Council offers $220K plus perks

The process for securing a new city manager in Boulder City took a big leap forward Tuesday as the city council voted unanimously to accept proposed changes to the previously-offered contract with current Milpitas, Calif. City Manager Ned Thomas.

This doesn’t mean that someone will be in the saddle vacated by former City Manager Taylour Tedder close to a year ago in the next week or so. But it does mean that the city and Thomas have come to agreement on a long list of changes that centered on compensation and residency requirements.

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 BC, 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.

In a special meeting in November, the city council voted unanimously to extend a conditional offer of employment to Thomas at a proposed salary of $200,000 per year plus an unspecified amount to account for moving expenses. Thomas’ biggest advantage over two other candidates presented by the headhunter hired by the city, as stated by multiple council members, was that he has ties to the region and owns a home in Henderson.

“I have owned a home here in Southern Nevada for 20 years,” Thomas said in that meeting, which was basically a publicly conducted job interview. “First in North Las Vegas and then more recently, in Henderson. My four children have all attended Foothill High School just over the hill and my youngest daughter is a now a senior at Foothill. My wife is also this year a full-time Spanish teacher at Foothill High School.”

Thomas has a master’s degree in urban planning from Harvard but, smartly given the council’s strongly worded previous preferences for someone tied to the region kept coming back to the, “I’ve owned a home in Southern Nevada for 20 years” theme.

Tedder was making $192,656, which is toward the upper end of the advertised salary range of up to $211,504. Several on the council agreed that figure may be low considering current housing costs in BC. Booth suggested a higher figure but Walker said that was a problem for this meeting as a higher figure had not been agendized. In the end, the council voted to extend an offer of $200,000 per year. Council members noted that, coming from California, it is assumed that Thomas would be taking a significant pay cut in the range of $60,000-70,000 per year.

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.

“Boulder City is a hidden gem,” he told the council in November. “Maybe not hidden to you because you live here, but for those who are on the outside… I have been pleasantly surprised. I thought I knew Boulder City well. We come over the hill to the Fourth of July. You know, breakfast and the parade and the fireworks, but it’s so much more than that.”

No mention was made in the meeting of a possible start date but, typically, a city manager is expected to give one or two months of notice before departing for another job or retiring.