WINOOSKI — After a six-month search for a new city manager, the City Council has decided not to move ahead with the final candidate put forward by a 10-member committee.
Now city officials are starting again from scratch.
In her weekly newsletter, Mayor Kristine Lott said Friday the council decided not to offer the position to the final candidate and will now go back to the drawing board.
“Ultimately, the Council voted to continue the process to find the ideal manager for the City of Winooski,” Lott wrote in the “Mayor’s Update.”
As a result, the city is likely to be without a chief administrator for at least another five months.
In the meantime, Phoebe Townsend and Jon Rauscher will stay on as co-interim city managers, having been appointed to those roles following the departure of city manager Jessie Baker, who took on the corresponding position in South Burlington June 1.
Townsend also serves as Winooski’s Human Resources Manager and Rauscher doubles as the head of the public works department.
In her statement Friday, Lott did not say why the candidate put forth by the search committee did not win approval from the council. However, some suggestions contained in the newsletter indicated that a lack of diversity in the candidate pool was a concern.
Yasamin Gordon, who was hired last May as the city’s first equity director, recommended creating a more equitable and inclusive hiring process in the future. She also urged supporting candidates with different levels of experience and increasing transparency with the community.
Gordon, however, declined a request to be interviewed.
Citing confidentiality considerations, no one directly involved in the latter stages of the process would say precisely what had led to the final decision.
“I think that we need a city manager that has really strong communication skills and has experience with leadership in an array of settings,” councilor Bryn Oakleaf said in an interview. In addition, that person should be “able to face the needs of our city from capital project management to coordinating with key state agencies.”
Oakleaf also said, “We are the most diverse community in Vermont, so I think that it is an element just as much as any other element.”
Following a series of phone calls, emails and text messages, Lott declined to agree to an interview and asked that any questions be submitted in writing. The mayor did point to a statement by co-interim manager Townsend, which said the hiring process was challenging but that the city is “confident that continuing a thorough search will help us engage our residents and find the excellent candidate who best meets Winooski’s needs.”
At Monday night’s City Council meeting, Mayor Lott and council members discussed what they had learned from the past few months and what sort of timeline they should lay out.
After noting they had lost some candidates to other opportunities during the months spent searching for and evaluating candidates, they agreed to outline a tight schedule and stick to it. The city also plans to work with an outside recruiter to review initial candidates in order to take some of the burden off of city employees and volunteers who might otherwise be involved.
Lott and the city councilors also said they want to stick with the same 10-person city manager search committee. However, it was not clear whether all members of that original panel — made up of business, nonprofit and city leaders — would want to stick it out for round two.
One member of the search committee said she would like to see a more diverse pool of candidates and ultimately a Black, Indigenous or person of color chosen as city manager for Winooski.
“I think it’s important to have BIPOC leadership all over Vermont for the obvious reason that we are a vital part of the population in Vermont,” said Margaret K. Bass, special assistant to the president for diversity and inclusion at St. Michael’s College. “Winooski is the most diverse city in the state and it seems reasonable to imagine that under those circumstances we would have representation from the BIPOC community.”
Winooski’s population is 77.4% white, according to 2019 U.S. census data, while Vermont’s is 94.2%. Almost a quarter of the residents in the 7,333-person large city are foreign born, 16.8% are Asian, 2.7% are Black or African American and another 2.7% are Hispanic or Latino.
“Every person of authority in Winooski except the equity director is white,” said Bass. “It makes no sense to keep talking about how we are the most diverse city if the power still lies in the hands of white people. It doesn’t matter what the demographics of the population are, what matters is the people that make decisions in the city and for the city.”
Mayor Lott said she hopes the city will be ready to introduce a candidate to the public by Town Meeting Day in March.
