City schedules public forum to meet unknown candidates

The timing means citizens who want to question candidates will have little, if any, opportunity to look into their backgrounds and possible problems in order to focus their questions.

The City Council will meet Tuesday afternoon to interview a number of applicants referred to them by a recruiter — city officials won’t say exactly how many.

From that pool, the council will identify those they consider finalists — again, it refuses to say how many — who will appear at the public forum that night. The names will be made public after the closed-door council session.

The council met with the recruiter in closed session two weeks ago to discuss the applicants and who they might want to bring in for interviews.

The council had promised an open and public hiring process.

But Mark Homan, a member of the appointed citizens committee that will interview finalists on Wednesday, said he was surprised at the low level of community engagement, expecting citizen voices to have more of a role in the selection.

City attorney Mike Rankin twice denied the Star’s records request to make the names and résumés of those candidates public now, saying they cannot be considered finalists.

“The process has been structured to allow the immediate release of the names of final candidates as soon as they are determined, so that this information will get to the public as soon as possible,” Rankin said in an email.

The public forum is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Copies of the candidates’ résumés will be available then, Rankin said.

While Rankin would not say how many candidates will be interviewed by the council, a memo describing the hiring process projected five to seven top candidates. Rankin speculated the council likely will choose three finalists.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild said the city is running a very open hiring process, and that most cities wouldn’t hold a community forum at all.

Due diligence is the council’s responsibility, he said.

The City Manager Appointment Advisory Committee, created to find out how the candidates’ respond to key issues, is scheduled to meet at 8 a.m. Wednesday to interview the finalists.

But the city first contacted the group about the timing of the meeting on Monday, and several members of the committee have indicated they are not available to attend at that time.

The committee questioning will be open to the public to attend, but not participate.

“I would’ve thought we would’ve been more fully involved in the process,” Homan said, adding the process has been a surprise, and he thought citizen voices would have a larger role.

Among the questions he’d like to ask the candidates is on that very point of public input, and how citizens’ opinions are used in their decision-making.

While public bodies are required under the Arizona Public Records Law to make public the interviewees’ names and application materials, it’s a management decision about whether they should be made public when they accept the interviews or after the interviews have taken place, said Kathryn Marquoit, Arizona assistant ombudsman.

After they meet with the citizens committee, finalists will also face interviews with a panel of elected officials, department heads and labor union representatives before one of them is selected.