From the Round Table: Thick skin among attributes for a suitable city manager

HELP WANTED: Midwestern 100K metropolitan community with research university seeks fiscally oriented city manager. Opening March 1. Oversees municipal utilities, 1,100 employees, $350M+ budget.
Helpful Attributes: Dancing experience. Able to keep step with leaders of dozens of city boards, commissions and neighborhood associations, as well as self-appointed “experts” and mouthpieces. Thick skin. Able to take abuse emanating from hyperactive media in all forms, including anonymous online comment boards and blogs. Prescience. Able to maneuver through minefields such as tasers, stoplight cameras, surveillance cameras, revenue shortfalls, utility fee increases, street maintenance and construction as well as conflicts between bicyclists and drivers, “town and gown” relationships. Magic: Able to conjure the full funding of pensions during an economic downturn of uncertain length (the top priority).
Compensation: Insufficient, considering the challenges and angst of this position.
That could be the gist of a classified advertisement; it’s sarcastic but probably more realistic than the pitch the professional head hunter will soon make to prospective candidates for city manager. Bill Watkins wants to vacate the office by next Easter. He presided over municipal affairs for five years, but the Watkins era, which followed the long reign of Raymond A. Beck, seems to have passed rather rapidly.
There are reasons behind Watkins’ desire to retire that must remain within his private ken, but I suspect the job simply wore him out, especially during the recent fiscal year dealing with the budget minefield. His predecessor hung around too long, and now Watkins is retiring just when he was getting warmed up on the job.
Optimism is in the air as we await the vetting process of suitable successor candidates, but a dark cloud could move in. Columbia has had mixed luck selecting successful managers during roughly 60 years as a council-manager governed city. The secret hope everyone nurtures is that there is a strong internal candidate ready to take the reins of this chariot. But no one on hand seems to be as obvious a choice today as Watkins was for the succession to Beck half a decade ago.
The increasingly complicated influences exerted by all those who wish to intervene in the process can be celebrated and chastised.
During the city’s ruder, less sophisticated times, it was the City Council — virtually alone and unaided — that selected its chief executive. It was a former city manager, Terry Novak during the 1970s, who initiated measures that complicated the process, though it might have occurred anyway.
The creation and support of various city boards and commissions and the burgeoning neighborhood association movement has brought forth scores of activist participants at all levels of the governance process. Via Internet links and social networking, virtual battalions can be summoned almost instantaneously to fight for or against a proposed City Council or administrative action. Of course, they will be involved during this selection process.
Watkins has served the business community well. He ranks among our most honored public servants. He skillfully navigated the city as if it were a business entity and kept a balanced budget during a stressful, challenging economic period. So there’s nervousness within the business community about who will be selected to succeed him.
There’s the recurring xenophobic fear of outsiders to contend with, though there also is hope that a suitably able understudy will emerge.
Whomever the City Council selects (the March deadline will require an aggressive selection process), the incomer must hit the ground running. The next budgeting cycle is predicted to be even tougher than the present one. It won’t be a cakewalk. Maybe we should add that line to the full-disclosure help-wanted ad.