SEQUIM – Is the Sequim City Council conducting its search for a new city manager in a gray legal area by interviewing candidates behind closed doors — instead of in public meetings?
The council interviewed four finalists last Tuesday in executive session and will re-interview two more this Tuesday, meeting again behind closed doors in an executive session at 5 p.m. in the Sequim Transit Center.
The council members have not identified the two candidates they will interview.
Open deliberation
Mayor Laura DuBois has said that after the closed meeting Tuesday, the council will call an open meeting to deliberate.
“When we make our final decision, it will be public,” she said last week, adding that she didn’t know when the selection would be made.
The state Public Meetings Act does not explicitly say that the council can interview candidates for public employment behind closed doors, said Tim Ford, state assistant attorney general for government accountability.
Whether or not the council took final action is not the issue, he said, because the open meetings act also disallows deliberating on a candidate’s qualifications, he said.
That must be done in open session.
Evaluate qualifications
But the council can evaluate a candidate’s qualifications in secret, and an interview might fall under that exemption, Ford said.
Ford said the state Supreme Court in Miller v. City of Tacoma acknowledged that there is no definition for “evaluate” in the Public Meetings Act and used the Webster’s dictionary definition: “to examine and judge concerning the worth, quality, significance, amount, degree, or condition of.”
“I think an interview could be ‘to examine’ the qualifications of a candidate and therefore fall within the permitted purpose of evaluating a candidate for public employment,” Ford said Friday.
Shaky ground
But the council could be on shaky ground, he added.
“As a caution, I would always tell people that if it’s not in the black-and-white letters and words of the act, see if you can do it in a different way, without an executive session,” Ford said.
DuBois said Friday the public had the opportunity to meet the candidates at a public reception and through a community panel.
She said she was following the advice of Waldron & Associates, a Seattle firm the city is paying $20,000 to conduct a search for worthy candidates.
Waldron did not discuss with the council which open meetings law allows them to meet in private to interview candidates, Dubois said.
The City Council hasn’t had a regular city manager since it fired Bill Elliott on May 5, 2008.
Instead, the council hired Sequim Police Chief Bob Spinks as interim city manager until December 2008, followed by the current fill-in, Linda Herzog.
Council members tried and failed in November 2008 to hire a city manager from among three candidates, then turned to Waldron to find qualified candidates.
Waldron came up with Steven Burkett, consultant with Management Partners Inc.; Mark Gervasi, city manager of Tillamook, Ore.; Subir Mukerjee, who has worked 17 years in Olympia’s city management team; and Vernon Stoner, former city manager of Lacey and Vancouver, Wash.
The salary range is $100,000 to $130,000.
Dubois could not say what council members would ask a candidate in private that they could not ask in public.
“I did not set up the process,” she said.
“Probably we could be more open, I would think.”
Lane Youngblood, Waldron’s vice president for the public sector, said Friday that meeting behind closed doors to interview candidates falls under the evaluation exemption of the open meetings act.
“The law allows government to have executive session for discussing qualifications, evaluating qualifications,” she said.
“The interview is a process by which you discover those right qualifications.”
While the interviews include discussions of budget philosophy, leadership skills and other public aspects of being a city manager — and display the priorities of elected council members as they ask questions — interviews also may include discussion of why a candidate left a previous job, Youngblood said.
“Some of that is pretty sensitive,” she said.
How the public is served by a closed-door process “is not a question for me to answer,” Youngblood said.
“It’s a question for the council to answer.
“They don’t have to do this process the way they are doing it. This is what we recommended.”
________
Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
