Amarillo City Council members will have a difficult choice to make soon.
It’s a difficulty made possible for the correct reasons.
Amarillo council members looked across the nation for someone to become its city manager and has come up with a strong field of finalists. One of them, interim City Manager Bob Cowell, is among the five men the council will consider for the job.
I want to offer a brief analysis on a couple of fronts.
The first is that I’ve long believed that local governments shouldn’t restrict their search options, particularly when the search involves finding someone to do as critical a job as administer the operations of a government that serves 200,000 residents and spends about $300 million annually to serve those constituents.
Back when I worked for the Amarillo Globe-News as editorial page editor, we urged the city to cast a wide net as it looked for a successor to former City Manager John Ward. The city instead looked inward and promoted Alan Taylor to the top job. The paper was critical of the choice … but the paper’s criticism had nothing to do with Taylor’s ability. The G-N merely thought that the city would have served itself better by collecting a large field of qualified candidates and then have Taylor compete against them for the job he would get.
Taylor took the criticism personally and I regret that to this day; I told him repeatedly that it was never about him or his skill set. He did well in the job.
The city looked inward again when it promoted Jarrett Atkinson to the manager’s post after Taylor retired. The G-N argued again for a national search. You know my feelings already about Atkinson and the job he did. I am sorry he couldn’t work with the new City Council majority, but I also am delighted that he has scored a new gig as Lubbock city manager.
Here we are again. All the finalists have municipal and/or county government experience. Some of them are Texans, which bodes well for someone who must be familiar with our state’s own municipal codes.
If the council chooses Cowell — who knows the city’s unique political landscape — that would be fine, too. He will have been asked to rise to the challenge of competing against four other qualified men for the top job.
The second point is the timing of this appointment. The Globe-News believes the current council should give way to the next one, which will take office after the May 6 election. I disagree with that notion, just as I disagreed with U.S. Senate Republicans’ insistence that President Obama’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court be denied a hearing and a vote because the president also was a lame duck.
In the case of the city, all five of these individuals stand for election every two years. At what point — given that brief time span — are these council members not facing potential lame-duck status?
The city charter gives the council the authority to act in its own time to deliver the only hiring decision it is empowered to make. If there is a concern that the council could change hands — as it did in May 2015 — then council members need to ask all the finalists how they would handle a potential change of political philosophy on the governing body. That seems like a direct question and it requires candor and honesty from the city manager candidates.
The city has gone too long already without a permanent city manager. Let these individuals make the call.
Good luck, council members. Study hard and be damn certain you get this one right.
