Fort Smith Board approves process to interview city administrator candidates
by January 5, 2016 9:49 pm 126 views
The Fort Smith Board of Directors moved one step closer to hiring a city administrator Tuesday night (Jan. 5) at its meeting from the Fort Smith Public Schools Service Center, identifying key dates in the interview and selection process.
By unanimous approval, the Board decided to hold evening meetings on Monday, Feb. 29; Thursday, March 3; Monday, March 7; and Tuesday, March 8. The plan is to interview one of three finalist candidates on each of the dates leading up to the March 8 meeting.
The final night – a regular meeting – will be when the Board reaches its decision on the trio of candidates. Exact times on each night will be locked down after Feb. 18, when the city decides on finalists for the position.
Under the initial schedule, the Mayor and Board were set to conduct candidate interviews beginning Jan. 15. That was pushed back when the Daytona Shores Beach, Fla., consulting firm Colin Baenziger & Associates (CBA) recommended pushing the application deadline back from Dec. 2 to Jan. 8 in order to find more qualified applicants. Colin Baenziger, the firm’s owner, clarified to Talk Business & Politics on Dec. 29 that “we do have some very strong applicants” and that extending the deadline was “just a matter of finding more.”
The new schedule will find CBA reporting applicant results on Jan. 13, and providing candidate info to the city by Feb. 10. From there, the city is set to select candidates for interviews by the aforementioned Feb. 18 date. While there is no indication on an exact time for each of the nights, Mayor Sandy Sanders favored a 5:30 p.m. meeting time during discussion, and said that media notifications would be forthcoming when more was known about the candidates and their availabilities.
The job has been open since early July 2015 when Ray Gosack suddenly resigned following a period of conflict with the Board related to budget balancing decisions. Gosack held the job for about three years, and was with the city for 16 years.
In other action Tuesday night, the Board narrowly approved a new three-year agreement to provide funding for the Sebastian County Humane Society (SCHS) starting retroactively on Jan. 1, 2016, and continuing through Dec. 31, 2018. City Directors Kevin Settle, Keith Lau, and Tracy Pennartz voted against the plan on grounds of rising costs. Settle said that he “couldn’t support” an agreement that raised rates from $17.25 per animal per day to $19 over a three-year period while the city was forced to cut back “on police cars and officers we need.”
“We make cuts to the general fund budget, cuts to our department budgets, and now we’re coming back with a contract that has a raise in it,” Settle said in comments to Fort Smith Police Chief Kevin Lindsey. “Going from $17.25 to $19 in three years is just too much.”
Lindsey said the contract had been negotiated with the SCHS “coming in high, the city coming in low, and we sort of met in the middle” and that he would be willing to go back to the drawing board if that’s what the Board wanted. Ultimately, City Directors Don Hutchings, Mike Lorenz, George Catsavis, and Andre Good, lent their support to the recommendation, which is expected to cost the city $286,074 in year one, $293,765 in year two, and $301,456 in year three. Costs for 2015 were approximately $235,000.
The next meeting of the Fort Smith Board of Directors will be its regular noon study session on Jan. 12.