you Hello, Kevin. Are we sure we have them? Yes. We'll bring the meeting to order. roll call please. Chairwoman Jamison, I'm here. Mr. Rashidot. Yes. Mr. Ward is not here. Ms. McDavid. Here. Ms. Penny. Yes. All right, I'm Mr. Kinnson is here. But we can't hear him. Kevin, are you there? Oh, no, maybe. My apologies. My second participant is read AI meeting. Oops. He did accept the invite. I said to him with the zoom. What's the chat? Well, maybe he just turned that on. Yes, he added it. Oh, okay. I just got a text. Mr. Ward is on his way. Okay. Oh, there he is. Kevin, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello, Kevin. Hello. Sorry, I'm late. I had trouble with my computer and I had to reboot it. So a couple minutes late. I understand that. Happens to me. More than I'd like to share. Mr. Ward is also running a few minutes behind. So I'm prepared to start whenever you would like to. But I'll stand by if we're gonna wait for Mr. Ward. Okay, well we will go ahead and begin the meeting. And I hope everybody was as pleased with our candidates as I was. I was very, very pleased that we had so many qualified candidates. And I'm hoping that we'll have some robust discussion and be able to reach some decisions today easily. Kevin, I'm just going to turn it over to you unless anybody else has something to say. I'd kind of like the other person's discussion. OK. I was not totally pleased that we have a fit. Have a fit for our community and our needs. I almost wonder if we stay with what we have if we're just choosing somebody for a chair to fill that chair. I didn't find anybody that I felt was strong enough to lead us through. I mean, I find bits and pieces from multiple candidates. If I could take a little from each one and build, we would have a candidate. But I wasn't satisfied. Kimberly? I understand everything she's saying. There were a couple that I was like, yeah, they've got the qualities, they've got the things, the background, the knowledge, but there were none of them that I was like, this is what we did. And out of all of those options, you would think. I mean, one of them, there were just things in them. One of them was applying for Edgewater, Virginia. And that video made it through. We're paying a lot of money for this. I don't know that we should see these things. We just did this with another investigative thing. And this was one of 11, I mean, he was one of 11. And you know, we were narrowing it down to 5. Yeah. And you guys felt like there were 5? Well, I picked out of what we were given. Yeah. I picked to 5. Mr. Pollard, we should have. I've done a lot of interviews throughout my career. It's always we have the same feeling that you just said. I wish we could take some from here and some from there. It is you're not going to find that perfect candidate. I could tell you this right now. Out of the nine that I looked at, I looked at the videos, and I looked at the questionnaires and the answers that they had. So I was looking at different categories and how I evaluated them. One thing is, I was looking out to see if they have any experience in dealing with flooding and flood plain management. That part. The other part is in terms of management. And the third part is in terms of personality. So that's how I determined them. And I agree with you. I mean I could take some from here and some from there. That's you're not going to find that. So what are the options right now that we have that she continue out advertising to see if he gets more applicants? I think out of the nine that you have, I think I have five or six that I would rate probably at least for interview with the council. So that's what I'm And that's where I'm I mean nobody's perfect We haven't had a perfect one in the history of edgewater. We haven't had a perfect You know we're not gonna guy. That is why you know he's the city manager and then we have a whole slate of staff that supports him and we need some of those as well. So it would be his job to come in and fill those gaps and create a team. The city's made up of multiple departments and multiple experts. That's where I kind of ran into my issues because a lot of what I saw, where I saw the experience, the personality wasn't there to be the strong personality that we need. If they had the strong personality, they didn't have the experience. So, I mean, I get what you're saying. I understand we're not going to have a perfect. But out of what we had, I'm not thrilled. Well, with that, you ready to move forward? Yeah, but let me just say this. I think there's probably, I would say, five of them that they were city managers, that they were dealing with a lot of issues. But again, you have to remember, it's a team effort. So, you know, starting with the council, the city manager and the staff. So, it's a whole component system that is there. And some of them, they've been there, you know, they had 20, 25 years of experience in Mocha government. Some of them, they were in the county. So, it's like a, it's a bigger age is So I don't know from the video if you could determine if they are strong personalities or not. I think that's Based on the interviews with the council based on their references Some cities actually they send people to where they were before and talk to residents I mean that's what happens. I mean we've done that with police chiefs. They send people to where they were in that area and ask the citizens about them and there's the stakeholders. So I mean that's easy to find. It's not a hard thing. I mean all it takes is a phone call, talk to some of the council members they or the commissioners that they work with and they will, or some they will, they will share with you. I mean that's just my two cents. Okay. Mr. Knutson, do you have any opening remarks after this discussion that you would like to start with before we get into the presentations? I think it was a great discussion and I