What's Taking So Long? City Still Looking for a Permanent Manager after Six Months

The Brevard City Council has hired another experienced interim manager, but its failure to land a long-term replacement for former City Manager Jim Fatland is raising questions.

BREVARD — The city of Brevard recently announced that, after six months of searching, it had hired a new city manager — an experienced and highly qualified veteran administrator named Larry Faison.

Only one word in his title prevented this from being big news: “interim.”

Faison, who retired last year after serving as manager of the city of Monroe in suburban Charlotte, is the second straight manager to sign on for a stint at Brevard that will last, at most, six months.

Though his hiring gives the City Council breathing room to continue looking for a permanent replacement for former city manager, Jim Fatland, who retired Jan. 1, it has raised questions about the search and even the running of the city:

Why is the process taking so long and does it show that something about the governance of Brevard — assumed to be a desirable landing spot because of its natural beauty and vibrant downtown — has discouraged applicants from accepting the position?

“Several” candidates, “more than three,” have turned down offers from the city, said Council member Geraldine Dinkins.

All of them “spent a day in Brevard and got to know the organization during a work day,” she said. “As an elected official, I’m curious to see what they see and what we don’t see, because they passed on us.”

That’s one way to look at the search. Another, according to Mayor Maureen Copelof and City Council member Maurice Jones, is to consider its high stakes for the future of Brevard.

The city manager is one of only two jobs, along with the city attorney, that Council has the power to hire. Ideally, it does so only once every several years. Council members must be sure they get it right, they said.

“The last thing we want to do is hurry up and get someone who is not exactly the right fit for us and repeat the process all over again,” Jones said.

“I’m much more focused on getting the right person rather than doing something within a particular time frame,” Copelof said.

The details of the search, including candidates’ reasons for not taking the job, won’t be public until after it is over. North Carolina open-government law exempts most aspects of job searches, including the names of the applicants for positions such as Brevard’s as well as considerations voiced in the Council’s many closed-door discussions about filling the opening.

The law does, however, allow the release of numbers of candidates who applied. And that total —161 in two rounds of advertisements — confirms that Brevard is widely considered to be an attractive place to live and work, several council members said.

Some candidates had vacationed in Brevard or even attended nearby camps as children, said Council member Mac Morrow. “The interest is there for sure and the individuals we selected to interview were top notch,” he said.

That number of interviewees — questioned either in person or remotely — is seven or eight, said McKeller, who added that it is hard to put a firm number on the number of candidates who have turned down offers. Conversations with them have not been clear cut, he wrote in a text: “It is a negotiation between Council and the potential manager rather than a take-it-or-leave-it job offer.”

One bright side for the city has been the performance of recently departed interim city manager Steve Harrell, who was widely praised for his work, including on the city’s recently passed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Faison, according to the release, has worked in municipal government for 34 years and brings experience in developing greenways and long-range land planning that may be particularly applicable to the city’s current priorities.

In the private sector, the announcement said, Faison has worked on the development of multi-family residential projects, which are considered crucial to addressing the city’s crushing shortage of affordable housing. 

But his hiring still leaves the city without a permanent replacement, and even Morrow, who was otherwise upbeat about the search process, said it has gone on far longer than expected.

One reason for that may be the competition, said City Attorney Mack McKeller. Currently, 63 cities in the state are looking for a city manager, according to the North Carolina League of Municipalities. And at least one candidate interviewed expressed concern about the high home prices in Transylvania, Morrow said.

According to the city’s posting of the opening, the starting salary for the job is expected to be between $134,000 and $164,000, and, Dinkins said, “I don’t believe it’s housing” that is discouraging candidates.

With “several people passing on us, I think it points to a pattern . . . a concern that something in our organization makes us not as desirable as we thought we were, and that’s something we need to take a good look at,” she said. “I’ve spent the last six months reading a lot of resumes from some very wonderful people who are going to work elsewhere.”

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com