SEQUIM — Two Midwesterners and a South Dakotan are in Sequim this weekend, hoping to land the city’s top job.
The finalists for Sequim city manager are Curt Carver, 53, city administrator of Inverness, Ill.; Alan Lanning, 50, former city manager of Steamboat Springs, Colo.; and Jim Southworth, 60, administrative officer of Monroe, southeast of Snohomish.
Each candidate faced about 40 people Friday during a reception for the public.
The reception drew mostly city staff, police officers and council members, as well as real estate broker Mike McAleer, Open Aire Market manager and city planning commissioner Mark Ozias and anti-light-pollution activist Pat Clark.
The candidates had closed interviews with City Council members, city department heads and a citizens’ panel on Saturday.
The council hopes to select a candidate and begin negotiations today in order to bring the new manager on board in January.
Carver
Carver, whose city of Inverness has a population of 7,200, said he’s looking for “a different challenge.” And he knows that’s a cliche. But having been in the Chicago suburbs all of his life, he’s interested in a whole new thing.
“I’m here for a reason: the environment — the natural environment, the size of the community,” said.
“I’m at a stage in my life where I can relocate where I want to go.”
Carver is married with children and grandchildren, and has spent 23 years in the public administration business; his only time outside it was when he served in the Army from 1973 to ’79.
“It seems to me that this community is at a crossroads,” Carver said of Sequim.
“But I don’t have a lot of preconceived notions. I am excited about learning more.”
Carver calls his style collaborative while adding that he’s no micromanager.
He’s run Inverness for 11 years, and managed Carpentersville, Ill., population 25,000, for 10 years prior to that.
Lanning
Lanning, a product of Elk Point, S.D., managed Brookings, S.D. — population 20,000 — and several other cities, including Minturn, Colo. — population 1,200 — before serving as Steamboat Springs’ chief for two years.
Last summer, “we agreed to separate,” Lanning said, after five new council members decided he wasn’t right for them.
He said Steamboat is facing the same growing pains as Sequim, with 540 annexed acres this year and some 2,000 new homes planned.
A good city manager “gives good counsel to the decision makers” — the city council members — as they seek to balance economic development with the town’s sense of community, he said.
The goal, Lanning said, is to control, not cut off, growth.
Southworth
Southworth grew up in Northfield, Minn., and took a master’s degree in urban regional studies before becoming city manager of Marine City, Mich.
He ran the Detroit suburb of 4,500 from 1976 to ’80, then managed Toppenish, Yakima County, for nearly 22 years.
He’s worked in Monroe for the past six years. The city of 16,400 has a strong-mayor form of government, so Southworth hopes to move to Sequim where the city manager is in charge.
“My background is in city management,” he said, adding that Lee Walton, the recruiter hired by the Sequim City Council, sought him out.
Southworth added that he’s impressed by Sequim’s department heads, especially Administrative Services Director Karen Goschen.
He read her 2009 budget presentation on the city’s Web site (www.ci.Sequim.wa.us), and noticed that Sequim’s sales-tax revenues are also “very impressive.”
Now that so much development has happened here, Southworth said the city manager must determine what the council and the rest of the residents want the place to look like in a decade.
As for management style, “I can be hands-on when I need to, but I prefer not to be. I want to encourage the staff to grow and develop.”
Robert Spinks, Sequim’s police chief and interim city manager since the council fired Bill Elliott on May 5, said each of the three candidates has the technical skills to run the city.
What is yet to be learned, Spinks said, is how each man would fit in with the council and how he would lead his staff.
