Panel to interview five remaining city manager candidates in Columbia
By JIM FAILE
The City of Hartsville’s City Manager Search Committee will interview the five remaining candidates for the position of city manager in Columbia on Tuesday.
The committee has scheduled a day-long meeting at the Municipal Association of South Carolina offices at 1411 Gervais St. for 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. to conduct the interviews.
The committee had narrowed the field of applicants from 10 to six during a closed executive session meeting on Aug. 19. One of those has since withdrawn from consideration, Interim City Manager Vern Myers said Friday.
“We felt like Columbia would be a good central location for everyone,” Myers said.
“We’ve got four driving and one flying in,” he said.
Myers said the municipal association offered its offices for the interviews as a courtesy to the city. But the association will have no role in the meeting or interviews, he said. “They’re just offering us the use of their building,” he said.
Myers said he anticipates the interviews will take the full day.
The search committee’s job is to recommend potential candidates to Hartsville City Council, which will conduct its own interviews before making the final selection of a new manager.
South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act requires council to release the names and background information on no fewer than three finalists for the position to the public.
Tuesday’s meeting will begin with an overview of the search process thus far by Kenneth D. Carrick Jr. and Nick Lomax, partners with Coleman Lew & Associates Inc., the Charlotte, N.C., executive recruitment firm hired by the city to search out and screen potential candidates for the job. That part of the meeting will take place in open session.
The firm started out with 81 resumes to review. Of those, 32 were deemed worth a closer look, Carrick said during the Aug. 19 meeting.
In the meantime, the consultants added some 80-plus names of people to contact, Carrick said.
Not all of those were candidates, he said. Some were potential candidates who were not included among the original group of applicants the consultants thought might be interested in the position, he said. Others were contacted as resources, he said.
From there, the consultants narrowed the field to 11, one of whom withdrew from the process, Carrick said.
Former City Manager Jim Pennington resigned in January. Myers, former chairman of the Hartsville Planning Commission, has been serving as interim city manager since then.