Fort Smith may use Florida-based search firm to find a new city administrator

Colin Baenziger & Associates (CBA), the Daytona Beach Shores, Fla.-based search firm that recruited former Fort Smith City Administrator Carl Geffken, could soon get the nod to help Fort Smith hire another city administrator.

City Director Lee Kemp asked near the end of Tuesday’s (Feb. 24) board study session to place on the March 3 meeting agenda approval to hire the search firm.

The board fired Geffken as city administrator in December 2024. Geffken was hired to be the city administrator in March 2016 with a salary of $175,000. His annual salary when he was fired was $204,513. Deputy City Administrator Jeff Dingman has been the interim administrator since Geffken’s firing.

Instead of hiring a national search firm, the board on Aug. 19, 2025, voted to have the city’s human resources department post the job on the city’s website. The board also named Kemp as the board’s liaison with the city administrator search.

Dingman, who was on the short list of candidates when Geffken was hired in 2016, applied for the job. The board in early December narrowed the list of applicants to four, including Dingman. Some board members said they were open to using a search firm if they were uncomfortable hiring from the short list. And that appears to be the case, as no person was hired from the effort to find an administrator without using a search firm.

Kemp said after Tuesday’s meeting that he worked with Eric Garvin, the city’s human resources director, and conducted a “great, long, due diligence process” that resulted in the decision to ask the board to hire CBA.

“They actually were the company that recruited Administrator Carl Geffken,” Kemp said. “And my sentiments are, if they were able to recruit someone at the beginning of an onset of a consent decree, we’ve made a lot of progress as a community.”

Kemp said if CBA is hired, they will first interview board members individually for their input, then “use that to conduct an appropriate search.” He said if all goes as planned, a city administrator could be hired by mid-July.

“They want to get straight to work,” Kemp said.

In Fort Smith’s form of government, the city administrator is the CEO, managing an annual budget of more than $300 million and more than 1,000 city employees who provide safety, sanitation, water, sewer, and other key services to a city with a population of around 90,000.