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Former Williamsport Finance Director and General Manager of the bus and transit service, William E. Nichols, has been punished.

On May 5, 2025, William “Bill” Nichols, Jr., pleaded guilty to one felony count of theft by failure to make required disposition of funds received, and one felony count of tampering with public records. The former loyal city employee was sentenced to one year of probation.

What exactly did Bill Nichols do? The criminal complaint and state grand jury presentment claim that Nichols misused in excess of $500,000. The city, state, and federal funds were to be used for transit purposes but instead Nichols used them on non-transit expenses that had not been approved. This included projects and payments that inured to the benefit of the city.

Nichols then was said to have provided false information on required grant expense reporting records to hide their true use.

What angered city authorities was that on April 11, 2025, the City of Williamsport and the Federal Transit Administration agreed to a repayment of $1,483,707 in federal grant funds that Nichols used on non-transit-related expenses. It was also claimed that there was lack of appropriate documentation as to how some of the expenses were calculated and spent.

The money that was supposed to be used for “transit purposes” was used for the betterment of the city. However, bureaucratic rules accompanying the grant of funds required them to be used in very limited and discrete ways. The City of Williamsport would not have been able to use almost $1.5 million for transit alone. Nichols had a better idea, and that was to bypass the bureaucracy altogether and use the funds for purposes which would enhance the city in other ways. While this was not legal, not a penny of money wound up in Nichols’ pocket.

To add insult to injury, the Officers and Employees Pension Board of the City of Williamsport voted 6 to 1 to revoke Nichols’ pension and medical benefits. Only one person dissented from the vote.

It is not unusual for a person convicted of a felony to be stripped of their pension and health benefits.

It should be remembered that Nichols served eight administrations before he was fired by Mayor Derek Slaughter in January of 2020.

The repayment will no doubt make it even more difficult to balance the city budget than would otherwise have been the case.

It should not be forgotten that Bill Nichols vastly improved the downtown of the City of Williamsport. Mayor Campana asked me to become involved in the Kohls/Wegmans project, which had many stumbling blocks. Wegmans was not crazy about Kohls relocating at its doorstep because it wanted room for expansion and needed plenty of places for parking. Kohls was concerned that it was not getting enough space, not a big enough footprint, and likewise would be deprived of necessary parking spaces. Navigating through Kohls’ requirements required a word by word, comma for comma, examination of a 110-page agreement. The mayor asked me to do it, and I put $44,000 of unpaid time into the effort. Incidentally, lawyers cannot deduct the value of pro bono work.

Thanks to taking several courses in mechanical drawing, I was able to help not only with the legal components of the project but also with the actual placement of the buildings. In order to pull the deal off, it was necessary to obtain additional parking from the owners of other buildings and to create the needed space to the south of Church Street. All in all, it was a massive undertaking which probably would not have come off absent the ingenuity and commitment of Bill Nichols. The city has been vastly improved by the construction projects made possible through Nichols’ efforts.

I was not involved in where the money came from to make the Wegmans/Kohls/parking issue solvable, but there is no question that the mayor, aided by Bill Nichols’ encyclopedic knowledge, brought the project to fruition.

My purpose is not to cry crocodile tears for someone who did not follow the rules and regulations and got into trouble for that. People are supposed to adhere to the requirements of the law, even if it means that they cannot fully accomplish what is necessary and useful for the citizenry. On the other hand, there are those who were screaming for Bill Nichols’ head and were troubled by the fact that the Court did not give Nichols jailtime.

Nichols was hoping to be the Robert Moses of Williamsport. Moses was known as the bridgebuilder in New York City. He linked the five boroughs with one another through grand and sometimes grotesque building projects. Who knows how Robert Moses raised the money and how he accounted for it, if at all. We do know that he vastly changed the landscape of the city of New York and helped to make it into a modern metropolis.

Nichols may very well have used money which the state and feds thought was intended for some transit projects in a way that did not neatly fit the requirements of the law. Certainly, Nichols believed that building parking garages and bus stations was consistent with the use of “transit” money. Whether the city could have avoided paying that $1.5 million is a question for others to answer.

When opposing political parties clash, it is not unusual for heads to role. When Bill Nichols began to serve, the city of Williamsport was solidly Republican. It was impossible to get elected to City Council without being an “R.” The Mayor and City Council will all Rs. Towards the end of Bill Nichols employment, the city had dramatically shifted. Today, the city is solidly Democratic. Whether politics had anything to do with the downfall of Bill Nichols as a result of both the city and the state being of a different political party is a question that cannot be answered with the information currently available.

What we do know is that Bill Nichols is neither devil nor demon. He did his best, under trying circumstances, to obtain the money for the city of Williamsport to help rebuild a failing, crumbling, infrastructure. Nichols created an address that people wanted to come to, and his bricks and mortar monuments will stand long after the Nichols contribution is forgotten.

As with so many other things in life, there are two sides to every story.

Clifford A. Rieders is a board-certified trial advocate in Williamsport.