SEQUIM — After a long day of interviews capped by a public reception for four city manager candidates Tuesday, the Sequim City Council has yet to choose the man for the job.
“We’re going to re-interview a couple of them,” council member Bill Huizinga said late Tuesday night after the council emerged from a closed executive session.
Choosing from the field of finalists “is very, very difficult,” Huizinga said. “We want to have complete consensus.”
The council plans another executive session with the candidates Monday, he added.
The council will call a special meeting during which it will make the final decision on Sequim’s next manager, said Mayor Laura Dubois on Tuesday night, although she wouldn’t estimate when that might be.
A flock of city staffers and a handful of other Sequim residents met the hopefuls at the reception.
• Steven Burkett, former manager of Shoreline and Tallahassee, Fla., among other larger cities.
• Mark Gervasi, manager of Tillamook, Ore.
• Subir Mukerjee, who recently ended a 17-year stint with the city of Olympia.
• Vernon Stoner, the former manager of Lacey and Vancouver, Wash., who has worked in the state insurance commissioner’s office and Labor and Industries Department.
Stoner, 61, said he’s eager to move to a smaller town than those he’s worked in — and where the City Council is a contentious body — because he relishes a fresh set of challenges.
Balancing Sequim’s budget and developing a productive relationship with the council are among those; when it comes to the council’s divisions, Stoner said he hopes to “be part of the solution.”
Mukerjee, 58, left Olympia, another financially strapped city where he was deputy city manager, in July.
In the wake of 22 layoffs at City Hall, his position was to be “restructured,” and he decided it was “time to see what other opportunities are out there.”
‘Growing pains’
Mukerjee sees Sequim undergoing “growing pains,” just as any desirable place copes with tension about what it wants to become.
Mukerjee, who grew up near Calcutta, India, moved to the United States to earn his graduate degree in urban planning at the University of Oklahoma, and worked in Wichita Falls, Texas, before coming to Olympia.
Gervasi, 60, said that after 12 years in Tillamook he’s “ready for a step up” to a larger town. Tillamook has 32 city employees while Sequim has 72.
“This would be a really stimulating job; an intellectual challenge,” said Gervasi, who grew up in Miami, Fla., and was a schoolteacher before going into city management in the small communities of Lafayette and Jefferson, Ore.
Of the Sequim council, Gervasi said: “They’re working through their issues.”
Burkett, 64, has been working for the past three years as a consultant with Management Partners Inc., and said he’s eager to return to a city hall — though Sequim’s is tiny compared with those where he’s worked.
Tallahassee had 2,800 employees when he was its boss, and “bigger is not better,” Burkett said. To him, such a place has too much bureaucracy and too little sense of community.
The Sequim City Council hired Waldron & Co. to recruit its manager candidates, and will have the firm assist with salary and benefits negotiations, Dubois said.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
