City Council - Regular Meeting

It is now 3PM. I call this city council meeting to order. All council members are present with the exception of council member Debbie Nash King. Let the records reflect that. I will be giving the invocation and Mayor Pro Tem Gonzales will give the presolutions.

Let us stand. For this day. We thank you for the opportunity to serve as a council. We thank you for the people of Killeen. We pray for every citizen that is in Killeen.

We thank you for our veterans. We thank you for those that have given their lives in reference to Memorial Day. Father, we are the better for this country. Experience freedom because of the ones that have given the ultimate sacrifice. And, father, we thank you for United States Of America. We thank you for the great city of Killeen. We ask you now to give us wisdom, give give us guidance in this meeting, and we thank you for that. In Jesus Christ's name, we do pray. Amen. And amen.

I need a motion to approve the agenda.

I make a motion to approve the agenda, mayor.

Motion has been made by council member Bass. Second. Second. Second by council member Brown. All in favor, say aye. Aye. You can press it. Say yes. Indicate by yes. No. Indicate by pressing no.

Debbie's.

You're

gonna have to do that all throughout.

That Okay. We can just raise our hands. All in favor. In favor, raise your hand. All opposed?

Motion has carried. Five to six to zero. Motion passed. You all just bear with me. I'll get the hang of this.

You're done.

Alright. Okay. Madam Secretary.

Presentations, PR26011. Present TxDOT Project of the Year award to the Skylark Field Terminal.

Good afternoon, mister Wilson.

Good evening, mayor and council. As most of you know, we just recently attended the Texas Transportation Department's Aviation Division at their annual aviation conference that they have every year. And typically, during this conference, they award various awards to airports for various accomplishments. So tonight, we'd like to share a video with you that was played at the conference during their during their award ceremony.

At airports, every improvement begins with a focus on safety, efficiency, and long term service to the community. This year's project of the year winner demonstrates how thoughtful planning and strong coordination can transform an airport's capabilities and strengthen the region's aviation infrastructure. The project delivered a 3,000 square foot general aviation terminal building equipped with modern architectural finishes and state of the art amenities for pilots, passengers, and visitors. The project included a new parking lot and terminal apron strengthening both landside and airside operations. And Citi utilized local funds to repurpose the former airport beacon as a landscape feature at the airport entrance, connecting the new facility with its heritage.

Despite the complexity of coordinating multiple funding sources and regulatory entities, the project was completed three months ahead of schedule and within budget. The community celebrated the opening with a ribbon cutting event featuring skydivers delivering the ceremonial key, a moment symbolic of the airport's continued growth and its relationship with the region it serves. The new terminal represents a significant infrastructure investment that will support future aviation activity, improve user experience, and contribute to the economic vitality of the region. This project was funded through multiple sources, including federal, state, and local funding, such as the FAA's airport terminal program and IIJA funding. Coordinating these funding sources required consistent collaboration among the city of Killeen, TxDOT, and the FAA.

Their joint effort kept the project on schedule and ensured regulatory compliance and effective resource allocation throughout the project's life cycle.

One of the things during design that we thought about was when you fly into this airport, the first thing you see, was our old terminal building. And so it was a very squat gray cinder block building and, businesses who were flying in here, private business owners, that was the first thing they were seeing in clean. So one of the things we wanted to do with this building was, we kind of wanted that, hey, this is a place where I wanna come do business. When I fly into Sky Lark Field, your first reaction when you see this building is like, okay. Yeah. This is where I I I kinda wanna do business here.

On behalf of the Texas Airports Council, congratulations to Skylark Field Airport for winning the 2026 project of the year.

As mentioned in the video, it was a this project was a team a big team effort. It was funded by multiple sources. Of course, the 2.9 CO bond from the city council, the FAA, there were two different grants. One of them was a competitive grant that we had to compete for. And then they didn't mention the video, but TechSide Aviation kicked in another $600,000 So it was a a lot of it took a lot of teamwork, a lot of folks, but it all started with the city council.

I I know that some of you were we had a new council now, but for the city council we had before and for you guys, we wanted to show our appreciation for your support. And we'd like for you to come down, and we'd like to present the award to you as a council and to the city, if you don't mind.

We don't mind. If you say so.

So on behalf of the, Department of Aviation, the city manager, mister Kent Cagle, the assistant city manager, Lori Wilson, We wanna present you the TxDOT 2026 project of the year to the current and past council.

Mister Wilson, we want to say thank you, Sir. And Mister provost, thank you for giving that to the city on behalf of the citizens of Killeen. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I want to say the airport and you and your staff, you do a tremendous job out there and I am I was so impressed when I took a tour out there and what a beautiful building that we have at Skylock. Beautiful building, and I'm looking forward to coming out there again and really getting a real tour of that building. So, thank you again. Appreciate it. Madam Secretary.

P r twenty six zero one two, biannual youth advisory commission report.

Good afternoon, mister Murphy.

Good afternoon, mister mayor and distinguished council members. It is with a grateful spirit that I come before you today to present to you the face of what perseverance looks like, dedication, and commitment to growth and service to their community. It is with my pleasure that I introduce chairperson Harmony Morales to present the Youth Advisory Commission's biannual report.

Thank you. Good afternoon. As he mentioned, I am the chairman for Killeen's Youth Advisory Commission for the twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six term. I'll be presenting the biannual report. Alright.

So, unfortunately, due to finals, graduation, of course, everything happening in May, I will be the only YEC commissioner here today, but we have a total of nine. We have 60 resource members and 28 junior YEC members. Alright. So we were created in 1993 to serve as a liaison to the Killeen City Council, and our mission statement is to provide the youth of our community opportunities through volunteerism and service by taking initiatives that are directed towards effective change. We have a bunch of benefits, including opportunities to make lifelong friendships.

We represent YAC and the city of Killeen at various events. We make a positive impact on our community, and we also develop and enhance leadership skills. So we do have a few changes to YAC, and these were implemented in order to make an effort to make YC more efficient and community oriented. So we did vote on yearly goals at the beginning of the term, and we want to increase the amount of volunteerism we do around the city. We wanna host teen events.

We specifically chose the summer since students will be out of school, and that's when they are in most need of engagement and enrichment. And our plan is also host a career fair in order to highlight jobs and just opportunities in general in the community that is directed towards youth. We have also revised our bylaws, and on June 2, we will present those to council. We also have implement implemented a Central Texas YC quarterly mixer. So that would include bent Belton, Temple, and Boys and Girls Club YC.

And it's basically kinda like a networking, but also just, like, fun teen event for us to get to know each other and, like, maybe share ideas that we have. So we do have a few accomplishments. So we have partnered with the Boys and Girls Club, NAACP, and the Texas Workforce of Killeen. And then we have made a lot of decisions that will set them us up for success in the coming year, which is what I mentioned earlier with our goals for the next year. We did a bunch of networking.

One of my favorite events is TML, which is a youth conference that's held in a different or held by a different YEC every year. This year, we went to Cedar Hill. And as I also mentioned on the previous slide is we developed the quarterly Central Texas YC gatherings. And so here are some pictures and examples. So we have leadership. So as I mentioned, we have TML, junior YC, leaders in training. We volunteer and we host a bunch of youth activities. Like we participate in Fall Fest by hosting our own haunted house. We have family volunteer day. We volunteer with the five k runs and also a lot more.

And then here are some examples of outreach. So we have been to multiple high school open houses. We created partnerships with NAACP, Boys and Girls Club, and etcetera. The middle picture is actually our challenge coin that we made recently so we can give those out at events like TML or at our quarterly gatherings just to kinda, like, a little, like, token to, like, kinda show, like, who we are. We have our motto, which is, like, give youth a voice.

And looking ahead, we do have a lot of plans. So for this previous term, we wanted to develop a stronger relationship and presence in Central Texas, especially with KIC and other nonprofit organizations, really focusing on, like, really what is the root of Killeen, which I believe is, like, the whole small business and giving everyone an opportunity to, like, create a larger image for themselves. So through continuing our initiatives to create events and programs that address and meet the needs of today's youth in our community as well as play a larger role in our community as well. So we want to build more effective relationships with our civic and community leaders so we can better represent and articulate the needs of our peers. So we are gonna continue to update policies and procedures, do group do sorry, group discussions, and also hopefully plan a lot more events for our teens and youth.

So for our summary, in this presentation, we have discussed the history and prospective future of the Youth Advisory Commission by highlighting the accomplishments and steps we are taking to further our outreach and impact on our beloved community and the youth that resides in it. The commission provides a platform for youth leaders to collaborate with city officials, develop leadership skills, and contribute to initiatives that positively impact the community. Through volunteer service, event planning, and advocacy, YC members serve as a voice for youth while fostering a sense of responsibility, teamwork, and civic pride. And that is the end of the presentation. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you so thank you. Thank you. Council, is there any comments or questions? Council member Kimball. Thank you, mister mayor. First of wanna say

thank you, mister mayor. I wanna say great work from the from the the council. You know, when you pick up the newspaper and when you look at the media, you always see all the bad things that children in our community are doing. It's always good to hear the positive things, know, the civic responsibility, leadership opportunities. So regardless of what the media may put out, it's a charge to all of us to make sure that we share these good stories, to make sure that the work that they're doing is getting out in the community. And I look forward to your presentation on June 2 to see all the the changes that you guys are making. Thank you, mister mayor.

Also, let the record reflect that council member Nash King is present. Council council member Bass?

Thank you for that presentation. That was wonderful. I had the honor of teaching at Ellison High School for ten years, and the most disturbing thing was when our teenagers are staying at home in their room like they're prisoners of their electronic devices. Obviously, the teenagers in your organization have not fallen into that trap. I commend you for that, and I hope you will invite us, council members, to some of your events. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Bass. Councilmember Brown?

I am so proud Harmony. I have known us Harmony since she was just a resource member in, I think, junior YAC. And she started out so quiet and shy and withdrawn, and to see her come up and be able to do a presentation in front of everybody confidence. It shows how much the program helps our young people grow. And our staff is very much behind that. They're always there supporting, making sure they're guiding, but also allowing them to grow and lead on their own. So I'd like to congratulate you personally, all of YAC, and thank our staff for doing such a great job.

Thank you, Councilmember Brown. You know, I just think that they deserve a round of applause for another round of applause for what you have done and contribute to this community. Thank you. Okay. We are moving right along.

This will go into our work session. We'll just be discussing the agenda items three through 15. Regular session, no final actions will be taken until the regular session. Madam Secretary?

Ailmen twenty six zero one five, consider minutes of regular city council meeting of 04/21/2026. Ailmen twenty six zero one six, consider minutes of regular city council meeting of 05/05/2026. RS twenty six zero seven six, consider a memorandum resolution selecting an executive executive search firm to conduct the recruitment for city manager.

Good afternoon, Ms. McDaniel.

Good afternoon, mayor and council. As the item states, we're here to talk about executive search firms for our city manager search. Just a real quick recap of our background. Mister Kent Cagle, our current city manager, announced his retirement, effective May 29. And on April 7, the council gave direction to prepare a list of executive search firms for consideration. Then again on May 5, the council narrowed that, list of executive search firms to four, and those four will be here to present to you this evening. In this order, we will start with Atheon Public and mister Scott Reilly. Clear Careers and ma'am, pardon me if I say your name wrong, but Kelly Kunstler? Kunstler? Okay.

Government Professional Solutions with Mr. Brett Bauer and Strategic Government Resources with Mr. Jay Singleton. Each of them have been asked to prepare a presentation of no more than fifteen minutes for you regarding their services, and then are available for questions after their presentations individually. It is staff recommendation that the council select a firm to conduct the city manager search, and that can come after all of the presentations this afternoon.

You have binders in front of you with each of their proposals, as well as a grading matrix, for you to kind of give feedback and rate, what you see this afternoon. So without any further ado, I would like to, present Mr. Scott Reilly with a fee on public as he will be our first presenter for the afternoon.

Good afternoon, Sir.

Good afternoon, mayor and council. Thanks thanks for having me. Again, my name is Scott Riley. I'm with Afyon Public. Afyon, Afyon, have you said it's made up word. It doesn't mean anything. So, I'm here today to discuss what we dubbed our partnership with the City of Killeen, the City Council, and AFEAN to do this work. And, you know, I say this often, this is one of the most important decisions you'll make. You'll pass the budget every year. You'll have great proclamations like you had.

But this one, this is a big decision that you have to make. So with that, I'm just going to kind of jump into why we say what we are and what we're about. So I'm the President and owner of Afyon. I started this firm in 2009. Height of the housing market crash was a great time, great plan to leave all stability and go and do this. But here we are still today. So, you know, why would you you know, we've got four great firms here. Why would you choose us? We've been around in this game for a long time. We've actually been doing public sector executive recruiting since about 2005.

So we have a great track record on that. We've got a really good track record. I think if you call around and talk to our references and talk to the folks that we've placed, can have known each other for a long time, way back when he was in Leander. So, you know, we've just been around for a while. And we have a dedicated team. So the way our company is set up and the way we work is that I will be the person here interacting with you. So, I just don't come down and do the fancy pitch and then, you know, throw somebody else at you. You'll be working with me. I've got a team of recruiters, sourcers, media folks behind me that will start calling the information. But that that's how we that's how we work.

