Garibaldi’s City Council approved a new contract for city manager recruitment services at a special meeting on May 24.Â
WBCP Inc. was selected to help with the early stages of the recruitment for a cost of $5,900, after a previous effort by another firm did not yield results.
Mayor Tim Hall said that the city had come close to hiring a candidate in the past several months, but that after extending an offer, the prospective candidate’s wife had received a promotion that led to their staying in Utah.
Following that unsuccessful recruitment, Hall said that he had decided the city needed to work with a firm specializing in government recruitment. Hall asked Bay City Mayor David McCall for a recommendation, and he suggested WBCP. Hall met with representatives from the company at a League of Oregon Cities conference and was impressed by their qualifications.
The firm then presented three different options for recruitment services to the city, ranging in price from $5,900 to almost $30,000. Hall said that because of the city’s compromised financial situation, the least expensive option was the only one they could afford.
That option includes meetings with city staff and officials to develop a candidate profile and recruitment timeline before initiating the headhunting process by listing the job. Application review and the interview and final hiring processes will be the city’s responsibility. In addition to the $5,900 base price, another $3,000-$4,500 in expenses related to advertising were forecast in the proposal.
The council also approved using the same qualification criteria for the search as they had in the previous, which requires that applicants have at least one year of experience as a city manager or assistant city manager. Several public commenters questioned this criterion, arguing that it could exclude potential candidates.
Hall pushed back vigorously against those commenters, saying that the city’s dire financial situation meant that they could ill afford to bring in a candidate who would require time to get up to speed.Â
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