City manager start date on hold

Those waiting for a new city manager to get into the saddle in Boulder City are going to have to wait a bit longer. Somewhere between four and six weeks.

The city council voted unanimously Tuesday and without discussion to approve an amendment to Ned Thomas’ employment contract changing his start date.

When the council, in January, approved a number of changes to the provisional contract they had offered Thomas in November, the final contract called for him to start his new job by March 15, which would be Saturday of this week.

But in an item on the agenda for this week’s meeting, staff asked the council to approve an extension to “on or about April 15, but no later than May 1.” The staff report supporting the change says only that Thomas “needs additional time before he can begin his tenure as city manger due to prior responsibilities.”

No clarification to that vague statement was made at the meeting and the council did not ask for one, voting to approve the changes without discussion or questions.

If Thomas starts at the end of the newly-agreed period, Boulder City will have been without a permanent city manager for one week shy of a year. Former City Manager Taylour Tedder resigned on May 8 of last year.

Community Development Director Michael Mays has served as acting city manager since Tedder’s departure. He served in the same position for about a year after a previous city council fired then-manager Al Noyola in 2020, meaning that Mays has acted as city manager for about two of the past four and a half years.

The start date is the latest in a series of contract changes since the council made a provisional job offer to Thomas in November of last year.

In January, the council met, discussed and approved several changes to Thomas’ contract. The simplest of the changes is the residency. Per the city’s charter, the city manager must reside in Boulder City proper. Thomas currently owns a home in Henderson, which is considered his residence despite the fact that he works Monday through Friday every week in Milpitas, a city in California’s Bay Area. The change in the contract gives Thomas up to one year to establish residency in Boulder City.

The change that got the most discussion was also presented as being driven by the fact that Thomas will be looking for a home in BC. There was a long discussion about the “executive leave” portion of the contract proposed by Thomas. Basically this is a separate trove of time off that can be used however Thomas wants to use it. While it has never been done in this exact manner, there is some precedent.

Both Tedder and current City Attorney Brittany Walker got an additional grant of 80 vacation hours upon employment. In other words, these were hours available immediately and would not have to be accrued over time. But there has not been a separate bucket of hours for executive leave in the past. The justification in the past was that Tedder needed time to find a house in Boulder City, as he was relocating from Kansas. The justification for Walker, who already lived in town, was that she was pregnant at the time she accepted the job.

Those were both one-time grants of additional vacation time. Thomas will get 80 hours at the beginning of employment but then an additional 80 hours a year in a bucket separate from vacation and sick time that will accrue along with those balances on a weekly basis. When questioned about the need, Thomas, appearing via a video link, noted that, as an employee of Milpitas for more than seven years, he currently gets 168 hours per year of vacation time.

In addition, Thomas has asked for a specific amount of money to be available to reimburse him for professional development. He said that he wants to use professional development funds to pursue certification as a city manager as well as to check in from time to time with a professional coach he already uses.

As residency in Boulder City is a charter requirement for city managers, Thomas will need to relocate from Henderson. He asked for and was given up to a $10,000 reimbursement for moving expenses. He had originally asked for $15,000 but backed off of that in changes proposed after the agenda was published. In the original proposed changes, he had also asked for a forgivable loan of $10,000. It would be given as a relocation bonus upon hiring and then forgiven once he had been on the job for one year. In another change, which the council ultimately approved, the $10,000 was reclassified as a retention bonus to be paid after Thomas completes two years on the job.