BY TRACY LEE TATE
Special to the Times
LAKE BUTLER— The City of Lake Butler held a special meeting Wed. Nov. 1 to interview its top three picks of the applicants for the position of city manager, but the meeting did not go as planned as two of the three persons selected for interviews had previously notified Mayor David Stegall that they had already found other employment, one as the new city manager of Jasper. Of the three, only local applicant Brian Reagan came to the meeting, but the commission felt it needed a bigger interview pool to select from.
After discussion, the board decided to re-advertise the position in search of more qualified applicants. Since it is doing so, City Attorney John Maines said it would not be appropriate to interview a single applicant ahead of time for the interviews from the new applications.
“If you interview now, the process may be conducted in a different manner or method than the later interviews, and this potential for inconsistency is not fair to any of the applicants,” Maines said.
Commissioner Melissa Hendrix commented that she thought it best to reject all the outstanding applications and allow those who applied to re-apply. She also said she felt the whole process was over-long, taking almost two months from the publication of the advertisements to the interview date. She said a citizen had suggested that the board meet every 15 days to review applications received and that it seemed like a good idea to her. She also said she favored leaving the salary range for the position at $75,000 to $85,000 and thought the commission needed to rethink the requirement that the selected applicant live in the city.
Hendrix made three motions, all of which passed unanimously. The first was to give Mayor David Stegall the authority to cancel any of the special meetings set for the business of the candidate selection process. The second was to modify the residence requirement in the advertisements to state that it could be waived. In her third motion, she moved to leave the application process open-ended and to have a special meeting every 15 days to review applications that have come in.
Hendrix then asked her fellow commissioners if there were set questions for the interviews. Commissioner Annette Redman commented that, in the past, each commissioner generated the questions they wanted to be asked. Maines asked each commissioner to create a set of questions and have them compiled and sent to him so that he could check with a labor law consultant to see if they fell within current legal parameters.
“As time goes on, there is an increasing sensitivity about what questions can be asked,” Maines said. He cited an example that questions about health issues could be violations of HIPPA regulations concerning privacy.
The board voted unanimously to set meeting dates for application review as Nov. 15th and 30th at 4 p.m. and Dec. 15, 2023, at 4 p.m.
