The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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The Emporia City Commission has chosen five candidates for city manager and the public won’t get to meet any of them.

Mayor Jim Kessler said Wednesday that none of the names would be released. The candidates will be interviewed by the commissioners and department heads but will not meet with the general public at any time.

“These candidates have jobs with their governing bodies — well, not all with governing bodies — and we do not want to jeopardize their positions they have now,” Mayor Jim Kessler said.

“We’d love for everyone to know who they are,” he said. “But we thought it was important to protect these five candidates.”

The process stands in contrast to that of Emporia State University, which chose its president late last year. All five finalists for the presidency, who were still employed by a university at the time, were introduced to Emporia in a public forum and invited to answer questions from the public. Michael Lane, the fourth candidate interviewed, was named to the position.

Asked if the public would be allowed any input before a final candidate was selected, Kessler said “Possibly not.”

“It’s our responsibility to hire the next city manager,” Kessler said. “We will have input from the department heads.”

The first candidate will be interviewed Wednesday. Two more will be interviewed on Feb. 15 and the last two on Feb. 16. On Thursday evening, all five will have dinner with the commission.

“We’re excited,” Kessler said. “We think we have five excellent candidates.”

Later in the interview, Kessler said that if there was more than one candidate selected from the five, the process might be opened up.

“If there is a finalist competition, I imagine the names would be released then,” Kessler said.

Legally, cities can treat city managers as "non-elected personnel" and discuss them solely in closed session, according to a Kansas Attorney General's opinion. But some cities have solicited public input in hiring a city manager. In 2002, Pittsburg named a 25-member citizen’s advisory group, five members per commissioner. When the city was down to five finalists for the job, the city commission held a round-robin dinner with five tables. Each table had a candidate, a commissioner and five citizens. As the meal went on, so did the locals.

“We rotated from table to table, so that everyone got to meet each candidate,” Pittsburg Mayor Marty Beezley said in a September interview with The Gazette.

Commissioner Tom Myers said the commission wanted to avoid some of the difficulties that occurred in 2005 when Salina announced its finalists for city manager — a list that included Emporia's city manager, Steve Commons.

“It didn’t hurt me any, but there were some members of the community that were upset that he was looking for another job,” Myers said.

Commons was not hired by Salina.

“I think we’re trying to do the best job we can for a complicated process,” Myers said. “This is pretty much the outline of the process that the consultant has advised us on.”

He also said that he felt the public does have a voice in the process.

“They have had an impact,” he said. “They’ve elected five members of the community to represent them in these sorts of choices.”

A Jan. 8 Gazette story reported that “The city commission has said it will announce the names of the four to six finalists,” when that stage of the process was reached. Kessler on Wednesday defined this group of five as “semi-finalists.”