City Council - Special Meeting

Yes, we're ready.

Good afternoon. It's Thursday, July 29th, 2026. We're at Carmel-by-the-Sea City Hall, and I'd like to call this special meeting of the Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council to order at 1 p.m. City Clerk, could you please call the roll? Sure.

Council Member Barron?

Here.

Council Member Booter?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Delves?

Here.

Council Member Dramaw? Here. Mayor Byrne?

Here.

All are present.

All right, before we begin, a reminder to the public that this is a hybrid meeting. You may attend in person via Zoom or watch now or at any time using the live stream on the city's YouTube page. Just so everybody knows, there are three people in attendance here in the chamber. There's probably not much opportunity for public comment directly. Nova, could you read the public comment guidelines for special meetings? Sure.

During special city council meetings, public comments are permitted on items listed on the agenda. After each item on the agenda is introduced, the mayor will invite public comment on that item. Each speaker has three minutes to speak unless otherwise adjusted. While stating your name is optional, it helps to identify speakers in the meeting minutes. Remote or in-person participants who do not comply with the requirements of the Brown Act will be muted.

Thank you. We have one order of business on the agenda today. It's to receive presentations from the three recruitment firms recommended by staff for the city administrator recruitment. Select one firm and adopt resolution 2026055 authorizing the acting city administrator to execute an agreement with the selected firm. We'll begin with public comment on this agenda item only. This will be the only opportunity for public comment today. Speakers will have three minutes each. Please state your name for the record before beginning your comments. Is anyone in the chamber wish to make a public comment? Seeing none, are there any people online?

There's no hands raised on Zoom.

All right, everybody online, if you want to make a public comment, I'm going to give you another 30 seconds. Put your hand up. I don't see any. All right. Seeing no additional speakers, public comment is now closed. We'll now receive the staff report from our acting assistant city administrator, Marissa Bermudez, who has been running this process under the direction council gave for selecting a new city administrator. Marissa.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to briefly recap why we're here today. As you just stated, at the direction of council, we issued an RFP for city administrator recruitment services. We received a total of 16 proposals, and all of them were evaluated for the following categories. Completeness, number one, quality of the proposal, and recruitment brochure samples. any relevant city manager recruitment experience, I'm gonna use city manager, city administrator interchangeably, placements in California specifically. And I understand there was an interest from council to have a national firm. We did have proposals from national firms that were headquartered out of the state. And while they did have extensive experience placing city administrators across the country, they had very limited placements in California specifically. So to me that reflected a limited reach into the California market and at times the time zones were also a challenge. So I made lots of phone calls to gauge the recruiter's understanding of coastal community, needs, expectations, their availability, their ability to be the single point of contact for council. I checked references and I ran through, I ran them through three separate evaluations. to come up with the top three. And all three firms presenting today met the criteria I've already mentioned. The recruiters have prior municipal work experience, which I believe to be important in this process. They're available for in-person meetings with council, and they demonstrated a strong outreach networks. So I'm gonna briefly explain why I moved all three forward, why they're here. WBCP, is focused in California, but has a national reach, and has lots of coastal community placements throughout California, and had a clear understanding of coastal communities. In the case of Mosaic, they're also focused in California, but have presence or networks in Colorado and Texas, which I consider to be the most exchangeable populations with California. And CPS, HR Consulting, is also a highly experienced firm, and they run many recruitments across the country. So they represented a more expansive reach option for Council. So really all three firms provide a broad range of options for Council to consider. And that's it for my introduction. So we can go with the, let the firms present.

So does Council have any clarifying questions for Marissa before we get started? I have a comment I'm going to make and then we'll get with the presentations. Anyone? All right, thank you for your research. I think it was pretty thorough. And I'd like to thank all 16 of the firms that contributed, not just the three here today. It's a lot of work to respond to these. But congratulations to the three firms that will be presenting today. We appreciate the time you've invested in preparing what I thought were excellent proposals. And you're going to be joining us by Zoom today. Before we begin, I'd encourage all of us to keep one thought in mind this afternoon. All three of these companies are qualified to conduct a successful recruitment to find our next city administrator. Our task this afternoon is simply to determine which one we, as a council, believe is the best fit for Carmel. As we listen to these presentations, we're not just evaluating their proposals. We're deciding whether we trust the people on the other side of the Zoom screen to best represent Carmel by the sea over the next several months to attract exceptional candidates and help us recruit one of the most important leaders this city will hire. One way to look at it is if we were trying to convince the best city manager in California to leave a great job and come to Carmel, which person and company would you want making that phone call? With that in mind, we have a clear goal of approving a resolution to hire one of these three firms today, and here's how I'd like to conduct today's presentations. Each firm will have 15 minutes for their presentation. Immediately following each presentation, Every council member will have the opportunity to ask one question if they choose. I'd suggest that we each ask the same question of all three firms to maintain consistency, but I'll leave it up to each council member as to what they'd like to ask. We'll reserve council discussion until after we've heard from all three firms. We'll begin with Mosaic Public Partners. Greg Nelson will be representing them today. Welcome, Greg. I'll be giving a two-minute notice so you'll have time to summarize. And the floor is yours, Greg.

Mayor and council, thank you for this opportunity to share some information about our firm and our opportunity to potentially serve you in your city administrator search. Our firm is relatively new, although I'm not new. I've been doing executive search for 11 years now and have been doing city manager searches both in California and across the country that entire time. Our firm's in our fifth year of business, and after I and a partner started it in January of 2022. And we decided to do it and actually chose the name Partners Inc. Because that's how we approach our work. We really view our work as better served in a partnership with our clients and not just simply a service delivery model. We feel that that kind of interaction with our clients, that high-touch interaction where we can deliver high-level service, very responsive, and represent our clients at the highest level provides the best outcomes and the best experience. As a result, we don't spend a penny on advertising. We rely solely on our good work and our reputation. And I think that we would be very excited to represent the city of Carmel in this search engagement. I do recognize the time we have. 15 minutes is not a lot. I want to be brief, but I do want to cover high points on the search effort that you'll probably hear some things that are similar with the other two firms. I just want to highlight them and potentially some differentiators. Each search that we do begins as a listening and learning exercise. We do not come into any community with any preset ideas on how the search should best be executed in that community. We have certainly past practices. We certainly have best practices, but we also understand every client's different and every client's unique. And so we seek first to learn and understand both what the environment is, what the needs are, and what our clients are looking for and candidates. And that honestly is a personal exercise. It's a lot of personal meetings, both with our client, in this case the council, but any stakeholders that you might identify that would be relevant. And for a city administrator search or a city manager search, Stakeholders typically come in three groups, although it can be different, but typically they're going to be stakeholders from the community. They're going to be stakeholders from the city team, the staff, and potentially from your partners, other agencies that you work closely with to get your work done for the city. Through all of those meetings, we then will craft a candidate profile or recruitment brochure that we'll use to market the position and set about outreach and recruiting. We source our candidates in five primary areas, two of which are passive, three of which are active. Passive work, things like advertising and LinkedIn presence, they both are helpful. They're helpful for a lot of reasons, but they don't always generate the best candidates. And as you mentioned earlier, Mayor, in your intro, sometimes it's that personal phone call or personal email or text message. that to get someone's attention and make them aware of an opportunity is what gets the right person engaged. Because oftentimes the very best candidates are not looking. They're busy, they're doing good work where they're at, and we need to get their attention and have a conversation about the opportunity. The other three methods are just that. It is personal outreach to people in our networks, other city managers or potential city managers that we think might be a good match based on what we've learned. It's also calling on those that are in the industry that are not looking, and we know they're not looking, but they're well-connected themselves. And we're really fortunate sometimes they really work sort of as surrogate recruiters for us if we can get them exploring their networks and making recommendations, and we can have those additional opportunities to reach candidates. And then lastly, we have a researcher on our team that's dedicated to help identify candidates in areas that perhaps we've not looked before based on our clients' needs. And so through all of that, we source candidates, we try to generate interest, and that gives us the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations. If selected, I would be the face of your search. Who you're meeting today is who would be representing you in conversations with candidates, with stakeholders, with yourselves, and throughout the process. Once we finish the search process, we do screening interviews, spend time in a call and a video call like this with top prospective candidates. We do a full media workup, make that available to our clients so there's no surprises. You get to see the LexisNexis review of news articles, information on the internet, social media review, just making sure that you know who you're inviting before you decide to invite anyone to the interview process and then we would design an interview process uh with you that accomplishes your needs and honestly that just varies so much from client to client um we would just want to understand what your needs are and design that process with your team and with you We know Carmel is a very highly engaged cities and we're accustomed to working in cities like that. I'm currently doing two searches, one in the city of Beverly Hills, one in the city of Palm Springs. I've done many other past cities with high levels of engagement. Also did the city manager search a couple of years ago for the city of Austin, Texas, which is a million people with a high level of engagement. So we've done searches large and small. And by starting with an open book and listening and learning, we can tailor our approach to meet our clients' needs. I also have familiar working along cities in California. We're based in California. My business partner and I are based in Sacramento and enjoy doing work in California. We have two other recruiters in Texas and one in Colorado, and they help us serve the other part of the country. Most of our work's west of the Mississippi, although we have done work coast to coast. And I do just think I want to take this opportunity to finish my career conversation with you and make more time available for any questions you may have.

Okay. You had about eight minutes left, so maybe we'll give the council people another extra question. I'm going to open it up for questions. I have, I'm going to do a different order for each company. Bob, you want to go first?

Jeff, you're going to be next, just so you know. Thank you. And yeah, we got one question, and then I'll try to do the same question for everybody. I'd love for you to just articulate a little bit more what differentiates you. Essentially, what's your secret sauce? And why would I be more excited about working with you than not necessarily the other two, but others in general? And what is it that I'm going to be most happy about when we're finished with this process?

I think it's, I would say I'd focus that on two things. One is we're a small firm. We're a boutique firm, nine members. That allows us to stay very agile, very highly responsive. You obviously would not be our only client, but you would feel like you're our only client. And second, we focus on three deliverables. We feel in every search effort, we are there to deliver the obvious, which are a diverse selection of highly qualified candidates for you to select from, but also helping you to design a search process that's thoughtful, that's understood and clearly communicated. It doesn't need to be mysterious. There's a lot of anxiety when there's a change of executive, both in the city organization and in the community. And to the degree that we design a process with you and communicate it in a way that it's understood, it helps that. The third deliverable is consulting. After having done hundreds of search engagements, we've learned a few things along the way. what goes well, what doesn't go well, what some pitfalls are, and can help you avoid them.

Thank you.

Sure.

Jeff?

Thank you. Thank you for coming today, Greg. As you know, or as you may not know, the mayor and I are tentatively, or not tentatively, won't be running for reelection. We're three months away from the election and four months away from the installation of a new council. And so we have some pretty concrete deadlines. in terms of our ability to participate in the search. What do you think, roughly 13 weeks from the election and 17 weeks from us, at least the two of us not sitting up here anymore, what do you think of these deadlines? What parts of your schedule do you think might present risks in terms of the time spent on them or how they might balloon out into more difficult tasks? And how would you mitigate the risk of not completing this process in time?

