Fifty people from across the nation applied to become Odessa’s next city manager and the Odessa City Council will interview the top four candidates the week of June 26.
The city council voted 5-2 on Dec. 13 to fire City Manager Michael Marrero and City Attorney Natasha Brooks without explanation and within hours Mayor Javier Joven signed a contract with T2 Professional Consulting to aid in the search for Marrero’s replacement.
On Tuesday, T2’s Mica Lunt recapped for the council what they’ve done up to this point to find a new city manager, including helping the council set benchmarks, creating a brochure, advertising the position, evaluating the candidate’s written and verbal responses to questionnaires and in a recorded video.
Lunt also discussed other services provided by the company, including assessing the city staff’s strengths and weaknesses, addressing inefficient and ineffective processes, helping overhaul personnel policies and providing training to directors and assistant directors.
Lunt told the council T2 had received 50 applications and the council then went into executive session for a little over an hour to discuss the top candidates.
After the council came back into session, they voted unanimously to continue T2’s contract until Aug. 13 for a total cost of $225,000 or $113,000 less than the original contracted amount. They also voted to set the week of June 26 aside for candidate interviews without mentioning how many.
In a press conference after the meeting, Mayor Javier Joven said “correct” when asked by the Odessa American if T2 will now apply a “TriMetrix” assessment to the 50 candidates to whittle the list down.
According to T2, the assessment explores candidates’ behavioural style, personal motivators/drivers, acumen, and competencies.
Joven then said the 50 applicants had already been reduced.
When asked by an OA reporter what the list had been reduced to, Joven replied, “Once again, I’ve answered the question. Next question.”
City Councilman Steve Thompson, in a separate press conference, said the number of candidates had been reduced to four and they’d be under going the TriMetrix assessment in advance of the interviews.
T2 will do the TriMetrix assessment the week of June 6-June 11, conduct “job fit” interviews June 13-19 and recommend finalists June 20, Lunt said. They’ll also be completing background investigations.
In March, the city council agreed the new city manager must have a “conferred degree from an accredited institution of higher education at the level of a bachelor’s degree or higher in the fields of study of public administration, business administration, management or a related field. Three or more years of professional experience as a city manager, assistant city manager, department head (or similar private-sector related leadership role) in an organization similar to the City of Odessa.”
Thompson and Joven both expressed pleasure with the number of overall candidates.
“My concern is I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible, number one, because (we have) a new calendar year, fiscal year starting October 1. We’re right in the middle of the budget process, and we need to get this person in here as quickly as we can and still do it prudently because this new city manager’s got to put a staff together. We have to have finance people. We’ve got to have assistant city managers, and I’m hoping they’ll promote within as much as we can, but we know we lost some people that have got to be replaced,” Thompson said.
Thompson said he didn’t know how T2 whittled down the candidates and hasn’t yet seen the remaining candidates’ resumes.
“I don’t want to see their resumes yet. That’s (T2’s) job. Now we’re going to do the TriMetrix, narrow it down, do the interviews and we’ll go from there,” Thompson said.
At the beginning of the meeting, Thompson and Councilmember Chris Hanie told Lunt none of the council members had received the series of emails Lunt said he sent out detailing T2’s progress.
“I don’t have an explanation as to why that did not happen,” Lunt said, before providing documents outlining the emails.
When Councilmember Denise Swanner asked if the process could be sped up, Lunt said no.
“As you saw from the email documentation that I provided now and was provided several weeks ago, we have been requesting confirmation and updates on this process for several weeks and have not received responses,” Lunt said.
Joven’s signing of the T2 contract was somewhat controversial and part of it had to do with the fact it specifically stated T2 should send all correspondence to [email protected].
In addition, Thompson and then Assistant City Manager Aaron Smith said Joven’s signing of the contract was illegal.
Under Article 1-4 of the City Charter, “all ordinances, resolutions and contract documents shall, before presentation to the council, have been reviewed as to form and legality by the city attorney or the city attorney’s authorized representative, and shall have been examined and reviewed for administration by the city manager or the city manager’s authorized representative.”
In addition, under City Charter, Section 30, city council approval of contracts must occur under certain circumstances, one being “contracts requiring the appropriation of funds.”
Bernal did not sign the contract and then-Interim City Attorney Dan Jones initialed it on Dec. 16, two days after T2 received a $50,000 initial payment.
Jones has since been named city attorney.
The mayor has repeatedly said the T2 contract is open-ended, the price tag is up to $338,000 and can be terminated with 30 days notice. However, the contract itself does not give the length of the contract, nor does it place a limit on the contract amount. Instead it states, “City shall pay professional for services actually performed, a monthly set fee of $24,000 for an annual base professional fee of $288,000. Payment one is due at the time of the execution of this agreement shall be a fee of $50,000.”
Smith, who was fired March 1, has actually filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the city alleging he was fired because he asked the Texas Attorney General’s Office, Texas Rangers and Ector County District Attorney’s Office to investigate Joven over the T2 contract and the city council over Brooks’ and Marrero’s terminations. He believes they violated the open meetings act when they fired the pair Dec. 13 because the public wasn’t allowed to speak until after the vote.
In fact, the council held another meeting Jan. 9 during which council members again voted to fire the pair after allowing the public to speak.
