By Jay Ermis
The Huntsville City Council returns to City Hall late this afternoon to get a rundown on candidates who could fill the vacant city manager’s job.
The meeting starts at 5 p.m. at City Hall, but the agenda calls for the council to immediately adjourn into executive session to discuss candidates with consultant Arcus Public.
Arcus Public is scheduled to present resumes for 10 candidates, including in-house candidates Victor Pena and finance director Winston Duke.
Pena, who is director of the city’s Administrative Services Department, has been serving as acting city manager since July 7 when the council voted to end Gene Pipes’ stay as interim city manager, but pay him until Tuesday.
Pipes submitted his letter of resignation the first week of July. It was effective Tuesday.
The council tabled a motion during its regular meeting Tuesday night to name Pena as interim city manager.
Mayor J. Turner said the council expects Arcus Public to provide a presentation of “about 10 candidates.”
“The council will decide who of the 10 do we want to do face-to-face interviews with,” Turner said. “Arcus has a process of where they met the candidates through multiple interviewers. That filters the applicants to those they deem as qualified.”
Turner applicants went through one last process where it was determined who would be suitable for Huntsville.
“There is a series of questions that they ask the candidates and they will review the answers with us. We will review their answers. I am expecting Arcus to have some sort of commentary about who would be a good candidate for various reasons.”
Turner said he also expects Arcus representatives to give an outline of the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate.
“Then we will take that and we will come up with a list of candidates that we will interview the following week and then I would say the week after that we will make an offer,” Turner said.
“I would like for us to have finalists by the end of July to where we can make an offer so that if they have an existing situation they would be able to give notice,” he said. “I would like to very much have a person in place Sept. 1.
“In fairness to this candidate, it is going to be a difficult situation coming into a process where someone else wrote your budget for you for the coming year. But there was no way around that.
“This is a result of Mr. (former city manager Kevin) Evans leaving in late December as opposed to leaving in October and it would have been different.”
“Bottom line is that I am hopeful we can have us a finalist by early August,” Turner said. “We are very optimistic that Arcus has done a good job here, but in the event that we do not feel comfortable with a single candidate, we will go back to Arcus and say we want to see more.
“That is within their contract and this is such an important position we will not settle for someone that we are not comfortable with. We are paying Arcus the money to bring us a good pool of candidates that would be appropriate for the City of Huntsville.”
Following its closed session talks with Arcus Public, the agenda calls for councilmembers to return to an open meeting where they will consider and possibly act on the review of candidates for city manager.
According to future events listed on the council agenda, councilmembers are scheduled to conduct city manager interviews July 29-30 in closed session.