Yeah, thank you for that question. And it's that time of year, I'm doing a city attorney search for another city in the Bay Area that is on a similar track. We're about to open and they have the same goals. I think that, again, we have to work with our clients to design the search process to accomplish your goals. And one option, for example, might be to ship some of the stakeholder engagement to occur during the outreach period and help it to inform the selection process. That would allow us to get the search open more quickly and allow us to do that stakeholder engagement while the search is progressing. Oftentimes, that's a quiet time in the recruitment on your side, and that would keep kind of the conversations going about the search process. and allow that feedback to be available to help inform the council on who you select for interviews and how we craft the interview process and who's involved. It is doable. It's certainly doable, but it is tight, admittedly. Thank you. You're welcome.

Great question, Jeff. Hans.

Yeah, Craig, it's good to meet you. So I think some firms have a pretty standardized approach to stakeholder interviews and to sort of how they develop a candidate profile. You mentioned customization. We have a community that likes to, you know, often get hands on. Can you tell us about a time when a client wanted a more extensive public engagement process? And, you know, how did you make that successful?

Yeah, I'd be happy to. And I'm going to turn back to the Austin, Texas City Manager search that I touched on earlier. Very engaged city, very progressive city, and a city that is accustomed to providing high-level access. And in that search effort, we did a number of things. We used... A lot of tools available. We offered survey instruments for those that could not participate personally and made those available. We had some designated stakeholder groups that we met with. I spent a week, I posted up for a week in City Hall and had focus group meetings over the course of a week and really booked solid every day. hitting different stakeholder groups that wanted to provide input into the process. We also engaged our boards and commissions, department heads, directors, partners, those kind of same three buckets of stakeholders that I discussed earlier. And we use that again. That was also a case where the council is very motivated to get the search underway right away for different reasons. And we did all of this while the search was progressing. So the search was open fairly quickly and we did the stakeholder engagement over the course of the search effort. And I think that. I would also wanna touch on, there's an opportunity with some trade-offs, but there's an opportunity to have stakeholder involvement and engagement in your selection process as well, and that was certainly done there.

All right, thank you. Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Greg, for your participation. So just a little bit of background. So Jeff and I are part of an ad hoc committee to choose an architect for our new police station and public works building. And so we've been going through. We had eight RFPs. We've narrowed it down to four. But what mattered a lot to us and what made the difference in the firms that we moved into the top four is they really seemed to understand Carmel by the Sea and what makes us unique and distinctive. And they clearly wrote that and made references to that. in their proposals. So what I'm getting at is that we are a very distinctive community. We're small with a population roughly around 3,000. It's an artistic community, a historic community, highly scenic and coastal, reinforced with our recent discussion on tourism spending and marketing that we are a tourism-driven economy, yet primarily still residential community in fact on the wall behind us at the dais it emphasizes that we're primarily a residential community with business and commerce second so what I'm getting at is I just want to know that you understand that we're unique and distinctive and we really want that attention in the candidate that you're choosing so I know this doesn't sound like much of a question but if you could just reinforce to us that you understand that and some of your thoughts on that thank you

Sure. And in no way at all to take away from what you just said. But I think every community is unique and every community really needs to be presented in a unique way. And some are the industries they have, some are their size, some of their location. And Carmel's, you know, is a lot of things. You're one square mile, 3,000 people, very unique requirements in your community. city in terms of structure and I know you recently just in the last year or two moved to have Addressing for the first time. There's a lot of things that Carmel is unique about and again as I mentioned before We really need to invest that time at the beginning of the search opportunity to learn and to understand and to be able to present that I think a lot of people in California and beyond and nationally know of Carmel already, but they don't know of Carmel in the way that perhaps you want them to. And we act on your behalf to really be able to sell those selling features. When I meet with stakeholders and with my clients, one of the very first questions I ask each of them is, what are you proud of about your community? What are some things that you really feel should be top of list for us in representing and that's where we get our best fruit in marketing your city or your community to prospective candidates because i know some things about carmel i've been to carmela but i cannot pretend to know your city like you know your city and so with that collective information that we get from you we really use that to market, not only in the marketing materials, but more importantly, in those conversations with candidates.

All right. Okay, it's my turn. I've got three questions here, but I'm going to have to pick one of them because some of them overlapped a little bit. So far, they've been really good questions. I'm going to ask an interesting one. What happens if you go through the process in this first round? and we don't find one that fits the bill in terms of the council. Does that happen?

It does happen. It's uncommon, but it does happen. And it's certainly not the desired outcome, but it is part of our triple guarantee. We do offer a guarantee that has three aspects to it. The one that I think everyone thinks of the first is if the placement doesn't work out, if they're dismissed or if they move on within that first year, we'll come back and repeat the search effort. not charging any new professional service fees to the client, only just actual expenses. But the second aspect of that guarantee is that if we go through the process and we get to a point where you've not found your next city administrator, you don't feel that person's in the candidate pool, then we also go back and repeat the search effort, charging no new additional professional service fees, just actual expenses. And so we have skin in the game, obviously, not just in our reputation, but in helping you to get to the outcome that you want the first time. And then the third part is that we commit that we will never actively recruit a placement. We will certainly can't prevent somebody from applying for a position if they do it on their own, but we're never going to actively recruit them. And we don't have a clock on that. We just feel it's a bad practice and don't do that.

Can you explain that a little more, what you meant by that?

Sure. So let's say we did the search effort for you and we placed a city administrator and another community three years from now has a similar search. And we knew that we placed a great city administrator for you, but we're never going to pick up the phone and ask that person to participate in that next search.

All right. So to be clear, your process, will pretty much in the first round, you're gonna find somebody that you think will be acceptable. So it sounds like the answer you gave was the process just stops and we have to sort of hire you again, but you don't charge. How far will you go before we know we didn't find the right person in that first round? I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but since we're in sort of a hurry, I mean, it could be that that right person doesn't pop up in the next three months.

that happen yeah so mayor that's that's let me back up a little bit and just clarify myself because i might have not been clear um and i'll add to it as well um you don't have to hire us back we would just continue on and do another outreach campaign and start over if needed but also if As we're getting closer to our closing date, if we don't feel like we're getting the right candidates, we're not going to wait till the end and either present candidates that are subpar for the position or kind of call it at that point. We're going to let you know along the way. And that really speaks to the partnership that I mentioned earlier, because I think that If we can have that conversation earlier and find out what is keeping us from getting the candidates that you're looking for, then we can make adjustments. Sometimes it's salary. Sometimes it's a relocation benefit. Sometimes it's the way the position's been marketed. It can be a variety of things, but we would rather find that and solve that before we get to the end.

All right, perfect. So since you had some time left, I'm going to open it up to the council if any of you have another question to ask. We have time left. Hans, do you have one? Go ahead.

Yeah, Greg, I wanted to get to one of the things that strikes me about your business model, and I'm not saying your business model in particular, but everyone in this space, is it's sort of a fixed fee of $30,000, which honestly isn't a ton of money. And so the question is about the degree to which there's what I, not a term of art in the industry, what I would consider sort of like passive recruiting. So people who are applying to based on job posts, advertisements, et cetera, versus active recruiting. And so the question I have for you is for a search like ours, how many potential candidates would you expect to apply? And how many of those would you expect to contact directly? Great.

Yeah, and to your first point, you're correct. I mean, in private sector executive search, there's generally a standard of one-third of salary plus expenses for a search firm fee. And the reality is public agencies typically can't do that. And so there is a space for public agency search firms with a different fee model, and that's why you're seeing what you see. But to your point about... how many candidates may apply. It's really hard to say. Honestly, I don't really get focused on the number. I get focused on the quality. It's quality over quantity. And sometimes, quite frankly, the quantity can get in the way. We sometimes will have positions where you're really flooded with candidates that are not really well aligned with the position that are not well matched, but it still takes time. You still have to interact with them. You still need to review their materials and potentially screen them. And so sometimes it's an impediment to have that kind of high level of numbers. What I would rather focus on is trying to get to a number of about six high quality candidates, four to six high quality candidates for you as our client to consider and evaluate and decide which are the ones that are best for you.

Yeah. And just to know if there, how many candidates would you contact directly as part of the search?

So I don't know if I can answer that yet because we don't know what your scope is. And whether you're looking at state of California focus, national focus, if you want coastal community focus, I don't want to pretend to answer that. But we would craft a search strategy around what your needs are and where you hope to find candidates from. And based on that, we're going to generate a number of candidates on our research list that we will contact. And sometimes that... Number is 50 to 100. Sometimes it's several hundred. It really just depends upon what your needs are.

Jeff, do you want one before we move on? Okay. Anyone else? Go ahead, Allison. Thank you, Mayor. Last one.

Sure. So in your proposal, you mentioned that you use innovative technology, and you may have touched on some of that in your explanation, but if you just wanted to go a little bit more in detail and have us understand that better, if you could explain that, it would be appreciated. Thank you.

Sure. Yeah, one of the benefits of starting a business new is you get to pick how you build it. And so we built our company to be completely paperless and virtual. We're able to work from anywhere and do. And with consultants based all over the country, it's really allowed us to be much more flexible and adaptive and responsive. We also have an executive search platform that, to my knowledge, is not used by any other public agency search firm. It's one that's more geared for boutique private sector executive search firms. It has a lot of advanced features in it that we leverage.

All right. Thank you, Greg. Great job. And we'll be moving on to the next company now. If, Nova, you want to switch, we're going to go to CPSHR Consulting. Teddy Anderson will be representing them today. Good afternoon, Teddy.

Good afternoon. Just turning my camera on here. There we go.

We can hear you. You're nice and clear. And the floor is yours.

I think Debbie was actually going to start off this.

Good afternoon. My name is Debbie Gutman. I am the talent acquisition manager at CPS HR Consulting. And so Teddy and I are kind of going to do a team approach on this presentation. So I'm going to share. We actually have a PowerPoint. Oh, it says I cannot share.

Let me see if I can do it. Nope, no sharing.

I just made Debbie a co-host. Oh, thank you.

Perfect.

Thank you. All right. There we go. Okay. Okay. And again, thank you for your time this afternoon and for considering us for this very important engagement that you are looking for your city administrator. So a little bit about CPSHR. We are a joint powers authority and have been in business for 40 years, but been focusing on recruiting for over 20 years in operations. only the public sector space. So that is, we are a public sector agency. And so by, through our bylaws, we can only work with public sector clients. So just to go through the proposed timeline and kind of our approach, we generally have a 14 to 16 week timeline. And I know we'll probably get to that in some questions about if we can narrow that down, but I'll leave that for later. But this kind of just shows month to month what is happening as we go through the recruitment process. It might be a little hard for you to read, but we can definitely, I'll talk through each of the phases. So phase one, we're defining the ideal candidate and that is establishing a concrete, more of a concrete as much as it can be concrete timeline and communication expectations with council and any stakeholders. We will conduct stakeholder meetings. So whether you, of course the council William be involved, but we would also contact your high level directors. If you've got union involvement, we would be working with them. We can do and have done community engagement. if that needs to take place, but this is where we really learn about exactly what you're looking for in a candidate and what's unique about your city and this engagement and this recruitment. And then we'll draft the ideal candidate profile and any advertising material that you will get to review prior to us going out and posting the position. The second phase is really the aggressive recruiting process. And this is really where the bulk of the work takes place. So we would launch outreach efforts through our professional groups, social media networks, and any leads that we might get. We use LinkedIn Recruiter Pro, which is probably not unique. I'm sure a lot of the recruiting forums also use that. We use a database called Zoom Info where we can reach out to candidates. potential candidates through that and market your position, whether that's a phone call, an email, however we can contact folks and get them to respond. And then CPSHR maintains a very large database of anybody who's done any kind of interaction with us. So whether that's through a recruitment or through training, or they've just said, hey, we're interested in hearing about positions that you are recruiting for. And so we will send the the opportunity out to them and hopefully generate some interest in that. Then phase two will be screening applications as they come in using that ideal candidate profile and narrowing the candidates down from there. We'll continue to engage candidates on an ongoing basis because once they've showed interest, we wouldn't want to lose them if they're good candidates. And then at the end of phase two, we're going to present a short list of recommended semifinalists to you as the council to consider and we'll go through their qualifications. We do phone screening with these candidates, very involved. So we make sure that we have vetted those candidates before they get presented to you. And we will just present those top level candidates that we feel meet your ideal candidate profile. And then phase three, the selection process, I'm gonna let Teddy take over.

