East Ridge Mayor Brian Williams is asking for help from residents of the city in choosing its next City Manager.
J. Scott Miller announced in September that he would be retiring as East Ridge City Manger in early November. The city received about 45 resumes for the position.
During last Thursday’s City Council meeting, Williams and the council discussed the process of interviewing candidates for the post. Williams noted that the University of Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service (MTAS) had reviewed the top eight candidates’ resumes and ranked them using a scoring matrix. The council concluded that it wished to interview the top six candidates from the MTAS list for the job.
In an effort to be more inclusive, Williams suggested, and the council agreed, that citizens should be offered an opportunity to participate in the selection of the next city manager by posing their own questions during the open interviews. To accomplish this aim, he requested that East Ridge News Online solicit questions from its readers that would be asked by ERNO publisher Dick Cook during the interviews.
To submit your question to the candidates readers may email them directly to Cook at (dickcook607@gmail.com). Readers can submit questions through ERNO’s contact form on its website.
If a reader is more accustomed to using Facebook, questions can be submitted by using ERNO’s Facebook page.
During Saturday’s “Meet the Mayor” event at Local Coffee, Williams told those present that he wished to move forward with the hiring process as quickly as possible. He has directed Acting City Manager Kenny Custer to contact the six finalists on Monday to begin scheduling interviews.
Williams said, if necessary, that a special called meeting might be held for purposes of expediting the hiring of the next city manager.
The six finalists, whose names have yet to be made public, will presumably be chosen from the following eight candidates, whose names were furnished to ERNO at the Jan. 24 council meeting: Former Red Bank City Manager Chris Dorsey, who declined the post in 2013 to take the city manager’s job at Signal Mountain; Kevin Owens, Glenn Irby. Caryn Miller, Alan Geans, Lyndon Bonner, William Vance and David Milliron.