appreciate that being brought up. It's often a problem when you're looking only at this little bit of material that you got there. some answers to some questions and some short videos to really get a read on the person. And the most important part of this process is bringing people in to meet with them and get a feel for who they are and whether they're a good fit for the organization. That interpersonal interaction is so critical because somebody can look amazing on paper and just fall flat in person. And somebody can look kind of like almost not fully qualified on paper and yet be exactly the right person that you need. And so this is an important part of the process to evaluate their experience in their education and their skills and their knowledge. But probably the most important part is when you bring the men and meet them and interact with the board and interact with staff and see who are these folks that have applied for this job and can they do it. So I hope that we can move forward with this process and evaluate whether any of these candidates are worth bringing in for those meetings. I think that would be our goal for today. Kevin, if I might just add a few, if you'd mind mind. Absolutely. Even if when you bring him in for the interviews. And he didn't find one of them that it's whatever you were looking for. Does it mean that you have to pick one? Right. So, you know, after the interviews, if the council doesn't feel like we have a good candidate, the right candidate for the job. They don't have to go with it. Absolutely. Simple as that. So it doesn't mean that if you select and go to the council that they have to pick one of them. They don't have to. They can pick somebody totally, somebody else. It's not even in a packet, I understand. So let me propose a methodology to go through this that I think that will be productive for us. I've created a spreadsheet for each of us to, for each of you to vote on each candidate, the one, two or three scoring that we have in the package. One is somebody you definitely wanna see come in for an interview and learn more about. Two is someone who's interesting, but you're not sure about it. three of somebody you definitely do not want to have come in for an interview and learn more about. Two is someone who's interesting, but you're not sure about it. Three is somebody you definitely do not want to have come in for an interview. And when we do that, we'll get some consensus rankings and we'll look and see how many people got a high enough score to consider for bringing in. And what we'll do is I'll go through each person and I will give you a little bit of information about, I've read through thousands of pages of newspaper articles over the past couple of days. And I will tell you whether or not they fully disclosed everything that I found out there. I'll ask you to each give me the number for it and if we have basic agreement if everybody says three for somebody probably doesn't require a lot of conversation. But if we get a one, a two, a three, a two and a one then maybe we need to slow down and talk about why we scored the person that way and whether or not it makes sense for any of us to change our votes. You know, somebody might be convinced, oh, I didn't think about that. I don't really want to bring that person in. Or I didn't think about it that way. I've changed my mind and I want to give that person a chance. So the ones where we don't have good consensus, I think we should have a little bit of discussion on How does that sound everyone? Does that work well? Good. If I could just quickly state for the record that Mr. Ward arrived at 412. And go ahead I'm sorry. I was just going to ask if you could just give Mr. Ward a brief synopsis of our conversation. So he's up to speed with where we are. Oh, absolutely. So we started the meeting with talking about whether or not we thought we had a good slate of candidates and a couple of folks talked about their concern that nobody had all the right qualifications and didn't seem to be the right fit. That said, we also know that nobody is going to be perfect and that we're going to have to look for the right set of combinations of personality and skills and having the opportunity to meet with some of these folks may make it easier for us to make that decision. So when we bring them in for the City Council meetings, that could be a big factor in the decision whether or not to hire one of these folks. Does that sound pretty complete? Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you. And then at the end of the meeting, I'm going to talk about the next steps. You know, what we're going to do to vet these finalists. There's a lot more that we're going to do and how we're going to work with the city to create the interviews themselves. And so I'll give you more information about that at the end. All right, I'm going to attempt to share my screen here so that you can see the spreadsheet that I was talking about. And I hopefully that'll work out well. If you could all just let me know if you can see that or not. Yep. And so what I want to do is let's start with Mr. Elborn. If you wouldn't mind just giving me your score for each candidate just in numerical form to start with. Oh, I gave him a one. Two. Two, three. Okay, and so you can see over at the end here he has total of 11 and the video is actually covering up the thing so his average score is 2.2. At the end I will rank everybody by this column and we'll see how they fall out in terms of preferences. Right. As I mentioned I did read quite a bit of background on these folks. Mr. O'Born had 565 pages of articles written about him. Most of them were in reference to things he did as part of his job. They were either mentions or quotes around city projects and things like that. But there were some that were discussing issues that he had, all of which he disclosed in his questionnaire. So