Sure, thank you. Thank you, Mayor Partem and Council, for having us. Just a little bit about who I am. I've been in government, local government, for about 30 years. I started out as a police officer back in 1995 and then transitioned to HR as a civilian in the early 2000s. And I've been either an HR manager over recruiting, comp and class, or a consultant with executive recruiting and other projects since then. So phase three is really about the selection process. And some of these things we'll discuss if we're selected to be awarded. We'll do that in the kickoff meeting. We talk about what to expect so we can start working on some of these things because the logistics of the selection process is often a place that we get slowed down a bit. So this is when we decide as a group, what is that going to look like? Is it one interview? Is it two interviews? Are they both in-person interviews? Are there going to be outside stakeholders involved in the panel? And then we will be on site to facilitate those interviews as well. Once a selection has been made after the interview process, we will do reference checks, obviously. There are occasions when we can do reference checks before a selection's been made, a final selection's been made. Maybe it's the top three. As long as they're on board with that, we usually do references ahead of time, and then you'll have that information. Once that selection has been made, we're going to obviously talk through an offer and we can help with that negotiation process as well. We'll have direction from you as to what those parameters are. long before this phase. And then we have a substantial background check. One thing on the background checks, too, is because nobody likes surprises, before we propose that shortlist to you, we are going to do a preliminary Google search, social media check, anything for articles so that we're not surprised. And then we'll have that in advance. But then once the selection's been made, there will be a substantial background check that we do before that final offer has been made. Just to go a little bit about our national reach, we have recruiters all over the country. We have touched many, many states in terms of our business. And it really starts with knowing what you're looking for because we do have some clients that only want us to work out of California. Other clients want a national search. So we are going to use all those tools to make sure we touch as many candidates as possible throughout the country. One thing, too, is out-of-state candidates can be tricky because as we start vetting them, we do want to know what their commitment level is. It's not just about changing jobs that are down the street. They're going to have to relocate. And so there's a lot of really good questions we ask and really want to make sure they've done their due diligence. Have they started their research? Have they started looking online for housing or schools, if that's appropriate? Whatever it is so that they are making meaningful steps to show us and have the confidence that they are going to move if selected. And then part of the kickoff conversation too is getting some of those parameters around salary and relocation parameters. anyone who's applying for a city administrator is going to ask about RELO if it's available. And so having that as an option, if possible, is always great, but those things will be worked out throughout, and then we can negotiate part of that as well. I think one thing that's California in terms of market is budget issues. Certainly it's statewide, it's worldwide, but especially in California right now, when we're thinking of it from a recruiting perspective is... you know, how to get the best candidate for you and talent within your budget. And sometimes those are two opposing forces, but I think that's what makes it very complicated, but also very interesting right now in the California job market is that people are possibly interested in leaving their safety net, but it's going to take something very enticing to do that. And then working within your budget to do that. We do have a 95% placement rate, which is fabulous. And part of that we attribute to just having a lot of candidates. We have a database that collects any candidate that's applied, or if they've sent us their materials, we can load it up. And then after each search, no matter whether candidates were discussed or interviewed or not, they also go into this database. So we are touching as many people as possible. I think the last number I heard there was over... almost 200,000 people in there. Now, they're not all going to be quality city administrator candidates, but a lot of them, too, have also moved in their career, or they may know people that would be a great fit. So we use all the networking we can and each other to talk through what would be the best fit for both you and the candidate. Obviously, we have a lot of experience with top management. We, you know, we like to be high touch. We like to be in person. We like to facilitate those conversations and take as much load off as possible. Most of the time that works as long as we have those logistics in place ahead of time. And questions.

Thank you for that presentation. We appreciate it. And for your proposal as well, it was very thorough. Okay, we're going to open up for questions. You still had four minutes left approximately, so we can ask more than one question. Jeff, why don't you get started this time?

Sure, I'd like to ask my alternate question rather than my standard question. Maybe we can come back to that. You guys, I noticed, are a joint powers authority, so you are a government body. Can you talk about a couple of things? First, are you subject to the Public Records Act request? And what does it mean that the documents that you might prepare for us are subject to or not subject to the Public Records Act request? Has that ever come up before? And the second thing is, What do you think the advantages and disadvantages are of being basically a government body when it comes to serving clients as us? That is really sort of a fascinating thing, fascinating idea for me, and I'd like to hear you talk about it a little bit. Thank you.

Sure. Yeah, so I can start. Yes, we are subject to the Public Records Request Act. And our recruiters definitely keep that in mind when we're doing our documentation. So, we make sure that everything is very thorough. And, you know, keeping in mind that it could be, you know, it's public record, anything that we are documenting and keeping for our clients. So that's something that we do keep in mind. I do think, you know, us being a public agency, we have all of our contacts are public agencies. So I do think that that's an advantage for us because we just have a vast number of contacts and they all are in the public space.

If I can, let me go back, if I may. Yeah, go ahead. Back to sort of the first answer. I'm concerned with the privacy of people. So let's say we have four candidates that apply to us and so they work through your process and they submit documents to you. Are the documents that they give you or the work that you do, like vetting them or talking to us about them, are those documents subject to the Public Records Act? Do they do they know that like sometimes we end up with in situation? You know, I would know the answers but I would imagine that we'll have people applying for the job that don't really want their current employer to know that they're applying for the job and so if the city manager of You know Podunkville, California applies applies to us And the mayor of Podunkville, California figures this out. Can he submit a public records act to you? and and figure out what's going on within his own agency or her own agency?

You want to take that, Debbie? Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sure. I mean, I think that with... One of the things that we do with our candidates is when we talk to them, I tell them, listen, we are a JPA and everything is going to be subject to open records and just assume that everything is. And that way we're better protected. We also, I mean, of course, they're thinking about that, especially in this position as to how they're going to be able to keep it at least as secret as possible until they're ready to tell their employer, because we don't want Nobody wants to lose the candidate. And of course, I usually ask them, have you told your employer? Do they know you're looking? And once it gets to a point where there's a panel, even if... you know, they're okay about knowing, you know, people knowing, I always give them a heads up and say, you know, it's no longer in our circle. It has now gone to the panel, the council, and we can't guarantee that it's not going to get out. So I see them as two separate things that could directly, you know, impact, but they're two separate issues that certainly candidates have.

Thank you. Interesting question.

um let's see alessandra you go next please thank you mayor uh thank you teddy and debbie um i just wanted to ask you heard the question that um i asked greg about um understanding carmel if you could just nod okay so i won't repeat it but just taking off from that point um i was just a bit concerned when i went through the cities that you had worked with because i couldn't really find anything that would be comparable to carmel not only coastal but just size wise i mean like Anaheim, Alameda, Wichita, Kansas, Sacramento, Oklahoma City, Orange, Carbondale, Illinois. Those are clearly, there's no comparisons there. The California cities I could find were Farmersville, Tulare, Simi Valley, and Ventura. But even that population of Simi Valley is 124,000. So if you could just sort of reassure us or let us know that you would be able to find somebody that works with Carmel and you would be comfortable enough finding a fit that is for a smaller community with all the qualities and characteristics I described in my question to Greg, thank you.

Yes, absolutely. We do work with cities of all sizes and even special districts that are very, very small. And so we do have the full gamut, not just the larger cities and counties, but also the smaller agencies that we work with on a regular basis. And so, yes, like you described, Carmel, it's being, it's very unique and, you know, although all cities are, but Carmel in particular, you know, because of the tourism that it attracts to that community and then the community engagement that I understand everybody and residents are very involved in the community, probably because they love it so much and so they want to have input and say, especially at the city administrator level, which is very respectable and also it's a great thing, right, to have that community involved as much as you do. So I'm confident in the contacts that we have and the ability to find a placement that really meets the needs of your city.

Thanks, Debbie. I'm going to have to interrupt for a second. Our city attorney has his hand raised. Brian, is that something you need to do immediately? If you want to.

Well, I guess that's a relative term. I did want to comment on the Public Records Act. If you want to hear it for a minute.

We'll stop the timer. We don't really have a timer, but we'll stop the questions right now and we'll let you have your comment. Go ahead.

I think there are many exceptions in the Public Records Act to documents as to whether they even though they may be a public record might be exempt from production. One of those exceptions is the personnel exception. So what would have to happen is we'd have to look at the records on a on a document by document basis to see which ones would be exempt and which ones would have to be produced. And I'm certain that the CPS has legal counsel that they would be able to consult with if they got those questions. Absolutely. That's all I have, Mayor.

All right, perfect. Thanks for breaking in there. Alessandra, did she get your question?

Yes, thank you.

Good. I'm going to go to Hans next.

Yes, as you heard in my first question to the last group, We have a really engaged community. They're sharp and they want to be involved. And so my question is, can you tell us about a time when you had a client that wanted to have a more extensive public engagement process? And how did you adapt? How did you make that successful?

I think that we actually get that more often than you would think. And so we do have kind of a process for that. We can develop a survey for folks to use and we can put it out in all languages, multiple languages. We have a QR code that they can scan and get into that. But we will also conduct in-person meetings We'll let the community know when we're gonna be there and the times that we would like to hear from them about what they're looking for in a new city administrator. And we will conduct those meetings both in person and virtually because sometimes it's easier for folks just to do it on a virtual basis. It sounds like you have a very engaged community, so I can imagine that they would like to do the in-person piece of it to be able to just sit down with whoever is selected to fill the role and just give input on what they're looking for in a new city administrator. We, you know, we can do that. You know, we usually do it at least a couple of times in person and then some virtual also. But then we do also get folks to do a survey, too.

And I might just add, you know, when I was co... managing or supporting City of Sacramento and City of Wichita, which are huge cities, and there was an expectation that the community would be involved. But I've experienced, whether it's a small organization or a large one, that knowing who you want to have involved is not easy. There's going to be people left out. You're going to have to manage those expectations. I think including them as much as possible without impeding the process or um without you know doing it um just for the sake and i know that sometimes we we end up we we want to do that too but um it can be too much um and we just find a way to say okay um instead of that so that we can keep moving and we can get these candidates on board how about we do the survey instead or we run things simultaneously so there's lots of ways to make it more efficient um but you know at the end of the day you're the client so if you want five community or town halls, we're going to do our best to help you with that. We may caution you on that, but we will do it because you are the client. You know your community better than we do.

All right. You good, Hans? All right. Bob, you're next.

I'll stick with my same question on special sauce. What differentiates you from others? What is it about you that when I think back on a successful recruitment, I'll say, well, we hired those people and I'm glad we did because of X.

