This story by Cassandra Hemenway was first published in The Bridge on Dec. 1, 2025.
With the Monday announcement that Montpelier’s Acting City Manager Kelly Murphy is leaving her role by the end of the year, the urgency has picked up for the City Council to fill the vacancy left by long-time City Manager Bill Fraser, whose 30-year tenure ended in June.
The council has plans to announce finalists for the position this week, and that list will not contain Murphy, the former city finance director and assistant city manager who stepped into the role of acting city manager this summer. Murphy has accepted a job as the education finance director with the Vermont Agency of Education, according to a Dec. 1 press release from the city.
Murphy will prepare and submit the City Manager’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget to the city council before her departure “to ensure continuity in municipal financial planning,” the release stated.
City Councilor Pelin Kohn told The Bridge that 30 people applied for the city manager role. The council chose eight of those applicants for the first round of interviews, then honed the list down to four for the second round of interviews, which, she said, was being completed on Monday.
“Any one we choose of those three finalists will be a good fit,” Kohn said, saying she felt confident about the candidates because of the in-depth process of vetting, interviewing, and discussing candidates undertaken by the full council.
The finalists will be invited to come to Montpelier to meet with the city staff, department heads, and business leaders and will be available in a public forum where residents are invited to ask their own questions, Kohn said. And, according to the release, the council will discuss the next steps for interim leadership at its Dec. 17 meeting.
Mayor Jack McCullough said in the release that “Kelly has provided steady, thoughtful leadership during an extraordinarily challenging time for our community. We are grateful for her service and wish her the very best in this next step.”
