Town Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, I got to find the day. Today is July 1st, 1110 a.m. Calling today's meeting into order. Madam Clerk, if you'll take the roll, please.

Yes, Mayor. Mayor Danziger?

Present.

Vice Mayor Van Merge? Present. Commissioner Trevani? I do not think he's online, so he's absent. Commissioner Vildostegui?

Here.

Commissioner Wynga? Here. Mayor, you have a quorum.

All right, thank you. Major slash Deputy Chief, if you'll lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, please. Thank you. Madam Clerk, I don't see any public comment before we start this item.

I don't have any, Mayor.

All right. If anybody wants to speak before we close that portion of the meeting, public comment. All right. Seeing none, I'm turning it over to our attorney.

Good morning. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Steve Helfman. I'm the town attorney. Mayor, Commission, About six weeks ago, I think it's been that long, you had asked me and our clerk to assist in trying to put out a selective solicitation for recruiting firms that could work with the town on two sort of fundamental recruitments, if you will. which is the most important, maybe not the most urgent, but the most important was to help identify a candidate for town manager. And that is something that we discussed together with the need to deal with because we expected that that would take some time, whether that's months, whether it's a year. I don't know how long that process will be. I don't think anybody does. The recruiters can share with you what their thoughts are in terms of long-term recruitment, the timing to bring people forward that are appropriate for the town. But also, and more importantly, because of the unusual situation that we're in with a an interim town manager who has very honestly and openly told you that he could at any moment with, quote, a week's notice, move on. And so you're faced with this dilemma where you have sort of a in his own words, a caretaker manager at the moment, who's told you that it could be very short notice, and you have a need to act. all of you have expressed the desire to get moving, get the administration working hard on initiatives, working hard at rebuilding the government, which over several years has degenerated to a great extent from, in many respects, but so, The task was, from my perspective, was to try to reach out to a handful of, I'm gonna call them pre-qualified firms, simply because of their reputations and their years of experience in doing recruitment of municipal officials and personnel, and bring forward, you know, proposals and people that you could interview, okay? So that's where we are today. The solicitation went out. It went out to three premier firms. Two of them responded. Colin Basinger's firm and SGR both responded with pretty complete proposals. They are, and they're both here today, I think that the format that we've set up is to have set aside up to an hour. If it doesn't take an hour, that's fine. For each firm to make a presentation, engage with the council in an open dialogue about what their thoughts are, what your thoughts are, and how they might be able to help you. And we'll go through each firm as a courtesy. I think SGR is gonna, sit in the conference room during the first group, and then we'll be invited in for their presentation and questioning. And then I would suspect we'll take a break and, um, and come back and have a dialogue amongst you on what you want to do. And there's no predetermined decision today. You could, make a final decision and say, we love you guys, and that's the guy we want, and sign him up. Or you could continue the process, engage further conversation, whatever it is. You don't need to feel like there is an absolute urgency to make any decision. But I do know that you want to make a decision. So with that in mind, we'll hopefully make some progress today.

OK.

Colin, I think your firm was for no reason at all except maybe just alphabetical chosen first. So welcome. And guys, we'll see you in no more than an hour. You know where to find us. Yes. Maybe there's a little button there that may go green. There we go.

I got it. Thank you. First of all, thank you for picking us as a premier firm. We certainly like that reputation, and we've worked very hard to build it. My name is Colin Benziger. I am the founder and senior partner at Colin Benziger & Associates, and I have with me Jeff Durbin who's a senior vice president with our firm. I've been working in local government for over 40 years the last 28 I've been doing executive search and I'll tell you a little more about that in a minute Jeff's Retired city manager. He's been in local government for over 30 years and What we intend to do today is I'll tell you a little bit about our firm. Jeff will tell you a little bit about our interim services. And then I'll come back and I'll tell you about our executive search services. What I'd like to say first of all is that we're here to work with you, to serve you, and to meet your needs. We understand that situations like this can be very fluid. Steve just alluded to the fact that Mario's on a week-to-week. Um, in our proposal, we suggested Jeff as your interim COO. I have another chap who could also be your interim COO. Um, but what I'm thinking is that, you know, if Mario bailed, uh, suddenly, or for whatever reason is no longer the intro or acting town manager, Jeff could step up in a heartbeat and we have the other chap who could step in as your COO. We're very flexible in that regard. When we looked at your interim or your town manager's assessment, we noticed that you have some problems in the finance department, quite frankly. It looks like five of the nine positions are either not filled or have an interim. I understand, and so that was a focus area for us, but I understand now that there may be somebody in the wings that could be the finance director. The point is we are flexible, and we'll do whatever we need to do to work with you to stabilize your organization and then create a wonderful organization, a great organization. Surfide's a great community, and it deserves a great town manager and a great staff. It seems to me that most of your positions are filled right now. Question is, do you have the right people doing the right job? And we'll get to that in a minute. By way of background, I started this firm 28 years ago. I'd been through some processes trying to get a job as a town manager, city manager. And I just felt like I could do a better job. And so I'd always been good at picking people, whether it was a public works director or the second baseman on my softball team. I thought if I provided a quality product, good communication, rather outstanding communication between both the candidates and the council and us, and charged a reasonable price, I'd be successful. I started from scratch and 28 years later, Fast forward, we've done searches in 36 states at this point. Our reputation is what we live on. We don't advertise. It's all word of mouth and making proposals. What we offer is a problem-free search. We've studied our competitors and other searches and seen the mistakes they make, and we've made one or two on our own. I hate to say it, but we've learned from them. And so at this point, our work is problem free. We have an extraordinary ability to find the right people. A couple of our placements are Brian Hill, who was an assistant city manager in a South Carolina county. We placed him in James City County, Virginia, and he's now the county manager in, Fairfax County, Virginia. Population, I don't know, around two million. Another placement was TC Broadnecks. He was an assistant in San Antonio. We brought him into Tacoma, and he then went on to become the city manager in Dallas, Texas, and then is now the manager in Austin, Texas. We're a turnkey firm, in other words, we know your staff's busy, they all have full-time jobs, so we're going to minimize any impact that we have on them when we do our work. We'll need some help here and there, like where do we put candidates up in hotels and stuff like that, but everything else we'll take care of. And I would say finally, we work extremely well with elected bodies and with candidates. That's important. It's one thing to work well with elected bodies, but you also have to work well with the candidates because it's two sides of the equation. I started this firm, as I said, 28 years ago in Florida. Since, in the last 25 years, we've done approximately two-thirds of the searches in Florida for city or county managers. Basically, we've done about twice as many as all the other firms combined, and that's based on our work product. People know our work, word gets around, and we get hired. Our focus is on basically executive recruiting, although when I first started this business, I was basically doing operational assessments and audits. I looked at the government in Jupiter Island, for example, and made recommendations on how to make it more efficient, more effective. I've done work in the city of Stewart. I've worked for Palm Beach County Water Utilities, so on and so forth. So whereas we do do primarily executive search at this point, we do have a background in assessing organizations and in determining where needs are and how to fix them. Client orientation, pretty obvious. Responsive, you will have our Cell phone numbers you can call anytime 24 7 365 I do like to take one day a week off, but you know if you need me I'm here Our approach is tailored and I alluded to that in the At the beginning when I said that situations like these are often very fairly fluid and so Whereas we gave you a response, it's a pretty general response, and we'll alter it and do whatever you need to have done to make this project a success. Information and advice. For us, local government is not a profession. It's an avocation. I love talking about local government. And having worked with probably over 300 governments in the last 30 years, um, I've seen a lot of different situations. So if you have a question that's totally unrelated to what we're being hired to do, I'm I'll be happy to answer it if I can. And if I can't answer it, I can probably tell you who you could talk to to find a good answer. You know, yesterday as I drove down, I spent half an hour talking to a mayor of another city. answering a question he had, and he's not a current client, but he's a friend and former client, and so I gave him the benefit of my knowledge. We're reliable. We will tell you what we're going to do, and then we'll do it. And we're thorough. You'll find, I think in our proposal, it's also in the back of your handout there, an article from the Fernandina Beach Observer by Dale Martin. He was one of our placements and the town manager there. And Dale said, you know, basically, I've been through a lot of searches. These guys do the best background checks in the business. And frankly, that's something we pride ourselves on. You probably saw a copy of a sample candidate report in our proposal. I'm gonna step back now and let Jeff Durbin talk to you about the interim work that we do. If you chose to hire us, Jeff would be our recommendation as your interim COO and then we'll work from there. We'll find out, we'll figure out what other positions you need and make it happen. So I'm gonna turn it over to Jeff.

Thanks, Colin. Good morning. Jeff Durbin here. Nice to see you all. As noted, I have been in local government service for 30 years. Like Colin, it's a passion. I love talking about it. I love seeing what other cities do. It's always been a labor of love is why we do this work. And I can tell you that I've actually been a candidate in CBA recruitments a couple times. And I've been candidates elsewhere. And I'm really proud to be a part of this firm starting this year because of the good work that this firm does. And I can tell you firsthand The vetting that they put candidates through is top notch. One of the themes throughout my local government career has been organizational change and transition, evolution even. It happens. The situation you're at with your finance department, about, well, three years ago, I was in the same place, a finance department that was just crumbling apart, had to completely rebuild it. and that happens, but the good news is you'll get through it. It's just gonna take some work and we can get you there. I would, as noted, be your lead on internal placements as deemed appropriate. I've had the chance to review your assessment report. That's a good piece of work. There's a lot of information in there. One of the things that I've found is every municipal organization has problems. You don't know how big or small they are until you really get your boots on the ground inside the organization to really see where the strengths and weaknesses are. Every organization has them, but I wouldn't want to make really firm recommendations based only upon the assessment. I think getting in the organization and really evaluating it firsthand is really important. I've also looked over your budget. That's also a great document, provides a lot of information and a good starting point. I would also be your kind of on the ground point for the permanent recruitments. And we move those through quickly. One of the things Colin might talk about is the schedule. I think a lot of firms that I've seen don't have a schedule and stick to it. They drag on and on and on. CBA, we don't do that. So when we talk about a schedule, we'll follow through on that. Let's see. I think that my priorities coming in, right off the bat, your finance department needs a lot of attention. Your finance department is a baseline service. You've got to hit payroll. You've got to know where your numbers are. So that's obviously a critical piece of work to get started on. Your public works department seems to have too much on the plate right now as well, so I think that's something that also needs attention. I'm not sure what the right steps are at this point without having, like I said, boots on the ground, but it definitely seems like they're overburdened and you can make a lot of big expensive mistakes if you have people trying to do too much in big capital projects without the right resources. So that's something that definitely needs attention as well. A third piece is what I would call triage. In the assessment report, there are recommendation after recommendation after recommendation. There's no chance you can get all those done in a year. You need some strategies around this and what are the hot points that you really need to work on up front and a strategy to get there in the end. You can get there, but not all at once at the same time, which is not realistic. I would want to meet with all of you individually to understand you and your perspectives. meet with your acting manager to understand what they know, as well as meeting with all of your department heads to really get firsthand understanding and awareness on what the challenges and issues are and where we go from there. A next priority that I would recommend, this would probably be something to wait for with your next permanent manager, but I could not find a strategic plan. I watched a little bit of your budget workshop yesterday. There wasn't alignment between your budget conversations, budget requests, and a strategy. What are your priorities, where do you want to go? I think that's something that would be a very good piece of work that would create alignment between your vision as well as what staff is doing. So that's something that I would recommend that you really work towards. We can start laying the framework for that now and get you there. With that, I think I can throw it back to Colin.

Our basic process, yes, our basic process, Jeff started to talk a little bit is each of you first and get a feel for who you are, how you relate to one another. And that has two purposes, one of which is it helps us understand the environment. It also helps us answer the question that any good candidate's going to ask, which is how well do they work together? What kind of situation am I getting into? Are they good people? Are their priorities in the right order? So that's our first step. We'll meet with you and staff or whomever you suggest, members of the community. And our goal would be to develop a brochure. I think Sandra has some examples that she can hand out. So that once we have that brochure, it's kind of a marketing document. I mean, basically, that's what we're doing. We have a job. that we want to advertise. And so the first thing is the brochure. It paints a picture of your community. We want to be fair and honest. But we also want to highlight the good things. And if there's things that need to be highlighted that maybe aren't so good, we will highlight those. But what we find is things that are not so good for some people are just what other people are looking for. So the point is, We want to do a fair and honest job in the brochure. Then the next step is to go out and search the marketplace, the industry. And that involves, first of all, networking. We're an executive search firm, so we're going to talk to people that might be a good fit that we know. We're going to talk to people that may know people that might be a good fit. And then we're going to advertise in the trade press because frankly, every now and then we get a great candidate out of the trade press. Maybe somebody that's in California that grew up in Miami and wants to come back. So the third thing is our email list. And that is around 14,000 people that have interest in local government. It's focused really on probably the eastern side of the Mississippi River, although we do have a substantial presence in the west as well. We find that in many cases, people tend to stay regional, in the sense that's where their family are, there is, and things like that. We have a great email list, in other words. We'll email a job announcement, just the first page, to everybody on our list. And our goal is to create a buzz in the industry. So Jeff might get it as a city manager in Colorado. He may know Sally in upstate New York that they went to school with together, and he may know that Sally came from Miami-Dade County or has expressed an interest in moving back, and so he may forward her to Sally. We can reach out. We can reach out to 75, 100, 200 people, but we can't reach out to the... I'm trying to remember the number offhand. I think it's about 4,000 city managers in cities over populations of about 2,500. We can't reach out to everybody. So our goal is to put this out in the trade press, email it, call people, and get them to help us with the work, find people for us. Once we've got this buzz created, it normally takes about three weeks to give people enough time to understand what the opportunity is, the brochure we're going to develop. You can see it's pretty detailed, and some people think it's a little too much. Our goal, frankly, is to give somebody, a potential candidate, all the information that they might want or need to have to make at least a preliminary decision on whether or not this is the right job for them. And of course, you can see there's headers over the different sections. So if they're not interested in the history of ServSci, they can just skip that. Or if they're not interested in the demographics, whatever. Once it's been out in the marketplace for three weeks, we'll have a deadline. We'll look at the resumes, the applications we get. We'll know a lot of the candidates. We've been doing this for quite a while, 28 years. And so one of the advantages of having a recruiter is I've seen a lot of these candidates over the last 28 years and I know which ones are good solid people and which ones aren't in many cases. I don't know everybody obviously. But it makes it a lot easier to go through those resumes and pick out the strongest candidates. Now I will tell you that in what we have found recently, and I'm not sure what the reason is, that we frequently need to go back out for another two weeks, extend the deadline. And I think it's, it maybe have to do with people are worried that the interim manager may get the job so they don't want to waste their time applying. They may be, might not be the right time, but the bottom line is that we'll often end up extending it and we'll get some more great candidates. Our goal is to have between eight and 10 candidates that we think are outstanding, any one of which can do the job. We try to get you in the ballpark of who the best candidates are. In other words, we're not gonna give you the list of 50 candidates and say, hey, pick out the ones you wanna talk to. We're going to pick out the ones we, based on our experience, know we'll do a great job for you, and then we'll give you their information. Now, when we actually close the job, I'll talk to The candidates, the best candidates will pick out, like I said, 8 to 10, might be 15, and figure out who I think is the best candidate. Jeff will do the same. Best candidates, excuse me. Our goal is to give you people, not person, to choose from once you're looking for your town manager, for example. The reason is we can know a lot about Surfside, but we don't know everything about Surfside. We don't know it the way you do. And so if we can give you five to eight candidates that you can look over, you may see things in their paperwork that we would miss that are important to you. So we'll give you that paperwork. Our vetting process is to have the candidates write an introduction. which is a series of about 16 questions. We tell them we want about four or five, five to six pages in response. So you're not gonna get a lengthy document, but at least everybody will be answering the same questions. It tells you a lot about how well they can write and how well they can prioritize because I've seen candidates write 20 page responses and that's not what we're looking for. Good candidate will be able to hit the high points and move on. You'll get their cover letter, you'll get their resume. We will reach out to, well, we ask them for about 20 references. They'll be the council they work for, prior council members, the city attorney, town attorney, the external auditor. It's important that you know that these people can manage the money of your community. You will talk to community activists. some peers, some subordinates, the media if they'll talk to us, and there's probably a few others that, oh, the HR director. We'll ask for all those names and we'll try to reach out to all of them. Our goal is to reach about eight to 10 people. We find if we can reach at least eight, we'll have a pretty good idea of who that candidate is. If there's something we need to know, somebody in that group will let us know. Eight just seems to be a good number. I'm not sure why. Each reference will come back to you. It'll be probably about a page long, could be a little longer. So you'll actually see what that person said. We don't summarize it. And by telling the candidates who we want to talk to, giving them the categories, we hope to get around the idea that one of the things that used to drive me crazy was when I was a candidate is they'd say, give us five references. Well, anybody who can't get you five references is pretty sad and probably wouldn't apply. So I wanna know, I don't want your five best friends. I want people who really know your work and will answer the questions honestly and critically. Now, confidentiality, some candidates don't want to know that they're looking, so we'll work with them. But the bottom line is we need to thoroughly vet those candidates. We also do criminal, well, we do records checks. We'll verify their education. We'll do criminal records checks at the county, state, and federal level. We'll do a civil records check at the county and federal level. We do driving records checks. Once in a while, you'll find somebody who has a Lead foot and that can tell you something about about them. We do credit and Also bankruptcy There's often you know, if somebody does have bankruptcy somebody will have a bankruptcy from time to time There's good reasons for it. Sometimes Sometimes there's not we want to make sure that if there is a bankruptcy there There is a good reason for it, you know sudden medical illness and they just couldn't meet their needs um when we get that oh and then we do the social media and the internet and local newspaper archives those are usually the best the local newspaper archives and nowadays pretty much everything's online so it's not that hard to check i will tell you that there are software programs out there that will do a lot of that stuff for you with ai and such we're starting to use ai a little bit but Frankly, our feeling is that the AI is not there yet. And so we do all of our work with people. They may use AI as a tool, but the bottom line is they're the ones that are looking and double checking, and we're double checking what they do. So we've got all this information. comes together on Jeff's desk, my desk. We pick the final five to eight candidates, or eight to 10 candidates we're going to recommend to you. You'll get their cover letter, you'll get their resume, you'll get their candidate introduction, which is the answers to the questions I mentioned. You'll get the results of their background checks. You will get the reference checks, and you will get the media checks. We usually give you about a week to look at those materials, and then we have a very straightforward process, Steve's seen it before, where we get to who you wanna interview, We will bring those candidates in and help you coordinate the process. We think you should see the candidates in really four settings. We like to have them meet the staff. It tends to put the staff at ease. They realize that these are real people and they're good, competent people. We like to do a public reception where you would invite the citizens of Surfside to come and meet the finalists, and that gives an opportunity for public input. It also gives you an opportunity to see how they interact with the public. I mean, your manager is gonna be a face of your government, and so it's important to know that they'll be able to handle themselves in a public venue. We then, the next morning, the nice thing about that too is it tends to put them at ease. They've already met you the night before, so that the next morning when they come in, we do one-on-one interviews with each of you, about 40 minutes each. My firm belief is that a manager succeeds or fails based on the chemistry and interaction he or she has with the elected officials. And a lot of that's one on one. So we feel it's critical that you talk to the candidates one on one and get to know them, look them in the eye. And then the final venue is to have the candidates come before you one at a time, like I'm doing right now, talking to you, answering questions and such. And what we find is that Some candidates do very well in the one-on-ones, and they do not so well in the public interview with the full commission. Some do just the opposite. So at that point, we can do one of two things. If somebody stands out and you're ready to make a decision, we'll make a decision. If not, we'll come back a couple of days later and let you sleep on it. Once we're done with that, once you've made a selection on your town manager, we will help you negotiate the contract. We'll work with Steve and say the mayor or whomever you designate as your representative and come back with a contract and then you've got a town manager. Now the timing on this is usually, it takes about 90 days from the point at which we start to the point at which you've made a selection for a town manager. That means that if they're working, they'll probably have to give 30 days notice, and then maybe a couple of weeks to move. So you can do it in four and a half months. The question we will have, and once we have a better feel for your organization, the situation you're in, is when do we start that 90 day period? Is it next week, or is it in three months, or six months, or a year? It's really up to you. and what we feel we can do and what will produce the best result for the organization. So in terms of our project team, For both the interim and the actual search function, I have general oversight, management oversight. Jeff is the boots on the ground. He's the first person on the ground. And then we have Scott Krim, who's our managing partner. He will play a role in it. And also we have Linnell Klein, who kind of runs our back office operation. She's been doing that for the last probably 15 years now. and has done every part of the business. So she knows our background checks and how to get our materials together better than anybody else in the firm, quite frankly. With that, I will conclude and say, you know, we put out a, gave you all a copy of a resolution from St. John's County. It's one of the first ones we got. But the point is our work has been recognized as outstanding. We will give you 125%, not the mere 110% that all the other firms will promise you. We think Surfside's a great community. We're here to be your consultant, to help you through this process, whether it's advice, consent, obviously helping you find people, making sure that you have the right people and the right jobs, and making this a premier government to work for. We want to find the best we want you to be the best you can possibly be and that's our job is to make that happen With your help and the staff's help So having said all that and taking about half an hour a little more 40 minutes any questions. I'd be happy to answer Open it up to the Commission