Um, so I think the special part of the special sauce is that we are a public agency. And so we do understand public agencies, like I've, like I've already said, um, but we are here to serve our clients. So we, you know, are, although we'll give advice and recommendations, um, ultimately we want to do what's right by the client. So we are very flexible in our process and, you know, whatever we can do that will make it easier and better for you with an outcome that you're, you know, confident in is what we strive to do. constantly communicating, not only with the stakeholders, but also with our candidates, because you want to keep candidates involved. Things move so quickly these days that you want to make sure that they know what's happening and keep that communication going. And so I think that's part of what has us stand out. And then our national reach, we definitely have that national presence at this point.

And I would just add that because we are more of a full-service consulting firm, a lot of the clients that we've had have used different resources from the agency. I think that because we do share information and we are more team-oriented, we do have more information about our clients, whether they've gone through an organizational strategy project or something else. So I do think that the full... I wouldn't say one-stop shop necessarily. I think that... belittles a little bit, but I think we're more well-rounded for sure.

Thank you. All right. So I'm going to ask a similar question to my last round, just a little differently. You had a 95% success number on there. What does the 5% look like? How does that happen and where does the city end up in that case?

So, for the placement piece, that means we, you know, successful in finding a candidate for the client. There are times when we have to extend, reopen, go out again, we call it. And that's included in that 95%. I can tell you an experience I had where I was working with a client and, you know, We were unsuccessful. We had a lot of candidates drop out. The process was delayed. And then a lot of people changed within the organization that were leading it. And they had a different relationship with a different firm. And so in that case, you know, I even said, you know, I understand if you want to go with a different firm for the second search because of that relationship. And you just can't let your ego get in the way of that because you do want what's best for the clients. But there are times when it's either the wrong timing or something changes within the organization or they decide they're going to try something different. It happens to everyone. So there's probably some other reasons in there, but that's usually the two that I'm aware of.

All right, I'm gonna look at Jeff. Jeff, why don't you ask the question you asked before to piggyback on that?

Sure, thanks Dale. So Teddy, as you know, the election season is coming up and at least two of us are not gonna be on the dais come some point in early December. And so we have here some pretty concrete deadlines. The last one, which is at the beginning of December, is a concrete legal deadline, like we won't have the legal authority to enter into a contract at that point if we've gone through a whole process. And the earlier one, sort of on election day, starts to get into the legitimacy of a couple of us being up here and making this decision. And I'll speak for myself. I understand where I am and all that, and that's all good. But the deadlines, especially that first one, are pretty firm. And I wondered if, you know, you were talking to the mayor just a minute ago about sort of failed processes. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you think of our schedule and what parts of your process you think might have the potential to balloon out and present some risk and how you as a firm might mitigate the risk involved in that process. And I don't know if it's I don't know if I'm talking to Teddy, but I don't know if Debbie is the right person to answer the question.

That's fine. So either one of us. So I do think that we get asked a lot to expedite the process. We do a proposal like this. We say it generally takes 14 to 16 weeks and then inevitably we're going to be asked to shorten it for reasons such as this or any others. And so there are opportunities in different phases to streamline, to expedite. I think the critical pieces that I would say to try to keep to the timeline are the outreach recruitment part. That's four weeks. When you want candidates that are passive and they're having to make these decisions, we want to give them as much time. as possible, but also sometimes it takes two or three times to talk to them about the opportunity. It's just such an investment and I also think that's really where we get that traction. There's up front when we're talking about logistics around approvals, that's usually where things in your words balloon out is when we're waiting for documents back and forth to post. Additionally, when you do add the community engagement piece, whether it's on the front end or the back end, meaning during the selection process, that also is an opportunity to where it can get delayed. So knowing that, going into it, tightening up where we can. We're going to have communication every week about the candidate pool. There could be an opportunity there to shorten it just because it's a great pool already. A lot of candidates will wait until the last minute, but that... Again, if it's shorter, we won't have as much time to do that outreach. So we understand the timeline. We will say we will do everything we can to make it. Understanding certainly the politics here because that's not unusual for us.

Thank you. All right. Thank you, Teddy. Anybody have one last question before we move on? Seeing none, we'll move on. Thank you so much. That was excellent. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Nice to meet you.

You too. Thank you.

So we're going to move on to presentation three. It's WBCP. And we're going to have Lauren Gerson-Green is going to be representing them today. Hello, Lauren.

Hello, Mayor and council members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you.

We can hear you and we can see you. So that's a good thing. So thanks for being here today. We're ready for your presentation. And again, you've got 15 minutes. If you don't use it all, we'll ask you some more questions. So however it happens, you're going to get your time. So take it away.

Thank you very much. And Nova, I do have a presentation to share on screen. Would it be all right for me to do that?

Yes. Since I made you co-host, you should be able to share your screen.

Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Hopefully you can all see.

We can see it. It's nice full screen.

Well, I am going to just spend a few minutes talking about our firm and our origins, and then I will introduce our recruiters a little bit, introduce myself, and sort of dive into some details. So we are WBCP. We have been recruiting for 22 years now. We are in 13 states and Washington, D.C. However, we still do, I would say, probably about 70% of our business in the state of California. And we work pretty much exclusively in public sector. We serve cities, counties. We serve nonprofits a little bit as well, but we work with GPAs and special districts as well quite a bit. And so a lot of experience in the California market in public sector specifically. As I mentioned, we've been in business for 22 years. We have completed over 1,600 searches during that time. That's usually about over 250 a year. We have a team of three core recruiters, and we stayed small for a number of years. We're still a boutique firm, Up until 2020, it was a team of three, and we grew quite a bit over the last few years. And though we still have our core team of recruiters, we have a support staff that brings us up to a little bit over 20 employees. We are 100% woman-built, owned, and operated with the same core executive team that started and built the business. We are also a registered small business. I will go into, I'll stay, I'll keep it really brief about myself. I want to also introduce two of our senior executive recruiters, including our owner, who unfortunately was not able to be here today because she's in interviews with another council. and very much wanted to be here. So I'll represent her a little bit as well. So my name is Lauren Gerson-Green. I joined WBCP in 2023. Prior to that, I did about 10 years worth of career services work in the private sector, workforce development, and worked on a platform that is used by nonprofits and some government organizations to for workforce development. And our founder, oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to talk about Terry first. Terry is one of our senior executive recruiters. She retired in 2023 from the county of Santa Barbara as their assistant county executive. Before that, she spent 15 years with the city of Santa Clarita. She brings experience in a number of public sector areas from health and human services, crisis communications, emergency management. She was a parks director. So she comes with a lot of public sector experience and has been recruiting with WBCP since she retired in 2023. So unfortunately, as I mentioned, Terry's also out of the country, so neither of them were able to be here today, but you would be able to work with any one of us. Any one of us would be happy to lead the recruitment for you. And I also will mention that we're a highly collaborative team. So we'll often work together. For instance, I'll probably mention the City of Malibu City Manager recruitment that we did recently. Terry led that recruitment, but we partnered and I worked on that recruitment as well. So there's a lot of collaboration amongst our team. And our founder and president, Wendy Brown, 20 plus years in marketing, advertising, and recruited. She was in private sector communications and marketing before she joined the County of Orange, which is where she started her public sector career. She worked in their HR, she trained recruiters and did executive search across the agency before she started WBCP and started working for clients across California. Um, we have locations, office locations, uh, all over the country. We are headquartered and where I am is in our Southern Oregon office, but we also have, uh, an office in San Jose and our founder, Wendy pretty much splits her time there in the San Jose office. We, uh, have folks working out of Gilroy, Los Angeles area, Roseville, Santa Barbara, that's Terry, um, as well as offices elsewhere around the country. This is just kind of a smattering of the clients that we've worked with. You can see, as I mentioned, there's a huge contingent of those folks that are in California. And I'll just click through this quickly. So a little bit diving into our process. The first thing that we do in a process after we've met with you all is a comprehensive engagement strategy. I have heard mentioned that you would like to incorporate a robust community engagement strategy, which I think is very often the case with city manager recruitments and something that we're very experienced at doing. So part of what we do in the early stage is really listening and hearing what it is that you'd like to incorporate, who those stakeholders are, and how we can best reach them. So we're going to be crafting in partnership with you a very robust engagement strategy that would typically involve in-person and virtual town hall meetings, individual meetings or group meetings with stakeholders, as well as we almost always recommend a public survey or a community survey for city manager recruitments. It's a great way to reach folks that don't want to show up to a meeting but still have something to say. So we use SurveyMonkey for that, and we can put out a survey with a wide reach that way. We also do craft a comprehensive advertising campaign. Our outreach to candidates through a variety of different tools is our most powerful tool to reach candidates, but we do find that a robust and... Customized advertising strategy can be very helpful. We use, I think somebody else mentioned earlier that they use Zoom Info. We do as well. That's an AI platform that scrapes contact information. It's gotten harder and harder in the last few years to get a hold of contact information for folks, and so reaching candidates has become increasingly difficult. ZoomInfo is a tool that allows us to do that really efficiently. So while we are LinkedIn recruiters and we do use LinkedIn Recruiter, and that is one of the best ways to find ideal candidates, it's not the ideal way to reach them. So we combine our technology tools to be able to really reliably reach those top applicants. And then one thing that's kind of unique about us is that we have a centralized marketing and communications team and a centralized talent acquisition team. So while you'll be partnering closely with a recruiter and that person will be your main point of contact and available to you all the time and communicating very closely, there will also be an entire team of four or five marketing folks behind them that are going to be helping to put together that ad strategy, that are going to be posting on niche social media groups, that are going to be sending that outreach wide, and there will be you know, four or five folks on our talent acquisition team that are making phone calls and sending emails the whole time. So while the recruiter is doing outreach, especially that sort of high value outreach to those potential top applicants, there are a number of folks making those phone calls and sending those emails. And we do that the entire time that the recruitment is posted. So we typically do about a one month posting period. We're not sitting on our laurels at any point. That is all active time. So I'm going to go through this very quickly. Our process is, you know, as I mentioned, stakeholder engagement before we open the recruitment and additional stakeholder engagement can be done during the recruitment during the open period for the recruitment. We develop an ideal candidate profile based on a competency system. We actually work with Polaris. which is the competency modeling system that's used by Nike and Disney, and we've recently patented a public sector version. So we put together the ideal candidate profile, a strategic marketing campaign, as I mentioned, and then Our candidate screening involves Zoom screens with top applicants. We're typically looking for about 20% of the applicant pool, if the pool is really healthy, to be able to engage directly with about 20% of those top folks. And from there, put together a shortlist presentation of ideal top applicants for you to choose from. One thing that our HR partners and staff love about us is that we are extremely supportive and high touch with our partners. And so we will do everything. We'll coordinate every aspect of the recruitment that you will allow us to and would like us to. We will coordinate your panels. We will facilitate every aspect of the process. We will secure everybody's calendars. We will go out and find you panelists if you need external panelists. We develop a robust set of interview questions that are customized based on candidates and based on the competencies and then take you through that interview process the whole time. And then we include background and reference processes as part of our included expenses in our contract. We also do offer a investigative background check as something additional if that's something you'd like to consider as well. Our timeline is highly adaptable to our clients' needs, so we generally take about eight to 12 weeks to recruit from the time that a recruitment opens. We can certainly condense that, though. I have heard that because of your upcoming elections that there is some impetus to shorten the recruiting period, and that's something that we can do in a number of different ways. It takes some consultation. There are certain things that we don't want to lose, and we never want to compromise the integrity of a recruitment and the possibility of getting you the best results. But there are definitely aspects of the recruitment that we can tighten up, and I can speak more to that in questions as well. One thing that's unique and important about us, I think one of the things that kind of makes our secret sauce is that we are excellent brand ambassadors. And I think that kind of comes out in two ways. We take really seriously our role as representatives of your organization when we partner with you. So we're very high touch with candidates so that they're having the kind of experience through the process that reflects you as an employer of choice. And we bring really strong marketing communications focus to the work that we do. So that the way that we market your organization and the role reflects what's great and unique about your community. Because candidates aren't just applying for a job. They're looking for a community where they're going to settle down and spend their time, raise their kids, potentially retire. And so we want to make sure that our materials and communications with candidates are reflecting the character of your community so that we can get folks interested based on that. So I have a few examples here of the marketing materials that we put out because I do think they are something that differentiates us from other firms that you may be looking at. We're really telling the story of your organization, the colors, the branding, everything about the look of the materials is going to be based on your organization. So I'm going to click through these pretty quickly, but I'm happy to also send over examples. Very different depending on the organization that we're recruiting for and really based on your needs and strategy. So throughout the recruitment process, we're very high touch with you, the client. We are sending weekly updates about the applicant pool and we're communicating constantly with your team about logistics. When we bring a short list of candidates, there's a number of other tools and bits of information that we bring forward that are gonna help you understand the recruitment process and how to move forward. And I'll share a couple of those on screen in some next slides. Let's see. So this is an example of a survey report. So after we've done a community survey, we're going to provide you with, you know, we ask, this is competency-based. As I mentioned, we work with Polaris. And so we're asking folks to identify the top competencies that they'd like to see in their next city administrator. And then you're going to see we give folks the opportunity to make comments and to provide additional feedback. We're going to summarize the findings for you in a report. This is a talent acquisition summary that we provide you at our shortlist meeting. This is so that you can see what our efforts have yielded. This is how many folks we were able to engage in a variety of ways. This is... Most importantly, I think we give feedback from the market. And if there's any feedback that we think is affecting the effectiveness of the recruitment, you're going to know ahead of time. We're not going to get to a shortlist meeting and say, we weren't able to find you with the great candidates because of X, Y, Z. That's going to be something that we address with you while we still have time to pivot. But at the end of the recruitment process, you are also going to get some market data from us about the folks that weren't interested. This is why. This is what they said would have gotten them interested. This is useful information for you for future recruitments as well. This is an example of a candidate summary that we would put together. This has information about the candidate that's mostly gleaned from our Zoom sessions with them for pre-screening and also snapshots of their resumes. So we're going to provide you with these useful insights and then take you through them in our meetings. This is an example of an EEO report that we would present as well. When we go through interviews, whether it's just counsel involved in interviews or whether you feel like you want to involve additional panels, sometimes there's a community panel that you want to involve. No matter how you conduct those interviews, we are going to collect feedback from panels through the interview process. with the aim of making sure that we can share with you real insights about how to move forward to the next part of the process. So in an initial first interview round, that feedback, either from your own interviews with candidates or from an additional panel's interview with candidates, is going to tell you how you want to move forward, what kinds of questions you want to explore further in a next interview, and we're consulting with you and working through that process with you in real time. And then our background and references are conducted by a retired police chief and detective that we've been working with for a number of years. He conducts 20 to 30 minute interviews with each reference. That is, we usually collect what we call 360 references. So that usually includes a couple of supervisors, a couple of peers, a couple of direct reports to give you a really well-rounded sense of the candidate from a variety of angles. And as I mentioned, we can also include additional investigative background checks as part of that conducted by the same consultant.

