Council debates hiring city manager recruiter

Following a lengthy discussion, Mayor Joe Hardy summed things up Tuesday by saying, “Our No. 1 priority is to get someone who will stay.”

Hardy said this at the tail end of an agenda item about hiring a recruitment firm to find candidates to fill the office left open when former City Manager Taylour Tedder departed after only 2 1/2 years.

The process of just finding a recruitment firm has been going on for almost two months already and the council will not meet again until mid-August.

On June 11, council rejected the proposal put forward by a consultant firm called Raftelis and instructed staff to seek additional proposals. Per acting City Manager Michael Mays, staff reached out to 24 firms and got 10 responses.

“Those responses are included in your packet with their proposals,” he said. “They talk about the various ways that they would undertake the recruitment process and bring candidates to the city council for your consideration.”

It was a virtual re-run of the meeting in May when the council got three such responses and declined to make a decision based on them asking, instead, that staff set up in-person presentations to be made at a future council meeting.

At least one member of the council, Cokie Booth, appeared to have been listening to members of the public who have asked at multiple meetings why the city was going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an outside recruitment firm when they already have a human resources department that hires for all other city positions.

Booth, a real estate broker in her day gig, said she likened many of the proposals to getting a property appraisal.

“If you get a house appraised, it’s about $400-$500,” she said. “If you get a commercial appraisal, you’re gonna start out at about $2,500 because they put all of this fluff in there.”

Referring to the multiple proposals, she continued, “So I kind of went through these and so many of them put in so much fluff that you didn’t really learn what they were doing.”

Notably, two of the firms who submitted offer a kind of “recruitment-lite” package where they offer assistance to the city’s HR department rather than conducting the entire search process.

Councilwoman Sherri Jorgensen noted that while there are advantages to a nationwide search, there are potential downsides. She seemed especially intent on finding a firm who would be able to understand the unique needs of a small town like Boulder City.

“Sometimes you find someone young and wonderful and they leave because they have bigger fish they want to fry,” she said in apparent reference to the fact that Tedder was headhunted out of BC and into a gig in Delaware by one of the same companies seeking to recruit someone to fill his now-vacant position.

She said she was not onboard with spending as much as $58,000 (the upper end of the prices being quoted), but was also skeptical of just using the existing city department.

“I’m not so sure we should in-house it because, as it has been said, it is not wise for us to pick our boss,” she said.

(Note: This was a reference to staff, not council. The city manager works for the council. But city staff works for the city manager.)

Continuing a thread from a previous meeting in which Councilman Steve Walton was insistent on a firm that could “identify leaders” via personality assessments, Jorgensen said, “If a personality test is what we are going to hang our hat on, the firms offering that are $30,000 and $35,000…”

Referencing an earlier comment from Booth, she said, “Cokie, what did you say we could get out own for? $80?” Which Booth confirmed.

But the emphasis on saving money was fleeting.

Eventually, the council decided to move forward with just one firm, Oregon-based WBCP, whose proposal was in the $30,000 range.

The next step in the process will be a presentation to the council where they will be able to give the firm specific parameters on what they want to see the process look like. This would happen before a contract for services is signed.

The next council meeting is scheduled for Aug. 13.