Just recalling from previous manager searches, a major question that came up in a lot of the conversations that I had with other commissioners and also just the people in the management of the town and in the community were asking was, did the person have experience in South Florida? And the view that some people had was that this was a unique environment and that you really needed a manager with local experience. I favored casting a much wider net. I'm curious how you, just based on your experience recruiting here and elsewhere, how you view that issue. I mean, obviously we'll take the candidates as they come, but do you think there's something special about South Florida that requires a connection to the area, whether it's, as you said, hypothetically, somebody growing up here or somebody having worked here before?

I think it's a plus. For me, it's not a determining factor. For me, you want somebody who's going to be the best possible manager you can find. And a few years ago, we did a survey, went through our past recruitments, and we looked at people that had come from out of state to Florida and from people that were in Florida that moved to become a city manager in a Florida city. And frankly, the results were pretty much the same. Yes, there's a little more of a learning curve if you're not from South Florida. And yes, I would agree that Miami-Dade County is different from any other county in the state, quite frankly. But it's not something you can't learn. To me, the innate gift of a manager and being able to do that job and work with five separate people with five different opinions on what you need to do and bringing them together and creating a great community is the key. I'll give you an example. Sam Kissinger was the manager in Key Biscayne for 20 years. Well, he came from New York. Eric Sirocco was in Aventura, but he was a South Florida manager. He'd come, I think, from Sunrise or someplace over in that general area of Broward County. Ron Watson and Aventura now came from New York to Bay Harbor Islands and then to Aventura. So again, I think the key is being a great manager and what the key to being a great manager is integrity, communication skills, and being a great manager. So being able to work with people and implement programs and get things done. So that's a lengthy answer to a short question, so I apologize.

Are you done?

I have other questions, but go ahead.

Anyone else? Good morning. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for your presentation. Surfside's at a turning point. We have a commission here that's really committed to elevating our town to A-plus standards. It's gonna take leadership that knows what that looks like, so they could take direction from us and run with it, but the idea here is a self-starter that's gonna know what that looks like and bring those ideas forth as well, and bring stability to the town staff and the residents. And this candidate, for looking at the town manager role specifically you know needs to be a true leader where they're cultivating relationships with their department heads so that they have that trusting relationship they know that finance has finance covered and if they need a report from finance they're going to get true data in a timely fashion and the leader needs to carry the vision and the direction to execution. So how many such roles has your firm successfully filled in the last 24 to 36 months where you saw a turnaround for a town that needed that?

I would say that towns that really needed a turnaround. We haven't had a lot of those, quite frankly. In the last 24 to 36 months, I'd have to think about that. It's not a situation that, I mean, we have dealt with those kinds of situations in the past, and really the key is to get that good manager that I talked about in there who understands working with you, working with the staff, working with the community, and how to get things done. There are managers that will do some of that. Maybe they're great with people and all that, but they can't get things done. And then there's managers that can keep things done that aren't so good with people. The goal is to find somebody that will get things done. And I really can't answer your question because I can't think of anybody right offhand at the moment.

All right. So in your 28 years, what was the most similar situation where you had a town that had multiple gaps, needed a leader, and to fill those gaps almost simultaneously? Okay.

Probably, it was a city outside Orlando where the commission did not get along at all. And it made it very difficult for the staff. And so we had to, first of all, find the town manager. We got a great one for that city. And then the town manager actually worked hard and filled those gaps. I'm trying to think of the name of the town that escapes me at the moment. It's been a few years. I'll have it later.

So what do you think would be the largest, the single largest obstacle in what we're trying to tackle here?

In terms of bringing people in, I think it's probably going to be overcoming the reputation of the town. You know, frankly, when we did Surfside the last time, it was a very similar situation, I think, with the council or commission that was very committed to having a great manager and having to turn the situation around. We brought in Guillermo Amadeo, and I think Guillermo's the longest serving town manager Surfside's had in the last 25 years. He stayed about five years. But, you know, sometimes it's a cycle. And so I think he saw the handwriting on the wall and left, and here we are again. Yeah, Jeff.

If you don't mind. Sure. Maybe you'll think of that city Like I said earlier, in my experience every organization has challenges. and it's finding that right person. I've gone into organizations myself that I thought were in great shape, come to find out they're not. Come to find out that it's broken here, it's broken there, it's broken. So I think, as Collin was saying, it's finding the right manager with the right attitude, the right skill set, a leader, somebody who knows how to delegate but also knows how to hold people accountable. I think it's a lot like, I always think of city management as like parenting. You have to encourage people to be their best, give them the tools to be their best, hold them accountable, and try to have fun at the same time. I think your biggest challenge is that you've had a lot of transition. And for us, it's gonna be finding the person who's at the right place, I think, in their career. There's a lot of people that, for family reasons or whatever, are not wanting to take a risk, something that might involve a lot of transition or a big relocation. But there's also a lot of people in this profession who are, we have a weird sense of humor. I have fun doing things that a lot of people say, how is that fun? Because it's a challenge, it's an opportunity to do something in a local government that provides service for people that you can all be proud of. So I'm actually working on a recruitment right now that is one of those, a lot worse off than your situation as a mess. So it happens, but we're getting candidates and we'll get there. It's just a matter of patience and finding strategies. So I think there's people out there that address both the things that you're both asking about, I really do.

Got it. And then my final question is, if you were to be filling this temporary or interim COO type of role, are you guiding the recruitment for the other gaps as well, where that's a separate segment of your team that's focused on that while you're handling town matters?

I would be the point person for that. but there's a lot to do within the organization, so we'd have to bring people in from the rest of our team to help with the managing that process.

Obviously being the boots on the ground, Jeff would have insights that the rest of our team would not have. And so his input would be critical, but as your interim COO, he's going to be very, very busy. And so he can kind of set the tone and give general direction, and then we'll execute it. By the way, the name of that town was Castleberry. But when I think about it, actually Surfside, 10 years ago was very similar to where you're at right now, except that I think the staffing was more stable.

So I have a follow-up to that question about Mr. Durbin's role, just to make sure I understand it. Because chief operating officer isn't a title that we've had normally. there's no automatically I don't sort of know what that means as you know as it relates to the manager but specifically maybe a way to get clear we have discussed earlier the possibility that the current acting manager might leave on relatively short notice and so I'm wondering what the exact role of the COO would be in that case or how that obviously there's there's The commission has to ultimately decide what's going on, but I'm wondering how you're thinking about that contingency right now.

That's a really good point, and that's something that we spent some time talking about. I think that we obviously are responding to your request for proposals for the COO. I think when I look at the role, I see it as more what I see in a lot of organizations, they call them a deputy role. town manager, um, kind of like a number two. Sometimes there's two deputy town managers for larger organizations. And those are the folks that oversee departments, the departmental operations. Uh, whereas the manager is working with the commission and commission priorities and the community and business relationships. So it's kind of a division of duties in terms of operations versus policy and, um, direction programming, if you will. And that's how I envisioned it.

All right. But then you're not imagining that the COO, there would always be an acting town manager that's not from the firm. There's either somebody internally or, you know, again, I'm trying to just get clear on what you're Your thoughts are about that contingency. Of course, the commission ultimately has to decide, but I'm wondering how you're imagining that.

I would say if I'm in the interim COO role and your current acting manager, for whatever reason, is no longer with you, I would be in a position where I could subject to your, you know, direction, uh, move into that role. Uh, and then with all the things you have on your plate, bringing somebody in to provide that additional support to me, if I was in that role, something that I would recommend again, you guys would have to authorize that.

And if I could,

If I could just follow up on that. One of the things that I noticed when I first came to Florida was that since you can't talk to one another outside a public meeting, a manager spends a lot of time with his or her commission just talking about priorities and where things are and getting ideas, exchanging ideas, and it makes it very difficult for that person to be completely on top of the rest of the organization. So that having a deputy or a COO frees up the manager, so the manager works with the commission, as Jeff suggested, to set priorities and such, and then the manager, obviously, the day-to-day CEO, is responsible for implementing those. But he or she has somebody working with them that can be more involved with the day-to-day and making it happen. Sometimes the city, the town manager will say, okay, police are a very visible function often, so often the town manager will say, okay, I'll have general oversight, I'll work with the commission, I'll work with the public, and I'll oversee the police department. You take everything else, and obviously there's accountability, I'm gonna keep an eye on you, But you're going to have most of the data responsibility for that. There was something else I was going to say, and I lost my thought.

I could add a little math to that as well. In my last role, I had a deputy and I spent on a weekly basis, two thirds, three quarters of my time was spent working with city council members or the mayor or key businesses.

And so your last role was as a manager, you mean?

As a manager, correct. Correct. And I had a deputy who, exactly like Colin was describing, managed or oversaw all the departments with the exception of police and public works.

My other thought was, if Mario left, our thought, one of the things we've talked about is Jeff could step up, assuming with your approval. We have another gentleman that I've looked at, looking at to help with public works, who's been a town manager. He's actually a retired Navy pilot, but most recently in his career, he was a town manager in Maine for six years, near the coast, and Derek, I could see helping out in public works, and then if Jeff transitioned from the COO to the town manager, Then again, with your approval, we would probably recommend you move Derek from Public Works to COO. And frankly, he might be able to do both. We don't know. Again, it's boots on the ground. We're reading paper, we're drawing the conclusions we can, but we really don't know until we actually get a chance to dig into the organization.

Any questions?

Yes, I would like to understand the flat fee of 10,000 for vetting and recruiting interim staff. What's exactly that for and what's the meaning of 20,000 per month, okay, plus temporary housing and administrative fee of 10%? What is it, administrative fees?

The 20,000 would be Jeff's salary. That would be paid to him. The temporary housing, we threw out a number between 3,500 and 4,500. That would be a furnished apartment. You know, frankly, maybe it's just the residence in down the street. It's very convenient. And if you're only going to be here, if you're going to be here four or five nights a week, maybe it's cheaper to do it that way. I don't know. The administrative fee is basically everything else that we need to do in terms of finding candidates. If, you know, if one of our interim, say we picked an interim director of public works and the he or she got a job somewhere else. Well, then we'd have to go back and find another interim director of public works. We'd have to fill that void. It's payroll, it's all the things associated with administering this contract.

I have a question for you, Steve. What is the process we're going through today?

Well, I think that we're in the process. And I think that if there's no further questions and you're satisfied with at least this phase, you're right on time to entertain the other group. have a conversation like this with them in a presentation, and then what I would anticipate, Mayor, is that, as I said, you maybe wanna take a couple of minute break, and then come back and just have a conversation about what's happened here and what the direction is you wanna take. Ultimately, however you get there, there would be a decision on which firm you'd like to work with as a quote recruiter. And I think what you're hearing here and what I am glad to hear is that their understanding that there is the principal role of finding you a manager But equally as important, and I want to stress this because I'm living this here for three months now, okay, equally as important as finding that very good person is to have a highly, highly professional and motivated interim team. I think that that is, this council is here Maybe they'll be here for four years, maybe they'll be here for two years if the electors decide not to extend their terms. But if it's two years, it's important that this interim person is not a caretaker, okay? I think it's important for the council and for the candidates, if you will, to understand this is not a caretaker position where you're going to be sort of making sure everything just stays status quo while you find a permanent person. You may end up being the interim for quite some time until you find that perfect candidate. And that time period has to be active, active, progressive management with implementing both administrative changes and implementing the council's goals because they're, at least my experience with this council is they've got stuff they wanna get done, okay? And The only way that that happens, they can want everything in the world, but at the end of the day, they're going to look over here, and this is the guy who's got to get it done for them. That's the reality of local government. They can't execute anything themselves. Some are more hands-on and will take a championship role, but at the end of the day, they've got to look to that person. And they're all, all of them, have ideas, goals, levels of achievement, levels of management that I think David spoke to. I'm sorry, to try to elevate the level of governance here. And that has, that's probably as important as the finding that end person. Because if this process is a year-long process, let's say, and it could be finding an ideal candidate. I know you say four months. If you do it in four months, you deserve a triple bonus, okay? But it could be a long-term process. And that process, period of time cannot be stagnant. This has to be, the person who comes in has to treat this as they are the manager. They gotta take this on as though they have taken the permanent position of running this government, doing whatever it takes to get it going, and start right away from day one focusing on accomplishments. I just that that that just to put this in context the mayor's asking kind of what it where do we go what do we do I just wanted to as as we have this conversation with you and amongst themselves and with the next group I think that this interim role is maybe even more important than the longterm goal. They will find somebody, as you said, okay, there will be somebody at some point who they arrive at, but I don't know when that's going to be. And work has to get done right away during that time. So this is a lot about, this is, I have confidence that you have a program of getting managers. This is, as maybe more important is what is your ability to help us on an interim basis to, which I'm gonna call interim permanent because it's not a caretaker job.

