Yachats city manager negotiating contract to take similar position in Willamette Valley community of Carlton

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

Yachats City Manager Shannon Beaucaire has been offered the job as the city manager in Carlton, a small city in the wine region of Yamhill County.

Beaucaire said Thursday she is negotiating the details of her Carlton contract and will wait to complete that before officially notifying the Yachats City Council that she is leaving.

Beaucaire’s contract in Yachats calls for her to give the city 60 days notice, but she and the City Council are expected to negotiate a shorter time by using some of her vacation hours for a portion of that.

“I am honored to have been selected by the city of Carlton as their next city manager,” Beaucaire said in a statement to YachatsNews. “We are still working out the details in contract negotiations. Until such time, as a hands-on manager, I still have important work to accomplish for the citizens and community of Yachats.”

Beaucaire had been Yachats’ city manager since October 2017. Yachats was Beaucaire’s first city manager job, coming from New Mexico where she operated a mediation and consulting business, was statewide manager for the New Mexico Supreme Court and a manager in the city of Albuquerque’s legal department.

Carlton is a town of 2,300 just north of McMinnville in Yamhill County. It has 14 employees, including a four-member police department, and a yearly budget of $20 million – double that of Yachats’.

The Carlton City Council announced in late December that Beaucaire and three others were finalists for the job, and held a public open house, interviews and an executive session last week.

Carlton was seeking a new top administrative officer to replace a city manager who resigned last July after two years in the job. The city’s finance director has been serving as interim manager. Other finalists were the city manager from Drain; a former city manager from Canby and Monmouth; and the former city manager of West Linn.

Mayor Leslie Vaaler said Thursday she had not been notified by Beaucaire of accepting Carlton’s job offer and until that occurs would withhold comment on her departure and a transition, including how the council might find someone to do her job and whether the city would seek a temporary manager via the League of Oregon Cities.

John Moore, who was Yachats’ mayor for two years before Vaaler defeated him in the November election, praised Beaucaire in a statement to YachatsNews.

“Shannon has been an excellent city manager for Yachats the last 3 1/2 years. If she accepts the offer from Carlton, it will be Carlton’s gain, and a big loss for Yachats,” Moore said. “She has accomplished a great deal in her tenure with us, and she will be sorely missed. Sure, she does have a few vocal critics locally, but each of them has a personal axe to grind with her, and their comments should not be taken as either fair or objective. Shannon has been a real pleasure to work with, and I wish her every success in her future pursuits.”

Moore and Beaucaire’s comments were in response to public criticism last week by Councilor Greg Scott, who in a meeting said that “she is not a working manager. She is delegating everything.” Those remarks came at the end of a council workshop to discuss city personnel and changing expectations for the city manager under a new mayor and two new council members.

Beaucaire had a majority of support from the previous City Council, but that weakened when those members – Moore, Max Glenn and Jim Tooke — lost their re-election bids in November.