By Craig Manning | Aug. 30, 2024
Will the second time be the charm in Leelanau County’s search for a new leader? That’s the hope of the county’s board of commissioners, which approved a motion earlier this week to restart the search for a new county administrator. The board went through an entire interview process to find a hybrid administrator/chief financial officer earlier this year, but ultimately opted not to hire any of their finalists. Now, commissioners have scrapped the CFO element of the position and are prepping a new job description, with hopes of opening the application process next month, interviewing candidates in November and December, and hiring a new administrator before the end of the year. The decision marks the latest pivot in a matter that has dominated the county board’s time in 2024. In February, amidst ongoing strife within the county’s finance department, District 3 Commissioner Doug Rexroat proposed adding financial leadership responsibilities to the administrator’s office. Then-administrator Deb Allen subsequently stepped down, noting that she lacked the financial experience commissioners were now seeking.
But commissioners have had a change of heart since Allen’s departure. In April, former Traverse City mayor Richard Lewis stepped into the administrator role on an interim basis. Around the same time, the board kicked off the search for a permanent administrator/CFO. But after a multi-stage interview process, commissioners decided against hiring anyone, choosing instead to extend Lewis’s contract. At the time, Rexroat argued that Lewis had brought unprecedented stability to the finance department and that giving him more time to right the ship could eliminate the need to find a candidate with both administrative and finance experience.
“Then we aren’t looking for a unicorn after that; we’re just looking for a good administrator,” Rexroat said in June, using the term ‘unicorn’ to express the difficulty of finding a candidate with both skillsets.
Earlier this month, the board appeared to punt the hiring of a new administrator to next year, with Lewis noting that the board of commissioners was guaranteed to see majority turnover in 2025.
“You will have four new members, at minimum, sitting up here [next year],” Lewis said during an August 13 meeting, which came on the heels of primary election results. “Is it right that this board makes that decision on who the next [administrator] is going to be? Personally, I don’t think so.”
A week later, commissioners voted to extend Lewis’s contract until at least next May, but also scheduled a special meeting for Wednesday, August 28 to discuss next steps for the administrator search. Now, in the wake of that meeting, commissioners are back to a goal of finding a new county leader by the end of the year.
“I want to keep Richard as long as we can…but I also want a new person to have some time with Richard,” Board Chair Ty Wessell said during Wednesday’s meeting. “I would favor beginning that process so that this board hires a person before the end of this year, with a start date sometime in late spring for some overlap time with Richard… I do not want to task a new board with the responsibility of learning county government, and learning the role of commissioner, and hiring a new [administrator]…”
Commissioners ultimately passed a motion for Lewis to retain the services of the Michigan Leadership Institute (MLI) – the firm the county hired in the spring to lead the admin/CFO search – and to work with MLI to develop a new job description. Crucially, commissioners decided to eliminate the CFO aspect of the job. Multiple board members noted that scrapping the hybrid aspect of the job would likely broaden the applicant pool and save the county from having to pay extra for a candidate with both leadership and financial backgrounds.
Under the motion, Lewis and MLI are expected to bring a draft of the modified job description to the board for consideration at their September executive session. Those meetings occur on the second Tuesday of each month.
Commissioners also discussed a tentative timeline for the search. If all goes according to plan, the board will approve a new job description in mid-September and post the position shortly after. The goal is to review candidates in November – likely after the election, so that incoming commissioners can be invited to attend those meetings and offer feedback – and to conduct interviews in November and December. Commissioners hope to make a final hiring decision before the end of the year, so that a new administrator can come aboard in early 2025.
While commissioners expect that their modified job description will mean a decidedly different batch of candidates than they saw in the spring, multiple board members did express interest in inviting some of the administrator/CFO candidates to reapply. Even back in June, when commissioners decided against hiring anyone, they briefly discussed keeping at least one of them – Michael Belsky, a former mayor of Highland Park, Illinois and the principal of financial analysis firm EKI Digital – in the mix.
But Belsky seems unlikely to come back to the table: In a message sent to the Leelanau Ticker in June, Belsky called Leelanau County’s search process “flawed” before stating: “I am out and will not reapply.”
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