City should name manager finalists

Published 3:20 pm Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The Baker City Council is preparing to make one of its more important decisions: hiring a city manager.

But the Council doesn’t seem especially interested in what its constituents think about the matter.

As has been the custom for many years, neither the Council nor city officials have announced the names of the four finalists whom councilors intend to interview over the next month or so.

This is a mistake.

Keeping the names of the four candidates secret precludes city residents from expressing their opinion about the slate of prospective managers.

It’s pretty hard, after all, to comment about a candidate if you don’t know who the candidate is.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting that residents ought to have a vote here.

We elected the seven councilors to make decisions on our behalf, including hiring and firing the city manager.

The choice, ultimately, rests with the Council.

Yet although the Council, as it should, solicits the public’s opinions about all sorts of topics before councilors vote, ranging from water and sewer rates to a monthly fee to pay for new sidewalks, residents are in effect excluded from the similarly vital choice of selecting a city manager.

Once the Council has offered the job, it’s obviously too late for citizens to contribute meaningful opinions to the deliberations.

That’s what happened in 2007. The city didn’t release the names of the six finalists until the Council had voted unanimously to offer the job to Sandra Zaida of Klamath Falls.

(Zaida turned down the offer. The Council ended up hiring Steve Brocato.)

We much prefer the method the Council employed when it replaced City Manager Gordon Zimmerman in 2003, and we recommend councilors use that method again.

That year councilors pared the list of 65 applicants to five finalists. Two of those five withdrew, and councilors decided to interview the remaining three.

Initially councilors refused to announce the names of those three candidates.

However, after one of the three withdrew, the Council not only publicly named the other two, but scheduled a public reception where citizens could meet the pair: John Bingham, and the man the Council hired, Jerry Gillham.

Although Oregon’s public records law allows cities to withhold the names of city manager candidates, the law doesn’t require that cities do so.

In explaining last week why the city was not publicly naming the four finalists, interim City Manager Tim Collins said that releasing those names could jeopardize the candidates’ current jobs.

The Oregon Attorney General’s public records manual puts it this way: “Disclosure of that information may constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy, because the revelation could seriously threaten the person’s current employment relationship and professional standing.”

The key word in that sentence is “may.”

We can understand why city manager candidates wouldn’t tell their current employer that they had applied for the Baker City job.

But applying for a job is quite different from being chosen as a finalist.

Once you know you’re a finalist, which means you’ll be traveling to Baker City for an interview with the Council, it seems proper to let your boss know what’s happening.

How else, after all, would you explain your absence or, should you impress during your interview, your pending resignation?

We’re leery, frankly, of the City Council hiring a manager who has shown a capacity for that sort of secrecy.

In any case, we don’t think the city’s argument about protecting candidates’ current jobs is compelling.

In 2003, for instance, Bingham, one of the two finalists, was working as a city manager in McCook, Neb., when he came to Baker City for the public reception and interview.

His photograph was prominently displayed in this newspaper, along with a lengthy interview.

Bingham didn’t get the Baker City job. But neither did the publicity here cost him his job in Nebraska – he stayed on as city manager in McCook until January 2006.

Mayor Dennis Dorrah said Tuesday that it’s possible the Council will pare the list of four candidates to two, then announce the names of the final pair before offering the job.

But Dorrah said it’s also conceivable that the Council will do this year what it did in 2007 – offer the job to one candidate before city residents know the names of any of the finalists.

The bottom line here is that if the choice comes down to either sparing a candidate a possible hassle with his or her current boss, or ensuring that Baker City residents have a chance to participate, in a limited way, in the hiring of the person who runs their city and spends their property tax dollars, we side with the residents.

We hope the City Council agrees.