So I'm gonna be the to be the point person and and I've got a good experience in working with a lot of different city councils. So we look at this as a really collaborative process. The most important thing is to start the process is to really figure out what is that you're looking for in your next city manager. What are the backgrounds? What are the skill sets? What are those key attributes you're looking at? What are the key initiatives the city wants to get done? And we're going to try to match people up to having success in doing that. These stakeholder meetings the start of that process. So obviously, this is your hire.

You are the client. So we want to talk with you on and get a feeling from you about what you want. It's really important to talk with city staff. Even though they don't get to make the decision on who their boss is going to be, we like to be able to talk with the candidates about kind of the staff and our belief about how they're performing and those kinds of things. The rest of these things, these change by city.

So, we're really just putting this out there. City residents, we like to do community forums. We like to do those in evening times, meet up with people, get that feedback. Boards and commissions, faith based groups, school district, neighborhood association, university, all of those people are stakeholders in this community. So, that's going to be really your directive to us to tell us how you want to go about and who you want us to engage with.

But what I like to say is it's always best to put as many people on the front side, because if you put them on the back side and they weren't involved on the front side, they don't know what it is that we were given direction to look for. So, we like that process to be very collaborative. Once we get that done, and so what does that look like? I'll come down here, I'll probably be down here for a couple of days. We'll do, you know, meeting with you one on ones, we'll meet with staff, you know, again, we can schedule breakfast, lunches, dinners, so that we know your community can come and meet with us, and we can go meet with them.

Out of all that information, we'll pull that together and we'll create a profile. Now, there's two profiles. There's a position profile and there's a candidate profile. The position profile, Kate wrote, it's a great job description. It says these are all the things the city manager has to do. But the candidate profile is something that we're going to kind of create and that's going to be again kind of what are those desired skill sets that you're looking for. There's not really a city manager school. You know, there's a master's in public Administration, a lot of city managers have, but there's not really a school. So, most city managers have come up to the ranks. They were the public works director, they were the parks and record, they were the planning or their economic development or finance.

So, we want to understand what challenges you see that are opportunities that you see in the city and how we're going to make that match because there's a six, seven thousand city managers out there in the country. Not all of them are right for the city of Killeen. We don't want them all applying. We don't want them all throwing their hat in the ring. We want to make sure that we're being very targeted about how we do that.

So that candidate profile, that position profile, we rolled that all up into a pretty brochure. Now I'm old enough to tell you that when I started in this business, we used to not make brochures. Now you have to, you got to social media, you got to do all those things and we do all those things. But, you know, that brochure is a marketing piece. It is not the document that's going to sell this opportunity.

What's going to sell this opportunity is our recruiting team. So, sometimes when we go through this process, we get former English teachers and stuff like that, but like to wordsmith the heck out of that brochure, you can do that. I'm all for that. Just give me a document so we can get going, because that's the important part of that. So, now we go into the recruiting process.

The recruiting process has changed over time and it continues to change. There's two things we're looking for. We're looking for passive active candidates. So, what does that mean? The first thing we're going to do is we're going to put it on anybody that ever thought about being the city manager of Killeen will know about it.

So, it'll be on TCMA, it'll be on ICMA, it'll be careersingovernment, governmentjobs.com, every place. Our socials, your socials, everywhere we'll make sure that that advertisement is out there. From that's the kickoff, that'll go out for thirty days and it'll will will leave it active and we'll refresh it and kind of keep that that going. On the backside of that is we're creating a we're creating a contact list. We are Afion is.

And that contact list is people that we've met or that we know or cities that we know that match the profile about what you just gave me, what you told me you're looking for. And we're going to proactively target those folks. So we're going to pick up the phone and call them, we're going to send them a text, we're going to send them an e mail, we're going to LinkedIn with them. We're going to proactively do that. You know, used to be, everybody used to talk about their databases. I mean, data's cheap now. Data's is cheap. I can get you a list of every city manager in the country and every assistant city manager in a second. That's not the value in the recruiting companies. The value is our ability to connect with those candidates.

So, from there, what happens is once we get that list down, at the end of thirty days we're going to have this bucket of candidates. They're going to be in a really technical file, a yes, no, and a maybe file. All the yeses we're going to talk to. And what does that look like? Our recruiting team, everybody, all the candidates go through a three step interview process with our firm.

So, the first step is with one of our recruiters, they're going to have a conversation about, you know, walk them through their resume, why they're interested, kind of get a feel for their work history, why they left one job and went to another job. If we're happy with that, they get passed on to another, a second recruiter, and that second recruiter is going to go a little bit more in-depth. We're going to talk a little bit more about some of the things that Killeen is looking for in their city manager and how their skill set might match that. Once that steps down and we're happy with that, we give them a written assignment. So, it's a one page document.

We do this for three reasons. The first reason is they're not going to get to meet you for the first time, so we want them to be able to explain who they are to you. So, it's a one page document, it's not overly complicated. The second reason we do that is, you know, honestly, it's really easy to push paper across the Internet these days. So, we're going to make them do a little bit more lifting to make sure that they're interested.

Because if they're not willing to write that document, they're not willing to come here necessarily. And the third thing, which is changing, is, you know, there's a lot of written communications that come out of the city manager's office, and we want to make sure that that's good. AI is changing that, you know. I can write things now and say make this sarcastic and it will do it, you know. Make this humorous, it will do it.

But that's what we're looking for is for them to do that. Once that written assignment's done, we're also asking them to sign a background release form and a social media release form. Those forms are criminal education financial background checks, and then we use a third party company that does all of our social media and media checks on the candidates. Then I interview all candidates. So ultimately, in the perfect world, my team will get me somewhere between fifteen and twenty candidates, and then I'm going to narrow that group down from that 15 to 20 down to your top eight or 10 that we're going to bring in.

And then what that meeting would look like, if we'd schedule another meeting, I'd come back down here. You have these pretty books with all their pictures and all this great written stuff, and I'm going to tell you why we think they're a good candidate for this job. We're going talk a little bit about their leadership style, their management style, how they've addressed some of the issues that you've detailed to us. So, that's that binder presentation. From there, then we move on to the interview process, and we help you with all of that.

So, you know, there's, I believe there's an established way to do a good interview process, but it's not my process, it's your process. So, I like to present that like a cafeteria plan. You know, you can get pizza, you can get a hamburger, whatever you want. It's all available. But there are a few steps that we like. We like a community meet and greet so that we can get that part of it. We'll create a QR code so that candidates can your constituents can come in. They can look at their resumes. They can look at their bios. They can give their feedback.

We'll shut that QR code down at whatever midnight, the night of that thing, so that it's not, you know, just going wildfires, people there that are actually interacting. And then we use an automated tool, an AI tool to give us the feedback. So by the next morning, we have a feedback. We like to also include two other important steps, well really three important steps in that interview process. First, we call it our speed dating round.

I should probably come up with a better name for that, but I like to break the council down into smaller groups. This is not to skirt any quorums or do anything like that, but you're going to interact with the city manager one on one, two on one often. So we want to create that environment so that you have that in the interview process. So you would sit down and you would interview with all the candidates. We'd like to have the we'd like to have the city staff have an opportunity to meet and greet with candidates so you can get their feedback.

We would like to have the community have an interview or a meet and greet with the candidates as well. We'd like to have a facilitated tour of the community so that we can see all the things that are going on and or not going on. And so we can help structure all of that. I'll be here to help facilitate that candidate flow as well. And then from there, ultimately, there would be a one final interview with you as an entire council.

Generally, we like to have them make a presentation, hopefully a lot more exciting than this one. But, you know, we want again, the idea is we want them to be able to facilitate a mock about what they would be presenting at City Council. It's not a heavy lift. We're not asking them to, you know, solve the Texas water problems or anything like that. It's going to be, you know, give me your ninety day plan, right?

So, it's not going to be something really heavy, but that's the purpose of that, so that you can assimilate how they would operate in the role. And then from there, we help facilitate any negotiations. We stay in the midst of all of that. We don't just like dump them and say, good luck, close them. We're here to help you with all that, and we'll work with you on that. And, yeah, that's my presentation. Questions? Be happy to answer.

Thank you, Mr. Ali. I'm going to open it up to the council for questions. Starting with council member Bass.

Thank you for that presentation. My question is, what is the financial background check specifically?

Great question. So we have two things. We use a company called CBY. They do all the criminal education and financial checks for us. So we're checking credit ratings and all that stuff, but nothing, any liens, defaults, anything like that, any bankruptcies, that uncovers all of that.

The second tool that we use, I'm not going to say it because all my competitors are in the room, but the second tool that we use is a it's a media company. They do they so they'll search all of the background. So Ken has been in this profession for a long time. If we do a Google on Kent Kaggle, his name's going to come up a lot, and it's going be he passed the budget, or the, you know, all those kinds of things. So, you know, there could be six, seven hundred pages of documents on that stuff.

This service, we get all that information if we wanted, but it really just kind of raises anything up that is of the negative impact. It also uses LexisNexis for legal things. So all of that information comes back. So that's that's what we'll provide.

Thank you.

Thank you, mayor. Good afternoon, sir. So when, one of the things that we well, yes, one of the things that we like is stability. And, you know, as as mister Cagle is leaving, and that that comes at a time where we're doing budget and some other things. So if you if you or we select a candidate and they leave, what happens then? Do you do you guarantee the person will be here for x amount of time and

what happens We have a two year guarantee. Say again? We have a two year guarantee. What does that guarantee look like? So, guarantee is if they leave before two years, we redo the search for free. We charge for the postings and stuff like that. But we have that guarantees in our proposal, but it's two years.

Goodness. There's no one in two years. Thank you.

Thank you, councilmember Kimmel. Council mayor pro tem Gonzales.

Thank you, sir, for your presentation. We appreciate you being here. You mentioned something that was extremely important as far as relationships with your prospective recruits that would be considered for us. When you're talking about the transition time as it relates to bringing them on board. We talked about meet and greets, for example, with counsel. What does that window typically look like? What does that timeframe typically look like when you're working on establishing those mock relationships with these folks?

Sure. So, people always wonder how long does the recruitment take? I can control two things in the recruitment process. One, when we post it, we're going to post it for thirty days. After that thirty day posting closes, forty no longer than forty five days later, I'll be back here in front of you. You know, these evergreen postings and these evergreen recruitments, they don't work. You know, you can't get people engaged. So, like to be very concise. We're going to start at the end of those stakeholder meetings. We're going to map out backwards.

We're going to map out when do you want this person's butt in the seat. Kent might drive that because he's coming back as the interim, so he might be saying, hey, I want out by whatever. But when do you want that person in the seat? And then we're going to work backwards from that. If you want them, I know this is not realistic, if you want them July 1, That means that we have to have a decision made by the beginning of June, because they're going have to give thirty days notice at least.

And depending on where they're coming from, if they have to relocate, and, you know, all those kinds of things. The timing of this is kind of interesting, right? You've got budget season coming up, so that's that's a hard time, but you want to do this before the school year starts if you can because they've got school age kids. That's going to be important. So there's lots of lots of things like that that you'll need to work out that we'll need to work through and kind of talk through the impacts of what gives you a stronger candidate pool. Thank you. Thank you.

Council Member Brown.

Good afternoon. How are you today? Good. Thanks for coming to Killeen. I see you have quite a bit of experience recruiting in Texas, but coming from Hershey, that's not a very military veteran intensive area, and I don't see a lot of military or veteran areas necessarily where you've brought in city managers before. So what is your experience with working with cities that are heavily veteran and active duty military and the unique challenges and opportunities we have?

Yeah. No, it's a great question. You know, I've so, hey, we get the Army War College in Carlisle, so, you know, let's not talk about Hershey So, that what I would tell you is that those are unique things. I mean, universities bring a uniqueness to it. I mean, I can promise you that I'm going to get a lot of former military people that are going to apply to this job.

That's an interesting conversation that we have to have and a walk we have to walk through with those candidates. I've done a fair amount of work in San Antonio though, and I would say that's a pretty heavy military city. I put city manager there, put assistant city managers there. So, I'm familiar with the dynamics of that. But, yeah, I mean, I won't say I can think of another one that we did up in gosh, North Of Nashville. I forget the base that's up there, but it was a pretty heavy military environment as well.

Okay. And then, I'm not going to weigh this too heavily because your competitors here have a little bit of an edge on this next question. How much research have you already done into clean, and how much do you know about what our position is as far as in Texas and the things that we've been doing and the opportunities that we've been looking at?

Sure. I would tell you that if you forget where I live

Forgot it.

I'm I would say that probably a good 70 to 75% of my work is in Texas. So, if you're asking me about the familiarities with, you know, I 35 corridor from, you know, Frisco and Salina all the way down to San Antonio and everything in between. I've worked in every one of the metroplex areas. I I know that the state legislature is getting very active in local government. I know, you know, Senate Bill two. I mean, I'm I'm intimately aware with what's going on in Texas.