You're on your last two minutes, just so you know.

Excellent. This is my last slide. So just to sum up, some of the reasons that I think we would be an excellent partner for you, we have a vast candidate network with tens of thousands of contacts. Our candidates and our HR teams love working with us, and we get excellent feedback from them about the experience that we create. We work with a centralized marketing and sourcing team so that you're not just getting the benefit of the time and effort from the recruiter that you're working with, but you have our whole team behind you. We are also, I didn't really talk about this, but we are a single awardee of the National Association of Counties Public Promise Procurement Program. I'm so sorry. And so we're able to contract directly through them. I can talk more about that if you're curious. And then we're also excellent consultants and culture cultivators. So we're not just partnering with you on an executive recruitment. We're available to you as your HR consultant for anything touching this recruitment and anything touching candidate onboarding. All right. And lastly, we bring excellent candidates. And that is it. So I'm happy to take your questions.

was a lot of information in 15 minutes. Thank you, Lauren. Yes.

I apologize. I know I went a little fast.

That's okay. I do the same thing once in a while. So I'm going to start with Jeff.

Hi, Lauren. Thank you for coming today. You spoke about this a little bit. I'm one of the council members that's not running for reelection, and so we have a pretty limited time frame in which to sort of sign on the dotted line. Could you talk a little bit about, I've asked sort of the same question to everybody, could you talk a little bit about our deadlines, what you think of them, and where you think the potential risks are in your schedule, and what we might do to mitigate those risks?

Absolutely. It is a little bit of a tight timeline. I don't actually think it's that time tight. We just did recently. We just did a superintendent recruitment in seven weeks. We've done city manager recruitments in eight weeks. I think really it's about partially it's about keeping the early part of the timeline really tight. Oftentimes things like. solidifying the contract, identifying a time that we can come meet you again for a kickoff meeting. Those are the things that often can take time because we are so high touch with clients and partially because each recruiter, I didn't mention this either, but each recruiter has a project manager that works with them exclusively in full-time and is staying on top of all those logistics and working directly with our staff partners. And so we don't allow you know, any barriers that we can possibly mitigate to get in the way of the timeline in that early stage. We are staying very communicative. And we're pushing those meetings and those deadlines so that we can make sure that we're as effective for you as possible. I also do think that it's possible to do some of the stakeholder and community engagement once the recruitment is open. I just did that actually with City of Berkeley. Very different community, but similar in that it's a very, very engaged constituency with a lot of expectation of community involvement. And we were able to push a pretty aggressive timeline while still engaging folks in all of the ways that we wanted to. We did an open community meeting that was hybrid, virtual, and in person. We did a survey. We did a council meeting where we allowed folks to come and bring public comment. I did a lot of individual engagement meetings. I did an engagement meeting with their police accountability board. This is for a director of police accountability, so. little different but it's definitely possible to do that and ultimately the interview process one thing that we sometimes recommend is conducting your interviews on back-to-back days in person so that eliminates some of the time that you would normally have kind of ballooning out in the interview process the selection part of the process can make that go a lot faster.

Thank you. Thanks Jeff. Alessandra?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Lauren, so much for your presentation. Just wanted to follow up. You heard my earlier question that I asked to Greg and Debbie and Teddy about understanding Carmel and its uniqueness, correct? Okay. So just to also follow up on that, I do see that you have a lot of cities, but I was just concerned that some of them aren't quite our size. And, you know, for example, there's Milpitas, Oxnard, California, Petaluma, Phoenix, Arizona, Santa Maria, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Tillamook, Oregon, Ventura, Portola Valley, Truckee, Rogue River, and other cities in Oregon. And while some of them might be small, they are diverse. different it's not that same kind of coastal tourism with the artistic and historic background that Carmel has so once again can you just reassure us and reinforce that you do understand what makes us a unique community and you would be able to find us a candidate that would work well with us thank you absolutely and thank you for the question I think first of all we I would almost say that we specialize in working with small cities and towns and while in

Each jurisdiction is different. And I know Carmel is very unique. I also think working with small communities has made us real experts in getting to know a community because oftentimes with small communities, it is very high touch. There are unique things about the community that the residents feel very passionate about and the community feels very passionate about. And it's really, you know, you are bringing on an administrator, you are bringing on a city manager, but you're also bringing on a member of the community. that has to be able to build trust with folks. And so I think that's been the case with a number of small cities that we've worked with. And I also think we have a lot of experience working with coastal communities. We just worked with city of Malibu, we worked with city of Santa Monica, which I understand is much bigger, much different issues. But I think a lot of the kind of things that come up, like wanting to preserve the character of a community, the pressures of development, And those, those kinds of issues come up a lot in coastal communities and we're very familiar with those. And so I would just say we are, our highest priority at the outset of a recruitment is learning a community and an organization and we're excellent listeners and excellent consultants. And so I think, you know, I could sit here and say that, you know, the character of your community, the fact that, you know, it's there's, you know, there's no stoplights in most of the city and it's, Like, I could say that we've recruited in communities that are similar, and we have. I just did a recruitment for City of Dunsmuir, which has no stoplights in the entire city, and it's 1,700 residents. I could say those things, but really what it is is we're going to learn your community because that's the only way that we can effectively engage with your constituency, and it's the only way that we can find you a true match of a candidate. Thank you.

I think Alessandra could give you a run for your money in terms of speaking fast and clearly. I love it.

Thank you for going in clearly. I appreciate that.

You're both incredible. All right, I'm going to go to Hans next.

Yeah, thank you, Lauren. So same question I asked other folks. Again, we have a very engaged community. And the question is, can you tell us about a time when a client wanted a more extensive public engagement process? What did that look like and how did you make it successful?

Absolutely. I think... This may have also been said earlier, but I think it's more often than not that clients want a robust engagement strategy. And frankly, we always recommend as robust an engagement strategy as a recruitment really can bear because particularly with a position that's so public facing and so critical to your organization, like your city administrator, it's really important that there's buy-in from your stakeholders and from your community at large. someone is not going to be successful in the role if there isn't that buy-in. And so we always recommend a robust stakeholder engagement strategy. I would say one instance where we pivoted to be able to accommodate some additional needs, whereas while recently working with the city of Berkeley, I tailored our community meeting strategy to really be more conducive to the type of collaborative engagement they were looking for. So we often do like a town hall style community engagement meeting where we'll facilitate and members of your council who'd like to participate and like to be there. Sometimes council likes to kind of run it and have us there to facilitate in the background. Sometimes council wants us to take the lead. Either is fine, but we usually conduct kind of town hall style meetings. And recently for the city of Berkeley, we designed a process instead of That was particularly complex because it was hybrid in its format, which I don't know that I would necessarily do again. I might recommend two separate meetings. But we did an engagement process for that meeting that involved breakout sessions and folks sitting down at roundtables and in smaller groups and brainstorming ideal candidate and then coming back together and sharing in a larger group. And that created a really interesting discussion dynamic that I think that they were looking for. and a richer type of engagement. And so we adapted our process to be able to do that. It involves a couple of more facilitators. It involved doing things a little bit differently logistically, but I think that was a really rewarding and the community got to participate in a way that was uniquely kind of perfect for them.

Thank you. That's a very helpful example.

Okay, Bob.

Lauren, thanks very much. You already really kind of went after the special sauce Thing but you your answer was a lot of special sauces So I'll give you the same challenge. Can you can you boil that down to one? And then I actually have I do have one other question. It wasn't as clear to me from this presentation or the proposal who would be the face of WBCP for our recruitment process Thanks.

