City of Lincoln: Search begins for new city administrator

[December 22, 2017] 

LINCOLN

On Monday evening, Lincoln aldermen passed by a narrow margin a motion to hire GovHR USA to lead the search for a new city administrator. Voting in favor of the motion were Michelle Bauer, Jeff Hoinacki, Kathy Horn and Steve Parrott. Heidi Brown, Rick Hoefle and Tracy Welch cast ‘no’ votes and Ron Keller was absent for the evening.

During the discussion period Bauer noted that with the departure of interim city administrator Robert Mahrt, the city needed to get moving on the search for a person to fill the position permanently. She said that she was sorry that Keller was not able to attend the meeting this week, because he had been the first to voice concerns about the contract price. She noted that GovHR had trimmed the cost, and she felt that it was probably the best the city could expect.

GovHR had originally quoted a cost of $19,000 to facilitate a search for the city administrator position. In that quote they had promised to create a brochure to distribute to would-be candidates about the city of Lincoln, to accept resumes and do pre-screening to narrow the field to the best possible candidates, to do initial interviews on behalf of the city, and to assist with the interview process for the half-dozen or so candidates they would bring before the council. In addition, they would do the employment advertising in key trade magazines and other pertinent publications around the country in order to draw a large selection of candidates.

This week, the council learned that GovHR had cut the price from $19,000 to $15,000. The firm had reduced the Recruitment Fee from $13K to $10K, Recruitment expenses from $4K to $3k, and had left the estimated cost of advertising at the original rate of $2,000.

Other than Bauer’s comments there was no other discussion on the topic before it went to vote.

In regard to interim city administrator Bob Mahrt, Mayor Seth Goodman said that the first contract expiration date had been December 15th. On the 14th Mahrt told Goodman that he was leaving, and did so the following day.

The council had in November voted to extend Mahrt's contract to December 15, with an automatic renewal to January 15th if no full-time administrator had been hired. Mahrt had told Goodman he had no desire to take on that automatic renewal.

This week, the city of Bloomington announced that Mahrt had been hired there to serve as an Interim Community Development Director.

When Kathy Rush, Vice-president of GovHR had appeared before the council the first part of December, she estimated that the process of finding, screening, interviewing, and hiring a new administrator could take several weeks, and told the aldermen to expect that it could be April before they were able to fill the position.

[Nila Smith]