City manager search ?narrows

The Santa Rosa City Council has narrowed the list of candidates for city manager to five applicants who are scheduled for job interviews this week.

The council will meet in closed session beginning at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday to interview the candidates who were winnowed from what Mayor Scott Bartley described as a strong field.

“We have a number of very viable candidates,” Bartley said.

The city received 40 applications for the job, which is a good response for such a search, said the city’s recruiter, David Morgan.

“The City of Santa Rosa is seen as a premier community and opportunity,” Morgan said.

City Manager Kathy Millison, 62, is retiring in September after nearly four years in the city’s top post. The council is hoping to have her replacement seated by the time she leaves. A second meeting for follow-up interviews with finalists is tentatively scheduled for July 15.

Assistant City Manager Jennifer Phillips declined to say whether she was applying for the position, calling the question “inappropriate.” She cited the confidentiality of the process and stated she had a “right to privacy.”

Former Deputy City Manager Greg Scoles, who was passed over for the interim city manager position in a divisive 2009 vote and is now the city manager of Belmont, said he is not a candidate for the job.

Two council members expressed concern that the selection process is moving too quickly.

“I think we’re rushing things,” Councilwoman Julie Combs said.

Combs said she didn’t feel council members spent enough time discussing candidates’ qualifications when they met behind closed doors June 17.

She said her preference is to wait until after the November election, when at least two council members will be selected.

Councilman Gary Wysocky said he’d rather slow things down, too, preferably until after the election.

“The nagging feeling I have is that we are violating a principle of hiring and retaining top people, and that is you hire slow and fire quickly,” Wysocky said.

When Wysocky was part of the council majority in the summer of 2010, however, he took a different view. He and his council allies pushed to hire Millison before the election over the strong objections of the three members of the then-council minority.

They, too, argued, that the decision should be postponed until after the election. They argued the candidate pool wasn’t strong enough in part because the decision to pass over Scoles in favor of former planning director Wayne Goldberg as the interim manager gave the city a reputation as a challenging place to work. The three members, Jane Bender, Ernesto Olivares and John Sawyer, walked out of city manager selection meetings early in protest.

Bartley, who was a planning commissioner at the time, said he disagreed with the decision to pass over Scoles for the interim job and even campaigned on the issue. He said the current selection process was set up to ensure a smooth transition, and delaying it until after the election would require the hiring of an interim city manager and unnecessarily leave the city without long-term leadership for several months.

“The timing is the timing,” Bartley said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @citybeater.