And These People Are Supposed to Hire a New Manager?

There was a way this could have been easy.  Of five Commissioners, only one was involved in hiring both our current manager and her predecessor.  The other four have had no experience hiring a manager, or anyone for the Village, and two of them were never Commissioners until after our current manager had been at her post for about two years.  She, on the other hand, has abundant municipal experience, including four years as a head manager, with us, and she has gotten herself well-connected in the County.  Furthermore, four of the five Commissioners have expressed great confidence in her, and appreciation of her.  So the easy road to have taken was to have accepted the road map she devised for a mechanism and a time line to replace her.  Maybe a minor tweak or two, here or there, for imprecise details, but generally, she proposed a navigable route.  But no, if you're wondering, it did not go smoothly.  And if it had, it would certainly have taken less than three hours.

Things were not looking good at the outset.  Noah Jacobs came in, when only Anderson and Ross were there, and he wanted the Commissioner seating arrangement changed.  He didn't say why, but he wanted Watts placed between him and Cooper, instead of next to Ross.  He got some resistance, and he stormed out of the room, demonstrating only an attenuated version of his patented temper tantrums.  The manager, clerk, and attorney had to go outside to mollify him.  Eventually, he came back in.

Watts was a few minutes late.  Cooper was 40 minutes late.  It was never clear what Jacobs' tantrum was about.

The meeting started with Dan Samaria's presenting a request that an RAB event be combined with the Halloween event.  There was a great deal of attempted exploration of this issue, but Dan was partially equivocal and partially evasive as to what RAB's consensus was about this move, and if they had actually voted on it.  It was clear what Dan wanted, but it was not clear what the RAB wanted.  The other complicating factor is that the Commission didn't seem to know what it should be doing.  It phrased this complication as if it was Dan's fault: "we don't understand what it is you want us to do."  The glaring cause of uncertainty came later in the meeting, when Noah mentioned in passing that the Commission had "usurped too much power."   If only the Commission in general, and Noah in particular, could have kept this insight in focus for the whole meeting.

And this was really the overarching problem.  The answer to Dan's question was that the Commission didn't need to get mixed up in this, and that Dan and RAB could work it out with the Manager and the recreation Director.  So the real response to Dan should have been "what's this got to do with the Commission?"  But that would have required the Commission to recognize and acknowledge that not everything is its business and purview.  It would have required the Commission to have the capacity not to usurp power.  Likewise, the Commission did not need to comb through the Manager's recommendation for how to replace her.  The main thing the Commission had to do was pick an end date.  It now appears this will be early in October.  The Commission did not need to bother itself with things like the differences among "should," "shall," and "will," although this debate was clearly self-stimulatory for the Commissioners, and it allowed Eve Boutsis to carry on in her usual excessive way.

Only one of the Commissioners has legal-related training, but it was clear that all of them fancy themselves junior attorneys.  As such, it was most important to them to get lost in irrelevant minutiae.  Regular attorneys do that to keep the clock running.  It wasn't clear why the Commissioners were doing it, unless it was to continue to satisfy the self-stimulatory urges.  The range of desperately important details that absolutely required careful debate and exploration was impressive.  If you think it's unimportant to take an uneducated guess as to whether people you don't know are on vacation, and how long these imagined vacations enjoyed, hypothetically, by these unknown people are likely to last, like might it be two weeks (from when?) or three weeks, or are they out of work and therefore not on vacation at all, it just shows how little you know.  It wasn't unimportant to our Commissioners.  And then there was the critically important insight that people who know nothing about municipal management might actually make wonderful municipal managers, and we would be foolish not to hire one of them.  Bryan Cooper thought people in general management of something or other, which he then rethought and decided should be "non-profit" organizations, might have just the right skills and connections.  Noah Jacobs, the teacher, thought we should consider people whose expertise is in teaching.  Barbara Watts, one of our college professors, had a sense that a good place to look for a municipal manager might be in academia.  Ana Garcia, our, um, Manager, tried to suggest that we really wanted someone with municipal management skills and experience.  Cooper, Jacobs, and Watts weren't so sure that was important.  And what about the characteristics of the manager?  Jacobs felt strongly, very strongly, that we don't want to advertise that we want someone with a "can-do" attitude and excellent communication skills.  Too bad he was in his completely-unaware-and-disinterested-in-the-Village phase when Frank Spence was our manager.  There was Noah's perfect manager: can't do, couldn't care less, terrible communication skills.  Not a teacher, though.

The other big topic of debate and maneuvering was how many committees should preview the manager applications, and who should be on these committees.  Only Bryan Cooper was "adamant" that no one from the County, or the "League of Cities," should be involved.  He didn't say why, but I assume the reason is connected with his overpowering contempt for and mistrust of government.  So no, he doesn't want any advice from anyone connected in any way to anything related to any government.   Apart from that, there was discussion of an ad hoc committee of "residents" (as if the Commissioners weren't residents) who would preview the applications.  There was careful and cagey debate about how such a group of "residents" would be chosen, and how many there would be.  And then, abundant advance consideration of how hard and long these people would have to work to get through the "100" (imagined) applications.  The last time we did this, there were eight.  And how short should the ultimate short list be?  (Knock it off, you.  Quit laughing.  This is important to determine far in advance of any actual data.  You see, this is why Noah was right about the Scouts.  "Be Prepared!")

Nothing substantive was accomplished by this exercise.  We needed a document to post in the search for a new manager, our current manager composed one, the Commission provided many "corrections," and now we have a document to post in the search for a new manager.  It is not materially different, and certainly not usefully different, from the one the manager proffered.  It just took an extra and meaningless 3 hours, which included paying the attorney ($500) and the video guy ($300-$400).

I expected to have to stay at this 6:30 meeting until 8.  After 8, I convinced myself to continue on until 9.  I decided at 9:30 enough was enough, and it sounded as though the group might be angling itself in the general direction of wrapping up anyway.  If I said there wasn't much else they could have found to talk about at that point, it's a statement I could have made at least an hour before.  So who knows.

Do you think this post was painfully long?  You should have come to the meeting.