Thank you.

So, yes.

Council Member Nash King.

Thank you. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. I know you have, like, a large firm, a large network, and you can recruit nationally if you chose to. Well, you should, not chose to, you should.

And also, your staff is big. So the process that you explained to us is very detailed. But the part that I have two questions for you, once they go through step one, two, and three, and then whomever your team chooses, you will interview them based on what you're looking for. That's one question to you. And also, how big of a part do your contact list that you already have set aside will play in this decision?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think there you guys remember the word Rolodex? You know, we used to have Rolodexes. Everybody used to talk about their Rolodex. I have been in this space now since 2005.

I have placed the same candidate. I've placed a duplicate candidate three times. So, what I'm saying is every search has new people that are new to it. Every search has people that we may have already known, but maybe didn't work with and didn't place. It's that is the special sauce in what we do, right?

I think it's getting so when I talked about the stakeholder meetings on the front side being the most important part, that's me getting a sense of what this community is and what you are as a council. And that's going to be hard because you're a lot of you are new. So you have to have a you know, get a figure about what you are as a council, right? So that's part of the process, and part of that's going to be, you know, maybe that's something that we're looking at with candidates. I'm not saying it is, but maybe it's something that's, you know, worked with new councils before and kind of, you know, done those things. I don't know what those items are yet, because I haven't met with you. You know, I can read you all the statistics about, you know, the city. I, you know, I got Wikipedia. I can do all that kind of stuff. I can get all that information, but you got to get here and get in the heart of it.

But I, you know, I know Texas. I think that Texas candidly has the strongest candidate pool for city management in the country, which is one of the reasons why we do a lot of work here. I think there's probably no greater depth of talent in the profession than this. So, I'm assuming you're going to have a lot of strong candidates that are from Texas. And then, you know, there's going to be people from Oklahoma, people always want to come to Texas, we pay better.

You know, there's always all those kinds of things. But that's the idea is to for us to really get to understand what you're looking for so that I can convey that to the candidates. I don't want my recruiting team necessarily conveying that. I want them to be on the nuts and bolts side of it, tactically saying, are they qualified because of these metrics that we're looking for?

Thank you for that. But my that was a compound question. But my last question is, why should we hire you? This is my second opportunity to be a part of the hiring process for city managers, so we I've gone through this process before, but why should we select your company?

Yeah. I'm fun.

Oh, my God. No,

I think this is serious work. You know, you said we're a big company. We're not a big company.

Okay.

You know, I have six employees. So, that's on purpose. I've been the CEO of a management consulting company. I've had the 200 employees. I've done all that stuff. We have specifically stayed small and we specifically just do executive search. I'm not trying to sell you training or interim stuff or consulting things. We just do executive search. I'm running close on time, so I want to be sensitive to this. But I will tell you that a long time ago, I it was the first city management proposal that I ever put out.

And it was a very large city in Texas. And the other two firms that I was competing against had done a 100 city manager searches each, and we had not done any. And the council person asked me, why should we hire you? You've never been a city manager. And that's what's different about our firm. We don't have anybody that's been a city manager. We don't have anybody that's ever worked in city government. You're not hiring a city manager, you're hiring a recruiting firm. We're a recruiting firm. That's what we do.

So if you ask me why should you hire me, I don't have any friends in the business that I need to get a job. I don't have any of that. I'm not saying that any of my competitors do, they're all very I'm just telling you that we're a recruiting company. We're based on methodologies and practices and we've been doing it for a long time in this space. So we know a lot of people, but there's still that baseline of what we do.

Thank you.

You bet.

Council Member Brown.

I'm sorry, just one other question. In the cost that you have quoted us here, is that going to include all of the community forums, all of the stakeholder meetings? Are we going to get like an a la carte every time we say we want two different community meetings so that the entire community can meet maybe twice?

Yeah, no. It's not like a Disney cruise where you're going have to pay for a drink. This is that's the one package. The only thing that's not included in our price is the price to bring candidates in for the interviews, because we don't know how many you want to bring in and where they're going be coming from. But that's it. That includes all the brochure creation, all the posting, all of the facilitation of all those meetings, yes.

Okay. Just so you know, the cost will be whatever it is to fly them to GRK.

Okay. No problem. I feel bad I flew to Austin. Should have.

That's it. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions from the council? Concerns?

Okay. Council Member Williams.

Yes. How are

you doing? Good.

Thank I'm thankful as well for your experience. And my question is is that I know that you said that that you search for them for a wide range as far as the area that you search. What is the area? Is it the entire country? What is your range as far as looking for the city manager?

Yeah. That's why I say don't look at where I live because I don't do any work in Pennsylvania. So, I mean, the truth of the matter is that technology has enabled us to really search everywhere, right? Like the biggest tools that we have in terms of technology are probably LinkedIn and the social media LinkedIn, it's not like we're putting stuff on TikTok or anything like that, right? It's the professional networks that we're using for this.

Membership in ICMA, membership in TCMA, membership in NFBPA, membership in International Hispanic Network, IGHN. Our network is that and people that are part of NFBPA and IHN and all these networks are from all over the country. Now, depending on what your profile is, depending on what you're looking for in candidate also will dictate some of those things, right? Like so, I do a lot of work in Collin County, Texas, right? Every city is just blowing up up there.

It's growing fast. Probably not going to recruit a lot of people from the Rust Belt, where there are cities of decline in population. They don't have the right skills, right? So it's kind of matching some of those things. So, you know, we talked about military, you know, we probably look at military cities and kind of see, you know, what those those are some of the things that will make this unique that will be customized in this recruitment.

And my second question is, what make you so distinctive? Why are you different than the other firms?

Yeah, I think it just goes back to the same question, know, I talked about. I mean, we're a recruiting firm. We're headhunters. We're every word that you can think about to do that, that's what we do. I'm not going to be your interim city manager. I'm not going to come in and try to, you know, sell you a council facilitation. I don't do any of those things. So, we're just recruiters, and you're trying to hire a recruiting company.

Thank you, appreciate it.

K. That's all questions for mister Raleigh. Yes. Council member Kendricks.

Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. Heard a lot. You just about answered most of my questions that I had, me being last. But you you you your main pitching point, you did say, how outside of Texas. Did you say that? No. No? We are not looking for a city manager nationwide?

We are. We are going to look for a city manager nationwide. My assumption would be that if we broke down the candidate pool based on location, that you'd probably see 70% of this candidate base will be out of Texas. 30% will be other. Just because tax first of all, Texas is Texas centric.

There's a benefit to to doing that. You know, your water rights, your, you know, having relationships with TxDOT, you know, all these kinds of things, you know, there's a real benefit to having some familiarity with that. It is not but that doesn't mean that we won't take a great candidate from Colorado, or dare I say California. I just did that up in Collin County. Just took a city manager from California to be the city manager in Ana, Texas, which is fast growing, right? So, I'm just telling you kind of statistically what the numbers would look like, but the announcements will be nationwide.

And the reason why I say that, if we are saying we're looking for the best candidate, I I being on the city council, I if it's the best candidate and they come from Nevada Yeah. I wouldn't care because that would be the best for this city. So, I'm not just, you know, yes, I'm in the state of Texas, but also when we say we want the best and we was just talking about leadership and all of that with this being military, a military town, I just feel like we should also concentrate on that aspect of it, of it being the best qualified person.

Agreed. That's the most important piece. I don't really care. Jacksonville, North Carolina, we're doing their transportation director over there right now. Big military town, you know. So, and there is a nuance to it. There certainly is a nuance to it. But I 100% agree with you. I don't really care where they come from. I don't care if they're sitting in this office in here. They're an internal. It doesn't like it doesn't the right candidate is the right candidate.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Riley. Thank you. There's no other questions?

Apologies.

Council Member Nash King. Thank you.

Sir, I agree with Council Member Kendrick about it doesn't matter where they come from, but I think you hit on two of the most important issues that we do deal with in Texas, and that's definitely water. And also, textile infrastructure is so important, what we're dealing with right now in our own city. But to add on to what council member Kendrick stated is that it coming here, I know these are some things, because we're have our own idea of what we think, and I know the public have their idea, everybody, and also staff. I think staff plays a very significant part, because that will be his or her leader. That's just Debbie's perspective.

But those issues that you mentioned and other issues that you see that's going on in just the state of Texas, things that we're all, all the municipalities are dealing with, those things for anyone that come up here to speak to present to us, you really need to focus on what is the concerns of Texas. Sure. Because that will have a direct effect on how the state will vote, and it will have a tremendous, as we see now, and even councilwoman Brown, the military. Those are things that we want people to be aware of, to fight for, because we're doing it right now. Mister Kagle and his assistant city managers, mister Reynolds and missus Wilson, and also staff have laid that foundation, and that's a charge from not only this current council, but councils prior to us.

Well, I was there too, but that's not the point. So, those issues for anyone that may present to us tonight, those are the issues we're focused on, but also, as Council Member Kendrick stated, we're not just stuck on a candidate here in Texas, just as long as they know our concerns.

Sure.

Thank I

appreciate that. And every region of the country has their version of that. You know, I've got a colleague here that does work in Colorado, as do we, you know. If you talk to anybody in Colorado, they'll talk about western water rights, like nobody can figure it out. Well, everybody can figure it out. But, it's nice to have a basis of a Senate bill, you know, SB two, you know, the capping of the taxes, all those kinds of things, you know. This legislature just kind of keeps getting a little bit more unique every session, so, you know, keeping an eye on that and knowing those things are going to be important.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much for your time, everybody. Appreciate it.

Okay. Our next firm will be Clear Careers and Ms. Kelly, come on the floor.

Good afternoon, ma'am.

Good afternoon, thank you so much for having us. We're excited to be here. My name is Kelly Kensler, I'm the Vice President of CLEAR Career Professionals, and some of this presentation, I'm probably just going to say we do it similarly to AFEON, just in the interest of your time, and so, you know, if you want me to stop and explain in further detail, I'm absolutely happy to. I just want to be respectful of your time. So we're a really young company.

To give you the long story short, one day a couple of other city managers that retired about the same time I did said, let's all get together and talk about something. They decided, two other gentlemen decided they wanted to start this recruitment firm. And honestly, I was a little bit against it. It took a little bit for me to buy in, and that's just because as a former, I ran a state agency, I was a county manager, I was a city manager, and I felt like recruitment was expensive, a lot of it was the same, and I wasn't necessary, I hadn't necessarily bought in. But what really made me buy into ClearCareer was the things that we decided to do that made us different, and in my opinion better.

And I say that with all due respect to the other recruitment firms here in the room, because they're all top notch. You're not going to go wrong with anybody, I will tell you that. So we got together in 2022 and decided this was something that we wanted to tap into and something we wanted to do, because we were all city managers. We have all dealt with recruitment firms. As a county manager, I dealt with one.

As a state agency director, I dealt with one. And so we just wanted to really talk about it, dissect it, and figure out what we could do and how we could be a little bit different. So as I stated, our team right now is retired of is comprised of retired city managers and senior public sector leaders. That's all that's on our team. People that have sat in the seat, people that have been there. So we're very different than AFEON in that aspect. We are Texas based. We're literally all around you. I'm in the San Antonio area. The person that would be the lead recruiter here, in addition to us, because you're not only going to get one recruiter, you'll realize you're going to get a team of city managers, but the person that's the lead recruiter, his name is Doctor.

Kent Myers, and he actually retired from, well, about 90 miles southeast of you in Fredericksburg. I'm from the San Antonio area. Mike Bayes, another retired city manager from South of you in Wimberley. He is in the Dallas Fort Worth area, and we have another one in the College Station, Bryan area, and a couple that are out of state, city managers. So anyway, we are excited about our team.

We're excited about the fact that we have been there, we've been boots on the ground, and that's one of the things that makes us different. So this particular recruitment is about trust, execution, and fit. So what we find is in so many recruitments, you can get qualified people, right? They check the boxes. But are they going to be a good fit for this community, and for this city council, and for this staff?

Are they going to be able to carry the torch forward from the things that you have already started? And also carry the new ideas forward, because there's a lot of new people here, and congratulations on the election, by the way. And so will they be able to carry that torch forward for you, whether it be, to your point, aging infrastructure, water rights, whatever your specific needs are in your community, we really do a lot of vetting before they come to you to make sure that they're going to be a good fit. As I said, that's one thing that makes us really different. It's a practitioner led recruitment.

Here are our Texas city managers that started this firm. All of us have at least thirty years of government experience. So the first thing we do, very similar to what AFIAN, and I'm sure the other companies do as well, we come here and we visit Killeen, and we want to know exactly we don't picture of exactly what that looks like. We're going to want to know what do you want that to look like? Do you want us in the beginning to visit with community?

Do you want us to visit with, you know, leaders of your school, leaders of your base, community groups, faith based groups? Whoever you'd like us to visit at the beginning, we will. We'll visit with your staff, and obviously with you, so that we get your input and we understand exactly what you're looking for. Lots of executive team conversations are going on during these visits, because like any of the other recruitment firms, we have a database and a list of names of people that have applied, people that we know are interested. And so we're already starting the discussion on, you know, what people have interviewed, what people we know that might fit into CLEAN.

