The City Council is moving closer to hiring a new City Manager.
The City Council and the City Manager Search Committee are both holding special meetings at City Hall next Wednesday, Sept. 20 to move forward with the search process.
The council is slated to meet at 6 p.m., followed by the search committee at 7 p.m.
At that search committee meeting, the names of the City Manager finalists are expected to be delivered to the City Council, according to Council President Leo Robinson.
Interviews of the finalists by the council are scheduled to begin on Saturday, Sept. 30 at 10 a.m.
Robinson said the Collins Center, which has been helping facilitate the search process, will be providing a packet with a list of sample questions, as well as fair employment standards and MCAD guidelines to council members.
At the end of 2022, former City Manager Thomas Ambrosino was selected as the next Court Administrator of the Trial Court in Massachusetts by the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court.
The council appointed Deputy City Manager Ned Keefe as the interim city manager soon after.
In June, the council took the interim tag off of Keefe’s position, with the understanding that he would serve until a new city manager is appointed by the council.
Due to the language in the city charter, an interim city manager cannot serve for more than six months, and Keefe was approaching that time limit.
The council also extended the deadline for the City Manager applicants at that time at the suggestion of officials from the Collins Center.
“We have received candidates, many who are exceptionally educated and experienced individuals,” said Mary Aicardi of the Collins Center at the time. “But not enough meet your qualifications in accordance with your profile and the charter provisions. What we would like to do is extend the deadline and do a little bit more work to do some recruitment.”
In doing outreach about the position, Aicardi said many people said that the salary as listed, at $200,000 per year, was insufficient to make them move from their current jobs.
Aicardi suggested putting language in the profile to say “a competitive employment package will be entered into with the city council depending on qualifications.”
At Monday night’s City Council meeting, Councilor-at-Large Damali Vidot urged her fellow councilors to be ready for a busy fall that includes the selection of a new city manager. “I hope you are ready to get to work, because we have a lot of things that we need to work on,” said Vidot. “We have a lot of concerns where we’ve kind of been waiting for us to start meeting again