By Sarah Light, staff writer

Further inquiry into the investigation about an allegation that a city employee was selling city property on the Internet has revealed that the items involved were deemed to be of no value by the city after the cleanup of the Jacobson Apartments building and the Freeborn National Bank building.

Albert Lea City Manager Victoria Simonsen said Wednesday that when the buildings were cleaned out over a period of several weeks, anything believed to be of value was salvaged. Then, items believed to be of no value were thrown away in a Dumpster.

Some of the items from the trash are what the employee &8212; who has since been revealed online as city building inspector Paul Nechanicky &8212; took to sell.

Nechanicky declined to comment about the situation.

Though the issue did not warrant pursuing criminal charges against the employee, Simonsen said, documentation of the incident has been placed in Nechanicky&8217;s personnel file.

Because the property in question was already located within a Dumpster and it is not illegal to take things from the trash, the issue was not considered to be criminal, she said. And because the case was not criminal, the police never got involved.

As a result of the situation, however, the Albert Lea City Council will soon be approving a more detailed business ethics policy, the city manager said. Currently, the city&8217;s personnel policy has only a short paragraph that states that employees need to hold themselves to a higher standard and be aware that they could be more easily open for criticism. The expanded policy will be much more specific, keeping in mind this incident, she said.

The chain of events began when someone tipped the city&8217;s most vocal critic, Roger Bok, to the supposed sale of city goods online. Bok then presented the information to the city.