I didn't find anything that he didn't bring up. There was quite a bit on the problem with the public works director in his last position. I'm trying to remember the name of the town. I've looked at so many pages right now that I'm forgetting. O'Carb or Washington. And there was quite a bit on that, including some court filings and things like that. So quite a bit of interesting reading. But like I said, the vast majority of us were related to city business and positive in nature. So we have quite a range of scoring on that. Does anyone want to make a case for why they chose the number they chose? Does it sound like anybody wants to make a strong case? We can let it stand as it is. All right. We'll move on to Brian Bender. Two. One. Two. Three. Two. Did I hear two from? Yes. Two. Yes, thank you. All right. Only 128 pages of media on Mr. Bender. Generally positive or referencing projects for the city. There was one resident op-ed criticizing him for taking a lot of time to go to conferences, which is not that unusual. And it was particularly revolving around the fact that he was keeping his AICP active, which requires going and taking training classes and having CES to get that renewed on a regular basis. Any, we're actually very similar to the last one, a little bit spread across the board on that. Anyone want to have any particular comments about Mr. Bender? All right. How about Mr. Wagner? One. One. That was actually a two. Two. Three. Alright, still, weagoner had 344 pages of media press on him. Many of them were positive or mentions of projects and things like that. But there was a large amount of material around the court case with two police officers that were let go from I I believe, was where was it? Van Daly or something like that? Yeah, Van Daly and Missouri. That generated a lot of press in the area, probably because it was a significant thing that happened in that community. A lot of folks were involved, including the elected officials and neighboring cities, even because one of the officers became the chief of police in the neighboring city. And so there was some interaction on that as well. I believe that he did disclose it appropriately. There was nothing that I found that was different from what he told us. I did note that there was other details that he did not fully disclose in the articles, but nothing that contradicted anything that he said. So if somebody did it like a Google search, they might get a little bit more backstory on it it but nothing that's contradictory to what he said. Anyone did we already that I already ask if anybody wanted to make a special case for why they chose the ranking they did. All right then Mr. Walker. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Did I hear a fifth three in that? I thought I did. All three. All threes, yes. All threes. Okay. With your permission, I want to even bother going through the 727 pages that we did of media. And we'll move on to Mr. Showning. Two. One. Two. One. All right, Mr. Showning had 257 pages of media. All of it was positive and mentioned of city projects and quotes about different things that were done. And somewhere on just mentioning him being a finalist and other jobs, but it's really nothing negative at all. Anybody want to make a case why they voted the way they did on Mr. Schoenman. Well you guys are going to make this really easy on me. Mr. Schoenbridge. One. One. One. One. One. Okay, Mr. Schu, bridge, only had 67 pages of articles. He was the smallest number of anybody. Everything was positive. And then, in fact, there was a really good article written about him and Crookston, Minnesota, where he did a budget hearing that really helped people understand how city budgets work and there was quite a bit of good mentions of that very positive. Since we're all scored the same unless anybody has a comment, I will move on. And I hope I'm not mispronouncing any of these folks' names, but I don't really know all of them that well. I've talked to a few of them but not everybody. So Mr. Ga is what I believe is the next one. One. One. Three. One. All right, Mr. Gaugher, 524 pages of media. Again, mostly mentions or quotes revolving around city projects. All right, Mr. Gaugh had 524 pages of media. Again, mostly mentions or quotes revolving around city projects. And the fact that he was a finalist in several other positions, there was some articles that had to do with allegations from a former water plant supervisor in one area, but those he did disclose in his comments. Anybody wanna have any conversation around that one? Hey Mr. Gossard. Two. Two. Two. Three. Two. Three. Two. Mr. Gasser had 323 pages of media stories, again, mostly revolving city business. There was some discussion of him as in his position as a school board member, basically on voting and things like that, and a whole heck of a lot of election results, because he has been involved as an elected official, those commonly show up all over the place. And I would say probably the majority of those 323 pages had to do with how many votes he got versus anything that he did as a as a Administrator or as an elected official Any discussion around mr. Gossart Mr. Omen one two two oops We got a two at the end? Two. