Yachats council finishing interviews with city manager candidates Friday, hopes to name finalists for visits

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

The Yachats City Council will complete its fourth and last preliminary interview with a city manager candidate Friday morning and then will decide whom to bring in for a final round of in-person interviews.

The council has been meeting in executive, or closed, sessions this week to conduct the first round of interviews.

Fourteen people had applied to be city manager and the council selected seven for online interviews. Three dropped out before those could be scheduled.

“We did not have any trouble determining who we should interview,” Mayor Leslie Vaaler said during the council’s meeting Wednesday. “I’m encouraged …”

The council – which is conducting the search process on its own – spent a good portion of the meeting working through how it will organize the finalist visits once they are chosen.

It plans to announce the finalists once they agree to come to Yachats for interviews with the council, city staff, commission chairs and the public.

After some debate and discussion over who, when and how to check references, the council decided to have Councilors Ann Stott and Anthony Muirhead do them together once the finalists are named.

The new city manager will get at a month’s overlap with interim manager Katherine Guenther, the council also decided Wednesday. The council spent the first part of its 1½-hour meeting discussing a transition with Guenther, who is also holds the title of city planner.

Guenther became the city’s 16-hour-a-week contract planner in March but by June became the city’s second interim city manager. Guenther did not apply for the city manager’s job and wants to go back to her position – it is not clear whether it would be as a contractor or employee – as city planner.

She told the council Wednesday that the pace of planning work was requiring much more time than 16 hours a week – and asked for clarity on how long the transition with a new city manager should be and if the hours of the planner should be expanded.

“People have assumed I would just slide back into the planner position … and I’m just not sure what that’s going to look like,” Guenther said. “I’m not picturing 40 hours but 16 hours is not cutting it.”

Councilors were sympathetic to the workload and the need to increase hours, not only to handle what has been a flood of building applications, but more complicated development proposals and long-range tasks that the Planning Commission is trying to work through.

The council voted unanimously to make the planning job four days a week and authorized Guenther to work full-time for a month once a new city manager arrives.

“I’m trying to avoid two city managers passing in the night like the last two transitions,” Guenther said. “I’m here to make that as easy as possible.”

In other business Wednesday the council:

• Heard that Guenther is finishing a five-year lease agreement with Yachats Youth and Families Together Program to rent the former city offices and one classroom in the Yachats Commons for its programs, allowing it to move out of the basement;
• Agreed to give Guenther authority to decide whether to enter into an agreement with an Oregon State University group to give the city an estimate on what it could cost to upgrade the city’s website to include the data library and data base prior to 2017, which is currently not accessible;
• Agreed to allow Guenther to close City Hall on Fridays so she and deputy city recorder Kimmie Jackson could focus on longer-term tasks and get caught up on the week’s work.