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Showing off how nimbly we do things around here, city council’s whole finance committee is getting ready to interview people who want to be Ottawa’s next city manager.
That’s 11 city council members, including Mayor Jim Watson, all acting together as a hiring panel.
They got together Monday afternoon for their first meeting since current city manager Kent Kirkpatrick announced in September he’d be leaving to hear city clerk Rick O’Connor lay down the law. As politicians, they can disagree and squabble and backbite. But as a hiring panel, they have to act like human resources managers. That means not missing meetings — so everyone involved works with the exact same information — and keeping names secret, O’Connor told them.
“We’re dealing with human beings here, not supplicants,” headhunter Eric Lathrop added. Let anything leak and not only could the city be sued for breaking confidence, but future hirings could be jeopardized.
There will be future hirings, because Kirkpatrick’s isn’t the only vacancy at city hall these days. It’s just the biggest.
Kirkpatrick has been city manager since 2004. Council promoted from a deputy position in charge of internal services like the treasury and real estate, but he succeeded a guy, Bruce Thom, who was such a star city council paid him $800,000 to not work here any more. Although Thom immediately started at an Edmonton law firm after his severance package was sealed, he’d also been on sick leave for nearly a year at that point.
Kirkpatrick was a steady, familiar hand, with years of experience in the former regional government. Since 2004, he’s led the city administration through multiple reorganizations, expansions and streamlinings, taking a post-amalgamation hodgepodge and finding a relatively stable equilibrium. The 15,000-strong bureaucracy is made in Kirkpatrick’s image. When he goes, it will miss him.
In 2006, after Bob Chiarelli lost the mayor’s job to Larry O’Brien, the senior managers who deal with city council had to figure out which things they did because they had to, and which they did only because that’s the way Chiarelli liked them. What do we run past the mayor first? When do we wait for his input and when do we go ahead? How much detail do we put in briefings? Does he really speak for city council on this or that? Kirkpatrick’s departure will be similar.
Done properly, his job has a punishing schedule. Our routine access-to-information requests turn up emails Kirkpatrick gets and sends at all hours, seven days a week. He’s regularly cashed in unused vacation time. Besides administering a $3-billion corporation, city council had Kirkpatrick personally negotiate its deals with Plasco Energy Group (producing a contract that protected the city admirably when Plasco fell apart) and the Lansdowne developers.
Yet Kirkpatrick’s progressed from a cane to a motorized wheelchair since he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002, and that’s just the most visible sign of an illness that attacks vital systems. He’s going because he has to, not because he wants to. When he announced he’d be retiring, he choked up.
Mayor Jim Watson says Kirkpatrick has done a good job of succession planning. But if he had, he’d have a successor. Instead, Ottawa’s missing its two deputy city managers. One retired and the other left to be city manager in Vaughan when Kirkpatrick last renewed his contract a year ago and looked like he’d be around a while. Neither has been replaced.
The new manager will get to hire deputies without having to shove anybody out of the way, but it’ll be like interviewing lifeguards while you thrash and splutter in the deep end.
Edmonton, Vancouver (the city of 600,000 at the core of greater Vancouver) and Halifax are all looking for new city managers at the same time we are. Ottawa is the largest of the four and it’s not a bad time to be a public official in the capital, but we’re also the only ones who’ll need someone who speaks passable French, and probably the only ones who’ll make the interview feel like a firing squad.
The way our councillors see it, a candidate who can’t handle that probably can’t handle the job. Fair enough. But our councillors need to remember that while they’re auditioning candidates, the good ones will be auditioning them, too. We need to get a good one.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
That’s 11 city council members, including Mayor Jim Watson, all acting together as a hiring panel.
They got together Monday afternoon for their first meeting since current city manager Kent Kirkpatrick announced in September he’d be leaving to hear city clerk Rick O’Connor lay down the law. As politicians, they can disagree and squabble and backbite. But as a hiring panel, they have to act like human resources managers. That means not missing meetings — so everyone involved works with the exact same information — and keeping names secret, O’Connor told them.
“We’re dealing with human beings here, not supplicants,” headhunter Eric Lathrop added. Let anything leak and not only could the city be sued for breaking confidence, but future hirings could be jeopardized.
There will be future hirings, because Kirkpatrick’s isn’t the only vacancy at city hall these days. It’s just the biggest.
Kirkpatrick has been city manager since 2004. Council promoted from a deputy position in charge of internal services like the treasury and real estate, but he succeeded a guy, Bruce Thom, who was such a star city council paid him $800,000 to not work here any more. Although Thom immediately started at an Edmonton law firm after his severance package was sealed, he’d also been on sick leave for nearly a year at that point.
Kirkpatrick was a steady, familiar hand, with years of experience in the former regional government. Since 2004, he’s led the city administration through multiple reorganizations, expansions and streamlinings, taking a post-amalgamation hodgepodge and finding a relatively stable equilibrium. The 15,000-strong bureaucracy is made in Kirkpatrick’s image. When he goes, it will miss him.
In 2006, after Bob Chiarelli lost the mayor’s job to Larry O’Brien, the senior managers who deal with city council had to figure out which things they did because they had to, and which they did only because that’s the way Chiarelli liked them. What do we run past the mayor first? When do we wait for his input and when do we go ahead? How much detail do we put in briefings? Does he really speak for city council on this or that? Kirkpatrick’s departure will be similar.
Done properly, his job has a punishing schedule. Our routine access-to-information requests turn up emails Kirkpatrick gets and sends at all hours, seven days a week. He’s regularly cashed in unused vacation time. Besides administering a $3-billion corporation, city council had Kirkpatrick personally negotiate its deals with Plasco Energy Group (producing a contract that protected the city admirably when Plasco fell apart) and the Lansdowne developers.
Yet Kirkpatrick’s progressed from a cane to a motorized wheelchair since he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002, and that’s just the most visible sign of an illness that attacks vital systems. He’s going because he has to, not because he wants to. When he announced he’d be retiring, he choked up.
Mayor Jim Watson says Kirkpatrick has done a good job of succession planning. But if he had, he’d have a successor. Instead, Ottawa’s missing its two deputy city managers. One retired and the other left to be city manager in Vaughan when Kirkpatrick last renewed his contract a year ago and looked like he’d be around a while. Neither has been replaced.
The new manager will get to hire deputies without having to shove anybody out of the way, but it’ll be like interviewing lifeguards while you thrash and splutter in the deep end.
Edmonton, Vancouver (the city of 600,000 at the core of greater Vancouver) and Halifax are all looking for new city managers at the same time we are. Ottawa is the largest of the four and it’s not a bad time to be a public official in the capital, but we’re also the only ones who’ll need someone who speaks passable French, and probably the only ones who’ll make the interview feel like a firing squad.
The way our councillors see it, a candidate who can’t handle that probably can’t handle the job. Fair enough. But our councillors need to remember that while they’re auditioning candidates, the good ones will be auditioning them, too. We need to get a good one.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
