Mayor David Mayfield and city council members talked briefly Monday about the person they hope will be the city’s new police chief but didn’t formally vote to hire him.

Mayfield said Gideon Cody, who retired as a captain with the Kansas City, Missouri, police department April 21, still needed to get his credentials transferred from Missouri to the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training.

“Missouri POST records show Gideon L. Cody has a valid Missouri Class A peace officer license and is currently commissioned by the Kansas City Police Department,” Mike O’Connell, communications director for the Missouri Department of Safety, wrote in an email to the Record.

That’s the only information Missouri will release about law enforcement officers. Kansas is different. It will confirm whether an officer’s certification has been suspended or revoked.

“I couldn’t tell you if he had been suspended from 2000 to 2001 or he’d been with five departments,” O’Connell said, speaking generally about any officer, not Cody. “I couldn’t tell you any of that. When he’s applying to work for a new department, he can sign a waiver form and then that department, because they are a police agency and he signed a waiver, they can get his records.”

Cody told the Record on Sunday that he had given the city permission to request his records. It was unclear at press time whether the city had requested or received them.

Cody wants to start June 1, Mayfield said, but the mayor has asked him to consider May 30 so he has a few days to be in Marion before Chingawassa Days, which are June 2 to June 4.

Mayfield confirmed Cody’s salary would be $60,000.