Amarillo’s interim city manager once scolded the City Council for creating a “caustic” political environment.
Interesting, yes? Why, of course it is. Because today, the manager in question — Terry Childers — resigned his post after calling a city resident a “stupid son of a b****” during a council meeting.
You want a caustic environment? There it is.
What happens now? The city is going to resume its search for a permanent city manager. It is going to launch an effort to find the best and the brightest city administrators it can find to operate City Hall’s machinery.
The question that continues to nag at me goes something like this: How does the city attract the best candidates possible when it operates in a dysfunctional environment?
Indeed, who wants to plunge into this setting, seeking to steady a ship that is heading on a bold, new course?
Childers has about 30 days to vacate the office. He need not take that long to hit the road and drift back into whatever life he had before he came on board a year ago to repair what supposedly was wrong with City Hall’s machinery.
His tenure hit some potholes early. He misplaced a briefcase at an Amarillo hotel and called the emergency dispatch center to report a “theft.” It turned into a top-shelf cluster hump.
Then came his stern lecture in September about the dysfunctional nature of municipal government, in which he blamed the council for creating a less-than-healthy atmosphere at City Hall.
This week was the last straw as he muttered an epithet into a “hot mic” about a critic of city policy.
Welcome to the hot seat, Assistant City Manager Bob Cowell, who will be asked to step into the interim post.
City Hall is making many of us around Amarillo a bit crazy. The City Council acts like it intends to set aside the city’s intramural squabbles and move forward as one in the effort to revamp and revitalize the downtown district. Then the city’s top administrator utters a profane insult at a constituent — one of the city “bosses” — and it falls apart … yet again.
Meanwhile …
The most recent permanent Amarillo city manager, Jarrett Atkinson, is set to take a similar post down the highway a bit, in Lubbock.
Atkinson quit his Amarillo city manager’s job because of an inability to work with the newly elected council majority. He has just stuck his landing in Lubbock.
Good for him.
What lies ahead for the city he leaves behind … well, it remains anyone’s guess.