What I would say is years ago I was in a position in the District of Columbia government where I was the acting Bureau Chief for the Bureau of Water Measurement and Billing. The Bureau had a terrible reputation and had a terrible reputation for 40 years. And I was asked to take over on an interim basis. I was the interim for three years. During that time, we turned around the operation. But we didn't do it by being a caretaker. We did that by action. And I kind of laughed, actually, because It did have a terrible reputation when I took it over. And I remember driving down the street one day. The mayor at the time was Marion Barry, who you may or may not know the name. And he was doing one of his political ads. And he said, da-da, da-da, da-da, and we turned around water building on my watch. And I thought, oh my gosh.

What did he say? I'm sorry.

He said, and we turned around water billing on my watch, which was basically what I'd done. And I thought, oh my gosh, the election is three weeks off. I cannot make a mistake. And we didn't. But that's the kind of people we are. We're not people that sit in a chair and do nothing or just keep the ship afloat. You've talked to Jeff. I mean, you've seen Jeff. Jeff's a doer. We looked at the interim town manager assessment and there's a lot of good information in there and there's a lot of big words that take up a lot of pages. And we're interested in the information and getting it done and getting you to where you wanna be.

Okay, so why don't we move forward. We got another group to visit with and then you can, Take this where you guys want to.

Colin, thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you. Once again, we promise to give you 125%. And we are not people that sit around and do nothing. I mean, that's how I built this business. I started from scratch 28 years ago. And I took a lot of risks. And I did a lot of this. But it worked. And that's what we're going to do for you. Thank you. Want to say anything, Jeff? Yeah, I just can't help myself.

The caretaker managers, one of the first, it was a village at the time, the first managers I worked for was a village manager, and he was an interim, and he was a true caretaker. His job was to keep the seat warm and just make sure things happened. I think that there's another type of interim, which is really about transition management. It was really preparing the organization for the next manager, taking steps to start making changes, taking steps to implement new things. And Surfside needs that. I mean, it's obvious to me. So I appreciate your comments. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, guys. I'll take a five-minute break. Yeah, please. Okay. Why don't we do that?

Reset the palette.

Go ahead.

All right. All right, guys, let's take a quick five-minute break. Join you back at, what is it, 1220? Good. All right.

I assume that's it.

All right, guys, ready to start again? Where's our IT? We're back on? All right, you can start the presentation. We're good, Ben? All right. All right, back on, do we need to take roll or we're good? All right, attorney says we're good. All right, guys, you're up.

Just for the record, Commissioner Valdostegui stepped out, but he's present.

Do you want to wait for Gerardo, or do you want to? Mayor, do you want to start, or do you just want to wait?

I mean, people walk in and out throughout the meeting. Here we go. No pressure.

All right.

I know the first guy.

You can start.

There's a button there. Is it green? Oh, there we go. Okay, now we're on. Super. All right, we got it green. Super. Well, once again, good afternoon. We appreciate the opportunity to be with you today and talk about what arguably is probably one of the most important things you do as elected officials, and that's just selecting your city manager who works with you individually and collectively to accomplish your goals and objectives. And we've had the opportunity to meet with your city attorney over the last several weeks to understand kind of the dynamics that you're facing in this organization and Certainly, we're pleased to be able to respond to a proposal to outline what we think is something that might be of interest to you as you get your arms and your head and your heart around the the issues and the the opportunities that you face here in your community and So we're gonna go through a presentation. I'll talk a little bit about myself first. A friend with SGR, Wendell Medford, he'll introduce himself as well, and then we'll talk a little bit about the firm. And then what we thought we'd do is just walk you through the various components of what we had proposed for your consideration as you go forward. That being said, we knew that this was somewhat of an evolving process, that the things in local government are all constantly moving. And so what we've tried to do is put together something that provides a framework for a conversation. If in fact you decide that you wanted to go with what we have proposed exactly everything kind of falls into suit if by chance There's some things you want to talk about maybe doing things differently or modifying along the line We certainly recognize that both Wendell and I come from local governments We understand kind of the nature and the operating environment which you're moving forward on so with that as a mind Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Doug Thomas I have been with SDR now for going close to 11 years. I'm probably a best commercial for SDR and I had hired the firm when I was city manager in Lakeland, Florida, and I was looking to do recruitments for three different department heads. And SGR at that time did not really have much of a market presence in Florida, and Ron Holifield, who was the principal of the firm, Kind of threw everything in the kitchen sink at Lakeland. And I was impressed as a client on how the process went, but I also was impressed with the team and the workings of their various candidates that they brought to the table. But through that process, Ron Holifield, who founded the firm, he and I got close and ultimately convinced me to take an early retirement and join the firm on a full-time basis. And so, after a couple months of yes, nos, and maybes, decided to do that. And I said, I give you a two-year commitment, and now we're getting close to 11 years later. So, it's been a fun second chapter to help be involved in the effort. So, my background is in city management, as I mentioned. I've got about 25 years, 35 years, excuse me, in terms of working in local government, either as a consultant and or as a practitioner city manager in Maryland, Michigan, and Florida. Lakeland Florida is obviously to the north. We're sitting about 75 square miles, close to 125,000 people. We do everything you can envision a city does, including electric generation and distribution. We serviced about a quarter million people in our service territory from there. And so when I came on board for SGR, I divvied up my time largely between executive recruitment activities, also being involved with working with council retreats, strategic planning. We're one of the first cities to do priority-based budgeting in the country, and so we help communities develop plans and help link their budgets to their plan to align their resources. I do a lot of public speaking at conferences and events about best management practices and programs, and have clients not only here in Florida, but across the country as well. So, I've been actively involved in local government both as a practitioner and now, as I say, for close to 11 years as a consultant. I want to introduce Wendell Medford, have him just briefly introduce himself first, and then we'll talk a little bit about SDR's background and history, and we'll go from there.

Thank you, Doug. Good afternoon. Wendell Medford. I've been with SGR for seven years. Prior to joining SGR, I was a client and also a client and just worked in local government for over 20 years. Started out in the tech space, but quickly evolved into city management. And so also I'm a U.S. Air Force veteran. And so it's been still with me. I've been a servant all my life, pretty much, even on the weekends when you wake up and you want to watch cartoons. But My parents had us mowing lawns at churches and some of the other locations, so she has to still with me to just be a great servant. I've got a Bachelor of Business Administration and also an MPA from the University of Texas at Arlington. So one of the things that I cover is the consulting, embedded services, and interim services. So we play in the consulting space. So if you have a need, we do org assessments, you name it. I always say if you dream it, we can help you achieve it. Embedded services is more like our, it's an interim services component, but some of our contractors or partners are actually embedded in the organizations. So one of our longest embedded services contracts spans over a decade. So we have a city that outsourced their city clerk function to us, a portion of that, and we've been serving that capacity. So we're here. We could provide service support, also just address those interim leadership needs. Let's see. I've actually had the privilege to facilitate and place over 300 interim professionals. Although we're Texas-founded, we're nationally trusted, and that means a lot. And one thing that Doug failed to mention here, so I grew up watching Miami Vice. I love Crockett and Tubbs, so we're a knockoff version of Crockett and Tubbs, but I like to think we're a great duo and get things done. So I'm excited to be here and discuss how we can help you out.

This place is a jacket.

Thank you.

I knew that Johnson had more hair than I did, though, so I don't know how that plays itself out going forward as well. So let's talk a little bit about SDR for those who may not be familiar with us. So we have really, our founder who was also a city manager, Ron Holyfield, I mentioned earlier, was really, pushing the envelope in terms of innovation and constant looking at pressing the envelope, if you will, with regards to that. So that has really become part of the core of what SGR's function has been, as many of us that come from local government are involved in leadership positions within SGR. We really are looking at trying to determine this concept of assessing and developing innovative and collaborative, authentic leaders. Um, you think about the services you perform, you touch your residents in more ways than any other level of government from the time they get up, they turn on the water. You're involved with the water delivery and services. They flush the toilet. They're on the streets. They're walking your sidewalks. They've got your street lights. They're in your parks, your services, if they're involved in an accident or a program, your police services are there. When you think about the number of ways in which you interact with your residents on a day-in-a-day basis, nobody does that more than the local government level. And so what our concept is is how do we help local governments be the best they can be under all those different circumstances in bringing that innovation. So we've been around for a while. As you can see, we've been around since 1999. We really do focus a lot on training and innovation programs, both for appointed individuals as well as individuals such as yourself, elected officials holding our various conferences and events and things like that. We really feel that local governments are laboratories in terms of innovation and programs, and so one of the things that we have with a national perspective is kind of following those best management practices and programs. I think what makes us unique as a firm is that unlike other firms that may be involved in individual lines of components, whether they are a recruitment firm or they're placing an interim type person in a capacity, we have a lot of competitors in a variety of those areas, but we really don't have a competitor that does everything that we do. And so when you consider that, we're one of the larger public sector executive recruitment firms. Wendell will talk a little bit later about the concept of our interim and consulting and embedded type services, something that our clients started asking us to do, and it has now grown to a significant operational line. within sgr we train a lot of individuals in leadership development we have a leadership development team that's involved in helping whatever training needs may come into play at the staff level but also as i said we also work a lot with councils and commissions in governance workshops council manager relationships strategic type planning efforts things of that nature We do that both online and we also have embedded operations where we're actually on site doing that. We've formed an alliance with the Alliance for Innovation. It's a strategic foresight membership program. We took that over a few years ago. We kind of stabilized it. It is now running off as a separate nonprofit, but it's still aligned to us where individual communities from communities as large as a couple million to as small as about 1,500 uh there's have joined and we do analysis and programs looking at strategic foresight and trying to help communities best position for what might be changing going forward and then as i said we run a broader a variety of conferences events regionally locally and nationally and so the reason i say that is that unlike some firms that are just involved in just one line of business we are totally embedded in operations with local government and so Many of us are regular speakers about best management practices and trends and issues. I think that helps us in all the individual lines in which we're involved with as well. So I think that does make us very unique. We're very, our focus internally is on integrity and impact and innovation as we're working delivering services to our constituents. So with that as a background, I'm going to have Wendell spend some time to talk a little bit about the interim management component since that's part of this component process. This is also intended to be an interactive discussion. If there's something we say that doesn't make sense or you want to unpack that to a greater extent, please feel free to do that. I know that we've got some time built in in the presentation for that later, but if there's something that you want to react to, please don't feel like you have to sit on your hands on that one as well. So, Wendell?

Thanks, Crockett. All right. So we'll talk a little bit about the interim management piece component. So as I mentioned before, I was a client before joining SGR. And one of the things that really drove me to SGR was just after I finished my last city management stint was I wanted to make sure I stayed connected to profession, but also continue to give back. And so it was a natural fit for me to join SGR. And so when I took over the interim practices, we were predominantly focused on city management placement. And we had a smaller outfit, but today I'm proud to say that we worked aggressively and we've made some great relationships. We're one of the nation's largest interim staffing firm. And so we, we cover everything from city management to, uh, police fire chiefs, HR finance, you name it. And so I wouldn't look at it just as, uh, feeling a leadership vacancy avoid. There are certain situations where you may need a mentor coach for a particular situation or position. So we'll have clients that ask us to provide an interim in that capacity. But also, as it relates to assessment, you may have someone come in, an interim come in and work with staff to look at some of those high impact, high focus areas, and they provide some consulting in that particular space. And so, having said that, so when we look at our national interim pool, I spend a tremendous amount of time getting to know, making connections with a majority of our candidates, which are retirees. And we always say, you know, when we reach out, either they retire because of a honeydew list or they want to get back to work because the honeydew list got long at home, or they just want to get back and jump back into the profession. So regardless, you know, we, we, we have these just, open and transparent conversations. Why do they want to get back to the profession? Because not everyone's a fit for our firm. And so we take that, we don't take that lightly. Also with us, you'll find that we're pretty nimble, agile, nimble. So I'll talk a little bit about our flexible onboarding and the way we deploy our interim professionals. And then I think what's most important here too, so It's not one of these situations where we come in and drop off or just integrate talent into your community or into the organization and walk off. It's important for us to stay aligned, have ongoing dialogue and communications to make sure that everyone, because we ultimately want success for everyone this entire project. So as you all know, without interim leadership, it causes what we found just doing a ton of these placements it's uncertainty in your business community. And so I've served as an interim city manager a couple of times and I can share with you just developers calling, trying to figure out, Hey, what's the next move is, I mean, does the city want to continue to move forward? So an interim would come in and actually, have to have that conversation with the elected body to make sure, Hey, let's, let's make sure we're aligned on all priorities because we all know business doesn't stop because you have a leadership vacancy. And so, uh, with staff, there's anxiety. Okay. They, you know, they're wondering who's coming in next. And so we don't like to refer to our interims as consultants. They're partners. They're embedded not only to the organization but in the communities. We always encourage them to get out and show face within the communities and attend events. And so it's very important that we continue that. So we talked about supporting staff and maintain organizational momentum and so Every organization has unique its unique challenges That's not uncommon But I think what's as important is for interim leadership to come in and build up off your successes not ignore some of those important and critical Challenges that were assessed in those reports But how do you go out and triage some of those items in the assessment report that were provided and work with the elected body to prioritize that and execute so you have this North star that your interim leader comes in and works with staff to make sure that you continue momentum. And so what this does is positions the organization for longterm success. When we talk about wraparound services. And so there are some cases where, uh, you know, you will provide a governance workshop with the elected body to make sure that we're all on the same page, but that the interim walks, they walk away with a blueprint. And they understand what needs to be addressed and making sure that they communicate with the governmental body and also with the constituents as the progress and with challenges, just making sure that everyone stays abreast. And so when we work with our executive recruitment team, what you get is an interim who's prepared, they've already addressed some of those immediate needs and priorities, and so as we're working the executive recruitment, you have a smooth transition. We have some intel that we can share with the recruiter that's handling that search, and there's a smooth transition, and so you're set for long-term success there. Let's see. For our model here, we talk about immediate leadership. We have 600-plus interims in our interim candidate pool, and they're dispersed across the country here. And one of the things that they stand ready, I have constant communication with these individuals, so I have a pretty good idea who's available and ready to jump in and position. With executive recruitment, with all due respect, it's more we consider that a marathon because, you know, it takes typically 90 days with our recruitment team to, to spin up, you know, get candidates and go through the process because it's a more detailed process. Our process is more like a sprint. The fastest place or quickest placement to date has been underneath 45 minutes. That's just knowing the organization knew what they needed in terms of leadership. I knew what candidate was available. We had those conversations pretty quick and we're able to get someone on boots on the ground pretty quickly. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you may be in that case. We work at your pace. On average, I would say after we you know, go back and we do an intake with the, with the commission here, go back and source candidates, see who's available. We present to the commission, give you the opportunity to, to interview those candidates. And then, uh, we begin our paperwork. So majority of our interim candidates are 10 99s underneath the SGR umbrella. So we have an exclusive contract with you, uh, with the town. and then we have a separate contract with our 1099 professionals. And so SUR handles all the back office administration, including the payroll processing. So we want this to be as seamless as possible to the town and make it to where you guys have nothing to worry about. So we talk about simple, transparent turnkey. With that, we have access to a variety of different professionals across different disciplines. And so I mentioned we handle all the recruiting. It's one of the things, Fortune, having a brand like SGR, everyone wants to partner with SGR in terms of our candidates. And so we're very fortunate to be in that position. And so just once again, going back, it's not just placing body. I remember when I transitioned to SGR, one of my colleagues mentioned, said, hey, you're going to be a headhunter. I said, no, not a headhunter. I'm a heart hunter because with SGR, we're servant leadership based. And so I hunt hearts, not heads. And so that's important. So with all our candidates, we do an extensive background media check because that's very important. We want to make sure that we're presenting the best candidate, but also with a clean background. And so the way that our compensation model work is that we look at your fully loaded salary for any particular position. We use it as a baseline. And so that's the total compensation package. And we use that to establish the hourly rate that we charge for that position. And so our interims are only paid for the time that they actually work. There's no vacation time or PTO involved. And so, Uh, there's also, if we don't have anyone within commuting distance being 50 miles or less, then we ask that, uh, our clients provide some temporary housing and we make that seamless that you can either do that through a monthly housing allowance, or, you know, we could do direct bill with, with any partnering lodging associate that you have here, but we make that pretty seamless as well. And then there's a travel component. And so we like to ask for anywhere between two to four trips home per month. But this is a very charming community. So, you know, I may even come out to do this, but I don't see anyone wanting to leave every weekend. But those are so those are major components here. So you have the costs associated for the labor itself, any housing or lodging, and then the travel component. So I had a chance to review the assessment with Doug, the assessment report. That was very thorough and a great job. And so what we heard was leadership turnover has created organizational instability. There's some institutional knowledge that reside with key individuals. Several operational areas need greater leadership depth. And then there are some major initiatives that must continue during transition. And so our proposal, I mean, that's what we took that in consideration when we did this. Just knowing that what we present here, when I talk about some of the immediate priorities based off the assessment, all these positions are interchangeable. So if the commission says, hey, this is more of a priority based off some recent developments, we're nimble, we're flexible, we can work with you on that. So the immediate priorities just based off the assessment report that we reviewed is to place an interim chief operating officer uh that ceo interim ceo would do an assessment as well just to share some intel uh what they're seeing i always like to get an unbiased or third party uh set of eyes on different things to provide some additional input and then followed by an interim finance director the third piece would be to place an interim public works or cip leadership We saw there were several capital projects in the works there. And so this is the immediate priorities as we see from the assessment report. And then here you notice at the bottom there, so we can add additional executive resources deployed as needs evolve. And so that goes back to the consulting component. We have some cases where an interim would come in. You guys have done a great job identifying some of those immediate challenges. But also you may need some additional resources to help operationalize some of the things that you found. And so this is where this comes into play. And so we're very flexible. One thing that I failed to mention, though, with our contracts or agreement, they're open-ended, so you don't have to commit to three months, six months, or a year. It's, you know, if you only need someone for three months, six months, what have you, then we work off from your needs. All we ask that you provide is 14-day advance notice of the intent to terminate the contract, and we work with you to phase out plan. Also, if we place anyone and, you know, it turns out not to be the best fit for you which hopefully that will not happen then we go back and source candidate we present additional candidates at no cost it'll be under the same contract structure so uh that way we continue momentum uh deployment timeline so Once again, this could be adjusted, but we look at doing a, uh, meet with town leadership and that could be with the entire commission or with a subcommittee. I've done it. I've seen it done a few different ways. But do an intake, initial intake, just to determine what the ideal interim COO would look like, what you're looking for in terms of management leadership style. But then I would go back quickly, go to work and start confirming availability of potential candidates and present to the commission pretty quickly. And then we could schedule interviews. That could be onsite or virtual, whatever you guys prefer. And then we would onboard the interim during week two. And then as I mentioned, ongoing performance check-in and knowledge transfer, which is important. So let's talk a little bit about some of the organizational outcomes. You can refer to them as case studies, but Doug and I have had a chance to partner on a few of these where we provide some interim leadership and then also we also facilitate the executive recruitment process. In Central Texas, in the Austin metro area, we had a high-growth community that's, you know, they had actually been through, I think it was two city managers, and so, you know, they needed an interim city manager, so we were able to go in and place an interim city manager, but at the same time, they were facing a major financial deficit And so we deployed an interim CFO and also supplemental CFO or finance help to help do some audits of city finances to get them back on track. That team was in place for quite some time. And so while this was taking place, we had some additional intel. We were able to get things stabilized. And then the executive recruitment team came and facilitated the executive recruitment process. And I will say today, this community, they're stable and they are moving ahead and everything was pretty great. We had another particular case in the South Texas border community. Can I interrupt you? How long was that process?

