The Morgan Hill City Council will take the search for a new city manager nationwide, probably starting this fall.
At a mid-year retreat Friday, council members talked about how expansive the search for a viable candidate to take Ed Tewes’ place in January 2013 should be.
While City Council members all agreed that City Hall already has a healthy stable of skilled and experienced staffers who are probably capable of handling the job, the council decided the best route to ensure they reach out to the most qualified candidate is to enlist a consultant to help conduct a nationwide search.
Immediately after Friday’s meeting, city staff sent a letter to six executive recruitment consultants asking for proposals and price quotes, Mayor Steve Tate said. The council is hoping to receive responses within the next couple of weeks.
Tewes, 61, announced earlier this month that he would be resigning from the position at the end of December after 13 years as Morgan Hill’s city manager. He hasn’t offered much insight on why he is resigning, except to say that he wants to keep his future career options open.
While brainstorming the city’s needs that a new city manager should understand and fulfill, the council Friday identified the “big issues” in the coming years as labor relations, fiscal stability, inter-government and regional relations with nearby agencies and cities, revenue generation, downtown revitalization and public relations.
The new city manager’s leadership style should be “collaborative,” and also capable of guiding the council on difficult decisions and in line with the elected body’s long-term vision, the council members agreed.
“I want somebody who can innovate, and bring new ideas and a fresh approach (but) not changing things just for the sake of changing,” said Tate, who will be seeking re-election to his fourth two-year term Nov. 6.
It’s also important that the city’s new head administrator should have a strong desire to live or work in Morgan Hill and “wants to be involved in the community,” added Councilman Rich Constantine.
Tewes added, “It’s as much telling them what you want, as selling this community” to potential candidates.
After a closed-session discussion at Friday’s meeting in which the Council weighed the advantages and disadvantages of an internal-only search versus a wider selection effort, they decided to go with a nationwide search, Tate said. The process will remain open to existing City Hall employees who are interested in the job.
Councilman Gordon Siebert, a former city manager of Palos Verdes Estates, said based on his experience, the selection process should promise confidentiality to any applicants, and it should be “open to everybody, and thorough.”
The ideal candidate for a city manager should be someone who possesses many of the same traits that Tewes has shown in his decade-plus management of City Hall, Constantine added.
“We’re going to be looking for someone who knows how to work through a fiscal time as we’ve been experiencing, where we’ve lost the RDA, lost some of the tax base – somebody who’s able to work well with people, and has experience working with towns such as ours and maybe even larger,” Constantine said Monday. “And someone who can maintain the growth that we have started, and maintain the atmosphere we have in Morgan Hill.”
Tewes has been the longest-serving city manager of Morgan Hill in recent memory, according to former mayor Dennis Kennedy, who served on the dais when Tewes was hired and has lived in Morgan Hill since 1976.
In 2011, Tewes’ total compensation, including allowances, benefits and leave payouts, was about $263,500. That includes regular wages of about $189,000.
The new city manager’s salary and benefits package will be determined in negotiations with the preferred candidate when that time comes later this year, Tate added. He said it’s too early to say what kind of pay the city will offer its new manager. As of now, the search is “wide open” and not limited by any type of offer or cap on salary or benefits.
Though he had his detractors and “took a lot of heat” for some decisions such as layoffs in recent years, among Tewes’ strengths and achievements in Morgan Hill are his expertise on difficult financial questions that helped the city weather the recent economic downturn, and his ability to enact the “visioning process” for city facilities that resulted in the construction of the public library, Centennial Recreation Center, Aquatics Center, Community and Cultural Center and other facilities, Kennedy said.
“He helped us build a very substantial reserve while I was in office, which helped us ride through the tough years of this ‘Great Recession,’ with minimal impact on the city,” Kennedy said. “The council dipped into those reserves, and we had to have some layoffs and cuts, but overall we made it through this recession in good fashion, and I attribute most of that to Ed and his expertise.”
Even though the council will hire an executive search firm to carry out most of the legwork in a search for a new city manager, Tate said the council should be closely involved in the process too. Tate and Siebert comprise a council subcommittee to work directly with the recruiter during the process. The mayor did not know how much the executive search will cost, but the Council thinks “it’s worth investing some money to make sure we have the right candidate.”
They hope to have the best candidate or candidates narrowed down and available for job interviews by the beginning of December.
