New Bern clears first hurdle toward replacing city manager

New Bern has received at least 46 applications from people vying to be the next city manager, and now, the work of deciding how to replace veteran leader Bill Hartman will begin in earnest.

The deadline for résumés was Friday, and by Monday, interim City Manager Danny Meadows will get his first glance at them, when Sonya Hayes, the director of human resources, puts them all together. But the decision as to who will become the next city manager will not belong to Meadows — and his name is not in the pool of potential candidates.

“I thought about it and prayed about it, and I’ve got peace that I’ve got about another year here,” said Meadows, a longtime city employee. “I’ll do whatever I can to help the aldermen with the process, and to carry out their wishes, but that’s my role here — and that’s my only role in it.”

Meadows said he may talk briefly about the manager-selection process during Tuesday’s work session, but that may depend on how many aldermen-elect are in attendance that night. It is the soon-to-be-installed aldermen who will choose New Bern’s next city manager. Meadows said he may instead talk with them during their informal tour of the city, which is set for Thursday and Friday.

“The question now is how they want to proceed,” Meadows said. “I’m pretty sure they’re ready to go on it. Around Christmas is going to be a tough time for something like this, but we’ll get rolling as soon as we can.”

So just how will they get rolling?

Alderman Dana Outlaw, the only returning member of the current board, said creating an “ad-hoc committee” of residents to narrow the field of applicants could be a possibility. He mentioned, by name, retired Major Gen. Tom Braaten as a good person to have on a committee like that one. But then Outlaw said he wasn’t sure that the new aldermen would want to create a separate group, just because it may add time to the selection process.

“I think we all want to expeditiously get on with the program,” Outlaw said.

He also said he wouldn’t endorse a particular method for picking a city manager, but would wait to get a sense of what the newest leaders wanted to do.

“I’m only one-sixth of the board of aldermen and I’m … not going to ramrod my ideology about how it should be done,” he said.

No clear deadline for hiring a city manager has been set. But when they were still candidates, all of the recently elected aldermen said that hiring a new city manager would be their first shared priority.

Nikie Mayo can be reached at 252-635-5665 or nmayo@freedomenc.com.