As far as... How long did it take you to... To, from the first time you were brought in to the point where you were felt like you had stabilized everything, you were operating well and your, maybe your, your project was done.

Yeah. So great question. Always, always tell our clients expect three to six months, the first three months or 90 days, you really just wrapped in your head. You have to collect data, you know, regardless of the position and get a pretty good lay on the land. Around the six-month period, that's when you really start to see things really turn around. And so some of our engagements have been a year because you get into it and things are really stabilized. So it's not uncommon to have an interim in place 12-plus months, right, depending on the situation. And fortunately, we've got team members that are up for the challenge. Okay? South Texas community, border community, one of the top inland ports in the U.S. They had a critical infrastructure issue with their water, wastewater. We were able to bring in a high-profile interim utility exec to come in and work with the team. The team really rallied around this individual, and he was able to provide some immediate report. It was 90 days that he were able to check in at 90 days. and the team had really rattled around, and he had a report, a 90-day report on here are some of the things that I've identified, and here's how we're gonna execute, which really went a long way. And then Doug was able to come in after this individual had really turned things around to provide the executive recruitment, and so this organization is operating fairly well. And then also here, we talked about the Texas Hill Country, which is something near and dear to us. If you all don't know the devastating flooding, we're approaching the one-year anniversary here right now. But we were able to deploy a team to focus on disaster recovery. And so what this team is actually doing, they've been there a year. They're helping with the rebuilding, the business and economic recovery for that region in Texas. And the gentleman, our lead consultant, is actually from Florida. He's a long-term city manager here in the Florida area, but he has an emergency management background. And I remember when I made the call and said, we need you. And he was on a plane just in an instant. So kudos to this team. And so we're actually going to extend. We've got a contract to extend our services. This will be a two-year engagement with this community. And so we're really proud of the work that's been done there. A lot left to do. And so I think to date, We were able to secure north of $60 million in grant funding. And so all the disaster recovery consultants stated we're somewhere 10 months ahead. So this is when we were three months, three to four months in engagement. That's how much progress we had made. And then right now, currently we've got a Florida coastal community. They were in need of an interim or a procurement officer. They had some particular items that they wanted to assess in their procurement offices. And so we're able to deploy a, an interim there that's there. He's been there for four or five months. And so just want to provide this with you just so you get an idea of the use cases that you can use our services. And so, um, what makes us different? Uh, what sets us apart? So as Doug mentioned earlier, we're recognized as a thought leader in local government. And so, although, uh, there are some cases where we have,

Apologize we've got a pause. We have got an audio issue right now. Okay, and so just for For sunshine issues, I guess we've got to wait until they can try to fix that Sorry about that Yes

What went down, our broadcasting, streaming?

Our broadcasting, I'm guessing, our recording, which is going to be a problem later on.

We're back on.

Okay.

All right. All right.

Sorry about that.

No problem. So what sets SGR interim staffing apart? You know, so we're recognizing the thought leader in the local government space. I have countless conversations with, Our colleagues and peers that even if we don't do business they reach out to just bounce ideas And so I think that says a lot about the firm As I mentioned, we're Texas founded, but we're nationally trusted or recognized so we have a deep outreach and connection Our team is made predominantly of former city manager and senior executives that work in the local government space So these are things we love to do with local government nerds and And we focus on fit and not just qualifications. And I think that's, that's what's important. So when I talk about working with the commission, whether a subcommittee of that commission, really making sure that we're aligned on what it is that you're looking for in terms of interim leadership. Uh, that way, when we go back and source candidates, we want to present, we want to be tough. So when I present resumes, we want it to be a tough job for you. That tells me that we've really done what our due diligence and research. So I'm going to pause there. I know I've said and covered a lot, but I'll be around here for questions, and I'll turn it back over to you, Doug. Good.

Thank you.

Thanks, Wendell.

What I want to stress before we go into the next several sections of the presentation is that this is a space that we operate in regularly. Wendell gave you four examples where either he or myself or other members of our team have been involved in helping to do interim type work. So it's not something that's new to us. At the same time, we're working with communities to help address their immediate needs and then rolling that into an ongoing process of recruitment for one or more personnel and positions. So this is something that is not something we've crafted just for your particular community. but it's something that we're well known for and we operate in this space on an ongoing basis. So with that as part of the process, as we look through the effort, we also wanted to at least put together a proposal for your consideration about governance. We, as I mentioned, I do a lot of governance workshops. I work with very highly functioning organizations. I've also worked with communities where councils are literally suing and deposing each other everything in between and so our goal is to try to figure out at the end of the day whoever you hire for your your city manager and your lead departments they can be the most outstanding professional in their league but if the the dais is not operating in some cohesive fashion that person and those team members are going to struggle so in many cases what we try to do as we say is what can we do to help governments deal with the the function of governing. And so many times we're asked to come in either at the front end or somewhere during a process of our activities to do a governance workshop where we're involved in actually getting to know kind of what's working, what isn't working, where are the pain points, what are things that we might be able to do to add some insight Because our goal is to, as we either are placing an interim or placing a permanent individual or individuals in senior leadership roles, we want to make sure that we've kind of plowed the fields in front of you, if you will, so that the seeds can nurture and grow effectively. So to that effect, our governance workshops will vary in different models based on what the given community may be looking to do. We think this is something that might be of interest to you as you're going through these challenges organizationally as we review the report in terms of the council and the commission and the administration relationships going forward. Our process is very much to get to know you, just like if we do it in the search effort. So typically we're involved with interviews with each of you individually. I've operated in Florida for a long time, so we know how we have to handle the sunshine issues. And we ask a lot of opening questions about what your interests would be, where you're your key priorities and programs, what is working, what isn't working, where are the pain points, how do you operate as a group. Collectively, we capture that. We use the feedback out of that process as a discussion point. So I won't say who said what, where, and how, but we'll identify the themes that we've heard. And that generally opens into a good conversation and helping boards try to find common grounds and issues to go forward. So the other piece that we often use is an optional component. It's called IOPT. It's the input-output processing template. And what that is is that individuals, it's a certified program where it does an analysis. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes for each of you to participate in it. And it will provide tendencies on how you process information. And so it's not a personality assessment. So for an example, my dad was a mechanical engineer. And so The way he approaches something is entirely different than me as a political science and history major approaches something. He's looking at data and facts and figures. I'm looking for trends and issues and outcomes and things like that. And so we often find that the IOPT process is something that works well when we go forward. in discussing with council members because everybody's kind of intrigued initially about their own style, which is human nature, but the real power in this is once you realize what your style is versus the style of your colleagues on the dais, and how do you best communicate to someone who may have a different tendency or processing information style than you might have. And then from there, as Wendell had mentioned, we're all over the country and doing these types of workshops and following what's going on and trends and issues. And in addition to our strategic foresight program, we really try to identify those communities that have good governance policies and procedures and try to help you develop things that work within your framework in the scheme of what we see work on a national type basis as well. So I mentioned about the advanced interviews and the process. The IOPT assessment effort that we were discussing as well, this is really, there's no one right answer. Everybody says, well, what does this look like if I'm one way or the other? It really doesn't matter, there's no one right answer. What you're gonna generally find that most individuals have a primary kind of processing style and then a secondary processing style They generally can operate in all four quadrants of the IOPTA model, but they're going to demonstrate tendencies one way or the other. Once you know that, you can feel like, how do I best present information to someone who's an engineer? If I talk the way I would normally talk and don't provide details, I'm going to lose that person. So I have to consciously redirect in how I present that information. So the IOPTA model talks about these four different styles. local processors, hypothetical analyzers, relational innovators, and reactive stimulators. And they all represent, little cartoon figures there, but they all represent kind of people that move either fast with information and only want high level details, those that are great idea generators, but really don't know how to implement anything, versus those that are rule followers and can develop your policies and procedures. And to be successful, it kind of works The concept is to have a diverse team. Everybody ends up with a kite chart. This happens to be from another Florida community, an elected body, and their council manager, or their manager. So those kind of represent, if you superimpose those over that chart that I just mentioned, that represents the different styles that they have. It's a fun way of learning, but it also is a very powerful way of understanding how you basically work well with your colleagues. And we often will do this with your senior leadership team as well so that you get a chance to see how they think and operate versus how you think and operate and how the team can operate better collectively going forward. And then we do some analysis to determine kind of how those processes all work and those represent the individual kind of center points of the different individuals. So how you come to conclusion and discussions are things that we work our way through in communication styles and we find that the IOP process works pretty effectively in helping you get that process as well. So beyond that, and we don't know where that may fit in. It may fit in at the front end of a process. It may fit in in the middle of your processes. We just wanted you to be recognizing that that's something we often do as organizations are going through transitions and significant transitions, either transitions on the dais or transitions with your senior leadership team. And the goal here is to make sure that we can help provide that fertile ground, if you will, to be successful going forward. So I want to talk a little bit beyond that, talking about the executive recruitment activities as well. In addition to being one of the larger firms for specific work on interim-type work and embedded-type work that Wendell discussed, we are one of the largest public sector executive recruitment firms in the country. And so our effort is to, coming out of local government, we understand kind of how you operate. And certainly in Florida, that's a different dynamic than other states. We're special in Florida. You all know that and how we operate here. Because of the dynamics of high, fast growth and the efforts of a southern state that promotes business and development and all the state legislative issues. Obviously, we've got major issues taking place with property tax reform that are before us. Those are things that not all states have to deal with as well. But our approach is really to get to know you. And so we spend, and this is something I've done as a recruiter and all of our recruiters do as well, but if we go forward, we spend time with each of you individually. We spend time with your senior leadership to get a sense of what's going on, what's working, what isn't working. You've got collective bargaining agreements. You've got AFSCME and FOP here. Sometimes we're asked to meet with the senior leadership of the union representation. We often will also meet with your, if you have boards and commissions or neighborhood associations or groups that are very engaged in your operation to learn about your community and desires and issues and wants and things of that nature. So from there, what we'll end up doing is developing and marketing a brochure. It's called a position profile brochure. We're going to talk about Surfside. We're going to talk about your governance and what your life cycles feel like, the festivals, events and activities. We'll certainly talk about your governance structure, how you're elected, the types of size budgets you have, the services you're providing, and then we start to drill down into the disposition of whatever the position may be. If it's a city manager, how are you structured, which are the direct reports. From those conversations we have, we're gonna learn about items that are beyond running the day-to-day functions of your town there are going to be major projects and initiatives and programs and those will all vary based on the community we're dealing with and we'll highlight those in addition from those conversations we're going to capture a lot of your insights about if you had a joke if you had a magic wand and waved it and said what's the perfect manager look like in terms of what skill sets are bringing they bring to the table with their experience their dynamics so we'll capture all that and those will also be incorporated into the brochure and then we'll have information about credentials and how to apply compensation, things of that nature. A lot of pictures, a lot of graphics, a lot of good data links that go forward. That is really the piece that we'll use to market this position or positions, as the case may be. So a candidate will look at that, and that will be the lens in which they're evaluating whether they think that that is a good fit for them or not. And that will vary based upon the position we've got and what issues we're involved with to get a handle on it. And then from there, that's put together by our graphics team. Many of those folks are also PIOs and individuals that have worked in local government, so they kind of know how to best present that information for us. Then we're going to go forward and market that position nationally, as was mentioned by Wendell. A traditional search is about a 90-day window after you give us the green light to launch. We may want to talk about what that window looks like here, given the turnover and the dynamics you're facing as well. But as local government practitioners, we also recognize, I've sat on the dais with elected officials over the years, we want to make sure that we don't catch you by surprise, so we do an incredible amount of background work as we're moving through the stages from semi-finalists to finalists and getting ready for your interviews in terms of looking at social media presence, criminal history, database efforts, verifying credentials, all that. We know in today's day and age, everybody that you have as you identify your finalists for whatever those public positions will be, They're going to be doing their own Googling work. So we want to make sure you have that information before they have that information. And you may be aware of their issues and their platforms and any issues they may be involved with. So our goal is to basically be a turnkey operation of recruitment so that you have that information. We also do a 360 as we go deeper into the search for finalist evaluations for reference checks, where we actually look at current and previous supervisors, subordinates, peers, community members, so that you get a 360 evaluation of those individuals in their current and previous positions as well. Our searches often will involve working with you in coordinating the actual onsite interview process. And many times we do that with just elected officials. Oftentimes we're involved with elected officials and sessions involving your senior staff. Sometimes we have citizen panels that are involved. We will manage that process and help you navigate that process going through the whole effort as well. And then during the interview process, we're onsite helping you evaluate those candidates. We will also typically incorporate some written assessment work that they would do to answer a first year game plan process, where if they're appointed in whatever the position may be, what do they do in their first 30, 60, 90, 180 days in the balance of a year? And you may think that's consistent, everybody would do the same, but that's actually, I've seen thousands of them, everybody does it differently and it gives you some normative insights. We often incorporate typically PowerPoint kind of TED Talk presentations because the manager has to or department head may have to make presentations. So we want to have an opportunity for you to see how they can incorporate that into their. Our effort is very strong. It's a lot more work than many other candidates experience in some other searches, but we found it to be very successful in the sense that at the end of the day, we have a 12 month guarantee. So for whatever reason, someone leaves employment within that 12 month, The cost, the major component of that cost is the professional fee for the recruitment. We will redo that search if that person leaves within 12 months. I will tell you I've done close to 300 searches. I've only done two redos. One, unfortunately, a person who fell down steps and succumbed to injuries and unfortunately transpired. Couldn't do much on that one. The other was kind of a post-COVID process. So our batting average is pretty strong. We rarely have to do redos because of the work that we put in the front end and engaging both you as an organization, the community, but also our candidates so that there's a common understanding. Because it's a two-way street. They're evaluating you as much as you're evaluating them. They're trying to figure out if this is the right spot for them as well. But we do stand behind our product. And fortunately, I love my clients, but I really don't want to come back and redo a second search for you for obvious reasons as well. The brochure I talked about there is just an example of one of ours there. We'll talk about the community and the governance and about the position, the types of challenges that they'll face, what you're looking for, and the ideal candidates and the other resources as well. We'll work with your staff, get a lot of pictures and graphics and programs to help incorporate that. What's important is that in today's day and age, how you market this position is critical. I speak a lot at conferences and events across the country and what's taking place, especially in local government arena, and now being with SGR for 10 years or going on 11 years now, The market has changed dramatically. Starting around 2018, 2019, we had this massive influx of all of us baby boomers hitting retirement age. And literally there are 10,000 people every single day starting around 2018, 2019 running through going to about 2030 that are hitting retirement age. And so a lot of the folks that have been in this business are now that pig in the python of the baby boom generation are getting out of the business. And when you add the complexities of COVID and the dynamics and kind of just the environment that used to just be at the federal government level, now at the state government level, and now we see at the local government level and the polarization of politics and issues, there are a lot of people that have been in leadership roles in city management going, I'm OK being number two. I don't think I want to be at the tip of that spear. So you have to recognize how you're going to market these positions are pretty critical. So we really do want to find passive candidates that may or may not have even thought about this opportunity. And so one of the things that we try to do through our various marketing efforts, we have outreaches, followers on LinkedIn. We have another program, our 10 and 10 type program, where it goes out to close to 30,000 people every day, or every week, and we identify positions so that they're aware of opportunities that are coming that they may not be thinking about the position, but all of a sudden see something on Surfside, and that will link them back into the brochure as well. And all those look and feel different based on the platform that we're involved with, and we're very actively involved in engaging that effort. The reason that's important is that you're not just advertising this position and people are gonna come. You're gonna capture some of that, you'll see. You'll get about 11%, this is an ongoing process, about 11% of your candidates have heard about the position through something they saw in an ad. But the other piece that is significant is what we say is almost 50% is the outreach. At any given time, we have thousands of candidates in searches. Many of those get processed as top tier or top two tier candidates. But at the end of the day, only one candidate gets hired. And so that doesn't mean you may have three or four or five finalists, only one gets hired. That means three or four other ones were very good. It just wasn't the right fit for them. And so we stay in touch with those candidates, not exclusively, but we want to make sure that those candidates understand what opportunities you have here. And so with despite all the outreach we've got, what we're going to find is a good portion of your candidates are going to hear about this position through something we've done through direct emails or outreaches or contacts or previous work that we have done with those candidates. We certainly will capture candidates at first impressions as well. So our process, as I mentioned, typically when you give us the green light to launch under normal days is about 90 days. So the first 30 days is kind of us doing our thing. We capture candidates, we're recruiting, we're getting them into the effort, we're doing outreach, we're promoting the opportunity. We're out of your hair during that window largely, but we will keep in touch with you. So you'll get regular updates about how many candidates have applied and what the demographics are and how the marketing has been and if we're encountering any difficulties or issues. But basically, that first 30 days is letting us do what we do for recruitment activities. After that position closes, we'll be back working with you or the leadership, depending on the position, your leadership, depending on what position we're recruiting for, to present the candidate pool. We'll have him tiered into different candidates categories of meeting or exceeding or largely meeting or don't meet your efforts at all, or if you have internal candidates, be able to vet those as well. And typically what most of our clients will do, they'll select somewhere between eight to 10 or 12 or so folks that they want to learn more about a semi-finalist. And we're going to ask those folks to go forward and participate in a fairly detailed written questionnaire about their background, their history, their experience, why they're interested in this position. Out of this, these interviews and the brochure, we're going to learn about the challenges and opportunities.

