Chapel Hill’s Town Council discussed the expectations and competencies officials will be looking for when selecting a new town manager at Wednesday night’s meeting. Current town manager Roger Stancil announced in November that he will retire in the fall of this year after 12 years of service.

President and founder of Developmental Associates Stephen Straus went over the selection process during the meeting and outline how the public will be given time to make comments regarding the selection.

Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger said that a long list that was written during the meeting centered on the values of the community and how Chapel Hill can continue to hold true to those values while growing and changing with infrastructure and budgetary needs.

“We had everything from affordable housing to economic development to environmental issues; it was a large,” Hemminger said. “I was proud of my colleagues; we had a very good long list. Competency dealt with someone embracing those values and working in partnership with all the partners.”

According to Hemminger, the town knows that they do better when they work together in partnerships and do not act alone in the community.

“We have the university and the health care system; we have Carrboro and Orange County and Hillsborough and Durham and Chatham Park exploding,” Hemminger said. “There’s just a lot going on so you have to have someone who’s willing to not already have all the answers but work in those partnerships to create those answers together.”

Hemminger said it was decided that there will be at least three more public engagement processes at different times of day in different places that will soon be announced as well as an online tool where the public can leave comments.

“We have a timeline where we’re looking to identify somebody by June,” Hemminger said. “The reason being is we’re trying to create that job description right now, then you have to let that be posted for a period of time, then the Developmental Associates firm that we’ve hired to go through all those applications and sort of rank them, with this goal of all this input they’ve collected from the community and from the council, to give us what they call the red, green, yellow group and then the council looks over all that information and selects top candidates to go through a further screening process.”

The further screening process could require giving a presentation on budgetary decisions and solving hypothetical scenarios involving citizens. The detailed 11-step process of recruiting and selecting a new town manager is available on the Town of Chapel Hill’s website.

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