Who picks Kansas City’s new manager? After some discontent, mayor, council set terms
A split between Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and a City Council committee chair ended Thursday with a resolution that gives the council more power in selecting the next city manager.
Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, 4th District at-large, brought the resolution last month, claiming Lucas’ office wasn’t sufficiently involving council members.
Kansas City’s longtime manager, Troy Schulte, left City Hall in December. Lucas appointed and the council approved Earnest Rouse to replace him temporarily while the city searches for a permanent successor. Initially, the balance of power in the search process wasn’t clear. To some on the council, the setup wasn’t acceptable.
“I feel very strongly that the council should be an integral part of this,” Shields said in a December Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee meeting.
The committee, which Shields chairs, voted unanimously in favor of her resolution, which Lucas co-sponsored. On Thursday, the City Council voted 9-2 to adopt it. At the committee meeting last year, Shields said the council has authority under the charter to work alongside the mayor to find a city manager, and she expressed concern about Lucas having too much say in the process.
“What I am concerned about is the situation where we have conversations and we think that you’re going to name three people or five people (as finalists) and, suddenly, when we get the list from you, it’s not any of those,” Shields said.
Lucas said at the time that he understood Shields to mean she didn’t want him to ignore the council.
“You and I have recently served on a council where sometimes the mayor might have gotten mad at us and just said, ‘To heck with you all. I’m going to do my thing,’” Lucas said, referencing his predecessor Sly James.
Lucas said he didn’t want that to happen.
The city plans to use a national search firm to vet candidates and provide a list of about 25 semifinalists. At issue in the hours-long committee debate in December was how much say the City Council should have in narrowing that list to three to five finalists for the city to interview.
Shields argued the City Council should work in concert with the mayor on that, but Lucas said at the time that he worried a search by the 12-member council and mayor could get unwieldy. He asked Shields if she envisioned a 13-member meeting with “vote after vote after vote” as to who would move on to the finalist round.
“I just think as a practical matter, there’s a point where we have to trust someone to do some whittling,” Lucas said.
But Shields said “certain things” had happened, underpinning her concern about Lucas naming preferred candidates that he hadn’t adequately discussed with the council.
”Frankly, we had a very surprise appointment as the interim,” Shields said, though she voted to approve Rouse.
Lucas argued, however, that he had selected Rouse in conjunction with other council members.
He told The Star Thursday that he disagreed with her premise. He did not address Shields’ feeling of surprise, but noted that Rouse was approved by a unanimous City Council vote.
“That would suggest to me that actually council was very comfortable with him as a choice, which I think makes sense given his three decades at City Hall,” Lucas said. “I’m proud of the work he’s done so far. I think council is proud of the work he’s done so far as well.”
In any process, he said, there will be those who aren’t pleased.
“We can’t guarantee results, but we do, I think, a very good job of communicating,” he said.
The resolution the council passed Thursday would give the City Council and mayor the combined authority of whittling the list of 25 candidates identified by the search firm to a list of three to five finalists. They would then interview them jointly. The mayor then gets to name his choice and submit it to the council for approval.
Lucas told The Star he did not feel that the resolution represented a trim of his authority.
“I think if you actually look at the committee substitute that I introduced, about 90% of the document is actually what I wrote, so I think what it suggests is … that we wanted a good, collaborative process, and I think it creates a clear process for us,” Lucas said.
Previously, Lucas appointed a four-member search committee that included him, Schulte, Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McManus and Madeline McDonough, managing partner of Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP. According to a press release issued at the time, the committee was to be “tasked with working with a national search firm and the City Council to select a new permanent Kansas City manager.”
But in an interview Thursday, Lucas said he appointed that committee to select the search firm.
Asked, absent Thursday’s resolution and absent that search firm, how the city would have narrowed the field of applicants, Lucas said that it was previously an “open question,” but that it would have been some combination of himself and council members.
The city did not plan, he said, to have the search firm determine a list of finalists.
Lucas, Shields, McManus and council members Kevin O’Neill, Dan Fowler, Eric Bunch, Lee Barnes, Ryana Parks-Shaw and Andrea Bough voted for the resolution. Councilwoman Heather Hall and Councilman Brandon Ellington voted against it. Councilwomen Teresa Loar and Melissa Robinson were absent.