So we'll identify those and we're going to ask them to kind of say, what did they bring to the table? How did they get their arms and deal with these issues?

You can ask them about any concerns that they may have as a future employer about their background or controversies. We'll ask about compensation and information as well so we'd have that information for you. And then we normally have them participate in prerecorded video interviews so you can see answers to three or four questions that you'll be able to monitor and review on your own at that point. And we give the candidates a chance to kind of complete that work. We packed it together, get it to you. You get a chance to review that. And then we're back reviewing that. And out of that group, it's kind of like the survivor and the movie theme elements. Who gets voted off the island? Who doesn't? I feel like most of my clients, two or three candidates everybody loves, two or three candidates nobody loves. And there's a bunch of discussion about folks in the middle and what that might look like. And so we've helped facilitate that conversation just as we would as a manager working with you on policy issues to help you select it. But at the end, you'll select those candidates. And then as they get to the final stage, then we're involved in more detailed evaluations on criminal history credit background reference checks and getting them and you prepared for the interview process as well. And at the end, after you get through that, we're engaged by the city, we're your client, not the candidate's client. But at the end, we will help you work with whoever your representative is on the commission, coupled typically with your attorney. and we'll help you negotiate an agreement to get you across the finish line. We see thousands of agreements. We can tell candidates if they're asking for something that's unrealistic, but we can also tell clients if you're offering something that would typically, or not offering something that typically would be involved in an opportunity, we can help try to bring the parties together, but always represent you, not the candidates, but our goal is to bring that together. Out of those 300 searches, I've only had two I haven't been able to bring together on the selected candidates, so we've got a pretty good batting average on that as well. So the other piece I want to emphasize is that although all the searches that I've ever been involved with, most of your candidates are going to come, a good portion of your candidates are going to come from your host state. And Florida is one of the top three states in council manager forms of governance, California, Texas, and Florida. So by virtue alone, you're going to capture more there. But we will also find an outreach. We will do a national search to help you bring prospective viable candidates into the community. Florida is a desirable state to locate in. We want to help you find candidates that aren't trying to come to Florida and retire in place. Rarely are we looking for that type of individual, but they'll apply. But the goal here is we'll find people that want to come back. Maybe they lived in Florida at one point or they got aging parents or kids or grandkids or whatever the case would be. Getting a national exposure will be able to help bring those quality candidates to the table. And as I say, we're one of the larger firms, so our outreach and efforts are pretty strong. This is, you've got this in the packet. These are just searches that I have personally done, but we've certainly been involved with that. They represent very large cities, urbanized cities, rural cities, everything in between. It just gives you a sense that we will have an opportunity to kind of understand all those different types of communities in which we've worked for and been selected for as well. And then beyond that, because when they talk about more than just a manager search here, there may be other positions we have individuals either myself or others that are involved if it's a police chief search or a city attorney search or otherwise i kind of handle all a number of those but if there's a desire to have a subject matter expertise in public works or engineering or something of that nature part of our recruitment team can be involved and actually bring that as practitioners just as we do as city managers to bring that to the table And so those are just some other Florida areas. I say Florida's different because everything's public record, we gotta handle it, we have to manage our clients and manage our candidates differently when we do Florida searches because individuals may not be aware of kind of the operating environment and the landscape that we operate here. So we talked about the thought leaders and processes here. As I say, we are unique in that sense. We're recognized in that. We do a lot of speaking at conferences, events, and our efforts to encourage innovation in local government. So many people know of SGR that even may not be touching a recruitment type effort. But our outreach efforts, when I mentioned earlier, about close to 50% of our candidates come from something we've done. We have an email that goes out every Tuesday morning to about 35,000 people that talks about kind of issues and trends in local government. We have 10 links of things that might be of topical interest to local government leaders. And then we identify our upcoming and our current searches so people see this as a passive candidate. And that goes to a lot of different folks across the country. We have, above and beyond that, we have individuals that have signed up for what are called job alerts, whether it's police chiefs or fire chiefs or public works or city management. In the city management arena alone, we've got over 5,000 people that they want to get an update every Friday of every search that we're doing. So they get something in their inbox, whether they're actively looking or not, they're at least being aware of what that is. So that'll generate some individuals as well. We have close to, now it's over 20,000 at this point now that are LinkedIn, and we use a LinkedIn recruiter that helps us for all our positions to also scour LinkedIn to try to find candidates that might be interested that may not have found us otherwise. And then in addition to our own job board, we have a separate job board called SGR Jobs which lists all of our jobs, all of some of our competitors' jobs, but also a variety of other clients that we've done other services for and capture that, and that captures quite a bit of interest as well. Our approach is to bring you as diverse of a candidate pool as possible. We have standing relationships with a number of other organizations to bring diversity into your candidate selection process. At the end, that's ultimately your goal is to find the most qualified person, but our goal is to set the table as broadly as possible to go forward. And then, as I said, at the end, our goal is to make sure you find the right person regardless of what position it is. And we really spend time at the front end and throughout the process to make sure. actually captured to find the right person so we're not having to redo a search as well from there. So lastly, as we bring this to a close, just some efforts. We're very proactive with you. Hopefully you've gotten that sense from the way in which we present our information. We will spend a lot of time with you at the front end to understand your organization, talk about our national reach, The recruiter, whether it's myself or one of my team members that are in the recruitment side, will come from local government and come from the dynamic organizations of either public works or city management or whatever the element would be to make sure you've got the appropriate subject matter expertise there. Our goal is to help you find the right person to go forward. And then, as I said, we want to make sure we don't lose anybody in the midst of being caught by surprise in terms of our candidate vetting. And so the last piece I have is just the slide that really outlines the different costs and components of the effort. What I want to emphasize here is that what we've tried to do is put together a template that gives you flexibility. So if you want to do one search or multiple search or you want to do one interim or multiple interims, we'll work with you to figure that out and this was to give you an idea of what those costs and components would look like, whether it's search, whether it's interim, whether you want to do a governance type workshop or an IOP type workshop, and then overall kind of project management element as well. So with that, hopefully we've given you an insight of kind of what we're all about, but both Wendell and I are prepared to address questions and issues you might have.

Leaving the last slide up here. Sure. Thank you. All right.

Well, do you have questions now or do you want to review that?

I don't want to.

Thank you, Doug and Wendell. Thanks for the presentation. First, counsel, if we engage these guys, we've got to tighten up the noninterference clause because they snag everyone that they work with.

I will tell you, after we place someone, we do not recruit someone that we place. That is our guarantee. You both were our clients. I want to clarify.

But it also says something about the firm. I just want to share with the other candidates here. I feel it's only fair. We're at a turning point here in Surfside. We have a commission that's deeply committed to elevating the town and bringing it to A-plus standards across the board, which is going to take leadership that understands that, understands what that looks like, and been to the dance floor before. And this candidate is going to, for town manager and other roles, have to be true leaders that are building up their departments and being able to cultivate those relationships with the directors and be able to carry the vision and the direction of the commission forward. But just two questions before we get into the pricing. is number one, the last 24 to 36 months, what was a similar type of engagement that comes to mind? Where's a town that was looking to fill gaps and really elevate it in this way?

So would you want the wraparound where we've done an interim couple with the recruitment or, because we can speak to that, both Wendell and I, why don't we talk first there and then I can talk maybe about some transformative single searches as well. Does that make sense? I want to make sure I'm responding.

Transformative as an organization. We're looking to elevate as a whole.

Okay. You want to talk a little bit about wraparounds first, and then I'll jump in on a couple of searches. So you can talk about the... Sure, that's fine, yeah.

Yeah, so in my slide I mentioned a community that we had in Texas, and this is just not uncommon, we've done it before in other areas too, where they had turnover in the city manager's chair seat, right, facing a multimillion dollar deficit, and coming in where we actually provided that interim leadership, And that interim CM was there for at least a year coupled with our finance team. And so when Doug, when we engaged the executive recruitment team, they came and done a governance workshop because the council weren't aligned on some, you know, their priorities. And so we've used that approach is very, very effective governance workshop, uh, to determine what those, when you talk about elevating the needs. But, yeah, we were able to use that information from the governance workshop. The manager took that and worked with staff to help execute and operationalize that. And then Doug came back in and did the recruitment for that, which landed a very good manager. And then also our finance team actually stayed on board to turn things around. That was a very lengthy engagement. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

And I guess while you're both up there, what do you see as the largest obstacle in attaining this objective here?

Sure. So just on a point on kind of the transformative efforts, two searches come to mind. One was Athens-Clarke County, home of University of Georgia, about 100,000 in population, city-county consolidation. They were going through some significant transformations in terms of doing things differently. They had traditionally promoted from within the organization. It was one of their first times they recruited some from outside. We had another candidate that has been there for about probably nine months now, 10 months, doing well. I just finished also Lawrence, Kansas, another university community, University of Kansas. Very engaged citizenry, and they also were facing some pretty significant fiscal challenges, they have not grown, and they were looking at how do they redo economic development, and so the manager we placed there came out of Texas, was an engineer, but has done some pretty transformative activities in their respective communities. I think we listed both of those as some references if you wanted to get a sense of that as well. So just wanted a piece on that.

And finally, I appreciate that you use IAPT in our organizations and In my business world, we used predictive index.

Sure, I'm familiar with that as well. Yep, absolutely.

And we found that extremely helpful in understanding the leaders, the managers, supervisors, and how they're going to work together, which is how you build a healthy ecosystem.

Exactly. So similar models, you know, they measure a little bit differently, but the outcome is exactly what you're trying to address. Absolutely. And you had another question before I jumped on the transformative one. I want to make sure I didn't miss that, though, Commissioner.

It was just other towns you've seen this and the largest obstacle.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, thank you. So you obviously have had transition in this position. So managers, I will joke, managers are often hired and fired with enthusiasm, but rarely by the same boards. And if you make that sense is that they may walk on water with one board and that transition has occurred and they haven't done anything wrong and they've met or exceeded everything and they found themselves out of favor because a new council has been seated. And it's kind of the nature of this business. And so managers, my wife is a nurse and she has said there's something that has typically gone wrong in the DNA sequencing in the womb because no one in their like mind would be a manager otherwise. It's just a very unique and challenging position, especially in today's time. So one of the things that you're going to be dealing with if I'm sizing you up as an organization that we're going to have to overcome as you've had transitioned this position, more so the average tenure of a manager nationally is around five to seven years. which means there's turnover, but myself, I had 12 plus years in Lakeland and 15 years in a previous community, so we had those that served long term and those that served short term. So your transition in this position is gonna be a function. The challenges that were identified in your interim mayor, Mario Diaz's report, Point to a lot of turnover in your position. You've got, I think the average tenure was 18 months or something, as I recall in looking through of many of your senior leaders. So you may have a talented pool, but they're not tenured within your organization. So embedded in that report, a lot of needs for systematic changes and policies and procedures, the boring stuff of government that needs to be done, but those need to be fixed. I want to say as you didn't get there overnight, you won't get out of there overnight. And so one of the things that I think that what we've tried to do in our proposal to address the issue is Managers, there's always a right manager for every community, but some of the ones that are very comfortable in their current community and we're trying to attract a passive candidate, we've got to make it attractive for why do they want to leave a stable operation to maybe step into a scenario that has a lot of other kind of landscape changing dynamics below the effort. So the ability of what we've done and what Wendell has tried to identify is that if we are helping a community address the basic blocking and tackling and understanding what's really going on behind the scenes, working as a governance type workshop with the elected official to develop good council manager relationships, we can help you attract candidates that would otherwise on the first blush probably not apply for your position. Because we've helped kind of stabilize and get the place in order, and they'll have a trust that we've done the lead blocking to make sure that they can come into fertile ground to be successful. So I think that's one of the things that you're going to have to face, whether it's in that position as the manager or many of the other positions below, that in order to trap the highest talent candidates for these positions, think about are they willing to jump in unless they know they've got some safe landing spot within the safety of a city management role. So hopefully it gives you some insight.

And finally, what's the knight in the logo?

Oh, it's chess piece. Yeah, so our founder, Ron Holfield, talks about the chess piece. It's the most versatile piece on a chessboard because it's the only piece that can jump over and maneuver around things, and that kind of represents what we're about. We often will come into a community with a plan, and that's the game plan, and something happens, and we have to be nimble and adapt to that. And so it really kind of represents the culture of it. It's the nimble chess piece. Thank you.

So I'm curious how you see the interim role functioning within the larger engagement. There are obviously some very particular things about Surfside's situation right now that we're figuring out, but then also I'm curious what your recommendation is for how to deal with them. Chief among them that we have an acting manager right now whose commitment could leave us at any time with relatively short notice. So I wasn't clear from your vision of the interim, as it's laid out here, how you would propose to deal with that contingency. So is the interim that you're searching for somebody who would work alongside the current acting manager? Or are you imagining that the interim is a manager? Or what's the function there? And how does that general proposal relate to our current situation where we have an acting manager but Again, one whose duration we're unclear about.

Let me take the first step to kind of set the tone, then I want to have Wendell kind of address how he would source that. So when we first started the conversation with your city attorney, we knew that there was an interim. We also knew that that interim manager may be leaving at some point, and there was a potential discussion about appointing someone else internally as the interim to maybe handle some of the functional areas with the commission. And so our original concept was to say, all right, we don't want to step in and mess up anything you've got in play. If you're happy with your interim and everything's working fine, we can come in and provide back-end support to help support kind of the blocking and tackling of some of the day-to-day functions below that and not step in that. We also recognize that that interim could leave you at any given time. If Mario were to get another job offer and say, I'm leaving, then you've got that immediate need. And so our structure was based upon the fact that we anticipated you had an interim manager either current or someone internally that might fit that role, and that what in our conversations with the attorney as we were developing the brochure initially, or developing the proposal was to say, What can we do to kind of backfill? Now, that being said, I said at the beginning, I know there's some discussions taking place about, you know, changes and we may have different needs. And so let me have Wendell kind of talk about how he would address that if that happened initially, if we provided a COO and then maybe all of a sudden you had a need and you want to elevate that person up. So that's the second piece.

Thank you. Thank you for setting the stage. So to answer your question there. So recommendation, we would have someone come in and serve as the interim CEO, but they have that proficiency. They're going to be a former manager, seasoned manager. So regardless of the title, they can come in as interim CEO. And if there's a transition at the interim CM level, then they would just elevate into that position. and which is not uncommon. We've had some organizations that actually had maybe an internal candidate for the permanent role, and they've asked us to bring in a seasoned manager to come in and do an assessment of that individual to see if they're ready. So they operate in parallel.

