Would an elected mayor be better?
This is the first part in a three-part series. Read the second part here. Read the third part here.
City Council is once again hiring a city manager.
It’s our fourth city manager hire in 10 years. To recap the past decade:
2010 18-year City Manager Dan Boroff retires. Council hires out a nationwide search, bringing us Terrence Moore from Las Cruces, New Mexico.
2013 Moore resigns. Council hires Boroff’s and Moore’s assistant city manager, Jeff Mikorski, into the position—he’d been with the city for over a decade and was a finalist when Moore was hired.
2016 Mikorski leaves for his native Wisconsin, prompting a nationwide search that brings us Paul Brake, from Michigan.
March 2020 Brake announces he’s returning to Michigan.
So here we are again. It feels like a lot of turnover—but is it? City manager tenure hasn’t gotten a lot of research attention, but a thorough 2005 study found that the median tenure of city managers in a cross-section of U.S. cities in the 1980s and 1990s was 5 years, a little shorter in cities under 50,000 population. So 3 years is not all that far from average. And to be fair, if we factor long-timer Boroff into the mix, our average of 6 years and 9 months among the past four city managers is well over the study’s median.
This search has been conducted by the recruiting firm Novak Consulting Group of Cincinnati, Ohio, at a cost of $24,300 plus expenses like advertisements and background checks. Novak closed the job posting on September 10.
A city manager search usually includes a public forum, says City Councilor Jenny Selin, who’s been on Council since 2007 and has witnessed all of this turnover. This one has not included a forum because of COVID, she says. Asked why there couldn’t have been a Zoom or other virtual forum, she says it’s simply that every aspect of the process has been logistically more complicated and more time-consuming than in a typical search. “It’s harder to bring people in, it’s harder to have open meetings, it’s even hard to take a person on a tour because you don’t want two people close together for any length of time,” she says. “We might have liked to do things differently, but this is how we’re doing it.”
City staff members have met with the candidates, she says, as have representatives of a cross-section of organizations that interact frequently with city government. Council met on October 22 and 23 and again on October 28—in executive session, as is customary for personnel matters—to review the short-listed applications and applicants.
“I think this recruiting firm has done a really nice job, has brought in good candidates,” Selin says. “I think we’ve done the best we can, with COVID, to have input from both city staff and community members, and we have received and taken seriously their good input. Aside from not having a community forum, it’s been a really good process.”
As is typical with executive recruitments, this one is not over until it’s over—Council is moving it along, Selin says, but will let thoroughness rather than an artificial deadline drive the final steps.
Given recent turnover and the opaqueness of this process during COVID, Morgantown magazine started wondering: Would it be better to have an elected mayor? We’ll look at the pros and cons in next week’s Lowdown.
This is the first part in a three-part series. Read the second part here. Read the third part here.
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