Absolutely Yes, absolutely. So I I'm going to answer the second piece first so that I can think about which special sauce I would boil things down to give me a moment. Um, but in terms of who would be the face, uh, it really, it could be either Terry or Wendy, whatever would be your preference. So Wendy is our, is our founder. Terry's got 40 years in public sector. Both of them are, um, you know, excellent, excellent recruiters and, and really whoever you work with, not that it's, I don't want to suggest by any means that it's not important who you work with, but I do want to stress our team is so heavily collaborative and we rely on, you know, our model is very centralized in terms of the different pieces of the recruitment that, you know, whether you work with Terry or with Wendy, which is entirely up to you, I think you're getting a lot of the same thing. We've worked really hard to make sure that our process is, is strong no matter who is the face of the recruitment. And we've designed a process through a lot of thought and trial and error that I think stands no matter who is leading the recruitment for you. But the short answer would be it could be either. It's up to you. Both would be available quickly to start for you. And then to answer kind of what I would boil our secret sauce down to, I think I mean, there are strategies that I think are unique to us, but at the end of the day, the reason that we've worked so hard to develop those strategies is our dedication to partnership with our clients. Our motto at WBCP is that we serve people who serve people. We're very mission oriented and working with public sector has always been our core and our mission. And we feel that the best way that we can represent you is as an extension of your organization. And so That's part of why we're so high touch. It's part of why we're available to you. I'm on the phone with clients at 10 o'clock at night sometimes. We're available to you as a partner all the time for whatever you need. And I think that's our secret sauce.

Thank you, Lauren. All right. I'm going to ask a different question this time. What's the biggest challenge that we're going to have finding the best city administrator for our city? And what's the biggest opportunity that you're going to be able to use for Carmel? Knowing what you know right now.

That's a great question.

We lost you.

Oh, can you still hear me?

Oh, you're back. Yeah. Okay.

That's a great question. I think, well, and I think if we were to be fortunate enough to work with you, that answer may change as we learn more about the recruitment. But I think one thing I would identify as a challenge, and I meant to bring this up when we were talking about timeline, but so the challenge of the shortened timeline to recruit before your election, it's not so much the timeline itself that's a challenge, but what I would flag and identify for you is the I have seen before candidates present with a little bit of anxiety and hesitation around coming into a process where there could be a flipped council that they're answering to when they come on board. That is something that I have seen discourage candidates before. And so there are actually a number of ways to mitigate that. And we could help you navigate through those things. There are contract adjustments that you can make that help provide candidates a little bit more security. There's a number of things that you can do that we can help consult on. And it's also about the way that we present it. We're going to learn about your community dynamics, and we're going to learn from you so that we can best represent why candidates shouldn't be nervous about that. Or if they should be nervous about it, again, we're going to consult with you and try to figure out ways that you can mitigate that risk. But I think that's a potential challenge that I see with this recruitment that we would be prepared to tackle.

And the best opportunity would

what's the high point that you're going to be telling people yes absolutely well I think the best opportunity for I think for Carmel the best opportunity is just that you have such an attractive community for someone to be in and I know because I work in the Monterey area a lot I work with a couple clients frequently there and I always try to I go out of my way the opposite direction to always spend a little bit of time in Carmel because your city is so beautiful and I think Location is a big factor for folks because city managers are often thinking about the community. Unfortunately, city manager tenures have really declined in the last few years. It's just the reality. ICMA's average is now, I think, between three and four years. However, what we're always looking for is candidates who are looking to stay long-term in a community, and your community is so attractive for folks to want to stay and put down roots. So I think that's a really big opportunity.

Okay, thank you. Any last, one last question? Go ahead, Hans.

Lauren, I don't know if you're able to maybe pull that slide deck back up, but there was a slide where you started to kind of quantify like the number of emails you sent and the number of LinkedIn in-mails you sent, and it made me very happy. The question I have for you, if you could maybe bring that up so we can see it one more time. Absolutely. And then the question I have for you, which I asked earlier was for a search like ours, how many potential candidates would you expect to apply and how many of them, how many of those would you expect to contact directly?

Yes, absolutely. And can you all see my screen again?

We can.

Excellent. So what I would say is what I have seen recently for small communities for, you know, for like pool size is probably in the neighborhood of between 70 and 100 applicants. I would expect to phone screen or to, in this case, Zoom screen. We always do Zoom screens for city administrators. I would say, you know, I mentioned that we like to target, you know, We should be able to target 20% of the applicant pool if it's a healthy pool. I think that that kind of holds true here. I mean, for City of Dunsmuir, which I recently completed, which had a lot of challenges that, you know, we expected and planned for, but is really a wonderful community. We had, I think, in the neighborhood of, I can pull it up and check for you, but we had about 100 applicants. And I phone screened, I Zoom screened, I think, I think 24 applicants. So we're normally expecting to do a pretty healthy engagement with folks. That's our sort of target. But it really depends on the applicant pool. If there's a really highly qualified pool and, you know, we go based on screening. So if there's a really highly qualified pool and we're seeing a lot more folks that are great, we're going to Zoom screen more folks. And, you know, if we're seeing a lower number, then we're going to do everything we can to bring that up. And we're going to tweak our sourcing strategy. And we're going to be talking with you saying these are the barriers that we're seeing. Here's a pivot that we might recommend or here's what we'd like to do.

Thank you, Lauren. That's helpful. I think just to clarify my question just a little bit, the question was more about of the 100 or so or 70, how many of those are people that you would reach by directly reaching out to them, targeting, sourcing emails, for example, versus... somebody that comes in over the transom because they responded to the job posting?

Absolutely. I'm so sorry. I completely misinterpreted your question. That's a great question, actually. And actually we are, I'll be honest, we're developing better metrics for this right now to be able to truly track that. But what I will say is I typically see of our shortlist that we present and we're aiming to present we're usually aiming to present about double the number of people that you would be bringing forward to an interview to give you some options, right? So we recommend typically for an initial interview process, bringing forward no more than seven, because that's anything more than that. You start to have to shorten interview times. It's a very long day. So we would aim to bring forward, let's say in the neighborhood of, you know, 12 to 16 highly qualified folks. And of those, we typically see a high percentage that were people that we directly sourced. So I would say, you know, oftentimes in that group, in that top group, I would expect to see eight to 12 that we had brought in through direct sourcing. And that's both through engaging with past candidates in our database and our direct networks. And also through, you know, lists that we procure in a variety of ways, LinkedIn recruiter, but you know, those are folks that we've directly engaged with.

Thank you. Very helpful. All right, Lauren, I think that wraps your section up. Thank you so much. Very thorough.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Thank you. Sure. All right. I just got a suggestion to take a bio break. I think that's an excellent idea. And then we'll come back and we'll see what we can do to make a selection. All right. So we're going to take, what do you think? 10 minutes? Five minutes? Five minutes. All right. We'll be back at 10. Let's just come back at 2.45. It's a nice even number, nine minutes. All right, we're back in session. And now we get to do the work that we came here to do. So I'd like to thank, again, they're not online, but I'd like to thank all three firms for their presentations today. We appreciate their time and effort to show up and answer all our questions. I'm just going to keep this simple. I'm just going to go around the dais and ask each council member which firm you're leaning towards, and in a minute or less, the primary reason for your choice. If you want to go longer, you can. And after we've heard from everyone, we'll see where the council is and we'll entertain a motion if we're to that point. But before we do that, I want to open it up, the floor up for questions from the council for Marissa, just in case there's any last information you'd like to get from her before we deliberate. And Marissa, I think, has something she'd like to say.

Thanks, Mayor. The only thing I wanted to offer was an answer to Council Member Delves, who asked who was the recruiter for WCP. Because I personally spoke to every one of the recruiters, I interviewed Wendy Brown. I asked her to be the person to handle the recruitment herself, and she agreed to that. Unfortunately, she couldn't be here, but I had her commitment to handle the recruitment if counsel chose to go in that direction. That's all.

All right. Any other questions, Marissa, before we get moving?

I just do have a question. I don't know if, Marissa, this would be something you would answer or if Brian would answer it. But if members of the public or any of us on council do want to see the full 16 firms, the other 13 that we did not get presentations, will that be available to us?

I'll let Brian answer that question.

Typically, the way that that works is once you made a selection of your candidate based on the recommendation, then the remaining proposals are a public record.

Thank you.

I guess the answer was yes. Was that a yes?

Once you select your candidate, or there's been a recommendation to select a particular candidate, that's when the other proposals become a public record.

Okay. Thank you. All right. I sort of threw all the names in the hat and drew them out. And Jeff, you were first.

Okay. First, I'll say that I've been asking questions about the timeline, and I'll say to all of us, the four of you, that I have concerns about that, not just for the December date, which is a legal date, but also for the November date, which point will become real lame ducks, and it becomes more politically difficult to make a decision about to make a decision like this. So that all said, I'll go through the presentations in the order that they were given. I'll start by saying, Mosaic, I feel like I could work with them. My primary issue, the issue that gives me a little bit of pause with Mosaic was they have a public safety background. A lot of the recruitments, the backgrounds of the two gentlemen that are partners in the firm is a public safety background. And I don't worry about it, but I'm concerned that that may bring some sort of unintended bias into the process. And I know, I do not mean to say that there will be a bias towards stern police officers, and you'll forgive me, Chief. But I'm a little worried about sort of the background. You know, it seems like all the firms You know, I appreciate I for one appreciated Marissa's statement that she looked for firms that were the principals worked in the business. And I feel like two public safety officers is, yeah, that's working in the business, but maybe that's not quite working in the business. So that was my concern with Mosaic with CPSHR. I am still concerned about the sort of the public agency process nature of the firm. One, and I don't believe that this will affect, you never know, I don't believe this will affect our process, but I'm assuming that the process Public Records Act exemption would apply. So if someone came to Carmel and applied for a job here, I assume the resume is protected under the Public Records Act. Like, we can exert sort of PRA privilege if you want because they're applying for a job here. I don't know. And I guess I could ask Brian, but Brian probably won't tell me because I don't know what an attorney that represents CPSHR would say if CPSHR was presented with a Public Records Act request, that applied to applicants that were applying for a job in Carmel. Do you know that, Brian?

Since you- Well, I don't know who their attorney is, so I can't predict what their answer would be. But my answer would be that these documents should be protected under the exception for personnel files. And there's also a general exception as well under the Public Records Act that's based on a balancing test. If you were to allow access to those records, it could discourage people from applying because they might not want their current employer to know that they're looking for a job. So I think there's strong grounds for the city, and there should be for CPS as well, but I don't want to speak for them. I'm not their lawyer.

Yeah, I would feel maybe a little bit more comfortable if we heard from the CPS's attorney, but this is all fine. The second thing that makes me a little bit uncomfortable about CPS is the fact that they're not, they don't work. The principals don't work at the firm and they don't own the firm. That is a public agency and public agencies have a duty to, public agencies, you know, have a duty to the board of directors and a duty to the, you know, JPAs have a duty to the agencies that above all these sort of, Agencies have duties to the agencies that compose their board and I don't think that they you know, I don't think it's I Don't know whether legitimate is the right word or appropriate is the right word to describe how their Loyalties would be towards us You know as opposed to their firm if they were so I find that to be a little bit concerning I don't think either one of those things is over is over They're not deal breakers for me, but those are bigger concerns for me than Mosaic. WCP, I generally like the presentation. I like that they're a relatively small company. I like that they can sort of work with us on timeline. I know that their timeline was the shortest one that was listed in the packet, and obviously I've expressed some interest in that. The The concern I have, which we've sort of talked about, was that the recruiter was not on the Zoom call with us, so we didn't really meet that person. And so that's a concern. It seemed... They seemed a lot more... I don't know how to describe it. The service that was described, I thought, for the presentation seemed less personal than the other two in terms of how they do their recruiting process and that. But I will say that right now, WCP would be my first choice. But again, I would stress that I'm much more concerned about the schedule than I am about the firm.