I would say as well, one of the things, it's not part of what we proposed here, but I wanted you to just be aware of the flexibility we offer. Many times we are asked to come in where maybe you have a variety of candidates that are internal candidates for a given position, and the manager or the council or the commission wants to get kind of a third-party evaluation. We will often been asked to come in and do an evaluation of those candidates, although we're not doing a full-blown search. We kind of approach it and get a sense of what their skill sets and their dynamics would be. We would meet with people. We may very well meet with some of the people, if they were external, that they've worked with in references to get a sense of how they deal with that. want to give you a sense that that wasn't part of the proposal but I understand if you've got people that you may be looking at some of these positions we don't necessarily have to do a full-blown search we can adapt and pivot that to say all right what do you want us to do if you've got three people that you're considering that we wouldn't we haven't necessarily brought to the table and you want us to help evaluate it so as I say we're pretty pretty nimble and can flex that and we do that for a variety of communities as well so

Anything else? Do you have anything else?

I have more comments, but I think it's general.

That'll be the next step. Any further questions or inquiries of this particular applicant before we kind of move on to a more general discussion of where you want to go?

I do, you know, one thing that I'm very intrigued by is just the role, as you envision the engagement, the role that you've given to the strategic planning is interesting to me. You know, coming into this meeting, I would have thought the main thing we're doing is looking for a manager and secondarily looking to fill roles like finance director that need to be filled. But I'm seeing and I kind of agree that it's hard to separate this from any kind of strategic planning. Like when my colleague here, Commissioner Weingart says he wants to elevate the services of the town certainly agree with that as a general goal but what that actually means you know in practice we haven't really worked I mean I think there's a general vision there but and then to articulate what that means and then to make an operational plan for it is not really something that we're I don't think it's something we're able to do up here in Commission meetings it sort of requires some consultancy or some extra help from the outside. So I see the sort of the way in which these search functions, executive recruitment functions kind of naturally grow into a strategic plan. There's also the, so am I right, is that sort of I think this might be something that distinguishes your firm, the way you see the connection between recruitment and planning. And I wanted to just invite you to say something about that, because that's kind of a big impression that this has left on me.

Yeah, and at the beginning of the presentation, I said we have competitors in different lines of business, but we really don't have a competitor that does everything we do. And I think that holistic approach that you're referencing, Commissioner, is exactly what we try to bring to the table. You didn't specifically ask for a strategic planning program, but we looked at the dynamics and said, here are the things and the systems we're seeing in play and the challenges you're facing. To me, it was just a natural to say, we should at least have a conversation about this. And so it's amazing when I speak conferences across the country, and I do a lot of discussions on strategic planning, and I'll say, how many of you in this room, regardless of what state I'm in, have a strategic plan? And ironically, I find only about a third. I don't care what state I'm in or what level of, whether it's a national conference or a state conference, about a third of the communities have it. And I sit there and I step back and I go, as a city manager, as a practitioner, if I don't know what all you want to do and accomplish, I have no idea if I'm meeting or what's the measurement and determining whether we're actually moving the ball down the field and elevating the organization, as you said, Commissioner, as well. We work with communities that have never done strategic planning, and it's a journey. It's not a one-step process. For those communities that have never done strategic planning, it's pretty basic, but at least we start to get the goals and objectives and the foundations of a plan in place. I've got other communities I've worked with for eight or nine years, and they've got very elaborate strategic plans, and we've helped them develop their benchmarks and their key success indicators and their goals and their objectives. And so it really depends on where you are in the spectrum. But at some point, whoever you hire for your next manager is going to want a roadmap and what that roadmap is collectively of what all of you want to accomplish in this organization. They're going to bring the technical expertise to say, we can do this and these are the resources to be done. But they're also pushed back and saying, if you want to be successful, the highest shining on the hill, but you also want to have the lowest possible millage rate, somewhere along the line you have to have a conversation, otherwise your staff's going to get beat up and they're never going to be successful in what they're doing. So to your point, we think that given the dynamics you're facing, we felt important to at least advance that as something that might be of consideration. So that when you do hire that next manager, as part of that process, either before or shortly after, or in concert with the hiring of the manager, that you have some roadmap to evaluate success. And that can be very basic. And as I say, many of our communities, we come back year after year and multiple years to help them refine those plans to go further. But we do think it's pretty critical. Because otherwise, you're just kind of managing the crisis of the day.

Mr. Medford, I also just want to thank you for your service as a veteran. Before you go down. Yeah, let's take another five minutes and then... Let's take a quick break.

Let's just have a brief conversation.

May I ask one quick question of this firm? Just, you know, the interim services, you have it there broken down as an hourly rate, but I just want to, just so we can compare apples to apples, I mean, is that... Is it that the interims typically bill hourly, or are you just taking a monthly contract and breaking it down as an hourly rate? I mean, I just want to make sure that...

So, Bill, it's per hour. And so they're only paid for the time they actually work.

Okay. So this is in reference to the... You mentioned a pool of interims that you often draw from. When somebody comes in from that pool, your general practice is to bill hourly for their work.

Yes. And the rate is established based upon kind of what the market rate for what we believe those positions will be. Either what you're currently paying is, as Wendell said, they'll take typically a fully loaded salary. But sometimes you might have to look differently at that so that we can get you a qualified candidate that meets those needs that are most critical to you.

Yes, I have a question.

Let's say that you already accomplished your goal before the time. So we pay you for the full service recruitment, and if it's accomplished prior the expected time, how does that work?

All right. So we've given you a couple different options. Typically for positions to report to a board, city manager type positions, city attorney positions, things like that, those are a little more dynamic than reporting to a department head that reports to a manager per se. So typically full service searches is our full complement of effort. We will manage that search entirely with you, work with you throughout the whole process, get you all the way across the finish line. Um, and so those are so those are broken off typically into 3 major 3 major cost. Uh, when you execute an agreement to say, we're going to do a city manager search at that point, you'll get a 3rd of the professional fees and then whatever travel may be involved as we're down here meeting with you to get with your, your, your background and meeting with your staff and your community. Um, then. After your semifinalists are selected, now we've triaged with you, you've done semifinal selection processes, there's a second component bill that comes with that full service. That'll be another third of the professional fee with whatever expenses were involved for advertising and things that are part of those costs as well. And then also the components that are associated with media searches and video interviews and things like that. And then the third piece would be when we actually complete the process and you've hired someone, they've been assigned, sealed, delivered, and approved, then you get the final piece of the bill for the last third and whatever ancillary costs are there. What that does not incorporate is any candidate travel fee or expenses, because we don't know who you're going to hire, where they may be coming from. That's on the city, that effort. But all the other pieces are involved with that. You basically get a chunk of that. Now, if something were to happen, we've had times where we've had, we've got one right now. Wendell and I are working in another community up in Indiana where we've got an interim manager being placed there and the council wants to go ahead and hire that person. So I was originally gonna be up and doing an interim, I was gonna do a town manager search for that community in addition to another department head search. I'm just going up to do the department head search because we've accomplished that need. If something were to happen and we change and we're halfway into a search and all of a sudden the community wants to do something different, we just bill you for our expenses at that point and we cease the work going further or pivot if need be from there. So does that address, Commissioner or Vice Mayor, what you were getting at? I mean, typically when we're involved to do a search, we're going to do the whole thing for you, but Things change and we just figure out what that is and we cut our cost or pivot if need be But the cost I've given you here for like full-service searches the component searches we call limited scope Many times for department heads if they've got a highly functioning HR operation and they're reporting to a manager or they're an assistant department head reporting to a department head sometimes you don't need the entirety of a full-service search and so the front end is is very similar, although we don't have any travel. We do everything remotely and have all those meetings and discussions remotely. We will triage the candidates. We'll market the position, get it out. We'll triage the candidates, whoever the search committee may be. And at that point, then we hand them off to the city. And then sometimes it's like an a la carte. They want us to do questionnaires. They want us to do video interviews. They want us to do media searches. And they can pick and choose. So sometimes for lower level positions that aren't reporting to a board, many of our communities offer those or utilize limited scope. So that's why I wanted to at least be aware. It's kind of a template. We can work with you and figure out what fits for what your particular needs may be.

Just curious what the asterisk next to the price is. There's no footnote.

It is in the brochure and the process. What that does is incorporates, for example, the 26-9 incorporates $2,500 worth of advertising. That's a typical advertising budget. Sometimes councils or communities will say, hey, we've got five or six other divisions we want you to do. That's going to push it above the $2,500. We just bill those above and beyond what those rates would be. They're straight pasture. We don't have a markup for those as well. So, Mayor, they're really referencing some sub-bullets within the actual proposal.

So just to summarize, let's assume that you were here just on a recruitment process, looking for a city manager, You're going to assist us with that whole process from beginning to end. There's a base fee of $26,919 plus the cost, and you stagger that payment, and then you have a whatever two-year guarantee or 12-month guarantee, and you'll replace that person if it doesn't work out.

Right. That's basic. That $26,919 is a not to exceed. So if we go over that, if I spend more time, if we have more travel involved in that, That's it. We at your cost.

And limited recruitments such as maybe a department head where you're not doing a nationwide search, you're doing a limited search and limited activity to help the manager, let's say, or. whoever it is to select the person for a particular job. Those could be, and then the manager takes over and says, thanks for this group of people. I'll make a decision here. I appreciate your help. 14 grand. Right.

That would be, that would be basically the concept, right? As I said, we would still, most of them in limited scopes are still national searches, but what we do is we're not physically onsite for those areas. We do all those meetings remotely, right? We would develop the brochure. We will place the ads. We will triage the candidates. And at that point of triage, you hand off, I hand off to you. If you want something more than that, then it's, you know, each questionnaire, each video. I got it.

But, but, but we run our own interviews and,

Exactly. We're not preparing interviews. We're not running that onsite process. Now, I will say, we don't do that for positions that report to boards. I get it. Yeah, but for many that report to a manager, limited scope sometimes.

So the city attorney, the city manager, those kind of things are the 26 number, and the other lower level positions sort of department head and personnel people is the more base fee.

Exactly. It's the base fee and then it's a la carte after that. But those are your not to exceed. So to your point, Vice Mayor, that's what we bill you for. And if we go over, we eat it. If we're under, it is what it is, but that's a not to exceed figure for you.

And just for your clarification, because I think you were talking, you saw the hourly number. Those are related to the Interim service prevent, uh, activities that they would provide, which they're providing on an hourly basis. Those aren't permanent employees. Those are interim people that they're bringing into place here and how they bill you for that. The time for those people.

Yeah. And just to add onto that, we could structure contract not to exceed on that as well. Unless it has commission.

Got it.

So we can be flexible.

Got it. Because. It is conceivable under these circumstances that there may be a long-term interim engagement that we would not want to be paying for every hour that that person is necessarily working here. We would want to establish a salary, if you will, and know what the number is and not be counting hours. Exactly. Okay, that would not be a good way to do that. And under our circumstances, I could envision the guy who may be there for the year, okay, or longer. And so we would, if that's kind of the arrangement, we would want to negotiate something different than an hourly rate. I don't want, you know.

Yeah, thank you for clarifying that, Steven. That was what I was asking about earlier. And I wasn't sure if you were locked into the hourly framework. Because even right now, our acting manager, I believe, has a monthly, you know, formally we have a contract with his consulting firm. And I believe we pay him $20,000 a month with his consulting firm, right? And that's been the provision of services since last October. So something like that is a possibility.

Most definitely. Okay. Good.

So let me just help guide this a little bit so that we can save, uh, move forward and also maybe save these guys time, not just sitting around. Okay. Because I think that, um, first, the first fundamental decision you have to make, which I, I think I know where you're going because it's the reason we're here is, are we going to be using a recruiting slash staffing firm to help us now with our personnel issues, management, interim government, and so forth? Or are we going to try to somehow do it, you know, on your own? I don't, okay. I don't think that's the direction you want to take. That's a very hard process to do. That's each person here suggesting somebody, and there's no organization. It's very hard to hire people. You don't have an HR department. I mean, it's almost impossible to do what you want to accomplish without the help of a consultant, if you will. So then you've got two presenters. It may be that the decision that you want to first have is, which group do we want to work with? I think that that's probably the first direction you want to take. And then begin to dive into the details of what is it that we need and Because you may have differing thoughts on what it is that you need. How long an interim position? Do we need interim at all? Do we, you know? But I think that that's the second level probably of discussion. In fairness to the presenters, I think it's fair to, you know, and to you all, kind of narrow down Who do you want to work with? And then, okay, what's the scope of service that we want that group to provide to us? What do we collectively think we need?

Well, shouldn't we articulate the scope first? Because maybe we wanted them to fulfill that.

You could do that, too. You could do that, too.

I think we should sit up here, see what path we want to take, put it out to both of them, see if they can... if they agreed to those. Maybe one wants to do exclusive, exclusively have interim model and the other one has another expectation of how they expect the staff. So let's figure out what we wanna do moving forward and then each one, if they're both willing, then we've gotta kinda figure out who we wanna work with, if not both. I mean, depending on the model we're moving forward with.

Yeah, what I heard from both of them is that they are both quite flexible. They'll work with you on whatever The scope of work is that you want to assign to them. And so I think you're going to end up back to what we're talking about, which is which firm do you want to work with? Because they're both going to tell you whatever you tell. If you tell them, you know what? We just want a manager. They're going to say, great. OK. So you're going to get back to the same decision of which group do you want to work with. But however you want to go about it. I'm just suggesting that I think that's where you may end up going.

Well, again, it might come down to pricing at that point. If they're both willing to do the same thing, they may have different pricing models. So, again, rather than throw one off the table immediately. Got it.

Got it. Okay. So do you want to have them... hang around while you have your, you know, I don't, we'll see however long you want to keep going today. Or do you want to have that discussion and then reach back out to them or what are you thinking?

From the commission.

I do think we just have a lot to talk about as a commission. A lot of this is, I mean, there's a lot of good stuff to talk about here, but I think just the scope discussion seems like it would take a while. And I wouldn't want to leave the firms just kind of waiting. I mean, I agree that we should get moving quickly, but we can try to tee something up for discussion at the July 16th meeting. for a final decision if we're, you know, I don't know. Just my thought is that like the scope discussion might be a long one unless I'm misreading the situation.

Maybe we schedule, I mean July 16th is a while from now. If we're available just to, you know, we can do an open coffee kind of thing and as long as we notice it and make it publicly accessible we could sit down and talk through it. I think it's going to take a little bit of a conversation to your point. I would hate to have you sitting here for two hours and maybe we don't even reach the decision. I think we've got to tighten up the scope of what it is we're looking to do moving forward, and then we can come back to you guys for a proposal, I think.

Should we invite back? I saw Colin.

Well, if that's what you're going to do, yeah. Just to let him know that that's sort of where you're going.

That's it. We get it. I've sat there with elected officials. You've got a lot on your plate to go with. Our goal is to just we're here to help you in whatever fashion that may be. And if we need to come back or do a Q&A on something that might look differently, we're here to work through that process with you as well. So I understand it's a big decision. All right. Thank you.

The way I see it is there's a bit of a catch-22. You know, we talk of the recruitment challenge and the image and the stigma that, you know, why it's a challenge to bring staff here so that they're seeking stability. In order to create that stability, we have to offer full-time positions, not more interim roles. At the same time, we're looking to stop the bleed, plug some holes, and do that simultaneously. So being mindful of that, I think that's at least that's where my mind is, in digesting here, in processing.

So Colin, I think where we ended up for today is to, the council has taken in a lot from both groups, and I think that the senses up here is that there needs to be a internal discussion about What, what, what are our, what are our exact needs? Um, and then which is the best firm to fulfill those needs. Okay. But they, they need to figure out exactly what sort of the, the best plan they think is moving forward for administration. Let's call it overall administration. And then. and then make a decision which firm is best to execute that for them. So we don't want you guys to wait around thinking there's a decision today. It's highly unlikely. I think this is going to be maybe an hour or so of a conversation, and it may even carry over to another workshop or something. But that's where we are. This is urgent. It's important. Nobody is naive about where we stand. I don't expect this to take a long time, but we don't want you waiting around for the rest of the day and then leave and say, why did we sit here all day? They didn't even make a decision. Okay? So you get that and we get that. So thank you, guys. One of us, somebody will reach out to you and, you know, sort of about next steps, but that's where we are. Yeah. Yes, we do.

Yeah, I think we got to align together as a commission. We've heard a lot. Maybe we have different ideas. So we should be aligned before we start modifying that proposal or request for an updated proposal kind of thing.

I think that's reasonable.

Speaking of which, is everyone available, let's say, Friday for an hour, meet in the conference room or in the morning?

Commissioner speaking to the mic. Sorry, is there interest in continuing today just for a little bit to maybe get some reactions? I mean, Friday. Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious where everybody's thoughts are. I would have some availability Friday, but it's a little bit patchy, my day. It's a holiday, too. I think it's a holiday, yeah. So that's not.

