Two approaches to hiring city managers
Under current law, there are at least two ways for the governing body of a North Carolina city to choose a new city manager: the Raleigh way, or the Durham way.
The Raleigh way, which involves techniques apparently borrowed from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, might also be called the arrogant way, or the “we-don’t-care-what-the-voters-think” way. It involves a “select” (i.e., politically compatible) committee, a secret list of candidates, stonewalling in the face of press inquiries, slipping finalists in and out of town under cover of darkness for closed-door interviews, and playing silly cat-and-mouse games with the voters and taxpayers.
The Durham way involves releasing the names of all candidates who are under serious consideration, honing the list to three or four finalists, bringing them to town for public tours and interviews, inviting comment from the local citizenry, including the entire council in the process, and giving local reporters the opportunity to visit the finalists’ home cities and write detailed profiles of them.
I like the Durham way better, even though Raleigh’s stiff-arming of the public gave reporters the motivation to do what they almost always do – uncover the information that the council was taking such pains to conceal. The Raleigh candidates must have thought they were playing roles in a Cold War spy movie.
Fun is fun, but to use an old North Carolina phrase, the Raleigh way “may be legal, but it ain’t right.” In fact, it may not even be legal. The Open Meetings Law allows a public body to hold a closed session to “consider the qualifications, competence, performance, character, fitness, conditions of appointment, or conditions of initial employment” of a public employee. To me, that means that when the recruitment and interview process is over and it’s time to make a selection, the members of a city council can meet behind closed doors to talk about the candidates. That’s what the Durham council did. Personally, I think it requires a lot of abusing of the English language to stretch this provision sufficiently to make the entire process as secretive as admission to a country club, as the Raleigh council did.
Legality aside, I like the Durham way better, because it treats both the candidates and the voters with respect and because it reflects the fact that a city manager is the people’s servant, not the hand-picked lackey of a few elected officials whose thinking all appears to originate in one brain. It also recognizes that the hiring of a new city manager is a two-way proposition. As Durham council member Jackie Wagstaff put it, “We’re going to be interviewed just as much as we interview [the candidates].”
The differences between the Raleigh way and the Durham way were highlighted in recent months as the two cities’ elected councils simultaneously searched for new managers. In the end the Durham council unanimously agreed to offer their position to Marcia L. Conner, an assistant city manager in Austin, Texas. The Raleigh council chose – or rather, rubber-stamped its committee’s choice of – Russell Allen, the city manager of Rock Hill, South Carolina. It is far too soon to judge how either will adapt to the challenges of these two dynamic, fast-growing cities, but both appear to have superb credentials.
In any event, the point is not which council made the better choice; indeed, I hope that experience proves that despite their disparate approaches, each somehow found the person best suited to manage their city. The point is that Ms. Conner will start her new job with something that Raleigh denied to Mr. Allen: the confidence that comes with having been chosen unanimously at the conclusion of an open process that included intense public scrutiny. If she knows nothing else as she assumes her new post, she knows this: she’s going to work for a city in which the elected officials trust the people.