Search continues for new Cedar Rapids City Manager

Some on the City Council thought they might find a new city manager nearby and in quick order after approving a “separation” agreement with former City Manager Jim Prosser on April 21.

Coralville's city administrator, Kelly Hayworth, and Dubuque's city manager, Mike Van Milligen, were two names mentioned as possible Prosser replacements.

But Van Milligen isn't interested, Monica Vernon, chairwoman of the council's Personnel Committee, said Monday, and Hayworth apparently has signaled as much, she indicated.

Even so, the Personnel Committee agreed to continue for another week or so to look for a quick hire from someone in the public or private sectors in the region, even as it prepares to seek proposals from search firms to begin a wider search for the next city manager.

Human resources director Conni Huber thought the city could conduct interviews with candidates by the end of July and have a new manager on the job by mid-September if a search firm was used. Vernon and council member Don Karr thought the committee and the council likely could get the job done on a faster schedule.

The Personnel Committee of Vernon, Karr and council colleagues Justin Shields and Chuck Swore helped form a core on the nine-member council that wanted to part ways with Prosser.

The group thought Prosser had come to assume too much power and the council too little, and on Monday, the committee spent the better part of an hour tinkering with the job description, apparently to remedy what they did not like in the way he did the job.

The tinkering was substantive enough that, at one point, Shields suggested that the committee was taking too many tasks from the city manager and giving them to the council.

“What is his job anymore?” Shields wondered. He said a city manager should be “an integral part of this community,” just like he said the city managers are in Coralville, Dubuque and Des Moines.

Prosser was Cedar Rapids' first city manager. He started work for the city in August 2006, eight months into the city's then-new form of government with a part-time council and a full-time city manager.

The job description was written in line with the City Charter, which gives the city manager the task of hiring and firing employees other than the city clerk and city attorney, which the council employs along with the city manager. The charter also requires the manager's picks for police chief and fire chief to be approved by the council.

The Personnel Committee on Monday proposed that the hiring of all employees be done with the advice and consent of the City Council.

Prosser was paid $165,000 a year and refused to take a raise in the 44 months he served as city manager.

Vernon noted that city managers in some suburban Des Moines communities earn in the $190,000 range, and she thought Van Milligen in Dubuque earned close to that. Actually, he earns $237,369.

Vernon said the city should be ready to pay its next manager more than it paid Prosser.