Steve, you need to speak into the mic.

You know, I know all of us are tired and these things just drag on, but maybe if everybody's got, or at least the quorum has got the opportunity to, you know, chat for 45 minutes, you know, just to kind of get some, a little direction going. 15? Okay.

15 minutes? Let's take a break until 2.15 and then...

It's down to business. No...

Okay. Well, do you want to skip a break then and just keep going?

I mean, I can continue, but they can leave, I guess.

Yeah, no, no, no. I know. They're leaving. They're leaving. They're leaving. Now that the...

They're out of here. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Nice meeting you all.

Thank you. Thank you. You too.

Happy holidays.

Thank you. Thank you. No, I was just suggesting, how long do you want to?

Okay. Fifteen minutes. I mean, I was trying to be mindful of everyone up here. We avoid Friday.

Well, Friday's not.

We avoid an extra.

Friday's not an option anyway.

Whatever, we can avoid. I think we can talk like straight 15, 20 minutes.

Okay, go.

Straight, and that's it.

Who's talking 15, 20 minutes straight?

I can't, I'm a doer.

I cannot, you know, let's go straight to business.

All right, let's do this.

No, I do think we should really try to zoom in on actual hires and be ready to commit to that. I know when you make that commitment, you gotta be ready to live by it, but if we stay in this interim cycle, think about it, as it is, town staff has this every two years, things could turn over, and what's next? So I would never wanna sit in that seat of not knowing what's happening my next two years career-wise. So I think it's our duty as a commission to provide stability to our town staff if we're gonna expect the level of service looking at and if we get too busy putting band-aids on things then my concern is that we don't we don't address that piece which we want to shift that we want to create the dynamic where people want to work here it's a commission that's unified that's that's going to support our town staff that's going to you know and and pay what it what it takes to have that level and ideally if we could skip the step of too many interns and focus on real recruitment. Just a thought.

For me, the number one takeaway from Mario's report, and I I believe him on this. I'm curious whether others see it the same way. He's telling us we don't have the institutional capacity right now to undertake a lot of major projects. So that even if we get a manager, and it's a great manager, first there's going to be the onboarding period of getting them acquainted with everything, but then they won't have the the base to sort of hit the ground running. So I... Not that I don't. I also would like to get things moving. And I realize that I've made this point before, and I'm not trying to push it. But I think one of the reasons why I favored extending an offer to Mario is that that's the best way to move things forward. We have somebody in place who gets the town and can do that. But assuming we're not doing that. I just don't think it's realistic to hire a new manager and then immediately results because what Mario is telling us and I think it's accurate is that we don't have the in public works in Finance, we don't have the capacity right now to launch major projects I'm glad we're having the retreat. We'll be able to talk about what major projects we want to pursue but we need to build that capacity and I think what both of these firms are offering is a path to that I wouldn't have thought that this was going to bleed into strategic planning, but I'm convinced somewhat by the vision. As I saw it, the second firm does the strategic planning more as part of their philosophy. It's sort of like they just naturally view that as part of recruitment. The first firm said something like, I go back and check the record, but Mario's assessment had so many things in it that need to be done that that can't be done in one year, and we need to triage the to-do list in Mario's plan. So either way, both firms are coming back to strategic planning. I think the first firm, because they, I think, think it's appropriate to our situation. The second firm, because I think that's what they do. Either way, I think we need some element of that. So again, I'm not in favor of having more interims, but I also don't see, if the goal is to do things, I don't see another way. I think both of these firms are giving us a path to that.

So I think we're all aligned, and we see and say the same thing, which is, You know, we've got a city, a municipality, we've got Town Hall, which is a living, you know, organism, but we've got blocked arteries. So no matter what you're trying to do, there's certain deficiencies within certain departments. We saw some of that play out in finance of where we're holding, you know, public works. Again, I just want to clarify for any staff that may be listening or listen, we've got great staff. The problem is over the years, Over the last couple of years specifically, especially with some of the people leaving, a lot of our staff have been forced to wear hats and get into roles that they may not have had the experience, the expertise, or even necessarily currently the bandwidth, as we can tell by a lot of the asks at yesterday's budgetary meeting, which is, hey, we need help. How do we move this town forward quickly, right? I think, to your point, we don't need interims, we need stability. I think we need an operational officer, whatever it is, deputy town manager, assistant town manager slash COO, whatever the title is, we need someone that's gonna come in here and focus on that aspect of it. And that can happen immediately, right? Now, simultaneously, we have them do the search for the manager. And throughout that process, and that is, you know, some of them are giving us a three month, four month process, we can still be assessing that COO for that same position. But at least we have somebody whose job it is to get these departments operational. It seems like we're gonna need that role anyways, and I think it's been brought up in the past. It's smart to have an assistant town manager or COO lined up and teed up in case, and I know you've brought that up in the past, So, you know, it doesn't have to be an interim role. We can bring someone in and, again, at the end of the day, if we find a manager, if it's not that COO, he may want a different second in place. And that will be completely up to him or her. But I think the quickest path forward essentially is, you know, these firms were presented to us and the idea was that they've got, a network ready to go. Not that we're going to wait four months for a search for a COO. And again, I don't know why in the proposal there's additional fees for different department heads. That's literally what the COO is supposed to do, build up those weaknesses. So that shouldn't even be in here. It's two positions. It's COO, whose job is, while he's working here, to build up those other departments or find those deficiencies or gaps and cover that.

I think the reason for that is because what was anticipated is that that COO would utilize the firm to fill those positions. In other words, if he is here running the business of the town, you don't want to divert him with a recruitment process. But right now that is the business of the town.

If we're stuck and we're being told we can't do capital projects, we can't do anything major, that right now is the business of the town for the next 30, 60 days.

Right, what I'm saying is that You could bring in that COO, but if you're going to place upon him the recruiting and hiring process also, I think that what was anticipated by these firms, and you could just tell the COO, you're doing the hiring, okay? You go do it, but he may come back to you and say, for these positions, we should be using a firm to help us find those people. He may come in and say, I'm going to run the thing, but if we need an HR director, I need help to go get that HR director. I'm not... I'm not a recruiter. I'm an operations guy. So that's why I think you're seeing the second level, which is, but they don't have, that COO, if he's capable of both running the government, filling positions, and doing all that great, then you don't need, I'm sorry.

Can we please get him a lapel mic?

You don't need, I hear you, you don't need a recruiting firm to help your COO recruit people. Oh, now I got two of them.

And then finally, another important piece is there are candidates that are going to come in organically. They're going to come in through our website or through perhaps referral. Once this is open, I think we could post it on our link and say our town's looking, right? I have a network. I would think there's going to be inbound, and we should not be paying the same fee for someone that was sourced through our efforts versus theirs.

That's a fee issue, but okay.

I will say, I think from what I heard from town manager Blumstein was that hiring finance is really hard, that we were putting out ads, and that seems to be a seller's market right now. So it took him a long time to find Sandra Siefkin. And so yeah, just putting that out there. I mean, things do take a while. And so that may be the reason why we want to make some provision possibly for interim staffing through one of these firms because even if we are doing a search, even if we're committed to a search for a finance role, we may not get the candidate.

Well, your COO may tell you, listen, for me to function well here, I can't. take a, I gotta get going. I may need interim services to help me operate this government. And cause it may take me six months to fill a position that's possible. And so then, you know, he, he may call upon whoever's placing him here.

I mean, it's not that different from what a law firm's town attorney does, right? I mean, if there's needs, you sort of staff up from the firm, and I feel like they're doing something similar on the medical side.

Yeah, I mean, this happened to work out well. But, yeah, yes, that's what I did. I mean, you know, I sort of... Literally, like he said, 45 minutes. Well, I moved up here in two minutes, and I staffed everything. You've got litigators. You've got zoning lawyers. You've got all that. But I have that base of people within my firm to put in those positions. How quickly a COO is able to fill in below him, I don't know, we'll have to see.

Yeah. I think at that point we could play it by ear, similar to what we did with finance, right? We had a deficiency immediately, we filled it with a very expensive consulting firm, but the idea is we're still moving towards full time.

Yes.

But that was brought in by our current acting.

And if we, as you say, organically identify people, That's great, then we should fill those positions, let the COO meet them or whatever or not, and just go. If we happen to come upon somebody great that we think is terrific, we don't need to go through a search firm. We'll just fill it.

So perhaps we're looking at a hybrid approach. We're bringing in a COO via one of these firms, perhaps. that the focus is to bring in full-time directors for any gaps we're filling, but the COO is beginning as an interim role, and perhaps if we consider that down the road, that is something we wanna keep on, we convert that to.

Yeah, and I think that COO is gonna take 30 days to get back to you to tell you what he thinks his staffing needs are to help you run this government, both permanent and long-term. So I think it's probably a person who comes in here and does an assessment, meets each person in every department, comes back and says, okay, I can help you run this place. This is the team I need.

That is an interesting difference between the firms that with CBA, they're telling you right away who their COO would be. It would be Mr. Durbin. The other firm takes a week, but they make a decision based on, well, look at their proposal, but they make a decision based on our specific needs, you know, and their pool. So that is an interesting difference between the two firms that we might want to consider is, you know,

Well, yeah, and again, Mr. Durbin is a VP in the other company, so he's not going to be staying here. And if the idea is, again, continuity, stability, we need to find somebody. If both firms have a pool, let them bring us 10 different COOs to interview and put in place currently. If they find a deficiency, they find a deficiency, and that's the job.

The job is to fix that. You may find, and you should consider this, that... that this city for the foreseeable future, this town for the foreseeable future, is not going to be able to operate without a COO level person. That that is essential to bringing this government up to the level that you want. I've been around a long time for, it's hard for me to envision that a city manager by himself is going to be able to undertake well at the level of service that I hear some of you talking about the task of this entire city. There, there's no way that, um, that I, I don't know a manager who could deal with all of the issues that you have and things that you want to accomplish and also rebuild and stabilize and redirect an administration underneath them that that that is not a one-person job you need a full-blown deputy if you will who's got full administrative capacity

I mean, the phrase came up at a meeting. I don't know. It wasn't mine. Somebody talked about finding a rock star manager or a rock star financial director. But I think the fact is, I don't know that that alone could do it. Even if you had the best manager immediately, they still are going to have difficulties, I think. And again, as the mayor said, I'll praise to the staff we have. It's not a knock against the structure.

I'm a prime example. I'm a prime example. I could not do this myself. There's no way that I could even... handle your legal affairs by myself. So forget about the whole city, just your legal affairs. I could not do this by myself. If I didn't have my team of people, there's no way I could do this. And I think that you saw that with prior city attorneys who tried to do They can't do it. They're farming out everything from zoning work to litigation to everything because they just can't do it. So I think that the same thing with the city manager. You can bring in the top rock star, whoever it is, but you should not expect that they're going to be able to manage all of these different things, especially at this state that they're in. If you've got high-functioning departments and you bring in the rock star, then it's great, okay? But a coach who doesn't have a quarterback and doesn't have, you know, a center and doesn't have, you know, a backfield and, you know, that coach is not going to be able to perform for you.

We have them. I think they just need assistance, some of them.

Well, maybe you do. But they also could be rookies who don't have the capacity to perform, and you need some veterans in there.

Yeah, maybe you need a senior person there. But they're not coming in with no one.

No, no, they're not coming in with no one. Of course not.

So that's why I think I think an operator with the intent to to keep that person there. Right. So this is not.

So maybe the recruitment is a full fledged full time CEO. But if you can't find that in the foreseeable future because we can't attract that person which goes to the issue of you know kind of having an attractive position then you got to consider an interim CEO. In other words, because if that's going to be a six, eight, 10-month process to try to find a great COO, you guys are going to be running for office soon.

Again, we need to hire an operator, somebody who can look at the current structure, find the deficiencies, similar to the report that was put together, which seems like it's just gonna be glossed over. And then put the right pieces in place. Continue to maintain that. There's a lot of operators. There's a skill that comes with town manager that is a little bit different than just operations you need to be a little more political you have five bosses and let's be clear this commission doesn't hire any of the directors if if the authority is given or the intent is to bring in a coo it's still everything has to go through a manager right well the you can you can direct the authority to you can get you can

We can figure out how to grant the COO the powers to engage personnel.

Engage, yes, but the final decision rests with the manager still by charter.

Okay. So you have an interim manager. If you don't have a manager, if Mario's not here to stamp that approval, then... Well, we already set a redundancy. But I do think that one of the interesting concepts here was, and I don't know how that works, is that the... but both of them suggested that whoever would be the COO is going to be somebody who has municipal managerial experience and could step into that role if need be. So I think you will cover yourself with that individual, but then you may have to backstop. If that person steps into that role of manager, then you're going to have to, fill backfill the person's position. So however it works, it, you know, if you, if you, if you don't have your manager, um, you're going to have to make a move there.

Just sharing my gut, my debriefing from my feeling. Both great presentations and clearly both have tremendous experience in this space. I think SGR perhaps has a broader bank of resources that could assist us through things that we're looking to accomplish. Even perhaps Commissioner Trevani's Charette concept. I think there's more, perhaps a pool of resources available there. and I like the workshops and other services that they provide to the government services, that I'm just leaning that direction from a gut feeling at the moment. I understand. Yeah.

I mean, we have talked, you know, there have been several, I'm curious what you all think about, well, let me start with a bit of a fundamental question. You know, From what I heard from the mayor and from Commissioner Weingart, it seemed to be an interest in scaling back from both of the proposals, or at least start with the core function and then build out. I'm just curious, is the primary motivator there just the cost, or is it just trying to focus our efforts? Having asked that, I'm curious what you all think about the strategic planning component, because there have been several proposals. Mario at one point was proposing some kind of retreat with a firm to kind of do something like that. Then Commissioner Trevani has the Charette idea. We're having the retreat on the 20th, which is kind of our own kind of homegrown conversation. These two firms in their different ways are proposing strategic planning. It seems like one way or another, we're going to do something like that, I think. Or I think we should do something like that. I think there's some advantage to folding that into the executive search, because it's- I want to jump in before we get too off topic. But the question is, well, is it off topic? I mean, it's sort of in the meat of their proposal. So I'm curious, just to address that, where does that stand with people?

Let me give you my impression of what they said. Um, th they did say that at any stage, they think at least SGR said that that concept is, is utilizable and should be used by local government in their opinion, whether you use it here, here or here, the, one of the things that they were suggesting is, is that to attract a candidate. Okay. Importantly to attract a solid managerial candidate. it is very important in their eyes that the government have a unified strategic plan so that that candidate and manager understands what it is that's expected of him, where the community's going, so that he can evaluate whether that's the right place for him. But I don't think you have, unfortunately, the time to do a strategic planning process, put it in place so that that candidate can have the benefit of it. That's what they were suggesting. They were suggesting that it would, if you had that, it would be very helpful to attract the candidate. That's why they were also saying that maybe the timing of when you go out to go get your manager is tied to the planning that you've done so that you can say to that manager that you're searching for, look what we've accomplished, look where we're going. So, um, I just want to put it in context of what was being said. Yes, a strategic planning process probably would be very helpful for you and the community overall. But as it relates to the manager, I don't think you can wait to develop a strategic plan to start searching for people. Or maybe you can if you've got a stabilized government and understand that the long-term manager position is going to be a longer term process that is in part, at the same time, part of a strategic plan?

So I want to answer the question first of all. Why I'm looking to scale back is because the interim just adds additional steps, additional steps to a process that we're trying to close. I don't have to tell you how short these terms are. We don't have the 12 months to go through the process before we start thinking about a stabilized government in the sense that they were presenting. That's why I'm jumping and I'm trying to skip, you know, the interim COO, the interim directors back to, you know, like it's just added four or five months to a process we don't need. As far as strategic planning, again, not many, I don't think many commissions have looked. We have a plan in place in 2006. It was a massive charrette done at the time. There was a plan for this town and not one commission has followed it. So there is a direction I would encourage everyone up here to look through it and read it. It has a very nice direction of where this town should have been today.

I was part of that process.

And it was amazing. And the fact that every commission every two years comes back in and has their own ideas. That's the challenge we face with a two year cycle and it will never change until our process and our election process changes. So to sit up here and pretend that we are going to create some sort of master plan for every commission following us to be following is a lot of hubris and it's not practical because it hasn't been. And so I think we need to focus on our for the next two years, not four years, not eight years, not 10 years, two years of what we wanna do. I can tell you already, you know as well as I do, we have a major water sewer project, six, $7 million. We've got a water treatment project that's gonna be presented soon, as soon as I work some things out. We've got Miami-Dade County that has to rebuild infrastructure. They're gonna be raising rates to the residents 237% a year over year. That is what we're looking at as a community, as a town. So along with many other communities, we're looking now to possibly build our own water and sewer treatment. It would be a large capital outlay up front, but it will allow us to dictate those prices and what we pass over to the residents moving forward. So these are real projects that can start that we already have on our plate in front of us, not to mention the traffic and congestion improvements, whatever that is, if it's AI-integrated solutions that the state doesn't cover. We will sit down as a group and define what the priorities are moving forward, but to sit and pretend that we're going to set the roadmap for this town moving forward, it's not practical.