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. All right. There was 471 pages. Mostly positive, but there was some discussion of his resignation in Becker County. And then there was he applied for a position in Fort Mead, Florida. This will show up frequently in a Google search where he was offered the job, but then they later rescinded the offer because they felt like he hadn't moved there fast enough. There was also a change in the city commission during that period, so there may have been some interest in selecting their own candidate as well. So it's hard to say what exactly happened there, but I did want to note that that is something that will show up in a Google search. Any discussion about Mr. Oman? All right, I had left Ms. Castanio and Mr. Moia on here because I had reached out to them several times to see if they could finish the process. I know in the case of one of them there was a very significant family emergency that had to be dealt with. The other I just didn't hear back from so at this point I'm going to assume both of them with true. I do for the record want to state that we had other candidates in the semifinalist pool. Two of them, Paul Stewart and Jeff Kentrell, accepted other offers in our city managers and other communities now. Which one? I didn't have it. Paul Stewart. I was all Stewart and Jeff Cantrell. Three others withdrew without providing any rationale. Brian Boltice, Danny Robbins, and Mark Sahoney. So they had all reached out prior to this meeting and asked to be withdrawn from consideration. So I'm going to move my thing here. We should be able to. The draw was a big disappointment. Yeah. He was a naval officer if you would command it. That's right. Too large naval air force bases or air force naval bases. To me that would have been the idea. That's what I'm saying. I was very deleter ship, the command, the personality. I mean, I could have been the slam, don't you? Yeah. But now we have to go with the next step. And what did he, what happened to him? He withdrew. He said he was pursuing other opportunities. I just looked at his email and that was the statement that he gave. So ignoring the first two here because we did not score them at all. The lowest scores were for Jeff Schubert, Damage Showning, just a god chase Wagner and Pat Omen. All of them are relatively close in the rankings. You can see it's between one and 1.8 for those folks. I would consider that a fairly positive indication that these are people worth meeting with and learning more about. The process that moves forward, just to give you some context, is we'll select the ones that you want to move forward today. It could be three, it could be four, it could be five, but we ask no more than five unless there's a compelling reason to do that. We do a Stage 2 media search which is much more intensive and includes social media, things like X and Facebook and mentions that may have been made them in Facebook pages and things that are publicly available. We do a background investigative report that looks into financial criminal and their life to make sure that there's nothing there that we need to know about. We do their reference checks. We get the references from them and we go and do those so that you have that. And then we have the possibilities of doing two additional things. The first one is a desk management assessment that gives you insight into the management leadership style. That's something that we had proposed as part of our original package so we could include here. And then the other thing is, and this is something I actually think would be worthwhile for you to recommend that we do. And that is for them to do a first-year plan on what is it that they would focus on upon getting the job, how would they conduct their first-year business, just to get a feel for the way they think about things and what their approach would be. I think we got a taste for that in that fourth question on the video interviews when we talked about how do you build trust because a lot of them talked about the ways that they would engage with the community and with the board and with staff in order to build those relationships. But this would be a little bit more concrete because we'd be asking them to look at the situation that they see on the ground in the city and talk about how they would address those things. After that we create a finalist briefing book that we would submit to the city, schedule the on-site interviews. I recommend that they meet individually with each of the council members so that there's a chance for one-on-one questions and an ability to get to know them a little bit better. I would also recommend that we figure out a way to have them meet with staff, either in like a meet and greet group setting or something like that. And if you'd like, I always think this is a good idea with members of the public. You could either do that through an open house or through invitation to a particular meeting for folks that are important for them to get to know in the community. I would recommend that we give each one of the finalists a tour of the city and have them see firsthand what the places look like that they're going to be asked about. And then a public meeting with formal interviews with the council. Does anybody have any questions or comments about those next steps? And I think Kevin, I know when we did in NUSMORNO, we did exactly what's, because we were working with Doug at the time. But we had them tour the city with one of the departments. We had the meets with the departments overall. They met with the commission individually. Then they had like an open house to the public. And then on Saturday they actually met in public with the commission, with the commission asking the question to each candidate. So that would be my recommendation. And also I would recommend to have at least the five that the top scores there for interviews. