Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ Salisbury City Council’s “mind-hive” presses ever forward in the saga of selecting the “perfect candidate” to be the next city manager. Yesterday they announced: “We are moving forward with the city manager selection process and have several strong candidates who are currently serving as managers in local government. Council has been assessing these applicants and due to the request for confidentiality by some of these top candidates, council has decided to take a direct approach and hold closed-session interviews rather than an assessment center. We are looking forward to sharing more information as we progress.”
In short our ever thoughtful city council stumbled on the idea that maybe they ought to keep the names of their city manager candidates on the “down low” because the few applicants who applied for this career misstep into vivid weirdness might just want to keep it secret. You know like their current employers might take a dim view of their testing the waters elsewhere?
Salisbury’s noble city council has repeatedly stressed that their next candidate must have “maturity”. Here is the short list of city manager qualifications:
• Possess a firm grasp of “Magic Math” wherein you can make the Fibrant debacle appear to show a profit. Ignore the Fibrant’s $7.6 debt to the water and sewer utility, most of Fibrant’s employee salaries are hidden in other departments, marketing expenses are squirreled away in other employee accounts, pole fees are paid late so they don’t show up as deficits, money owed to TV providers are not paid in time so they disappear from the “happy meal” budget, and so forth.
• Be willing to hide the skeletons in the city’s immense closet. The cloying odor may linger, but they must be hidden from view.
• Write scripts for city council and on occasion make scripted conflict appear (only to disappear in the warm haze of working together)
• Erase any transparency and punt any public information requests out of bounds.
• If a major embezzlement or two occurs, deftly get the embezzler to make repayments. Heaven forbid a state law enforcement agency starts digging around.
• Continue the cover-up of the “mutual termination” and “golden parachuting” of the last city manager. Will the next city manager have the same option?
• Know how to spin doctor and verbally turn a negative into a positive should anything go haywire.
• Play footsy with the “5 families”, the historic preservationists, the Downtown Shop Locals, and the country club.
• Let the folks living outside of “8 block” know that you are really listening and have their concerns at heart. You are “working on it”. Know the art of active of non-doing.
• Be the visionary city manager who supports traffic calming on East Innes and lusts to wipeout Salisbury’s corporate retail and restaurant tax base.
• Be able to work hard behind the scenes to enforce vendettas against those who don’t play ball with the big team.
• Gussy up your resume with bold print quotes from P.T. Barnum which will set city council’s hearts aflutter.
City Council will resume the relentless and ever changing search for the perfect city manager at 2:30 p.m. Friday. Perhaps even conduct interviews.
We await the next twist and turn in the ever changing saga.
