The Public Interview

A city let the public weigh in on its next manager, then hired a candidate the public ranked far behind

Gary Livingston indicated that he was leaning towards Jonathan Cain to be Lakewood, Colorado’s next city manager. He thought it was a close call between Mr. Cain and Larry Dorr, but Mr. Cain’s focus on an M.A. in Political Science and Public Policy put him over the edge. He was, however, a bit disappointed that none of the candidates spoke to workforce and unions, because he believes every community deserves leadership that accounts for and cares about every stakeholder it represents. Those who are the most vulnerable and have the least power, he wrote, deserve the most attention and focus.

Gary didn’t interview any of the candidates. He’s never met them, and he doesn’t live anywhere near Lakewood. He lives in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and doesn’t appear to have any public sector experience. But he feels strongly that Jonathan Cain should be the city manager of a city 1,000 miles away that he has no ties to.

This isn’t a knock on Gary. I traded emails with him. He’s a sharp guy, and his opinion made sense given what he had to work with. He offered it because the algorithm dropped the post in his feed, and when something asks for your take, there’s nothing wrong with giving it.

The Search

Like many complex and growing communities looking for their next city manager, Lakewood undertook a national search. To most of us in the profession, that signals a community serious about finding a credible leader. Lakewood appears to be no different. It partnered with a consultant and put forth a detailed recruitment process.

But Lakewood took it a step further, doing what some towns do across the country. It ran a very public process. The five finalists were named, and their biographies were on the city website. Interviews were posted online, and there was a public reception where the finalists were stationed throughout a park visitor center so residents could rotate through and speak with each of them. The public then had the opportunity to submit comments. In the end, the council made its choice, and on paper, he’s an easy choice to defend, which is exactly why the process deserves a look.

In Lakewood, as in likely every community that hires a chief administrator, the final decision rests solely with the mayor and council. And like all city managers, whoever is hired will report to that governing body. This begs the question: what value does a public process like this provide when the public providing the input has no ability to affect the outcome? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? What happens when the public leans toward one candidate and the council hires another? Or worse, what happens when the council goes against its own instincts and takes the choice the public preferred over its own?

All of this comes with the understanding that the “public” is often the handful of people in any community actually paying attention.

The council has no obligation to ask, no obligation to listen, and no obligation to act on what it hears. The charter doesn’t require a public phase, and nothing binds the council to weigh a single comment. Council can read every submission and hire the person nobody mentioned.

Accountability

In local government, residents elect their officials and hold them accountable by paying attention to the decisions they make. This is one decision a council owns more than most, because of what’s at stake if it goes wrong. Council hires because council answers for it at the next election; the survey respondents answer for nothing. And bad hires happen. That’s true here as in any sector. But the mechanism to address this already exists. If a manager leaves after a short tenure, and the public believes the council created the conditions that drove them out, residents can change the council. If a council is churning through managers or perpetually unhappy with the ones it hires, maybe the council is the problem and that same mechanism applies.

Now add another layer of public input to the hire. Residents who feel wronged by a manager’s decision, or who don’t like the direction the organization is heading, have a new place to push for ouster. This happens with or without a public process. But it gets far more intense when a council invites public comments on the hire to begin with and then, later, refuses to listen to public complaints about the person they helped pick. The council taught the residents their voice counts on personnel matters. It can’t be surprised when they use it.

The Cost, Made Concrete

Four of the five finalists had to go back to work when they weren’t selected. Three of them served as chief financial officer, a deputy city manager, and an associate vice president at a university. In those cases, it stings less: they can credibly tell their employer that they love their current job but saw a chance to advance in another community. But the question still lingers, will they keep looking now that they got a taste of being a finalist? The other two were sitting city managers. They’d have to go back to their board and explain why they’re still committed to a job they just tried to leave.

Managers change jobs for all kinds of reasons. But it’s rare that a candidate looks at one opening, decides that opening is the only place worth applying for, and if it doesn’t work out, they’ll stay put without ever looking elsewhere. So the mayor and council of that manager’s current community are left wondering when they’ll need to run their own recruitment, and whether it’s only a matter of time before their incumbent gets picked off elsewhere.

