Selecting the searchers

The Austin Chronicle
BY AUSTIN SANDERS
FRI., OCT. 20, 2023

City Council's search for the firm responsible for finding Austin's next city manager has come to an end. Selection of the next manager will be a hugely consequential decision and selecting the best firm to identify those candidates is crucial.

Council is expected to authorize a $150,000 contract with executive headhunter firm Mosaic Public Partners to search the nation for the person best qualified to serve as chief executive of city government in Austin. Once the contract is approved, Mosaic will meet with Mayor Kirk Watson and City Council members to determine a broad plan for the recruitment process.

Our city manager is more powerful than most in large cities, because we operate under the council-manager form of government, which is increasingly rare for big metros. (Among the 10 most populous cities in America, only four still use this form of government: Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix.) Under this form of government, the day-to-day affairs of running city government are led by the unelected city manager, who is hired and overseen by the elected City Council. Mayor and Council are the legislative branch voting on policy matters, while city staff, led by the manager, serve as the administrative branch carrying out those policy directives. Under the strong mayor system of government (which Austin voters declined to switch over to through a ballot measure in the May 2021 election), the mayor performs the work of the city manager.

Former Austin City Manager Jesús Garza has occupied the role on an interim basis since February, following Council ousting Spencer Cronk after a tumultuous period that saw simmering tensions between Cronk and Council boil over in public. Since occupying the manager's office, Garza has made sweeping changes to the city bureaucracy, which has distressed  some of the advocacy groups that lobby Council on policy matters but has generally been welcomed by Council members as an aggressive push for needed change to a flagging enterprise.

According to backup material posted for Council's Oct. 19 meeting agenda, Mosaic will engage in a variety of tasks relating to the search, including developing the candidate profile that will help Mosaic find the kinds of candidates Council thinks are best suited to lead Austin, probably for the next five years (about the length of time recent Austin city managers have lasted). Mosaic will use that profile to whittle down the list of applicants and then work with Council to determine who should be offered the job.

Selection of Mosaic as the lone finalist for the city manager search followed vetting of 12 other applicants, conducted by a Council committee consisting of Watson, Mayor Pro Tem Paige Ellis, and Council Members Vanessa Fuentes, Chito Vela, and Leslie Pool. The previous search, which led to the hiring of Cronk, was a calamitous affair shrouded in secrecy. In a Council message board post, Watson indicated that would not be the case this time.

"Among other factors the [Council] committee considered in making this recommendation," Watson wrote, "was Mosaic's commitment to an open, transparent process that involved a robust public process."