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, what is the timeframe for this? So it usually takes about two or three weeks to gather all this information. And then we wanna give them a not-time notice that they can schedule their travel to the city and at that point we're looking at the early part of May. So I would work with the city to determine what works well with the council's calendar and how we make it work for staff. We'll pick some time and make to do that. Okay and so all of that would take place the first part of May. Yeah we've tried to pick like a three day period where we could do all of that together so it's not broken for time. Yeah. Three day period. So we're going to be you know working with the city to determine what scheduling things we have to anticipate. It's it's always good if it's near or around a meeting or far enough away from a meeting that they can do a special meeting and it also has to be we have to anticipate. It's always good if it's near or around a meeting or far enough away from a meeting that they can do a special meeting. And it also has to be we have to be sure that people are not on spring break or not going to be participating in the process because that would be something that would hinder this process. That's my concern. Yeah. Bonnie, when is the next City Council meeting? Or if the one for May? The fifth. The fifth. Okay. Yeah. Bonnie, when is the next City Council meeting? Or the one for May, the fifth? The fifth, okay. Kevin, how do you handle the references that are provided? Is that a phone call? Is it an email? How do you do that? We have an online tool that we ask each one of the references to go in and answer a series of questions about the candidate. And we completely allow that into a document that doesn't identify any particular respondent. So this is a way of encouraging to be very honest about what they're saying. Right. Because we identify who said just say. Here's what the respondent said in total on these different areas. Yeah. Have you ever had any experience with pursuing any unprovided references before as a way, and is it an even appropriate in a situation like this? Well, if I understand what you're asking, is it appropriate for us to identify people who might have persons, character and work history and things like that and pursue reaching out to them to ask questions about them? Is that basically what you're going to do? Yeah, only because you know if you're going to use somebody as a reference generally you said hey would you be a reference for me for this job I'm going after? And by default, they're probably going to only say positive things about you, right? Or as if we could do a non-provided reference, is there any value to talking to somebody that they used to work for or work with that was not a provided reference to find out if there's anything else there that might be gleaned from that actual reference. So my, I'm sorry, just a thought. I'm just curious. In my experience, that becomes necessary when there's open questions about particular issues and going to someone who is involved in that issue and saying, could you give us your perspective on that? I've made those kind of phone calls before but that's usually much later in the process and usually about the time we're trying to decide who the ultimate finalist is going to be. And usually it's a pretty significant issue that comes up during the background checks and things like that. From based on what we know about these folks already I I don't see that as becoming an issue, but it could. Okay. I think the other situation, and I think Mr. Reshidat actually alluded to this, is sometimes the cities will send folks to the communities that these folks are coming from. And just talk to folks. Were you aware of the city manager or city administrator did you have interactions with them what did you think you know that kind of thing that that can happen as well I'm going to move forward. I'm as James and I think to move forward We have to have a formal recommendation to make a motion. Do we have any public comment at this point in time? Seeing none,'ll move on. I may. I may. Do you want to. I make a motion to invite the top five scores for interview with the council and then also to do the one-on-one meeting with the council meeting meeting with the department has taken a tool of the city meeting with the public, and then final interview with the council in the public format. Second. Before we vote, can I just confirm that it was Dana's showing Jeffrey Schubridge, Joseph Ga, Michael Gossert and Pat Omen? So based on the scores that we have in 577-9 and get 2-9s. And that's true. You got 2-1-8s, so you have to make 6. You get pull. That is absolutely accurate. I did not notice that. Thank you for bringing that out. So between Pat Oman and Brian Bender, is there any preference for who you'd like to see be included? Is there anyone want to make it on? Not Brian Bender. You know, it'd be between Pat and Chase. Mr. Wagner and Omen, right? They're both. But that make it six candidates. Let me say more than nine at nine score. I thought we had five. You're right. It's Chase Wagner, Pat Omen, Joseph God, Dana Schoening and Jeff Schubert, Zara Five. So they both had nine but they fell within the five. It was five, seven, seven, nine, nine. So I think we're fine. Michael Gossert actually scored 11. I now heard that name. Okay. Yep. So these are our five. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Chairwoman Jamison. Yes. Ms. McDavid. Yes. Ms. Penny. Yes. Mr. Ward. Yes, Mr. Rashidot. Yes. Well, my next steps will be to notify the candidates that are not moved or that they are no longer being considered in the search. Let the candidates who have been named finalists know that they are finalists and start them on the process for gathering the data that we talked about in next steps. And then I will reach out to the city and start planning the actual site visit for the interviews. Any questions for me? I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. Any questions for me? None at this time. Thank you very much. Looking forward to the next part. I want to thank you all. I know this is volunteer work and you spend a lot of time reading and watching videos the past few days and I appreciate the energy that you've devoted to this and your thoughtfulness. It's been a lot of help. She had it given. Thank you. Thank you for it as the candidates to review. Appreciate it very much. Looking forward to the person next to us. Yes. I make a motion to adjourn. Thank you. Good evening.