Then there’s the real question of what kind of candidate this process deters. I’ve spoken with several consultants who have handled hundreds of recruitments among them, and they all agree that a public process like Lakewood is not the norm. Most agreed that while they will run them when a client insists, many candidates tell them a role with a process like this is a hard no. Some consultants I spoke with took a firm stance in refusing to take on a client who insisted on this. The first reason was obvious: many good candidates don’t want their current employer to know they’re looking, and a diluted applicant pool reflects on them as recruiters. The second came up nearly as often: candidates are wary of working for a council that puts a hire like this to something resembling a community vote. Every community has its challenges, and consultants will tell you, carefully, that a council choosing to run its personnel decision this way can be the first thing a prospective manager learns about how that community operates.

The HR of it All

Residents offering written input are now creating public records of their assessments. They aren’t being advised by counsel, and they could be creating documents that at best are embarrassing and at worst are discoverable in future litigation. Maybe they haven’t done much hiring in their own jobs and something like “nice guy, but probably too old to modernize operations” seems perfectly normal and non-discriminatory. Spoiler alert: it’s not, and it is. Or they watch the video interviews and think, “seems strong, but the accent could be an issue.” Then a rejected internal candidate sues, and the city has to sift through a record of potentially discriminatory comments and convince a court it ignored every one. A council can weigh candidates in executive session, on advice of counsel, and keep its deliberations private. This one chose to put the assessments in public view instead.

What The Input Actually Measures

Put Gary aside, the man who felt very strongly about a community he has no ties to and consider what the input measures from the residents who do have a stake. Each person’s view is going to be shaped by their own background.

Sometimes residents bring their own grievances with the council, and those come out as questions that fall outside what the job actually controls. On a local forum, one resident described stepping into a conversation at the reception where an activist was grilling a candidate on policy matters the council decides, not the manager. The resident explained that the city manager is not a policymaker, but an implementer.

A resident who works in human resources might see great value in a candidate who comes from that space in the public sector. And that matters, but it’s a small part of the manager’s job. A resident who spent a career in a public sector union environment might favor someone without a long history of tough labor negotiations, someone who reads as more worker friendly. Not because it’s their contract on the line, but because they read a stranger’s labor history through their own.

Now take Gary. From reading his initial comment and our email exchange, it was clear he viewed the hire through the lens of working-class residents and economic development. Those seem to be the issues that drive his career, and what he believes should be top of mind for city leaders. He didn’t feel what was presented to residents made it a priority.

Every resident offering insight brings their own experiences to the table, and their reading of a candidate is really just a read of their own priorities. The same could be said of the elected officials, who almost always come from private-sector backgrounds of their own. But even the relatively new ones have seen the organization from the inside. They know the needs and can weigh the things that can’t be quantified, the things you can’t measure in the few minutes you spend meeting someone at a visitor center in the park.

My Thoughts on the Candidates, or Not

Like many of you probably reading this, I do this for a living. For this article, I read every bio and watched all the video interviews. I was even tempted to fly to Lakewood and visit the Heritage Lakewood Belmar Park Visitor Center to get a feel for the candidates in person, but my LinkedIn article budget didn’t allow. Even if I’d stood in the park and talked with all five finalists, I still think it would be crazy for me to offer any real insight without sitting through an actual interview.

So What Actually Happened

I reviewed the results of the public reception surveys, the online survey results, and the handwritten feedback forms. The reception at the park and handwritten notes didn’t generate much interest. The online survey drew 163 responses. A handful of comments were less than ideal, but nothing troubling. By and large the respondents gave thoughtful answers and took the process seriously.

But the vote didn’t matter. The candidate the council selected was not even close to the candidate the public selected. The candidate the council hired finished in a tie for third. Jonathan Cain and one other finalist drew 17 votes each. The top two drew 116 between them. The public’s top choice pulled nearly four times Cain’s total.

Is this a problem? No. The council did its job. It interviewed the finalists and hired the one it believed would best serve the city. But now what? The 163 residents who voted, out of a city of 155,000, are presumably among the more engaged. They were asked what they thought, they said so, and the council went the other way. How do they feel now?

Transparency Matters

None of this should be read as an argument against transparency because community input matters. Done properly, it helps a council set a vision for the future, and that includes what to look for in the next manager. A council that asks residents what they need from their local government, and listens, is doing exactly what it was elected to do.

But there’s a difference between input on the job and input on the people. The first belongs to the public. What should the next manager prioritize? What has the community been missing? Where should the organization be in five years? Those are questions residents are equipped to answer, and a council that asks them early builds the trust that makes everything downstream easier. The second question - which of these five to choose - was never the public’s to answer. It’s the one the council was elected to answer, and the one it alone will have to account for.

Get the first part right and you don’t need the second. The trust earned by listening when it counts is what lets a council run a professional search without staging a public one. Lakewood staged the search.