Arnold’s suspended police chief will no longer be paid as he faces theft and other charges stemming from a sting against him staged by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state police.

City council decided unanimously to change Josh Stanga’s leave from paid to unpaid, Mayor Shannon Santucci said Friday. Stanga had been on leave since Aug. 16, the same day investigators confronted him.

Stanga’s leave was changed because criminal charges were filed, Arnold Solicitor Jaclyn Shaw said. He was arraigned Thursday and released without bail.

“It’s been past practice in the city,” Shaw said. “We felt that to keep with past precedent, we would have to do that with Chief Stanga.”

While Robert Haus remains the officer-in-charge of the department, Santucci, a former Arnold officer and chief, said she is handling administrative decisions for the force of seven full-time and one part-time officers.

“We’re just trying to be transparent,” Santucci said. “We don’t want to make anyone think we’re trying to hide anything. My goal is to always be transparent about what’s going on.”

Stanga, 41, faces one misdemeanor count each of theft, misapplying entrusted property, obstructing administration of law, unsworn falsification to authorities and tampering with evidence. He maintains his innocence.

Arnold cannot fire Stanga until and unless he pleads or is found guilty, Santucci said.

In a criminal complaint, the attorney general’s office said they and state police conducted an “integrity check operation” on Stanga on Aug. 6 by placing a vehicle reported stolen in Union Cemetery with $313 and eight fake opioid pills inside.

While Stanga turned over all of the fake drugs to state police on Aug. 9, he reported recovering only $35 from the vehicle, the complaint states.

When questioned by narcotics agents with the state attorney general’s office on Aug. 16, authorities say Stanga admitted to taking the money from the vehicle, the complaint states. He told them he planned to return the $278 to the car’s owner.

While officers recovered $291 from Stanga’s police vehicle, only a $50 bill matched the serial numbers of the money that had been placed in the staged stolen vehicle, according to the complaint.

Santucci said she was not personally familiar with integrity checks being conducted on police officers.

A representative of the Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to a request for comment about them Friday.

State Attorney General’s Office spokesman Brett Hambright said he could not comment on the operations, saying that they “by design and for effectiveness, need to be covert.”

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