Thank you.

Great comments, Jeff. Thank you. Thorough. Alessandra, you're next.

Thank you, Mayor. And certainly, I thank all three firms for participating. I share some of the same concerns with Jeff. I'll start. My third place choice would be CPS, in part with the concerns with the JPA, as Jeff mentioned, and that they had the longest timeline My first choice was tending towards Mosaic. I liked Greg's presentation and description of how they were a boutique firm and that they are small. Just looking at what they included, the Morro Bay survey results, I thought they did a good job with that. Taking a look at some of the, I'm always trying to find comparable cities to Carmel. I know you're not going to find the perfect match, but the closest ones they had that worked with were all three in San Luis Obispo County. You had Pismo Beach with a population of 8,000. Arroyo Grande, 18,000, and Morro Bay, 10.5,000. So that's somewhat similar to coastal cities. But I do have to say, with WBCP, I thought it was the best presentation overall, and that part won me over. I do agree that it would have been nice if the recruiter was able to speak to us, but I understand she wasn't available. I liked some of the comments that Lauren made as far as being excellent listeners, working with small communities. She seemed very dynamic throughout the presentation, things such as being a brand ambassador, high touch, marketing, understanding what makes our community unique. And the way they did the reports, too, I thought was very detailed and helpful. So right now, I'd say those are my top two almost It's hard to say which one, but I'd say very top two.

Which one do you put number one?

Presentation-wise, it's clearly WBCP, but I just have a little bit of concerns that we didn't meet the recruiter. And it's also good that they're small, somewhat of a boutique firm, I think a little bit larger than Mosaic was. So they're both pretty high up there, I'd say.

Sounds like WCP might be your number one right now. I need to know. Well, I don't necessarily know. Yeah, let's go. We'll go around. I'm going to give us a chance to. Okay, so you just have two number ones right now, right? Okay, Hans, go ahead.

I just had a suggestion. So Marissa had a I don't know, at least one, maybe a couple conversations with Wendy, the founder of the firm, who could potentially do the recruitment. I don't know if you wanted to, if she'd be able to speak to that.

Somehow you picked her to be the person. So, I mean, out of their people, you suggested that she would be their representative. Did you interview her?

I did. I spoke to her several times. And again, as I mentioned earlier, it was unfortunate she just couldn't make it because the timeline was really short for to get the recruiters here. I'm sorry, Mr. Buda, can you tell me specifically what you'd like me to speak to?

I guess just summarize your interaction. I mean, we didn't get the benefit of that. So you did all this, spent all this time on the phone with her. And so tell us, what did you like? What did you not like?

I found her to be really energetic and dynamic, just as her team member that presented, Lauren. She founded the company. She established the protocol and the process for recruitment. It's her idea. And I found it to be worthy of consideration. And I mean, that's what I can share. I don't know if that's enough.

I mean, so you would consider her to be somebody that interpersonally we could?

Oh, absolutely. Yes. Okay.

If she would have presented, would we have liked her and been impressed?

You would have, yes. Okay.

I mean, that's a little bit unfair to the people that showed up, but she was good. Okay. It's your turn, Hans.

Yeah, I think my third place firm is CPSHR. I was intrigued by having a more national footprint firm. I just don't know that this is the one. Everything just seemed a little bit less crisp to me, particularly on kind of Bob's question of the secret sauce. I just kind of can't. It's just not coming together for me. Mosaic, I spoke to some folks down in Lodi and Pismo Beach over the past 24 hours, and they got good references, very good references. I think what's unique about them is you get the principles for sure. It's a small firm, nine people. I just think that they've only been around for four or five years, but I think they're starting to develop a really good reputation. I did think the answer on direct outreach that I asked was a little bit squishy, but apparently they have this, as he alluded to, the people that I spoke to, that they have this... software system where you basically can see all of the information on every candidate. And it's apparently pretty good. So I think that they would do a great job for us. I liked Greg interpersonally, kind of no nonsense. I think we could work well with him. I liked their materials. I thought those were good. The surveys looked really good. I think when I was going through this preliminarily they were sort of probably my number one i think um wbcp i agree that it was i think the best presentation um i thought i had the best sense of some of their secret sauce um you know the notion that they've got a deeper team behind the scenes that's doing the recruitment and doing the you know the branding i'm sure you know mosaic has somebody doing the some of that as well, but I was really impressed by their willingness to customize the process. I think they, it came through in their materials, but then it came through even more in listening to Lauren, like they're willing to sort of work with us and meet the client where they are. And I thought a good example of that was the community engagement question. I thought that was like by far the strongest answer that we heard this sort of meeting in Berkeley that she described and, with breakout groups and they made it hybrid virtual because that's what the client wanted, despite that being like pretty complicated to do. I just think it speaks to this willingness to meet the client's needs. And yeah, I really liked, again, the screen that I brought back up there where they're quantifying like how many in-mail outreaches am I doing? How many like I really got the sense that they have a team of people that are reaching out to some people, which is helpful. You know, I did a reference check on them with one city where it's not one of the recruiters that we would be using, somebody else in their firm who did the recruitment. And the first go around was, uh, I think that the city didn't love the options that came back. And Wendy was like, Hey, I want to make this right and make sure that you're satisfied. And they went back and they, um, they did it again and got the people that they wanted. Um, so I'm trying to make sense of sort of how that fits in. I do appreciate the fact that we could potentially get the founder if we wanted the founder. Um, I'm sure if we wanted Lauren, we could get Lauren. Um, and Marissa says good things about them. I think dynamic and energetic, I think those are good words that Marissa used to describe them. So, sort of on the fence between them and Mosaic, but maybe a little bit of an edge to the Wendy Brown group.

Okay, thank you. Bob, your turn.

I think I'm coming down similarly. I might give a little more edge to Mosaic. Pardon me, my best friend. For those of you who can't see, we have a dog under the table. So I love working with owner entrepreneurs, people whose name is on the door or that responsibility that if they don't do a good job, their kids don't eat. And that, to me, that is definitely Mosaic. Small firm, entrepreneurial, fairly recent startup, so probably still quite hungry, still small. Um, and, um, the, I think that, uh, energy came through from Greg, um, in a, in a, you know, in a, with his personality, in a, in a philosophical, uh, kind of way. Um, WBCP, um, uh, Also, it's a more mature organization in terms of years. They're now at 22 people. Wendy is the owner. Same deal. OK, but we didn't meet her. That's not good for me. And Lauren, you guys have said it. The WBCP presentation was the best presentation, if that's exactly what we were looking for. It's a presentation Lauren has clearly given many times. She's very good at it. She knows it inside out. She conveys competence and confidence in it. They do a really good job. She did a really good job of really draining the methodology as a former Accenture consultant. I love methodology. It's almost like it's a perfect presentation for me because it tells me how you're going to do this. But I thought, well, CPS is my third, I think, for a lot of the reasons that have come out here today. I think they do a fine job for us. I just didn't feel the same connection. And I won't be dealing with the owner, the entrepreneur, So that's important to me. From a methodology standpoint, again, the WBCP methodology presentation was the best, but the proposal that was prepared by all of them, frankly, I thought all did a good job of explaining their approach and their methodology. In terms of actually meeting the lead, We did meet Greg, and so I can say with confidence that I like him and would be comfortable working with him. And I didn't meet Wendy, so I can't say that. The thing I most liked about Mosaic was actually the Morro Bay example that they provided for their recruitment there. Actually, the other two, there were not examples. sorry, CPS provided the area city of Arcata example, which I thought was good, but I thought this Morro Bay one was kind of very similar to what we were trying to do. I thought it was a very high quality. I like, I'll just read this to you, that the ideal candidate, in addition to being ethical, well-qualified, and experienced, the next city manager must possess certain traits and essential for success, the ability to build and maintain rich and effective relationships with council staff and community. An approachable, easygoing style coupled with a powerful work ethic and a drive to accomplish goals and completing projects will be well received. The ideal candidate will place high value on customer service and will convey that priority across the organization. Innovative and solution-oriented, the next city manager should continually seek to drive effectiveness and efficiency. Those are great words. What impresses me is that the people at Mosaic listened to Morro Bay and understood that those are important things, and they made those front and center to a recruitment. Those things... That's the one I would pretty much write ours that way, frankly, because I think those are traits we're looking for. So I have a real-world hard example of a work product that I think is very similar to what we're looking for. So edge to mosaic, I'm going to be OK with either two of these firms, absolutely. Wish we would have met Wendy.

Okay, all great comments. I agree with pretty much everything everybody said. I gave the edge to WBCP. I just felt that... They've got a deeper bench. They seemed really flexible in terms of being able to hit her timeline. And they have people that could help probably make that happen, maybe more than Mosaic. I like the idea of a small company. I've been there several times. I know what that feels like and that you're hungry and you want to go after it. But I give the edge to WPCP. Alessandra, do you want to revisit anything at this point? Sure.

I do appreciate that. Thank you, Mayor. I think I side with Bob as far as giving the edge to Mosaic. I mean, I appreciate that he actually gave some of the details that were in the presentation. That really was a tipping point for me.

Okay. All right. I'm keeping score here. I want to make sure I'm accurate. Jeff, I heard you say WBCP is number one. but you can revisit it where this is a process we're going through. Need to get three votes.

I would honestly say that I'm on the fence. I would honestly say that I... You know, I've listened to Bob's comments. I think Bob makes a lot of sense. And I would say, you know, I would find it difficult to choose between the two. So I have less of a preference for WBC. I would say I have less of a preference for WBCP than I do, than I think that Alessandra and Bob do for Mosaic. And I'm understanding that they have not very much preference. Well, let's go back to Hans.

Are you able to, so I spoke to Marissa this morning. It turns out that Marissa actually did a bunch of references. I tried to call some people the past 24 hours, but she's been doing this for a few days. She also spoke multiple times to some of these people. Do you have anything to share without, I'm not trying to have you sway it one way or the other, but is there anything that we haven't talked about that's of note?

PUTS ME IN A TOUGH SPOT, COUNCILMEMBER DALLAS.

HE'S COUNCILMEMBER BOOTER.

I'M SORRY, COUNCILMEMBER BOOTER. IT JUST PUTS ME IN A TOUGH SPOT BECAUSE I DON'T WANT THE REST OF COUNCIL TO PERCEIVE ME AS TRYING TO INFLUENCE YOUR DECISION OR TIP THE SCALE HERE. So I get that you don't have, you know, the benefit of talking to Wendy. I understand that. I understand the hesitation. And again, I'm not here to sell you on that, but because Council Member Booder is asking, you know, I just, I simply had the benefit of talking to the founder, right, who has, understand her philosophy and how she developed the process. What I found very compelling from my several conversations with her was simply her well-rounded background of exposure and understanding of the process, not just from her experience in the public sector, working in the public sector, but also with her marketing background, which nobody really out there has. And to me, that spoke to her entire process, which is why you're seeing or why you're grading her presentation as kind of the best. I got the sense that her entire process runs the same way. And I did talk to several agencies. I've never worked with them. I should start by saying that I've never worked with Wendy. I don't know her. This is my first exposure to her firm. But she is highly regarded in the HR world for recruitments.

