Council takes city manager search national; has about given up on 'quiet' campaign to find an area replacement for Prosser

CEDAR RAPIDS - Some 20 search firms in and out of Iowa have been contacted and asked to compete to help the City Council find a new city manager.

At the same time, members of the council's Personnel Committee on Monday said they had about given up on an effort to convince a local or regional candidate to look at the Cedar Rapids city manager post held until last month by Jim Prosser.

Council member Monica Vernon, the committee's chairwoman, said the “quiet” effort to find a known candidate from Eastern Iowa to take the Cedar Rapids city manager post involved contacts with managers whose talents some on the council have seen first hand over the years. Both Kelly Hayworth, Coralville's city administrator, and Mike Van Milligen, Dubuque's city manager, are two of those people.

However, Vernon said Monday it looked like the regional approach was not going to work, and the new city manager will come from elsewhere.

Conni Huber, the city's human resources director, has suggested that the council could conduct interviews with a group of candidate finalists in July if a search firm is used with the new city manager in place by mid-September.

With that in mind, Vernon and committee members Justin Shields and Don Karr on Monday said the council likely would bring on an interim city manager until the new city manager is in place.

Currently, Casey Drew, the city's finance director, is acting city manager, but the sentiment was that Drew was overworked as finance director before having now to assume the tasks as acting city manager.

The Personnel Committee also continued on Monday to refine the job description and candidate profile to be used in hiring a new city manager.

A week ago, council member Shields said the committee needed to make sure it was not stripping tasks from the city manager's job that were spelled out in the City Charter, and on Monday the committee made some changes from a week ago to protect against any such conflict with the charter. City Attorney Jim Flitz had provided some advice. The council, for instance, will not now require the city manager to obtain the council's advice and consent in the hiring of city employees other than the few spelled out in the charter. A few others, including the manager, work directly for the council.

Don Thomas, former streets commissioner and City Council member, attended the Monday committee meeting to report that he knew of a city manager in Illinois who would make a good candidate for the Cedar Rapids job. Thomas did not identify the manager other than to say he had gone to school in Cedar Rapids.

The committee told Thomas to have the candidate apply once the application process opens.