So the stakeholder engagement is really how in-depth you want it to be. The other thing that we do is we will do a custom candidate profile. Actually I'm gonna talk about that a little bit later. So we recruit leaders, not just applicants, like I said. A lot of resumes that you'll notice will check the boxes.

We do direct outreach, we have a database, we do peer referrals, We do we get a lot from peer referrals, because we were practitioners, so we have a ton of peer contacts. We get our referrals through municipal networks, through national networks, and then through passive candidate engagement. The other thing that really sets CLEAR apart, because I know that was a couple of your questions, you know, what's going to make you different? One thing that I think is super cool that Clear does is we do what's called position casts. So we actually have an individual who does podcasts for Clear Career.

I would love for you to go and listen to them. It's clearcareerpro.com, and you can listen to some of the podcasts and some of the position casts that we have posted. But what that looks like is the recruiter comes and does a podcast with the mayor, and if the mayor would like it to be with the interim city manager or with another council member or whoever you all choose to do this position cast. And it takes usually about forty five minutes or so, and we just start asking you questions. By this time, we really already know the answer to the questions, but we ask you questions about Killeen, about City Hall, about the community.

We really kind of try to make certain that the applicant not only understands the position they're applying for, but gets a nice picture and feel of what the community looks like. So that would be something, like I said, that we would ask you to do with us, Mayor. And then it gets posted. In fact, it gets blasted all around national media, Texas media, anywhere we can blast it, we do. And I can tell you that of every position cast that we've done, sometimes thousands, sometimes hundreds of views, but we definitely are getting the engagement from people deciding, do I even want to apply for clean?

Let me go listen to this podcast, and let me hear from the mayor and whoever else you choose, and let me decide if I'm even interested in this position, because believe it or not, sometimes people fly out after that, right? They're like, maybe that position's not for me. It's just one more way that we can engage, because not only are you our client, but the people that the applicants are our clients as well. And so it's a great way for us to engage applicants and have them understand what's going on in Killeen, and what you're expecting. As you can see, a few of the things.

Oh, it's promoted through a channel we call the Clear Voice. We've had 50,000 plus plays since July. It's not even a year old yet, and that thing has just blown up. So I'm super excited. Every time I get to do one of these position casts, I love it when we're interviewing candidates all the way to the very end, when they come to Killeen, Texas, and they're referring to that podcast that they listen to again. So it's a great tool that we have. And one thing, I just want to go back a little bit. It absolutely creates a connection before the candidates apply, where they decide if they really want to or not. So we're super proud of that product. So what happens with candidate care?

We are not somebody that is going to take an application, send them an email out, and say, thank you so much for applying, you know, you'll hear from us as to whether or not make the next step. That's not who we are, and that's not what we do. We actually have what we call a client engagement team, client relations team, and they call the candidates weekly just to say, you know, first call might look like, thank you for applying for Killeen, we have your resume, happy you're here, we will be in touch weekly. The next week might look like something, hey, we heard this from the council, this is when they're thinking of doing the final interviews. We always keep in touch with them as to what's going on, and then we document that we've kept in touch.

And the other really cool thing that our client relations team does that as a recruiter, it's been helpful for me, is if a client has obviously done their homework and has lots of favorable things or unfavorable things to do, say, we're documenting that. So we're even learning about the client from these weekly phone calls. So that's another thing that sets us apart. Very clear communication with the client, and very clear communication with you. You know what we are doing at all times.

Our recruiter makes sure of it. We're very responsive. When clients call, we almost always will call them back. I can honestly say with our clients relations team within the hour, but let's say within the day, let's give us some wiggle room there. I'm just so proud of our clients relations team and the work that they're doing.

Professional candidate experience, and because we are all retired city managers, there's this trust that the clients have with us, because we've sat in their seat, we know what it's like. So there's lots of information for counsel decisions, and we literally go through so much of the same process that AFION does. We bring, you know, we do the pre interviews. All the interviews are not done with one person. They are done with a team of three or four retired city managers.

All semifinalist interviews are all done that way. And what happens is we do the semi finalist interviews, but we record them for you. So then we send every council member links, and you, at your own leisure, can sit there and view these semifinalist interviews that we have conducted, and we will pick depending I mean, I've seen six finalists go to a city, and I've seen three, just depending on who really shines and who really seems to fit the bill for clean. If at any time you all look at these interviews and you say, I think CLEAR really missed out on John Doe, absolutely, we'll bring John Doe in then too, because you'll know exactly what happened during our semifinalist interviews. Our goal is to make sure you are so involved in the process, because as Scott said, and agree 100%, this is such an important decision for you.

And so by the time these candidates come to clean, and we do the community interviews, the faith based interviews, the staff interviews, the council interviews, you're already going to feel like you kind of know them. So the other thing that we do is we also have a finalist packet that comes to you. We use a company called Checkr, and they do your concern counselor about the financial backgrounds, They do the comprehensive financial backgrounds as far as someone's credit. It's the same thing as far as any judgments or outstanding debts, anything like that. They do the criminal background check, and they also do the social media background check, because as Scott was mentioning, I can certainly Google Kent Cagle's name, right, and it takes a long time to go through all the articles and all the information about that particular person, especially if there's a practitioner, they have any experience, they're gonna be all over the media.

So we give you these little pretty packets, same thing, picture of the candidate, the resume, the references, the background checks, and we also have a tool so that we can decipher the candidates or the applicant's writing. We do a management analysis tool where they have to write something for you as well, and that is sent along with our finalist packet. So very, very similar. That finalist packet is just honestly almost identical to what Appian's looks like. So we have our fixed fixed fee there.

To answer your question, counselor, about the expenses, that includes absolutely everything. The only thing I want to make sure that, and this actually is wrong, we actually have a two year guarantee, but the community that we did before this was a one guarantee, and that didn't get fixed. So I'm telling you it's a two year guarantee for this one. The only thing that would increase at all is if a candidate, let's just say, came in from Washington DC or something like that, and wanted their flight reimbursed. That is typically, and I think all recruitment firms do this, that's something that the city typically covers.

But this is everything is included in the $23,000 package. So some of the benefits of choosing CLEAR, it has been our experience so far in these years of doing business that we're pretty cost effective comparatively, especially considering all of the services that we offer. We are your partner throughout the process. You will probably get tired of hearing from us, especially you mayor. That's just, that's the way it works.

We definitely wanna make certain that there is lots of communication. And the unwavering commitment not only to communication with you, but communication to the client as well. Some examples of successful recruitments, and I just plucked some of the more recent ones. Kerrville is actually a good one up there because, Counselor, you were asking about our involvement with veterans. So one of our city manager is actually a retired colonel, and we actually have placed a veteran up in Montana, and we also placed one in Kerrville, Texas.

And that veteran, we were pretty involved with him because he hadn't been placed there very long when the floods happened, and so we were all trying to see what we could do to help out and lend a hand there in Kerrville. Something else that CLEAR does is when we started this, we all agreed that we could run a recruitment firm and march forward, but we wanted to be a little different. Another way that we are different is we try to give back. And the way that we're giving back right now is through involvement in the universities. The universities actually, well, two of us in CLEAR actually were elected to the Texas City Manager Statewide Board.

I'm one of them, and Brad Stafford is the other. So we're really involved in TML and TCMA and that line. But what we do every year at TCMA, we started an intercollegiate bowl. By we, I mean the board at the time, intercollegiate bowl. And so what we do is we actually coach grad students during this Intercollegiate Bowl, and then throughout the semester, to help them A, get exposed to cities around Texas, B, kind of get their foot in the door and understand what city management is, or an executive position in city is.

And we teach them. And then so many of them that have passed through, I'm able to follow them now. And so that's something else that I'm really proud of all of us is the way that we give back. So anyway, so there are just some other recruitments that either we have done or we are doing. We're happy to give you any references that you would like. We actually have a complete list of our recruitments on our website. There's a lot more than this. With that, I tried to be brief and not duplicate any of the information, but I will stand for questions, and we thank you for your time.

Thank you. We do have some questions. We'll start with Councilmember Kimball.

Good afternoon, and thank you for coming down.

Good afternoon, counselor.

I see on your website, or you said on your website you have another list of places that you have done recruitments, and besides the county, Montgomery County, what has been the largest municipality that you have done?

We're in Odessa right now, we're in Victoria right now, Missouri City, trying to think of some of our larger ones. Boy. Denison is another one, we're in Denison.

Denison, so does any of those municipalities have a population over 150,000?

Yes, Odessa does.

Odessa?

Uh-huh. Missouri City is at about 100, aren't they?

Close.

About right.

So the largest municipality that you've done to date is Odessa?

I believe that's correct.

Is that a city manager search?

No. That is their CFO and their city attorney search.

Okay. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Okay. Council member Bess.

Thank you for that briefing. I have two questions. You are the low bid by far. So the first question is how can you be the low bid? And the second question is, how can you, when you do the process of interviews, how can you tell what kind of boss that person was at their previous job or at their current job? Do you get input from the people that they supervise? Thank you.

Both excellent questions, Counselor. So how can we do it at this rate? CLEAR doesn't realize as much of a profit as the other agencies do. Why do we do it for this amount? Because we were there. We sat in that chair. We had to deal with budgets. I, for one, went, I don't know about executive recruitment. It's expensive, and I and so we wanted to be able to give a less expensive product, but we wanted to make it a little different. And this is our fee structure.

Like I said, what ends up happening is the company does not end up making as much as the other companies do, but none of us are really ready to sit on the I'm not ready to sit on the back porch and knit. I really still want to be involved, and in addition to being involved in my community, I love being involved in Texas cities and TCMA and ICMA and Texas City management, and so we all want to be here, and I really don't have a better answer for you, but that's the honest answer.

Thank you.

And then, I'm sorry, do you mind restating the second

No, part of your I'm

Second question is, when you do the interview process with the applicants, how can you tell what kind of boss that person was? Do you get input from the people that they are currently supervising or supervised in the past?

I think that's a great question as well. So there's several ways that we do that. One way, we talked about a little bit earlier, I like to know the way they treat people, and the way they treat our client relations team is important to me, because the way that you treat them is very potentially, in my opinion, the way you might end up treating those that you work with. Those notes are important to me. The other thing, we always ask them about their style and their leadership.

The other thing is we try to get diverse references, and we don't only want to hear from this group of people, we want to hear from somebody that supervised you, somebody in an elected position, we'd love to hear from somebody that was under you, somebody in the community. Give us some really good examples, and maybe one or two from, you know, outside, but also inside City Hall.

Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you for the questions.

Mayor Pro Tem Gonzalez.

Thank you for your presentation.

Yes, ma'am.

You had some triggers in there that kind of got me excited that you'd done your homework on us, so thank you for recognizing and congratulating the newest councilmember as I one of do find your structure to be very interesting. I think it is beneficial to know that not only are you guys boots on the ground, but that you're also former city managers, but then yet that you're actively staying on top of it and engaged with current trends and things that are happening, especially statewide. Think that's essential. That's something that's very unique about your company that My I really question is though, just in general, for objective evaluating, because each council member will have something that they feel is ultimately the most important thing. So how do you help us narrow that down so that we get a clear consensus of what is really truly important to us as a team moving forward?

So the way that we do that, honestly, is we come and we sit down and we talk to you. But from the outside looking in, you have an amazing base here. We have veterans that in fact, Mark Strives will actually be in charge of doing the veteran led recruitment piece of this. We have veterans. We've appointed veterans.

I actually have been in I mean, I'm in the San Antonio, Texas area at Military City USA. We are constantly in fact, one of my very dearest friends is a city manager in Divine, Texas, and he's a former veteran. We just got finished helping him, and we appointed a veteran there. So we are very familiar with the veteran community, with the military community, and, you know, one thing that you talked about is the issues in Texas that are everywhere, right? Water issues, aging infrastructure, the cities that have infrastructure that's over 100 years old, and they're trying to piece this all back together or whatever.

All these problems that are pretty much synonymous with 90% of Texas towns, right? But what is unique to Killeen? You have a young population here. You have a diverse population here. You have a very strong military base here. You have a lot of new electeds. So it's really important for us to get in there and understand the direction of the newly electeds, so we make sure that when we're at the table considering candidates, we are representing you, your interest, and your needs. Did that answer your question? Good.

Absolutely. Thank you. And then on the flip side of that, do you all provide information or feedback back to the municipality? As we know, some areas are challenge areas, or we might receive maybe negative or not so, or counterproductive information that could be beneficial to us in the future, meaning feedback from your clients as it relates to our city, as it relates to this process with us. Do you provide information back to us as your client in that situation?

So, Mayor Pro Tem, are you talking about after the final interviews?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay. So after the final interviews, you actually will meet with the chief recruiter, and the chief recruiter absolutely gives you feedback.

Thank you. Good, bad, or indifferent.