Any nuggets from the references that you spoke to?

Again, she was very professional.

Not just on Wendy, but on Mosaic as well.

Oh, on Mosaic. Mosaic has a different approach. They simply have a different approach. I think it's a reflection of Greg's personality and demeanor. They're just very different firms, right? And their approach is also very different. I... I... I have a little bit more confidence in Wendy's sort of dynamic process and engagement in searching for a candidate than I do with Greg. And that's just my personal take from talking to them and from talking to their references.

So I didn't really say that much. So I'm going to add a little bit more about my thoughts about WBCP. I mean, I would take Lauren any day of the week She had a lot of energy. She knew her material. The presentation was far superior to any of the other two, I believe. I think that she showed us what kind of materials they're going to give us, the things that Hans brought up. I didn't see anything or hear anything about that other than that they have a system at Mosaic. I just really felt comfortable that They're going to have the resources because we're going to have to be in a hurry to get this done. Jeff's points are really well taken. And I just think that I love their marketing materials. They showed us like six different ones in a matter of like 10 seconds and they were all seem to be very good. They've worked with lots of companies in California. I don't know. I just... I just feel really comfortable that they're going to be able to execute for us and not meeting Wednesday. They work as a team, and I like that too. I like the fact that she was doing an interview today because they're on a tight time frame somewhere else, and she chose the client that they've signed up versus us, and I'm not going to hold that against her because we might be in the same position sometime. So I feel pretty strongly about WBCP. We now have, I don't know where Jeff is. I mean, I need to get three votes on something. And they're all good.

I think you'll get five votes. I mean, I think that, you know, I think we've all expressed that we would certainly be, all of us would be comfortable with either of those two firms. So I would... WBCB would be my first choice. Like I don't, like that's, you know, you want a choice, that's it.

Okay. All right. Thanks. Hans, it's number one. For me, it's number one. It's number two for Alessandra and Bob. So we've got a three to two vote at this point, unless you want to change.

Yeah. I mean, I just want to, I think it's so important. So I want to make sure that you guys feel comfortable with it. I mean, I, the thing that I like about, Mosaic is, is nine people. And like you said, it's the first four to five years. So they are out there really working hard at it. I'm just wondering on WBCP, I guess if we knew we were going to get Wendy or, I mean, honestly, even like Dale said, Lauren, the person we had today, I mean, I want to give you a chance to speak to it because I think it was really important. Do you want to? Sure, just real quick.

The only other thing I wanted to add is because I was emphasizing some of the cities that the other ones work with. And with WBCP, even though Lauren mentioned that some of these are smaller communities and they're used to working with smaller communities, I didn't really see too much where there could be parallels with Carmel. There were a lot of cities in Oregon, but there weren't similarities enough, even if they were small, even Truckee, Ventura. I mean, perhaps closest could be Malibu and Santa Maria, but yet the population sizes are different. And there were significant differences. So that also played a little bit in my decision as well. So I'm just factoring that in also and throwing that out there.

Yeah, I would comment, if I may, comment on Alessandra's comment. I think that, so there's sort of two characteristics here. You know, there's sort of the size of a community and the nature of a community. And having been to both Morro Bay and Malibu, you know, Morro Bay is closer to us in size than Malibu is, but Malibu is closer to us. in terms of the characteristic. Or when I think of the people that live here versus the people that live in those two places, Malibu is a more apt. Malibu, I think, is a more apt comparison than Morro Bay or the other one that was mentioned.

Thanks. Pounce, I'm fine. I really am completely fine going with WBCP. I mean, you heard what I said about who gets the edge. I think all your comments are right. Honestly, WBCP is probably the safest choice just because they are 22 people. They're not 50. They're 22 people. That's a nice number. The methodology, it does convey... You've heard me say many times... if you've got a good methodology, a good process in place, people can come and go. And a great methodology allows all 22 of those people to essentially behave in a common way. And it allows a team to be cohesive. And that presentation showed me a great methodology. So I think the points that, especially if we're needing to condense something, Perhaps they've got just a little bit more strength, a little bit more bench to be able to move a little more crisply. So I'm fine. I feel comfortable with it.

Okay. Anybody want to make a motion?

Can I just bring up one other thought before that? Do we want to discuss at all who on that team we'd be interested in working with?

vote for the founder, like if that's a choice for us. I mean, it's her, it's obviously her sort of thing. Marissa has indicated that that's a choice. It's her company, it's her methodology, it's her personality that presumably trickles down into the firm.

She gave us that option, so we should take it.

Right, she offered it.

Okay, so the motion would be, if someone wants to make it, to select WBCP, with Wendy Brown as the primary representative and to adopt resolution 2025-055. 2026. 2026, I'm sorry about that, yeah. All right, somebody want to make that motion?

So moved.

Second.

Do you understand what the motion is?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Councilmember Barron?

Yeah, before I just have a comment before we do that, just since I'm allowed to do that, just reminding everybody that I leave Wednesday after the council meeting. So if there's something that needs to, if there's something that, you know, if there's a critical path item and you want me involved, your deadline is the deadline of staff to sort of do whatever it is that needs to be done for the next two weeks is literally Tuesday of next week.

After we take a vote, I'm turning it back over to Marissa.

I'm afraid that I was afraid that after we took the vote, the meeting's over.

I'm going to turn it back over to Marissa to take control and tell us what's happening next. That was planned.

I might be able to address the calendar. I mean, I have some brief sort of closing statements of what the next steps are, and we can discuss the timeline at that point, if that's what council prefers. Okay.

Okay, I just want to make sure that Brian, like it says, receive presentations and make a choice, and then it says adjournment on the calendar, on the agenda. So I want to make sure that we can do those things.

Let's just do it now. Let's just do it now. Procedurally, I think you're right, Jeff. Yeah.

Okay. So the only thing that's left once, you know, there's a vote from council, what happens next essentially is that I will initiate a contract with WBCP, if that's the choice. And as soon as that's done, that should take about a week. No more than a week. And then a kickoff meeting has to happen with council and the recruiter. So if council member Barron is gone, when's your return?

The 19th.

We can simply schedule the meeting to happen right after that. So the timeline I think is okay.

And they could be working on prep work and other things ahead of time.

And just to clarify, what the kickoff meeting is, is simply to discuss the process that council wants out of the recruiter, which can include, of course, community engagement. So that conversation will happen in that kickoff meeting, nothing else.

Is that a closed session or an open session?

Traditionally, yes.

Which one?

Closed session. Closed session. Yes. Okay.

And it's going to happen, the timing is going to happen no matter who we pick at this point. It doesn't matter. Because Jeff's not going to be here.

Right. And we'll have to, so that we don't wait until the next council meeting in September, we could set up a special meeting scheduled in the middle of August if that's, if council, if something in council is available. Sounds like a good idea.

I've got a question to clarify if Brian is still available. I thought all of these meetings had to be open session. I thought we weren't allowed to do closed session on these.

The closed session with respect to the selection of the recruiting firm was not permitted. But now it's my understanding that you would be able to have the proposed closed session. But let me do this. I can do some further research on that and get back to Marissa. And if for any reason I find that there's a limitation on that process. My research has indicated that the appointment process is more than just the appointment itself. So preliminary steps are allowed. So let me look into that a little further. I'll give Marissa the results of that research and then either that discussion would happen in a closed session if it's permitted or open session if it's not.

Thank you, Brian.

Is there anything else that we could authorize you to get started on, like in the intervening two and a half, three weeks, aside from, I guess you come up with a contract and then?

We have to start with the contract, and then I can start working on a kickoff meeting. you know, based on council's schedule. So there's not a lot because the majority of the work is going to happen between council and the recruiter. I mean, that's essentially their role.

And the kickoff meeting, so at the kickoff meeting, the recruiter would present us with a timeline for the next 12 weeks. That's right. So like a one-page project plan on what's going to happen and when it's going to happen.

That's right. And discuss, you know.

Okay, it's important to me that that happens.

Thanks. And you can execute the contract without having us approve it, correct?

Because the cost of their fee, I mean the fees is within city administrator authority, the city administrator will be signing that off.

All right, good. Any other discussion before we continue to vote?

So we all, Jeff's going to be gone. I will certainly, I know now that I will have needs to not be in Carmel-by-the-Sea, both personal and professional, over the next couple months. I think in almost all situations I can phone in. I guess the point is, let's not let any one of our schedules slow it down. There's five of us. I want all five of us to be informed on every decision, but we also... We can't always be waiting. And I'm not saying we're waiting for you, Jeff. I'm just saying we can't always be waiting for the one who can't make it, whoever that happens to be. And I'm throwing that out there because I want to get some feedback on it.

There are also other ways to have your opinion be known in writing, especially for the beginning stages. If you have opinions about what we should do and how we should do it, you can let your opinions be known in a written statement.

I just wanted to, oh, I'm sorry. I absolutely didn't mean to interrupt. Jeff's gone till, I think you said Wednesday, August 19th, is that correct?

Thursday, the 20th.

Okay, yeah.

But I would also say, you know, to your point, I would say that I am making an effort because of this process to keep my city calendar updated. So I would encourage, you know, for this one time, for the next three months, I'm going to try to put all my conflicts on the city calendar. So if staff needs to schedule a meeting or know where to start, that's a good point. I would encourage everybody to do that. at least if you're gonna be not available, like I have other agency meetings and whatnot.

So I had just given NOVA notice quite a while back that I also am not available that Thursday and Friday of that week, so the 20th and 21st.

So that puts us to the... I'm gonna lose a month here. Yeah, that's my concern. That puts us to the 24th of August.

Can you zoom in for the kickoff meeting maybe while on vacation?

No. I'm going to be in the mountains.

All right. Well, let's get the vote in. Marissa is going to be really good at coordinating this and making it happen fast. All right. I think we had a motion. We had a second. I think, Jeff, you were voting.

Okay.

Okay, Council Member Barron?

Yes.

Council Member Booter?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Delos? Yes. Council Member Dramaw? Yes. Mayor Byrne?

Yes.

Motion carries.

All right. Congratulations to WBCP and our partner in obtaining the best city administrator that can be found. And Marissa, do you have anything else to say before we close out? All right, so we're going to be... spending some time getting the contract pulled together. You're going to approve the contract without us, and then you can start working with the firm to expedite the process as much as we can.

Can I, I don't even know if I'm allowed to speak substantively at this point, but is there any possibility, I mean, It's a contract for $30,000. Is there any possibility of trying to fast-track that contract so that we could potentially have a kickoff meeting on Tuesday or something?

I can certainly try, yes. We have a template of contract. It's not a big deal. We should be able to sign it, yes.

All right, see what you can do. Yeah, so that would be the best. The best thing for me would be to just do it Tuesday afternoon when we have time.

It's just a regular meeting. I don't know if you could do a special meeting on just one part of it because we have to give three days' notice, right? Yeah, we got to get to go. Yeah, it's right on the edge here. All right, do we have a can, Marissa?

I have the answer to that one, Larry. Go ahead. We could do a special meeting on 24 hours notice. So you could schedule it for any time as long as the notice is out 24 hours in advance.

Right, okay. All right, good. Marissa, thank you.

Well done. Well done. All right, since there's no other business to do here, we're going to adjourn the meeting. Thank you for our attendees for sticking it out.