By Pepper Fisher
SEQUIM – The Sequim City Council will narrow the field of applicants for City Manager to 4 or 5 Thursday night, and it sounds like there’s a pretty good chance they’ll announce who those candidates are when they come out of executive session.
A great deal of culling has already happened to get to this point. Colin Baenziger, President of the search firm hired by the City, says he got 48 applicants and from there turned over a list of under 10, though he declined to give us the exact number.
“When all was said and done, we had a very good group of candidates. We didn’t have a very deep group of candidates. Meaning that, you know, we had a lot of applicants, but in terms of those that fit the council’s specifications and requirements, we didn’t have a huge number.”
Councilmembers will begin the evening in open session to discuss the ground rules for the discussion that will take place next in closed executive session. HR Director Emily Stednick explains.
“Because when they’re in executive session, they can’t make any decisions. Right? They can only talk about the qualifications of the candidates. And so it’s a bit tricky to manage that. So we want to make sure that we have a process set out at the beginning, so everybody knows how to go through executive session, being able to talk candidly about these confidential application packets without violating any kind of OPMA rules. Because all of those decisions would need to be made back out in open session.”
Specifically, there be no voting or even the appearance of endorsing candidates by councilors in executive session. If all goes according to plan, councilors will come back out and select publicly the final field of candidates, who are then scheduled to be interviewed in person on September 8, 9 and 10.
Ideally, councilors will have a decision on the tenth as to who will be the next Sequim City Manager. If not, there’s a council meeting on the thirteenth where they may prefer to make that announcement.
Thursday night’s meeting begins at 6:00pm and the public can tune in virtually by clicking here.