Actually, we give you more feedback than that, and I'm just going to digress a little bit to a city that I just did, and one of the reasons that the applicants were not applying and were really looking at it, listened to the podcast, and then backed off is because the council, the newly elected council, was having a little bit of a tough time distinguishing between making policy administration, right? And so applicants were dropping, And so I had to go to the mayor and say, look, these two strong candidates, I can't tell you who they are, but they have a lot of experience, just dropped. And this is the reason. And so we need to really work on this, and we need to try to come together collectively as a group, because not only are these candidates trying to sell themselves to you, but you and me and CLEAR, we're trying to sell clean to these candidates. I hope that helps.

Absolutely. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Councilmember Brown.

Had to wait for the green light. It's like traffic. When it's red, you can't go yet. Well, thank you for coming. And you've answered a lot of the questions, so thank you for proactively listening and getting to those. In your information and in your presentation, you said that we get two visits on-site. You get what? Two on-site visits, one at the beginning, one closer to the end of selection, correct?

So what happens is we come in at the beginning and we spend several days here, and we usually don't come back until the final interviews, but I would not that is not set in stone, because a recent city that I just did well, one that I'm doing, I've been there more than twice. So that is typically the arrangement, but if attention is needed between time, then we come.

And that's why I ask about is it all inclusive in that cost, so if we need additional visits It is. Historically, Killeen, the City Council will appoint a citizen committee that also does an interview process, and then we have our larger community at large meetings to be able to interview, ask questions, get to know the candidates. So besides the staff and the other executives within the city, the council, then you have another subcommittee made up of citizens. And usually that input, I think, is going to be good in addition in a visit in person to be able to speak with them at least during one of their meetings to be able to set that up, and I just wanted to make sure that would be included in that cost.

Mayor, council member, yes. The answer is that is included. Usually, if you have citizens groups, schools, faith based groups, whoever you want us to visit to, we try to visit with them at the beginning before as we're doing that job profile, because everybody's input is important. And so we really don't want to push out a final brochure, a final product, until we have all that information that the council wants us to have.

And then you're a relatively newer group, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm sorry, didn't hear You're a relatively newer

We are, yes ma'am.

Necessarily a bad thing. However, timeline that you proposed is significantly faster than some of the other ones. What are the pros and cons in your mind to going faster versus taking our time and going a little bit slower?

So honestly, my answer would really be the same as Scott's answer. You have budget season coming up, which is one of the reasons for an aggressive timeline. You have school starting, if you have a city manager with a family, that's going to be important. This is a really summer is an important time, because we see movement in the summer, and that's the reason for this aggressive timeline. If we need to amend the timeline, if the council thinks the timeline needs to amend, we can absolutely do that in the contract. But that's the reason for this timeline is summer consideration.

And I know you already started to answer this, but how much do you know about Killeen and our opportunities and our objectives and the goals that we might have?

So what I know about Killeen is what I said. I understand your demographics. I've probably visited Killeen half a dozen times. I understand your main employers. I understand things like your population and where you are in proximity to some of the larger cities. Have I gone through your strategic plan? No. That is going to be questions, though, that we actually will talk about in the podcast. So before the podcast, we will actually be asking you some of those questions so that we're sharing that information with the people that apply.

Thank you. I have one other question. I know you've only been in business for a couple years.

Have Three and a few months, correct.

So now you've gone from a one year to a two year guarantee.

Yes, and that one year guarantee was actually not for a city manager position, it was a slide that didn't get corrected. The city manager position is a two year guarantee.

Have you ever had to go back for that two year guarantee yet? Yes, You have?

Okay. Yes, have. Okay. And it costs us a lot of money when

we have to

do that, so. Right. And a lot of time, so we really want to try to get it right. It's in every single firm in here. It's in all of our best interest to get it right the first time.

Exactly. Thank Absolutely.

Councilmember Naskin?

Thank you. Thank you, ma'am, for going over the presentation. I like the three sixty evaluation when you go out and talk to their peers and people that have worked for them. I think that is amazing. That's one of the things that the military does when it's time for evaluation. And also, I like the point that you made in reference to how you go about recruiting, especially in Texas because you're from Texas. Right. So here's my question to you. Your firm is made up of city managers. It is.

And you're going to have a lot of input from a lot of us, I mean, the community, the staff, council. How does that determine when you get to your semifinalists, the ones that you select, your company select to present to us based on that information? How much does your input, along with the other city managers, play in what we may tell you what we want, but you're going to do all this research on our city to ensure that it meets that fit. So, all of you city managers, how much input does that have in when you select a person or the finalist for us?

So, there's really a twofold that I see on a candidate, and one is you all have agreed on the brochure by the time it goes out, and honestly, with the timeline, that's given we have an aggressive timeline, but you have to get back with us. There's times where we say, okay, we can have the brochure created in two weeks or whatever, but if we're not getting feedback from you and it's taking seven or nine days to get your feedback, then that timeline's not going to be met, right? So that's one thing that happens. So by the time we create the brochure, it's your product. It's with your feedback.

It's not something that we're just going out and creating. Part of it's going to be from your job description that the City Council has approved, part of it's going to show the compensation the City Council has approved, but you will notice in some of our brochures there's also some soft skills in there, and those soft skills are where do we get those soft skills? Staff, community, council. It's easy to read a job description and I can know exactly what you want. That's not a big deal. But it's those soft skills that honestly, in my opinion, and personalities that determine whether or not someone's going to stay here and whether or not someone's a good fit for Killeen. And so did that answer your question?

Yes, ma'am. You gave your opinion and put you also told us what you're going to have in the brochures based on if we get back with you, our input from anyone. Absolutely. Time and is everything.

Okay, very I'm

glad I answered it. Yes, ma'am, thank you.

Thank you so much, counselor.

Okay. Any other questions? Councilmember Williams?

Yes, how you doing here?

I'm here.

Thank you, Councilor Williams. It's great to be

What you said thus far, I mean, it's been awesome. I also like how you said that you always keep in touch and that you communicate with the clients and you communicate with us because during the process, even communicating with us is very important.

Yes. It is.

Now for your semifinals, would they be brought back to the city council? Will we be involved in that as well for your semifinal being bring back to the city council? And then will we select those, or how do you guys do the process there? And thank you for mentioning the veterans and being involved in the military community. It's important to appreciate it's very important.

It's very important

to us as well.

Now, we understand it.

Yes, ma'am.

So, Mayor Councilor, the way it typically works, but we structure it based on what you want, because we have definitely structured it different than this. In fact, I'm structuring it different in Victoria, Texas right now. But what typically happens is we I mean, I'm just going to throw a number out there. I bet we'll get 50 applicants for this Massimo. See, I don't know, 50 applicants, And let's so there's going to be those that aren't qualified, right? Their resume doesn't meet your preferred qualifications or your minimum qualifications. Those,

we will

be in contact with, and then we will very politely call them and say, Thank you for applying on behalf of CLEAR career professionals and the City of Killeen, because not only do we want the applicants to have a favorable image of Killeen, but it's also important that they have a favorable image of Killeen, because we represent you. And so I just got off track.

That's okay.

And so, anyway, so that's the first thing that we do. We'll get rid of those, right? And then you'll have a panel of us, three or four of us, will sit there and we'll go through the resumes that do qualify and figure out who meets the preferred qualifications, because sure, they would get in semifinalists, right? As long as everything had been copacetic so far. And we would determine 10 or so people that we thought should be semifinalists, and then we interview all of them without you.

But we record all of the interviews, and we send them all to you, so that at your leisure, in your inbox, you're going to be able to watch us interviewing these people. And then Doctor. Myers will tell you, these are the people that this group of city managers think should come forward and should be finalists and clean. If at that time you say, you know, and we talked about this a little earlier, I saw John Doe in that bunch, and I think you guys missed him, then we'll bring him in. And that's why we like to get those to you. I have to tell you, it's never happened. We've never had to bring somebody in because the council disagrees with who we're bringing in. Could it happen in the future? We're only three years and several months young. Sure, could, but it hasn't yet.

Thank you. And what's the process from the hiring from the interview to the hiring? Is there stages that they go through? What is the process of that?

Yes. So, by the time they come to Killeen for their final interviews, you have all the information on them. You have the references, hopefully some diverse references. You have, you know, the social media, the financial, all the criminal, everything that everybody else is going to do for you. You have that packet so you know.

If we find somebody that we determine is a finalist and they have, you know, issues with that, they probably won't be brought forward, or at the very least, we will be bringing it to the mayor's attention to say, this is what we found. This person was supposed to come as a finalist. Do you want to take them, or do you want us to bring the next person up? So by the time there's not going to be any surprises by the time they're here. We know what's going on.

Thank you. Does that help?

Ma'am. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Mr. Kagle,

Got a very important question. The latest the last college bowl, do you know which university won that?

Yes, I do. University of North Texas, Mr. Kagle.

Oh, I thought it was Texas Tech, was it not?

No, it was University of North Texas. Well, that's no fun. But they represent well. My daughter got her master's from there, so.

Council Member Kendricks. Good afternoon. Just about you very you pretty much answered all of the questions, but I I had this. When we started talking about candidates and things, When you put in in there what we are looking for, is is it dictated on whether or not that candidate is an assistant city manager now and held those type of positions, or could someone who has held an executive director position actually fall in the realm of possibly be selected as a candidate even if they have no city manager experience?

You know, I know that several of you are newly elected, but I'm just going to say one thing. I've never been in front of a council with this good of question. You guys really do have good questions, so nice job doing your homework. So let me tell you what happens. We take your job description from the city of Killeen. You tell us the answer if you want the answer to that, you're going to tell me the answer. I'm not going to tell you. You're the boss.

You just gave me an answer to

the text.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Any other questions from the council? Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you so much for your time, council.

Thank you.

Thank you. While we're waiting for the candidate, I just want to say this is very important and thank you council for asking these questions. This is very, very important. This is we want to get it right. And so, the council had studied and researched and so they're asking a lot of questions because this will affect our city. Thank you for your patience. Ms. McDaniel?

Yes. So your next firm will be Government Professional Solutions and Mr. Brett Bauer.

Thank you, ma'am.

Good afternoon, mayor Solomon and council members.

Good afternoon, sir.

And for the new ones, did everybody get their pictures taken today? If you did not, I think the I think the photograph room is upstairs. Well, I do wanna thank you guys for inviting me to come here and meet and speak and visit with you guys here today about our process with GPS. You know, for the record, my name is Brett Bauer. I am a cofounder and partner to GPS. My partner, he's based out of Colorado, and he and I are both former city managers. We came up through the ranks in the Kansas City Metroplex. We're both from Kansas. I got tired of shoveling snow, so I came to Texas. And he loves the snow, and he moved to Colorado.

So and I've been at Texas for the last ten, eleven years now. And we started GPS never mind. Thank you. You know, who we are as GPS, I've kind of started on that process. You know, we're senior level city managers, both my partner, his name is Chris Lowe, by the way.

Combined, we've got thirty plus years of city management experience in multiple states, both in Texas and throughout the Midwest. We are committed to high ethics, integrity, and relationships. That's a word that you can hear me mention multiple times throughout my time speaking and visiting with you here this afternoon. I've kind of touched on myself and my business partner. I would add that my business partner, because I know it was a question, when it comes to the the interview and hiring process and and what sort of process or how involved do we get, and that's dependent upon you guys.

My business partner is a an attorney specializing in in municipal employment law. So if there is an ask of us to help and assist in in that contract negotiations, we can and we can more than happy to do that for you. Why hire GPS for your executive search needs? Twenty years of successful recruiting. Some past more recent Texas executive recruitments include City Of DeSoto, Duncanville, Hutto, La Grange, Prosper, Windcrest.

I would add on that one because I know you guys are a military community with Fort Hood right next door. Another military community that that we did the city manager recruitment for was Junction City, Kansas. There's a big US army military base there and installation there with Fort Riley. And the city of Junction City, Kansas know, had Fort Riley, their garrison commander, which is the equivalent to a city manager, involved in that process to some degree. So we've got that direct experience as well.

I know that's very important to each and every one of you. Senior level partner, myself, would be the project lead and the handler of your project. There is no other employees beneath me other than my business partner who who he and I like to backstop one another. You see me, you hear from me, and I'm gonna be here every time. As former city managers and candidates ourselves, we know how to get in front of top candidates because we've been in that position.

We've been on that side of the table. When we started GPS approximately seven years ago, eight years ago, you know, there was a gap there in in what could be done and how it could be done to be better as an executive recruitment firm working for you guys as a client. We know what it takes to be successful in city county management because we've done that. We've sat in the same seat that Kent has sat in. And by the way, Kent, congratulations.

We have an extensive network of public officials across The US. Personally speaking, my network here in Texas is vast and wide. I've served on different boards and committees with TCMA, specifically the membership committee, the ethics committee, which is a very big and important committee. I've also served as the vice president of the East Texas City Manor Association, which is, you know, a regent within TCMA. And last but not least, commitment to giving you customized and personal service of the highest quality.

