RIDGEFIELD — Ridgefield officials did not make a public decision on who would become the next city manager Friday, deciding to conduct another meeting and perform a background check before making a hiring decision.
In a series of closed-door meetings at the Clark County Fire & Rescue Station 21, interview panels consisting of community members, elected officials and city and regional managers sat down and met the candidates. The finalists are County Commissioner Steve Stuart, Port of Woodland Executive Director Nelson Holmberg and Vancouver’s Assistant Police Chief Chris Sutter.
The city council will likely hold a special executive session to receive the results of the background check before its next regularly scheduled meeting March 13. The city is in no hurry to rush a process that, in the past, hasn’t always worked out.
The hiring decision could have been made Friday but wasn’t, giving city council members more time to mull the decision.
While the job candidates were prominent Friday, the process — including the hiring criteria and the questions posed to candidates — was not.
And that was by design.
“In most selection processes, the interviews are private,” said Paul Lewis, a Vancouver-based financial consultant who’s assisting the city with the hiring process.
Doors in the station’s meeting room were closed at lunchtime, as they were throughout the day, and, with few exceptions, anyone who came to watch the interviews were told they couldn’t.
Only a select few community members have been part of the selection process.
“There were individual interviews with stakeholders,” Lewis said, “and those were taken into consideration.”
Stakeholders include a handful of business owners, Port of Ridgefield Executive Director Brent Grening and others, Lewis said.
The city is attempting a thorough process, he said. The city’s current crop of candidates offers a stark contrast to some past city managers, who have had inconsistent and typically short-lived tenures over the past decade.
Perhaps the most prominent example was former City Manager George Fox, fired by the city council a little more than a year into his four-year contract. Because of how Fox’s contract was written — he could be fired only if he were convicted of a felony or gross misdemeanor, which he was not — he received a $247,500 settlement, a little less than half of what he’d originally sought. At the time, the settlement was called “the product of a unilateral mistake by the city” by John Spencer Stewart, Ridgefield’s attorney.
Justin Clary replaced Fox and shepherded the city through a period of heavy growth. He served in the position from 2005, in an interim capacity, until 2012, when he took an engineering job with Maul Foster Alongi’s Bellingham office. He was Ridgefield’s longest-serving city manager.
The city created the position in 2000.
Clary has been lauded for the job he did, but he was followed by Phil Messina, an Oregon transplant, who served less than a year before announcing his resignation.
Mayor Ron Onslow acknowledged Friday that Ridgefield had a spotty history with city managers. But he said the city was looking to turn a corner with its professional management.
“For the most part, the council doesn’t look so much at the past,” he said. “We need to make good decisions moving forward.”
With three well-known Clark County names as finalists, there’s hope within the city that it will find someone for the long haul.
Lloyd Halverson, who spent 24 years as Camas’ city administrator, sat on the managers’ interview committee. He said he was impressed by the city’s handling of the process, calling it a thorough approach.
“I think it’s been a very good process the team has put together here,” he said. “It’s broad based and thoughtful.”
Following the interviews, Onslow said the final decision would be a difficult one to make.
“I thought all three candidates were great,” he said. “I thought any one of them could do the job. They had strengths and weaknesses but, gosh, I don’t think anyone (on the hiring committees) was very critical.”
