the council appointed Spinks interim manager, even as he continued as police chief. In the ensuing months he oversaw, among other things, the formulation of the 2009 budget amid dire shortfalls in revenue.
Soon after becoming city manager, Spinks promoted Crain to lieutenant and acting chief, moved his office to City Hall and sat at the city’s helm through spring, summer and most of fall.
On the night of Nov. 10, he announced at a City Council meeting that he’d been diagnosed with the neuroma. He’d noticed some hearing loss and thought he had some kind of sinus infection.
“I went from that,” Spinks said, “to having my mortality flapping in my face.”
The Monday before Thanksgiving, the council voted to bring in then-Mercer Island deputy manager Linda Herzog as Sequim’s interim chief.
Herzog started work in December, just as Spinks and his wife, Connie, left for Seattle.
The operation lasted all day, but the immediate recovery period was at least as difficult, Spinks said. He called the first two days in intensive care the worst of his adult life.
His vertigo was so intense that Spinks had only to open his eyes to trigger a bout of vomiting. He asked for more anti-nausea medication, and when the doctors said no, he replied, “Then shoot me.”
But one of the miraculous things about this, Spinks said, was that he got so much better each day. He and Connie came home after six days at Virginia Mason and Spinks began coping with other effects of the surgery.
He’s deaf in his left ear now, so he bought a special hearing aid for $4,000. That item wasn’t covered by his insurance, Spinks said, so he paid out of pocket for it.
His eyes and balance were affected too, though both have greatly improved since those first days at home.
“I looked like a frickin’ iguana,” Spinks said of the out-of-sync blinking that is milder now.
Spinks said his taste for coffee and rich foods has also changed. He’s no longer guzzling lattes like he used to, and when he made chili recently he enjoyed just one bowl, not the three he would have had pre-surgery.
And Spinks, who still freely calls himself “fat,” has lost 27 of the 50-plus pounds put on since he became Sequim’s police chief.
He admitted that before his neuroma diagnosis, he’d thought a heart attack might be the thing that brought an early end to his career.
Instead he faced a tumor, the type that has “increased exponentially.” Acoustic neuromas, Spinks said, are “associated, but not officially linked, to cell phone use.”
He calls himself a poster child, then, for cell-phone-personal-data-assistant-work-all-the-time syndrome.
Now that’s got to change, the chief said.
“I love police work, but I can’t do the 13-, 14- and 15-hour work days like I have done since I came up here,” said Spinks, who moved from Milton-Freewater, Ore., four years ago. He’s since built a house, married and said he hopes to retire in Sequim.
Spinks added that he has many goals for the Police Department but wants to achieve them “without killing myself.”
Among this year’s plans are expanding the department — by square footage, not number of officers — into the former Danny’s Restaurant at 609 W. Washington St. That space is next door to the existing police station, in the Penney’s shopping center. Through much of 2007 and 2008, Spinks pushed for building a new, larger police station, but with Sequim facing the same financial tempests as the rest of the country, he downsized that vision. The station will stay in its current location while the restaurant is remodeled, and the officers will move in this summer, according to Crain.
She added that her time as acting chief was challenging. “I had moments where it was fun,” Crain said.
When Spinks returns, she plans to work with him on a new policy and procedures manual.
“That’s one of our big rollouts,” this year, said Spinks, who added that the manual may include content related to the flare and sold-property incidents. It’s a guide that will “help employees to make good decisions,” he said.
Looking back on his long medical leave, Spinks marveled at the way many people reacted –and are still reacting. Stacks of get-well cards surround him, and his in-box is full of similar e-mail messages.
“I was apparently on a couple dozen prayer lists around town and frankly was taken aback by the community’s tenderness,” he said. “It’s been incredibly eye-opening.”
Spinks expressed gratitude, too, to his father-in-law, Bill Cusick of Sequim, for lending him a walker. “I needed it for less than a week,” he said, “because I was determined to not use one of those.”
Then there’s his mother-in-law, Vi Cusick, who held his hand while he was getting used to his new hearing aid.
Connie Spinks stayed at his side from intensive care forward. A supervisor for the Kitsap County Juvenile Detention Center, she’s working toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice through Portland State University.
“Between work, the commute [to Kitsap] and studies, she’s the one with the full day,” Spinks said.
“I could not have gotten through this without her,” he said.
They’ll celebrate their third wedding anniversary in June.
At the police station next week, “I am going to ease into it, and work some half days; see how it goes,” the chief said.
Spinks is enormously relieved that he won’t be going back to the dual job of police chief-city manager. He called Herzog, who’s under contract to stay through June, “a breath of fresh air,” and admitted he’d like her to stay longer.
The City Council, however, has hired Waldron & Co., a Seattle human resources firm, to start the search for a permanent manager next month.
“Sequim is making the transition,” Spinks added, “from small town to small city.”
He plans to shepherd his police department along that path while safeguarding his own health.
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
