It turns out that Amarillo interim City Manager Terry Childers’ expression of “regret” hasn’t quite buttoned up the controversy surrounding his ill-fated phone call to the Amarillo Emergency Communication Center.

Childers offered his “sincere” regrets Tuesday at a City Council meeting over the way he acted during a 911 call he made to report a missing briefcase at a local hotel. He was brusque with a dispatcher who was doing her job. To be candid, he bullied her over the phone while demanding that she send police officers to the hotel to find the briefcase. He said he wanted the hotel “shut down” while the cops looked for the missing item.

The briefcase was recovered shortly after Childers made the call.

His call has prompted a lot of conversation around the city.

So has his expression of “regret,” which technically falls a bit short of an apology.

Panhandle PBS is going to broadcast a “Live Here” segment Thursday to examine the potential fallout from the event. The public TV station is going to visit with Mayor Paul Harpole and councilmen Elisha Demerson and Brian Eades to discuss what happens next.

See the promo here

Oh, but there’s a good bit more to this episode.

Terry Bavousett, the former head of the AECC, has issued a lengthy public statement about his views of what happened. He has announced his retirement effective next week.

But the statement goes into considerable detail about what Bavousett said happened when Childers made the call and how the dispatcher handled it.

It’s not a flattering portrait of Childers, to say the least.

Where does this matter go from here? That depends on the City Council, which hired Childers as the interim manager after Jarrett Atkinson resigned — under apparent pressure from some council members.

If I were on the council, I would be inclined to accept Childers’ mea culpa at face value. He vowed never to do it again. Take the man at his word, OK? But make damn sure he remains faithful to his pledge to treat city staffers with the respect they deserve as professional public servants.

Then I would be inclined to get moving rapidly on finding a permanent replacement. I’m not privy to the expressions of interest the city has received regarding the city manager’s position. Maybe it has a lot of qualified people interested in coming to work here; maybe it has only a few. Whatever the circumstance, the city should accelerate the search.

Childers well might want to return to Oklahoma City to resume the life he had before coming here. He might want to retire and move back home to Abilene. Or, he just might want to go fishin’.

The city is embarking on an ambitious downtown revitalization effort as well as equally ambitious street and highway infrastructure improvements being done by the state; it needs a permanent chief administrator on hand to take charge.

Incidents such as this have this way of taking on lives of their own. That appears to be the case with the city manager’s phone call to a 911 dispatcher who was doing the job she was trained to do.

Maybe we’ll get an idea of what the immediate future holds for Terry Childers when the three council members talk to Panhandle PBS. More importantly, though, is what’s in store for the city as it continues to move forward.

This fallout from this unfortunate event will recede eventually. My hope is that it does so sooner rather than too much later.

It’s your move, City Council.