You know, our recruitment, yes, we have a process. Yes, that process works, and we believe that it's a very good process. It is still a process that ultimately is your process. So we would want you guys to determine and steer the ship, so to say, and tell us how you guys want your process to go. And if we think you might be steering a little off course, we're going to let you know.

Okay? You can see the recent recruitments that we've done both in Texas and throughout the Midwest, across the country as well. Our approach is a five step approach. Number one, and and step one, in our opinion, is the most important step in all of this, these five steps. Number one, understanding your community.

We're going to spend time and invest time in your community, getting to know your community, getting to know you, your staff, any stakeholders that you want us to meet and visit with, we're gonna take that time and invest in getting to know them. As I mentioned earlier, the one word that you're gonna hear me say a lot about, and that's relationships. You know, in what we do, we believe in building relationships. Selection criteria. That is where we began to develop a foundation or a bedrock of what you guys are looking for in your next city manager.

We call it a a search criteria survey. We would send that out immediately following an execution of a contract and give you guys approximately, you know, 7 to 14 days to provide responses directly to me. And then after that, I will come here personally and meet with all of you, either collectively or individually, however you guys would like that to be, whatever you guys are most comfortable with. Also meet with your staff and any, identified stakeholders that you would want to be a part of this process at the at the beginning as well, meet with them. But getting those that that that communication, in person communication, and and take notes, back that up with your guys' responses to those search criteria surveys is actually what we wanna know.

Because if there is any red flags, you know, if maybe you guys don't agree or maybe some of you are not on the same page, or maybe you guys and staff are not on the same page, That's gonna come out in that in that review process. Okay? So we can work that out before we go any farther. That's why I say this is the bedrock. This is the foundation of your guys' recruitment process. Okay? And and I'd say bedrock because, ultimately, it's the foundation that will, you know, pyramid your project all the way to to the finish line. Okay? We will go over the job description. If that is if that is something that needs to be updated or at least looked at, we're happy to do that with you.

All of that would then be used to create a candidate profile. This candidate profile is what's going to give us the ability to then take all that information from your responses, from those surveys, from your responses in, you know, in person communication, and create the marketing material that is ultimately going to be submitted out and put out there for for any prospective candidates to be able to see, read, review, and learn about you guys as a community, as an organization, so they can make the determination whether or not they would like to apply,

okay?

One thing I would add right here is that we do create a beyond the the ideal candidate profile, but we create a grading matrix at this point in the process as well. And this grading matrix will be derived from you guys on what you guys wanna see and what you guys believe to be the most important variables within what you want to see in your next city manager. And these columns, there's approximately six columns in that grading matrix, and they're weighted by percentages. And we can adjust those percentages to how you guys feel each column, you know, is more important versus another column. As long as the total equals 100, I'm good with whatever you guys want to come up with.

But it's got to equal 100. But that will allow me, when we do get to the advertising part of the process and I start receiving application packets, that is going to allow me to grade those applicants per their applicant application packets and materials they will submit. I will be able to grade those packets based off of what you guys have already talked about and agreed upon as far as what you guys wanna see in your next city manager. Okay? Step two, the recruiting brochure, you know, that's that's a pretty standard document.

It's approximately five to six pages in length, and we're gonna create that snapshot of you guys as an organization, you guys as a community, you guys with staff, your governance. We're gonna create that snapshot, put that out there, so that way any prospective candidates are that's gonna be a starting point for them. And then they will be able to branch out and flower out into gathering more information, more specific information, whether that's getting on your guys' website, social media, calling me, texting me, direct messaging me on LinkedIn. That that seems to be a a favorite by candidates for some reason. I'm not sure why.

But either way, I'm open to any any and all of that communication with any prospective candidates or any candidates that have already applied. If they have some questions that they think of after they've submitted their application materials, I'm happy to talk with them, And that just gives me more opportunity to get to know them on a more personal level. Okay? Outreach network. I've kind of touched on the social media a little bit.

We do utilize social media personally as a company, but also our personal networks. You know, we we know these candidates. There's been a lot of talk of, you know, region, regional versus national. I would highly encourage you guys, whether it's, you know, with GPS or, you know, fellow colleagues slash competitors, you know, do do a national search. Please do.

You're gonna get a better outcome at the end when you guys do cross that finish line. And and as it's been said before me, you're going to get quite a few candidates that are within the state of Texas. You know, is a very centralized part of Texas. This is a very desirable part of Texas. You know, the high the the whole I-thirty 5 Corridor, really from San Antonio all the way up to DFW for that matter, is a very desirable, you know, corridor that that people wanna live in, city managers wanna live and work in.

And it's also, you know, quick access to to go anywhere. You know, maybe there's a final four game in San Antonio. You know, who knows? So the the outreach network, you know, it would be state and national. I touched that I touched on that in my proposal with ICMA and some other national professional organizations along with TML and TCMA as well.

Okay? Step three in our process. Once all of that stuff has been reviewed by you guys and approved, blessed, You know, I'm talking about the the ideal candidate profile, the grading matrix. If there needs to be an update or an adjustment to the job description as well, that would be the time to do all of those things. Establish a timeline. Okay. I know that's been talked about. You know, we suggest a timeline of roughly twelve to fourteen weeks that can be sped up, can be slowed down. That's dependent upon you guys and how fast or how slow you guys would like to go. We want you guys to be comfortable in our process as we partner with you in getting you to the finish line.

Okay? But once all of that is approved by you guys, that's when the advertisement period begins. And it was mentioned by Scott earlier, you know, that is a thirty day process that that I cannot do anything with that part of that process as far as speeding that up. But once that thirty days expires, and as those thirty days are going and I'm collecting those application packets, I'm doing multiple things. Number one, I'm keeping you guys updated weekly, daily, whatever you guys feel comfortable with.

Mayor Solomon, if you are the main point of contact for me, that would be with you. If you would like me to share that those updates with you and the entire council, I'm happy to do that as well. It's whatever you guys are comfortable with and what you guys would desire. Okay? But I'm also doing constant communication with the candidates. I've already touched on it. It's it could be a phone call. It could be a text message. It could be a direct message, you know, through LinkedIn, some other social media platform. And we also have questionnaires that sometimes candidates will fill out on our website, and then I'll receive an email.

So then I will con contact them on the method that they would like me to contact them and continue those conversations, allowing me to have more of those personable type of conversations, getting to know them on a more personable level. After those thirty days and the advertisement period ends, I'm gonna come back down here personally, and I'm gonna meet with you guys. I'm gonna give you the presentation on the overall candidate pool. That candidate pool is gonna be broken down into three tiers. Okay?

And these tiers are gonna be determined based off of the grading matrix that you guys will have already approved in that first foundation. Okay? The third tier or the bottom tier, those folks do not meet your minimum qualifications. I will not waste your time or my time or their time for that matter on on giving them any sort of, you know, screen time, if you will, with you guys as I'm presenting the candidate pool to you. Those candidates that are in the second tier, those candidates are going to meet your minimum qualifications.

Okay? Those minimum qualifications are determined or derived from the job description for that position. Okay? The folks that are in the top tier or the first tier, those candidates are going to exceed the minimum qualifications. Okay?

Maybe it's through education, maybe it's through years of experience, maybe it's experience in certain population of cities. You know, whatever that may be, which is determined by the grading matrix is going to determine where those candidates would fall in, you know, Tier one or Tier two, for example. But those candidates that are in Tier one and Tier two, they will have their own PowerPoint slide in that presentation, okay? And I will extract out the highlights out of their application materials and put that in those slides so you can see each and every one of them. Okay?

I will also have that information with me. So if anybody wanted to see their actual resume or any other application materials, I would be able to pull that up and show that to you guys right there on the spot. Okay? At the end of that presentation, you know, that is when you guys would then decide and tell me who you guys would like to identify and select as a semifinalist to continue on in the process. Okay? I am not going to tell you who you should pick. That is your job. That is when you get to the finish line, I'm not gonna I'm not a decision maker in your process. You know, I can help you. I can guide you.

I can answer any and all questions, and and that's what I'm here for. Okay? But during that presentation, if there is any communication that I've had with any of those candidates, I'm gonna share that communication with you at that point in time, whether it was a phone conversation, you know, a text message, emails, you name it. I'm gonna share that share that information with you. And if they've asked questions, you know, what questions have they asked?

I want you guys to know those questions. You know, I think it's very important. If if I was a decision maker, and I've I've sat in that seat over there, you know, anytime a candidate asks questions, I think that is showing somebody's taken the initiative and and showing that they want to learn about you guys' organization, your community. And I think it shows a willingness to want to serve your community as well. So I will make sure to share all that communication with you guys at that point in time.

But getting back to your guys' decision, that would be when you guys would then be able to, you know, select a group of semifinalists to continue on in the process. You know, that is approximately 10 to 15 people. Sometimes it's been a little bit more, but that's really dependent upon the candidate pool. And maybe there's a diamond in the rough that might be that sixteenth spot. And if you guys would want that person to go through a more vetting process that's more in-depth, that would be the time to do it so we're not backtracking later on.

Okay? So adding, you know, one or two more people beyond 15, it's not gonna hurt my feelings. You know, that's what I'm here for. So once you guys do select the group of semifinalists, I got my my marching orders. I'll go back to the office. I'm gonna make contact with those semifinalists immediately following the next day. Those semifinalists are gonna receive a homework assignment from me. That homework assignment is what we like to call a candidate questionnaire. That candidate questionnaire forces those semifinalists to go into much greater detail rather than the highlights they're putting in their cover letters, their resumes, any other supporting application materials that there's that they've submitted in the beginning. Okay?

It also shows their ability to write or type. You know? Can they put sentences together, or is it just a, know, whole paragraph and no periods in between the sentences? You know, all of that information would then be gathered. We try to give the candidates at least a weekend to do that because some of them might be currently employed, but we try to shoot for at least five to seven days for them to be able to have the time to do that.

Okay? We want them to have the time to be able to sit down, process those questions, provide answers to those questions, sleep on it maybe for a night or two, and if they need to make adjustments in their questions to do that, giving them the time to do that before they submit them to me. Okay? During that whole process of five to seven days, I'm having multiple conversations with these semifinalists primarily to establish what we like to call a virtual meeting. This is not an interview nor does it take place in lieu of any interview.

Okay? It's a virtual meeting that we like to set up with each semifinalist, and we like to give them the opportunity to tell us, you know, video storytelling of their professional progress throughout their professional career. You know, we wanna learn about them as human beings, not just what we read about on a piece of paper. Okay? As fellow competitor slash colleague mentioned, we do record these virtual meetings.

We do share them with our clients. In this case, it would be you guys. So once we completed the the semifinalist phase of this, you're gonna receive a semifinalist packet on each of the semifinalists. A semifinalist packet is gonna include all of the application materials that they've submitted in the beginning. That's going to include their candidate questionnaire responses, and that's also going to include their virtual meeting recordings as well. So you guys will be able to see them, listen to them, hear them, and read about them as well. Okay? After that, I'll come back down here again. And it's just a short two hour drive for me, so it's no big deal. I'll come back down here again, and that's when, you know, open it up to you guys to discuss those semifinalists.

You know, when you guys come together as a governing body, this is your opportunity to to to discuss collectively, you know, any any agenda item, but specifically for this one,

those

semifinalists. You know, who did you like? Who did you not like? You know, were there red flags to you guys? Were there no red flags? You know, whatever whatever that topic entails, that's your guys' time to be able to have those conversations. I am here to answer questions. If you guys have questions about any of the communication that I've had with any of these semifinalists, I am here to answer your question and and, you know, help guide you down that path to towards the finish line. At the end of that meeting, that is when you guys would identify and select a group of finalists to continue on the process. Okay?

Finalists range roughly three to five candidates. You start going north of five, that can get very chaotic. I've seen a, you know, only one time as a client chose to have six, and and I think they regretted it. The mayor at least told me that he regretted it, and he did not wanna do it.

So I'm so sorry. Mayor council, I wanna inject. He is at time. So at your discretion, he can continue forward, but I just just wanna give you that option. Yes.

Are you about through?

Yep. About

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you.

So once you guys select a group of, finalists for in person interviews, that's when I would be working with, you know, you, Mayor Solomon, or a designated staff member, maybe it would be Kate, to, develop the logistics for what that in person interview process is going to look like. It's been touched on, prior to me coming up here. You know, I do recommend a minimum of two day process. Day one, let that be staff's day. Okay?

And we can work out the different events. One event I do highly recommend is pick a topic that is current in your community or within your organization, and let me know what that topic is, develop it into a question, and we'll give that to those finalists a couple of weeks in advance. They can draft a a presentation and give that as one of the events to staff acting as a mock city council. And and you guys be able to record that. You guys can watch that and see that.

At the end of day one, can some sort of community forum, community meet and greet, and then day two, that's your guys' time with them, whether it's one on one, groups against one, or all of you collectively with each finalist that way. That's solely up to you guys on how you guys would like to, you know, set that up. And then I've kind of touched on the hiring process. Once you guys do cross that finish line, we're happy to help negotiate that contract.

Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. We'll start with Mayor Pro Tem. Okay. We'll go to Councilmember Bass.

Sir, thank you for that presentation. I have a question based on your firm's and your knowledge of other firms' policy. If applicant, say, is a retired colonel with thirty years military experience, and then some years is like an assistant city manager, or say, you know, twenty years with a corporate background and then a little few years as city manager, is that a serious candidate?

Absolutely, yes. That's a candidate that that we definitely would wanna learn more information about.

Yep. Thank you.

Council member Nasky.

Thank you. Thank you, sir, for your presentation. The cost, so the $8,000 is for the semifinalists, and if you said 15, is that taking care of all 15 flights and everything that

No. No. I I we have a we offer a firm fixed fee of 24,500. Mhmm. Okay? That is for all of our expenses that we incur, whether it's my travel to and from, whether it's, you know, professional graphic design background, investigations, any expenses where it comes to you guys inviting people for in person interviews, those would be expenses that you guys would be expected to incur. Okay? But every other expense, I'll take care of it.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Councilmember Brown. Good

evening. Thank

you for coming to Killeen. You indicate is it just you and your partner who work for the company? Yes, ma'am. Okay. How many recruitments are you working on simultaneously?

We, collectively, in our business plan, our business model when we created GPS to not do more than three each at any given time. Okay. Because that would take away our ability to actually provide that personable connection with our clients, and it would prevent us from being able to develop those professional and those, you know, family relationships.

How do you prioritize where you go when? So if we're on a time crunch, one of your other clients is on the same time crunch, who gets priority?

That's a great question. And I can honestly tell you, you know, you guys have work sessions during the day. That that is a huge plus. You know, anybody that sit in that seat would very much value that. I don't have any clients currently that are willing to have meetings during the day. So there would be no issue with prioritizing you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Council Member Williams.

Yes, yes, I a question. It's

put this on.

Okay. Beyond the resume, what specific soft skills or leadership that you do that traits that you do see making General Manager most successful in today's local government environment? What are they?

That's a good question. You know, one thing that we are looking for, and I'm gonna go back to the virtual meetings that we have with each of the semifinalists. You know, we're looking for, you know, body, you know, position, composure. Do they keep eye contact? Are they looking at computer screen versus their camera? I know it's virtual and not in person. But those are little telltale signs, you know, do they have a glass of water off to the side, slurping through a straw, things of that nature. You know, how they carry themselves in their conversation is also is equally, if not more important. You know, does it back up what they presented in writing to that point in time? Does it justify that, yes, they can, you know, write clear sentences?

If there are red flags in any of those semifinalists, that's gonna be another time where we're gonna ask them about that. You know, for clarification, you know, share with us, share with our our client, you know, what it is, you know, that, you know, was why were you why did you abruptly leave, you know, this position, you know, four years ago or however long it might have been? You know, clarify that. You know, every city manager knows that, you know, their time could be, you know, done the next day or after any, you know, council meeting, special council meeting. You know, it's part of the nature of this business.

But it also is their responsibility to provide that clarification as well. So getting back to your question of soft skills, all of that combined is going to tell us and begin to paint the picture visually of who they are as human beings, and does it support and defend who they are in paper of the application materials that they've already submitted to that point in time.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Council member Kimball. Thank you, mister mayor. And this may be very similar to council person William's question. When you are looking at the candidate and are evaluating them, you got your resume, you got the the video storytelling if we use it. Do you do any type of other management survey or personality assessment, anything like that?

We do not do personality assessments. We do do another questionnaire, and that is for the finalists, and only for the finalists. It is a questionnaire that we call a due diligence questionnaire. It's a last ditch opportunity for those finalists to disclose anything to us they haven't already disclosed. That might be viewed as an embarrassment or a red flag by you guys or anybody within your community organization as well.

You know, a lot of these candidates, we're gonna know them. We're gonna know them directly or indirectly or know somebody that knows them. We're gonna be able to, you know, find out anything and everything on these candidates. So if they don't disclose something upfront in some sort of conversation or in some way with me, that could be viewed as, you know, deceit or lie. And if that were to happen, mayor Solomon is gonna be the first person I call and, you know, say, hey. This is what I found out. Do you want this person to continue on in the process

or not?

If I could just piggyback on it. I know, you know, you do your due diligence, like you said, and and say, for example, you have a candidate who comes out good and he or she, you know, is top of the list, but they somehow mask their dictatorial management style. I mean, how can you assess that before you bring them forward? I mean, we don't want to find out afterwards. I mean, we would like for that to come out through some type of personality assessment, a management assessment, or something like

Yeah. We we try to assess that during the semifinal stage when we are virtually meeting with them. Mhmm. And if there's questions that need to be addressed or clarification questions, we give them the opportunity to do that in that virtual recorded meeting that we then ultimately would share

with you. Okay.

Thank you, sir.

Yep. May I appoint Tim Gonzalez?

Thank you. Thank you for being here. I think that overall we can generally deduce that the process is pretty similar. Technologies are different. So in sales world, sell features sell benefits, sell. So what would be the benefit of our Citi hiring your company to help us recruit for our next Citi manager?

Well, there's a couple of benefits. We believe, number one, in creating relationships and building relationships with our clients. The majority of our clients are repeat clients. We might do a city manager recruitment for them, and then they're going to want us to do a department head level recruitment for them, or come in and do some leadership development training with them. So establishing professional relationships or family relationships is very important for us. You know, that's that's the bedrock. When when we create GPS, that's what we that's what we want it to be. We don't want to be a paycheck to you guys or just another vendor to you guys. We wanna be your family member, your partner. Okay?

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Council member of Kimball. You could. Any other questions, council? Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. Excuse me, I'm sorry. We have one other council member, council member Williams.

That's okay.

I have

to ask

you when I was doing. Okay. How do you research and integrate our city's current strategic priorities, operation challenges, and long term vision into your recruitment process? How do you do that?

Good question. You know, that is all done by me at the front end of any project or any recruitment. You know, that's when I'm doing my due diligence to learn about you guys collectively as a governing body, as an organization, sitting down and visiting with you guys collectively or individually, also your staff members, you know, getting all of that information, those details specific, that's that information is going to go into that recruitment brochure and the room and the marketing materials. So I'm going to know more about you guys before any candidate ever sees any of that marketing material, because inevitably, I will be I will field questions, and I wanna be able to answer those prospective candidates' questions. Any other questions?

Thank you.

Appreciate it. Council member Brown?

Here, I thought I was done.

Surprised. Keep this in mind, all the recruiters here. We are full of surprises in Killeen. So I I did you mentioned a few of them. Can you, just go over the, military towns and then how much the military and veteran cities that you're experienced with, and then the question, how much do you know about Killeen at this point in our opportunities and objectives?

Okay. I'll address the second part of your question first, Colleen. You know, I've been in Texas for over ten years now. I've got family up and down I 35 Corridor from San Antonio all the way to Kansas City. You know, essentially, I I live outside of DFW, but I 35 is is home to me, you know, whether it's northbound or southbound. From a from a local government standpoint, what do I know about the city of Killeen? You know, Killeen is is is primed and ready, and it's already experiencing large economic development. And and I don't know you guys per se. I've never had the opportunity to visit with you guys one on one or collectively prior to this afternoon. But I would venture to guess that economic development is gonna be a priority for you guys.

And looking at your information online, I I think that supports that. And I think, you know, whoever sits in that seat, you know, having that background, that experience is gonna be important for you guys to to see as well. Going back to the first question or the first part of that question and the military part of this, we see a lot of candidates that do have that background specifically. Council member Bass also touched on it with one of his questions earlier. There are a number of, you know, retired military personnel, both of officer rank and and and enlistment ranks that are applying for these professional positions.

And and, you know, I I mentioned it earlier during the presentation, you know, those folks that are former garrison commanders, you know, they view that as the equivalent to a city manager position. You know, we see that quite often as well. So, you know, my direct question to council member Bass was absolutely yes. You know, that would be a candidate we would definitely wanna learn more about. You know, we've seen that in our recruitment pools and our candidate pools.

And we're and working with the city of Junction that I mentioned earlier in Kansas, you know, have Fort Riley right next door on their doorstep, just as you guys have Fort Hood on on your guys' doorstep. You know, those two entities worked very well with one another. They they had a good working relationship, and they felt comfortable inviting, you know, that counterpart, if you will, to the city manager position, and to be a part of this process, and and giving me the opportunity to meet and visit with that individual to make sure that that relationship continues on with who their next city manager was. And I would be willing to do the exact same thing for you.

Thank you. You're welcome. Good. Other questions? Thank you, sir. You're welcome. Thank you.

Alright, counsel. Last but not least, we do have the presenter from Strategic Government Resources, mister Jay Singleton. There you go.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, sir.

Jay Singleton. I'm which button do I push? Oh. My name is Jay Singleton with SGR. I've, just a little profile of my experience in local government.

I've been in local government for about forty five years, both as in city and county government, both. Former city manager and budget director and different levels of city or city organizations and county organizations also. I do have a master's degree from the University of North Texas that won the Collegiate Bowl this last year at TML, apparently. I didn't I learned that today. So, what you're gonna hear today from me is a very similar story about our product and what we do with cities.

So, if you've seen the movie Groundhog Day, this is probably day four of that. So, here's a list of some of the recent recruitments that SDRs perform. I've highlighted four of those. Those are four that I've done recently. Actually, two of those are active right now, Giddings and Farmersville. So we we do a nationwide search. We have recruiters across the nation. Our President of Executive Recruiting lives in Michigan. Our CEO lives in Colorado. So we're all over the place.

And so we have a wide network of experience that we can tap on and their personal networks in the various states also. We believe in a full service partnership. As you can see on here, we do executive recruitment. This is a firm profile here. Interim placements, leadership development and consulting as an agency would need.

So probably the most important word on this slide is in the title, it's called customizable. We don't do a one size fits all. Every client is different. Every city is different. Every applicant is different. Every council member is different. And so it's not a one size fits all. We have a formula, I guess you could call it. We try to stay within that to make sure we're consistent across, our recruitment processes, but we also know that everyone's different. So also know that you all have jobs potentially.

You have families. You have other community commitments. So we're respectful of your time and scheduling and making making sure we take the best use of your time when it's available. Currently, SGR, has a weekly newsletter called ten and ten. It has 38,000 subscribers.

We have significant job board that we have. We have an average of about a thousand views of our, job, recruitment page every month. It's we have some people that subscribe to it for certain job categories. And so we our network is nationwide, and our profile is nationwide. We use LinkedIn as others do.

We we do a lot of the same advertising and social media outreach that others do, TML, ICMA, TCMA, and LinkedIn, of course. We'll also use any there are certain minority based recruitment, groups that we also will, advertise with if it's appropriate or any special, professional groups that, in addition to those that I listed already. Our job board, I mentioned already, we've had about $28,000 not 28,028 views in the last thirty days. Other recruiting firms actually use our job board to advertise on. It is an open job board that other agencies, cities can also advertise on, so it's not strictly limited to SGR recruitment.

We believe in people being placed in the city government, the best people, and so we want to make sure that we extend the opportunity for people to have a job in local government the best we can. Most of our recruitment or candidates come from our direct outreach, which is I mentioned the ten and ten, our job board, and our weekly postings that we send out every Friday of jobs that are open in different career categories. People can't potential candidates, they're passive or active, can see go into our get receive those emails each week and pass along to their colleagues in their network. We get a lot of referrals from people that are passing on to a colleague that they know that's looking for a job, whether they're currently employed or not. Client feedback, you may not gonna read that, but it says that the orange line says very comfortable.

And the other one is, on both of those. And as you can see, we're in the 85 range 85% range on 180% range on the other. We have very positive feedback from our clients about the process and the experience they went through during the recruitment process. Also with candidates, we seek candidate feedback. We get very favorable response on the experience that they had.

We want to know and improve upon what they have to share with us. This is kind of a graphic of our recruiting process and the progress as others do. We do the candidate profile. We're talking to you individually. I'm going to be the recruiter on recruitment, and I will interview each of you individually and whoever else you choose, your interim manager, your people in your community, your school superintendent, whoever you need us to talk to to make sure that when we develop that candidate profile, it's comprehensive.

That brochure that we end up producing needs to be very truthful and forthcoming. No city is perfect. I'm sorry. No city is perfect. They all have their challenges, and we wanna make sure those are laid out in clear, concise manner. So because these candidates are interviewing you as much as you're interviewing them. Is this the place for me professionally? Is this where I wanna move my family? Is this the next step? So that's why we wanna lay out a very clear picture of what the opportunities and challenges are within your community.

And a lot of that comes through the candidate profile and those interviews up front. It takes a little time, but it pays off. And we'll go through, after we produce the brochure, go through a thirty day posting period. I will go through and look at all the candidates and kind of put them in different tiers of same as everybody, yes, no, maybe. I call those the diamonds or maybes are kind of the diamonds in the rough.

I kind of like to think they may be a little bit short, but there's a potential maybe there that you might want to look at. We do make available all candidates to you. All everybody applies. Now I will ask you, can I please eliminate those that just don't have any experience? But if you wanna see them, you do.

