By
NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — City of Hutchinson Human Resources Director Tom Sanders said the City Council has decided to use a search firm to help find a permanent city manager.
"We did have an executive session and we reviewed the proposals," Sanders said. "We haven't signed the contract yet, but they have selected a search firm. We should be getting the contract, hopefully, executed next week."
That will be after the next regular meeting of the council on Tuesday. The initial temporary contract with Gary Meagher was for two months, but Sanders expects that to continue.
"Honestly, it will probably take longer than two months," Sanders said. "I don't want to speak for Gary, but I think he's open to staying on longer than that. I don't want to rush it and two months, to me, sounds, just based on past experience, a little aggressive."
It took longer than that to find and hire Jeff Cantrell when they knew John Deardoff was going to retire.
"I looked back at that here recently," Sanders said. "It was almost a year. We started the recruitment and that lasted longer than we thought. Some of that got kind of postponed a little bit, because we had two new council members joining the council and so that kind of slowed things down, too. It did take Jeff a little while to transition from his old job to here. By the time you put all of that together, it was almost a year."
It's also going to be difficult to recruit someone who is currently working in Kansas quickly.
"There's never a great time to recruit," Sanders said. "Right now, a lot of cities are under crunch time with budgets and to get all that done. I think, this year, for most cities, it's going to be a particularly challenging budget year with all the inflation issues and things like that."
Sanders believes the city would be doing good to have someone on board within six months.