I wasn't imagining something that's the goal of which is to bind future commissions. I thought for the work of the town of this commission, you know, some planning is needed. That's, that's where, that's where my comments sort of started with this idea of like having a commission, you know, when Mario was proposing doing a commission retreat with a firm, that's the plan, what we're going to do during these terms. So I, I wasn't thinking of, you know, this master document. Um, but at the same time, you know, that, that Charette was a, was not really a, um, a political plan so much as a vision for the town. I think it's a different kind of document. The Charette was like a map of the town with specific ideas for development, but it wasn't a political program. I think a strategic plan is something different. just a set of goals for for us and you know part of the value that i see to that is that um you know i've expressed before my frustration in the previous commission was that whenever i wanted to float an idea for something new or interesting would be an item nine thing that would get like five minutes of consideration and then you know there was no vehicle for for trying out ideas and you know it's hard enough to do it during our monthly meeting so we should do it early in the term. And it's really for us. It's not, I wasn't thinking of it as a.

No, but you also understand how these things work. We're going to sit down in a couple of weeks, come up with hopefully our plan moving forward for the next couple of years. And then in the month, somebody is going to email you about something or a challenge comes up. These things change. And now at least we'll have, we'll be able to weigh that item nine against what we've set down as a group already.

Yeah, exactly.

And then something's got to move down if that moves up. So yes, I mean, we're fully capable of putting that together in the next couple of weeks.

I think so. I mean, July 20th will be a chance for that, but I do think there is an opportunity with these firms. That's all. It's just that they're offering some expertise in that kind of planning. I'm inclined to say we should take them up on it as part of this, but I agree. I mean, priorities are priorities, and we need the staffing, and we need the staffing at the very top. I don't think we disagree about that.

So I don't I don't know if we still want to keep talking about this how comfortable we are again the way out of the way I see this is ask them to bring forward a seal. Right give us somebody from your pool if you don't have a pool we're not waiting for months to go into recruitment process because then we might as well to start the recruitment of a town manager. If that's the only option we have that's the only option we have but we need to separate those 2.

So basically what we're doing is at the moment, the very short term step with one of these firms is, or maybe both, I don't know whether they, you know, sort of want to be in competition with each other to bring forward COO candidates or that's, that's the reason I said, that's the reason I said, maybe we need to figure out which one we're working with and let them run and bring us the candidates. But maybe they're willing to sort of, compete with each other, bring forward a COO candidate, and we're talking about, you're talking about a permanent person, right? Okay, so this is a permanent placement, and whoever brings forth the first and best candidate is the people that we're going to work with. So we basically are going to have two recruiters out there working the same job, working the same project.

If they're willing to do that. That's why I don't want to knock anyone out yet.

If they're willing to do that, they may both say, listen, either pick us and we'll do it or pick them, but we don't want to be running around trying to choose somebody. I mean, Colin obviously brought somebody, but he's not permanent. So that's out. Even if you like them, he's a principal in the company. He's not interested in working for us. So...

I'm assuming it's not like real estate where everyone's working off the same MLS listing. So you have to sign. No, that's not. Yeah. Here, each one has their own pool that they work with, especially one coming from, you know, based out of Texas, one in North Florida.

Yes.

Bring us candidates. The first one gets paid for it. And at the same time, simultaneously, we're looking for a manager.

It could be a little awkward having dual processes running. They're all searching for similar candidates. They're all going to be publishing out there and posting.

We also know the challenge we're going to have in Surfside with our reputation, with a two-year term, with the fact that we have high turnover for decades. I understand.

We're going to have a very... We have a challenge. That's why I'm wondering whether... Listen, I want to make it simple. I don't want to make it complicated. for you guys. That's why I'm wondering is it going to get too complicated having two firms doing these national searches or, you know, because this person who may be the COO doesn't necessarily have to be tied into Miami-Dade County. Okay? No, but it helps. Okay? That's different than the manager. Okay? So you might, they may, do you, I don't know whether they're both willing to go out and sort of do national searches. What's his name?

But that's why I don't want to choose because we don't know.

One might say no. I understand. And our decision is made for us. No, I understand SGR. For example, SGR said we'll go do that, but you pay us a third up front. And so they may say, yeah, we'll go do it, but you're going to pay us 10,000 of the 30,000 and we'll go do it. Um, and I don't know what Colin will say.

So that's why I don't want to pick because let's see what they come back. One might say we're not interested or one might say we want all the money up front to them.

Tell them that where we arrived at today is that we would like to seek out as quickly as we can candidates for a permanent COO position that potentially could be elevated to manager if we had, if we have a change.

Simultaneously, they should be looking for a manager. I'm assuming that process will be longer.

Okay, so then I think, if you're going to be asking two firms to be doing the same job for us, I don't expect that either one of them are going to want to do that. But maybe they will. Maybe I'm wrong.

Well, let's see their proposals, and then we can choose. We're going to put out the proposal. One may say we're not interested, one, and then our choice.

Well, it's not, I'm just going to call them up and say this is what we want. We want you to, want to hire you to be, to make a, start a permanent manager search and a permanent COO search.

And one may want to charge us ahead of time with every charge that they put out. And what are your fees to do that? Exactly. And that's what we base it and evaluate it on.

Are you proposing to cut out the interim COO

The concept of interim, again, we can all agree we need a secondary COO, correct? I think this town needs that second layer. You've asked for that. So I think it's easier, remember, in theory, it really shouldn't be up to us to be finding a COO. That should be up to the manager. This is where we find ourselves today. So let's close that gap so that person has the responsibility of bringing to the manager and filling any gaps that they find in the operational structure of the town. We're hands off already at this point, except that we're waiting. We could be on our own evaluating the COO during the interim time that we're going through this process of a manager.

So you got a dual search going by potentially two firms side by side.

Well, if you want us to choose, then let them. No, no, I don't want.

I'm not saying you have to. I'm suggesting that they they neither of them may want to be. You know, these firms generally operate, they're your exclusive broker, if you will, out there, and they're working for you performing that job.

I think it's a little tricky because the COO is technically interim, right? Because they may move on to manager over the next few months.

You can't go out and search for a permanent manager when the... applicant pool knows that the government may likely not hire you and they're gonna push the COO into that position.

There's no guarantee and I think when that decision's made, it's made by the commission.

It's not. But it could be made in a matter of weeks.

I doubt it. Or days. I would never do that in a couple of weeks or days.

I just think that this, if I'm reading you right, the desire is to avoid the interim because you want to get things going. But I think the interim COO is what allows us to move forward. Because you do a search for a COO, that's going to take a while. In the meantime, we're in this precarious situation where if Mario leaves, we don't have a manager or a COO until the COO is hired. And then I think it's going to be hard to recruit somebody to be the number two if they don't know who their direct report is.

I think you're correct in the sense that we need maybe the interim COO because the manager may want to choose their own. So I think that expectation is there initially. And so... Let's get an interim COO. If they have a pool ready to go, great. We're not looking to do a four month search for that.

I think you should meet him and interview him, but I think Colin brought the guy who he's proposing to be the interim COO. He stood here. I think that that's who he's gonna bring forward. So let's ask the other guys if they have somebody that they'd like to bring forward and we can.

And let's see the pricing structures and compare that as well and yeah.

Yeah, I think what they said on an interim person is he would work hourly or you just set a, they'll set a fee for him.

Well, I tend to side with Commissioner Valastegui where I'd like to see similar to a contract that we have with Mario, this idea of an employee that's working three, four days or hourly. I mean, in this role, you're coming in at a rate of whatever we agreed to and that's it.

Well, and also it's a little bit different here. They're not, if you do the interim, then at least with SGR, They're employing that person. They're putting him here. They're paying him. With Colin, I think it's a little bit different. I think he's going to expect you to hire that person. But I could be wrong. Maybe he'll hire him. No, actually, if it's the guy that was here, he already works for him. So he's placing him here.

OK. Right, I think they both would, right, are paid through the firm.

Yes, through the firm.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, that was a good 15 minutes.

Yeah.

You have direction.

A little bit longer than 15 minutes, but it's okay. I think we have.

What do you need? Sorry.

Really, for our benefit, Stephen, I was gonna ask you, what did we just decide? I mean, did somebody?

I think what you decided is that you want to have a interim COO and you want both the firms to put forward a person and a price proposal for that position.

And then will we discuss later potential expansions of the engagement with the firm? Or are you looking to sort of, I think that's, we're skipping a step, which is the manager.

Well, we still have to deal with the city manager job.

Right.

And whether, um, so, But I think maybe the very first step is to just get this COO person in place, who I think everybody thinks is really important to the continuing operations of the government. Even if we lose our manager, at least you have somebody who's here running the governmental operations day to day. So why don't you take that step? get that in place, and then you can decide, again, which of the two firms do you want to use for the manager search.

So what I'm hearing is that From CBA, they've kind of already suggested who their COO would be. Yes. So maybe we should meet, we should talk to him more. Yes. And then for SGR, we want to say, please tell us more specifically who you have in mind. And we want to meet that person.

And we want to meet that person. And see if they're prepared to work, you know, sort of in competition with each other.

And then I want to hear what the mayor has to say, but I'm also curious, you know, but I could ask again, you know, is our thought then that we are basing our choice of the firms off of this COO issue, interim COO, and then for the rest? Whoever gives us the better interim COO we go with for everything? Or is the idea that are we breaking it up somehow? Are we kind of modularizing this? What is the thought on that? I...

I think it's a good opportunity for them to flirt with us and show us what they're capable of. Excuse my language. Show us what they got. Their best foot forward.

Yes.

Okay.

Waiting for the mayor and then I think we're done.

Yeah. I'll ask him the same question, just make sure we're on the same page about that. Am I clear?

No. I mean, what I'm saying, you're going to be the one getting in touch with them?

I will call them, and I'll tell them where you guys are and ask Colin if the interim COO is the gentleman who was here with him, and if it is, is he willing to work with us while we're also potentially, I'll speak to them also. I want to see whether the CGR people are interested in proceeding with us on this kind of basis. Okay? Whether they want, whether they're interested. I think Colin is clearly brought to the table a COO. He's prepared to place him here and bill us for him. And I think that And we understand that now, whether he wants to do that, whether he says, yes, I'll offer that, but you're hiring me. I don't want to go through a thing here where my guy interviews and then you hire another guy from the other firm. If you don't like, if Connell say, if you don't like him, I'll bring you somebody else, but work with me. I just want to see if they're both willing to work alongside each other and bring us candidates.

Right.

Well, I want to make sure they have a pool ready to go. Not that they're going to be doing a search. Because then they're not the right person for this current role.

Right. Permanent COO. He's... Okay, we're talking about interim COO. Plop in there. Maybe it's interim to permanent, but that's not for us. We know that Colin has somebody, and I suspect that they will, in their pool of 100 or whatever they got, COOs, that they can find somebody fast that they're going to put forward. Right.

And so then to the mayor, what we were talking about when you stepped out was whether the idea is then that You know, we meet with Mr. Durbin, we ask SGR who they would put in as interim COO, or who they might suggest. On the basis of the interim COO, are we then choosing a firm to do the manager search and potentially any other consulting side stuff?

I also see there are proposals from the financial aspect of it. Right, one seems, one's put one forward and the other one seems flexible because they came forward with an hourly rate but is willing to have a conversation. So I think we need to see.

But the proposal's for the interim COO.

Yeah.

Right, but it sounds like that's gonna be the sort of test case and then based on that we're choosing a firm for more, for the manager recruitment. plus whatever strategic component goes with that, or no?

Yeah, I don't think you're bound to make a long-term commitment to either of these firms unless you're adding into this a commencing a manager search now. then I think that they're going to want you to select between one of them. I see. If the limited engagement right now is bring us an interim COO, okay, fine. If we want to expand that now further and also start the long-term process of finding us a manager, I think it's a different proposal to them. I think they're And I think it's going to be a bit weird to having two firms out there searching the same market for the same people. It's going to be awkward to candidates, like, well, who, Colin, who are you representing? They're gonna, I don't see them doing that. They might, for this interim position, agree to, so we're gonna have to, in relatively short order, make a decision on who's, because you're gonna hire a manager. So you're gonna have to make a decision on which firm you would like to choose to go out and find a manager for you.

All right, so let's try to get, I'm gonna try to articulate a motion so we can, which is to direct you to go back to them for two separate proposals. One is for the proposal for an interim manager. I want to see the pricing models that they have and how many candidates they have. Interim COO.

Sorry, what did I say?

COO. Interim COO. I want to know how many candidates they have ready in a pool, right? If one of them is only offering one, well, then it, this is the interview and if we don't like him, then we're stuck with the other, you know, the other firm. So if they have a few candidates ready to go, ready for us to sit down with, now let's see your pricing model. a secondary proposal for a town manager, what that looks like. Okay.

And that's pretty, that's, that's pretty easy. I mean, they, they both, you know, you know what one of them is, he's $26,000 and he'll do the national search and start going.

So we just, and Colin will give you a number two. Well, what the expectation is, do they get paid ahead of time? A third upfront? Like, Oh, yeah.

I'm not sure what Colin's staging is. I always understood that he, you pay him when he places somebody with you. So, but yeah, Whether you pay $10,000 up front with the one firm or not, I think you have to make a decision based upon who you feel is going to bring you the best qualified candidates, which of the recruitment firms you have the trust in as opposed to how they structure their fee. I don't think it makes a difference. I think if you think one firm is stronger than the other and going to bring you the best people, the fact that they want an up front $10,000 probably is not going to make a huge difference. but maybe it will, maybe you guys will, maybe that'll be the deciding point.

You say trust, but trust is earned. Like a two hour interview doesn't give me trust in it. So it's hard to gauge. And therefore I've got to revert back to network and cost.

Right. Right. I didn't mean trust in the sense of trust, qualifications to get you a, you know, bring you a qualified manager. Okay, so listen, I'll ask them to.

Just cost and cost. I mean, CBA was 36.5 for the town manager search, and for additional searches, it looks like it was 32.5, whereas SGR was what we had up on the screen. 26. 26 and 14. But they wanted, but yeah, 20, 14 on the interim stuff.

That's what I'm saying. But the permanent was 36 and 26. So there is a difference there.

I'm a little confused on how, again, with one company paying the interim directly, they have a fee. The other one is going to, what, hire us from the pool and we have to pay them, so that means we set the payment structure. They get a fee for finding and placement, and then we've got to set a salary, as opposed to the other firm that seems to set the salary and the standards ahead of time.

The SGR for interim services... said they would adjust their hourly to a fixed monthly fee based upon the salary they had to pay that person, basically. If they're going to bring in a person who makes $250,000 or $300,000 a year, they're going to divide it by 12 months, put some 10% or 15% burden on it, and that's what you're going to pay them on a monthly basis. That's, I don't think, I don't think Colin quantified what his interim person was gonna pay.

Oh, I think he did, 20,000, I think.

Did he say 20,000 a month? 20, and a 10% admin fee.

$4,700 for apartments, plus travel, plus, you know.

Right, but the salary was, but the other one was plus housing. Talking $300,000 a year. I believe he did say plus 20. 20 was the salary. And the high end, you know, I was doing in the, you know, 150 an hour comes out for a 40-hour work week comes out to something like 27,000. So the, you know, SGR had more of a range. I'm guessing CBA saw what we were paying Mario and got their number from that, or if not, it's a nice coincidence. But right, plus housing and plus administrative fee.

Listen, Surfside once upon a time paid $160,000 for a manager and got him an apartment. Those numbers are a lot higher. I don't know why we're paying lodging and transport. You're either working here or you're not kind of thing for the next little while.

Well, then he's just going to lump it all into one fee.

That's fine. Let's see what that fee looks like and what we're prepared to pay for that position.

Right. Right. Okay, so we want a fixed fee from both of them for the interim person on a monthly basis, right? That's what we want. We don't want to calculate hours. We want a total fixed fee to provide that person, place that person here on an interim basis, a monthly fee. And we want to ask them to provide at least SGR, at least one candidate for us to interview. Okay, all right, I think I know what to do.

And equally important is for us to have division of labor. Duties and responsibilities clearly outlined who's doing what. Interim COO and a town manager.

Well, okay, so yeah, I think you have to be apples to apples. We've got to understand exactly what that person is doing.

All right. Okay. Let's rearticulate the motion.

I don't think we need a motion. You're just giving direction to me to move forward and bring forward these proposals. That's it. If you want to make it in a motion, that's fine.

Well, I guess just for the record, can you articulate what you're walking away with?

Okay. So I'm fine. Just propose it in the form of a motion and second. And if that's what you like, that's fine.

Pass it and try to articulate a motion. All right, so pass the gavel Well try to make the motion to direct the town attorney to engage back with these firms

to bring back a structured pricing, fixed pricing for an interim town manager on monthly, sorry, an interim COO on a monthly basis with proposed candidates that we can sit down with already. And simultaneously a proposal for a town manager recruitment search. Fine. Okay. Okay.

Got it.

Got a second. Is there a second?

I'll second them.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Thank you. Thank you. Motion to adjourn.

Second. All right. That was a very long meeting.