Now if there are any residents of Killeen that live and are not qualified, I'm still going to show you those names. I want to make sure you don't have any pushback or kickback because a candidate that you may know or may not know, so there's not a surprise in the future. No surprises. We'll go through and select the semifinalists, who will then be asked to do a written questionnaire, 10 to 12 questions. We'll also have them do a video interview, and we'll also have our media search started.

You will then, once we get all the information back, you'll receive a resume book with a cover letter, resume, their link to their video interview, their written questionnaire, and I'll also send you their media search too. And then we'll go through and meet again, and we'll narrow that down to the semifinals we do 12 to 15 people at that point in time. Then we narrow it down to three to five for finalists to come to be present. One question came up about the cost as others do. The expense of bringing those finalists to your town is up to y'all.

We also though, however, highly recommend you bring their spouse or significant other with them because they can be a big veto vote in your process. And you get to the end, and that you get the rug pull out from you and under you. It's happened. And we highly recommend you pay for their expense to bring their spouse or significant other in town. And then we'll have interview, period, a day or two.

We'll go through the itinerary of what you all want to do, whether you want employ how you want employees engaged, how you want the community engaged. Also do one on one interviews between you and each candidate. Those are very productive. It's an icebreaker of sorts. So you have a better idea of that person not in an interview state. You can just this thirty minute discussion. Sorry. My mouth is dry. We I frame interview the interview day or days as the fit test. Up until that point, you've qualified the people.

You know who's coming to town and what their resume is, but it's your ability to envision this person as your city manager and living in this town and working with the community. It's a fit test. So we're gonna all up until interview day, we're trying to we're qualifying them. They're qualified. But now it's envisioning that person being here in Killeen, Texas.

The price structure, there's a knock to exceed of $27,006.59 dollars That includes $2,500 of advertising expense. But the so that's a not to exceed amount. The fixed fee is $25,169 I think it is. But then the $2,500 goes on top of that. One other thing, I'm not going read this slide, we have a nationwide outreach and search process.

We have in network. We are all all of our recruiters are former city managers, police chiefs, fire chiefs, HR directors, planning directors, finance directors. We have a wide variety of recruiters that we can call on. And so and if I need help on something, I can call my fellow recruiters and they will will step in. We're we've retired, but we're willing want to and willing to give back in whatever way.

We believe in local government. So So I've kind of gone through this fairly quick. I didn't want to repeat, make day four of Groundhog Day two troublesome for you. So if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them.

Thank you, sir. Councilmember Brown.

I know my number was up already. I didn't even push a button. Let's start here. So there's a bunch of a la carte expenses essentially. One of them that jumps out to me is the, more than two visits. So you only have two visits included and then each one after that has that same a la carte price attached to it.

I'm sorry, say that again. So

in the the maximum price, it includes two visits. Right. And then each visit after that would be that additional cost, correct?

I

can work through that.

And then what is a DISC management assessment?

The DISC management, it's a personality profile if you choose to do it. Not many do it, and sometimes your HR group may already have a product they use, that's just the product we use.

Okay. And while I continue to formulate my questions, I have my standard too that I'd like to give everybody a fair chance at answering. So can you explain your experience in dealing with military and veteran heavy cities? And then how much do you know about Killeen and our current opportunities and objectives?

I've had three previous chances to think about that question, so. I did a recruitment in the San Antonio area of the city manager. The mayor is a retired colonel, and another member of the council was also a retired military. I've also worked in two cities that had active air force bases, and I understand the economic driver that a military base can be, and also the engagement and the number of people that are there and the types types of services they provide. So I I understand that.

Second question oh, what do I know about Colleen?

Okay.

I knew. At this point, what are you trying to do is I look at the organization and its stability, its structure, its, you know, its website and those sorts of thing. It was a little bit difficult with you all since you have five new council members. And so where that goes, you know, it kind of depends. So I, at this point, is this somewhere I want to put my name to also? So that's what I'm looking at the organization, and I we would dig deeper into the city and its various assets and issues that it may have and where it wants to go.

I appreciate your candor on that because this is time sensitive. And usually by the time we get a proposal, an organization has already determined they want to work with us. I do know this is your profession, and our successes that we have with any candidates you bring in directly reflect back on you. So I understand why you would want to take that time to look into it. I believe our staff is recommending we make a decision today.

And so my concern would be, just out of pure candor with you, if we were to decide to go with your organization, what happens if you dig a little bit deeper in that time frame between two weeks from now, or today and two weeks from now, when we have our next meeting, and you decide, I don't know if clean is something that I want to gamble on?

That won't happen.

No. SGR, whether good or bad, SGR kinda has put me in a position of taking on troubled cities, and I'm not saying you are that way. So if there are issues, I can get through it. As a former city manager, as you've heard here, we learned to adapt. We learned how to develop consensus.

Part of and part of the process I went through, once we're out of the posting period, and that's where the recruiting part goes on. After that, I really become a facilitator. I've worked with hundreds of elected officials, hundreds of all sorts, and so nothing really surprised me.

Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you.

Council member Bess.

Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for mentioning the spouse. When I was a lieutenant coming on to active duty with orders to Fort Bragg, my wife and I took off from Tulsa, drove to Fort Bragg. I took a wrong turn trying to get to the main gate, and we got an impromptu tour of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and it wasn't the nice part of Fayetteville. And before we even got to the main gate, my spouse said, I want to go back to Tulsa. So thankfully, was able to convince her to give Fort Bragg and Fayetteville a chance. We ended up being very happy there.

Good.

So I'm going to keep that in mind that this is not just a recruitment process of a city manager, there's a spouse involved

in There is. It

My question is, how large is your firm?

How large is the firm? Yes. Well, are we have an interim services area, interim placement group, consulting group, whatever. But the executive recruiting group, there the number of full time employees is less than 10, but we have, again, recruiters who are we're all contract, across the nation, and there's probably maybe 15 to 20 of us, out there. It it can vary. So that's I'd say 25 maybe.

Thank you.

But I will say that even though those we have the other divisions, we also talk to them and use them a lot for different things too.

Thank you.

Council member Williams.

Yes sir.

How you

doing, Hi.

Good, thank you.

Thank you, Ned. Could you tell me, because your SGR heavily emphasizes servant leadership, How do they measure a candidate's capability with this kind of style?

Well, there's not one answer to that question because it's a series of effort, you know, through the written questionnaire, through the background checks we do, reference checks that we do, talking to them. I will interview them all, just a one on one sort of interview, asking them questions like that. So it's really a multilayer effort to assess that person. There's not a one product or effort to figure out if this person's reliable and can do the job or not. So and also talk to colleagues.

We we see as the other firms do, we see a lot of the same candidates over and over Mhmm. Again. Because, you know, they're you're going only pick one, but we may have, you know, you'll probably most of them this side, have about 90 applicants usually. And so you you just see a lot of them over and over. So you get to know the pool. You also get to know their weaknesses and their their background. Let's put it that way. And there are some out there that we will not pull forward.

Okay. My second question is, how do you differentiate between a candidate who looks great on paper and one who had the proven adaptability to lead out a specific community. How do you do that?

Oh, that

let

me give you a horror story in answering that question that happened fairly recently. Mhmm. Had a candidate who had a great resume, is highly qualified, highly qualified, was selected, and then we found out there was information on his resume that was not accurate because he had put used AI to update his resume and didn't read it. Mhmm. And we none of us picked it up, and he had he had freely admitted it.

He he when I questioned him about it, he said, that's not true. I can't go any further with you. Sorry. You know, I I we we just can't do it. So, I think right now in some of that credibility sort of question you're asking is AI is a a tool, and a lot of people use it.

And I'm not gonna say it's I use it too, but it's that is a high risk right now in some of the applicants that we get and how they use it on, their written questionnaires Mhmm. On their resume Mhmm. On any other thing. But that's why you talk to them. You do a a video interview with them.

You do phone calls with them because I can I can tell someone's the depth of their answer? If it's surface level, no. I I I've been doing it, like I said, forty five years. I can tell someone's depth of knowledge that the way they answer a question. It's the unwritten it's that intuitive sense that you I call upon.

Well, thank you. Appreciate

it. Council member Nash King.

Thank you.

Did I leave you speechless? No.

I was just trying to see how I'm a word this question to Okay. So how well do you know

How do well do I know clean?

Mhmm.

Honestly, I haven't dug dug into clean very much other than your organizational structure.

Right. And so I think councilwoman Brown said it best that we have to make a decision tonight. Right. And just having the word troubled cities and clean together.

No, that's

That didn't sit this is just I have the floor. Thank you. It didn't sit right with me.

Yeah.

That's one thing. Every city has their challenges. Of course, they do. And to come here, to me, I mean, because you want to do this. You want to And be how you came about being among the top four, I don't know.

But Killeen, to me, I have a lot of pride in Killeen. Killeen is home to our veterans, to our military families, and that's significant to me, whomever the council decide to choose to recruit. I really don't want somebody trying to figure out or think about if they want to recruit for because Killeen, I I call home.

Mhmm.

And as the former mayor, I take a lot of pride in all of the accomplishments and the things that our city has done and will continue to do. The one thing that's unique about this council I heard this over and over tonight is that we have new council members. We all have to start from somewhere. The people selected in them, they want them to represent them, and we have the most significant, amazing staff, especially Cece and our admin side of the house that has laid the roadmap for each individual council member on here to be successful. So that troubled me, that one word.

Even though you retracted, just putting it together with Colleen, that just didn't sit right with me. My other concern is, I think Councilwoman Brown said it best, not to exceed. What does that even mean not to exceed? Could the price continue to go up based on what this council requests of you? Or just we do not to exceed, and that comes with our change orders and everything, because we know stuff do happen. Could you explain that more so on the cost not to exceed?

Yeah. It's a cap. It will not go over that amount.

Okay.

So it's a cap. And can I

Yes, sir?

Address the first part? Yes, sir. Apologize.

What part you're going back to? What I said first?

Yes, ma'am.

Oh, okay.

Yes, sir. I'm sorry if I offended you, but that was not the intention. It was just to let you know that I have done some easy ones and I've done some tough ones, and I managed my way through it successfully. And so consequently, whether I don't know why you have five new council members. I haven't looked into that. But I I'm again, I apologize if that was offensive to you, but it was not the intent to be that way. You know, I better just shut up.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, learn quick.

Yes, sir. Thank you. You did explain why you said he was doing a comparison, but just that being together. And my last question, why should we hire you?

I think it's our network, our national network, along with the experience of our recruiting team that we have and experience a number of years. We've worked with, as I said earlier, I've personally worked with a lot of elected officials. I've sat in the executive sessions with y'all, and I know I know how to speak the language. I know how to pick up cues. It's like I was talking on her answer about depth of experience.

That is probably one of the things that I I personally have and our other recruiters do to our long tenure in different levels of service within local government. So that's really it's really the recruiter and their experience and our tenure and our ability to understand how to facilitate and help y'all council come together

Yes, sir.

And work together. Like I said earlier, I I become more of a facilitator than a recruiter, and that's just going drawing back on being city manager in the past. And so and plus our our nationwide network.

Yes, sir. And one more question. You talked about the personality profile. What do you find that shows a good city manager, he or she may fit or not fit?

Well, the tool we use, she was asking about the DISC profile, which is a tool. It's one tool. There are other tools out there, and as I said, your HR team may use one already. It kinda tells you, kind of a hot and cold, what trigger points are, where they kind of fall on the spectrum of decision making. It it just really gives you a more in-depth view of the person themselves and kind of where they're where they fall.

And it's also beneficial that if you all all had a DISC profile done and how that person can fit within and how y'all work together too. So

Yes, sir. Oh, all right.

Well, I think I tapped the they stand.

Oh, no, that's fine. Sir, thank you so much for answering my Sure. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Kimball.

Good afternoon, Jay. Good to see you again. Good to see you. So for full transparency, you know, been in the business for many years, thirty something years. And initially, when I got hired here in 2017, SGR, I was hired by SGR. And then when I recruited, I mean, I retired, I actually worked for SGR for a while. I don't anymore. So I'm very familiar with the SGR process. But I think something has changed, and that is the placement guarantee. If you can just briefly go over the placement guarantee, I think it's different from what it was when I was associated with it.

The placement guarantee, I think when you were there, it was a year and a half announced one year. And I'm sure that's negotiable, but I I'm not the one that could make that decision. The if that's a decision making point, I would take that forward. I could take that forward to the powers that be in that case. So and mister Kimball did work for SCR at one point. This is the first time I've seen him face to face. So and not on the screen.

I mean, concerns my concern because we have to make a decision today, and it is, it's in your proposal, so we have to take it as written. So that's all I have. Alright.

Okay. Thank you, sir. Any other questions from the council? Thank you, sir. Thank you. Okay.

We.

If you had anything for me otherwise, that was our last candidate.

Okay. Thank you, Ms. McDonough. Okay. We are going to take a ten minute break. Okay. We'll be back.

Look like they heard it now.

We would like to start our meeting. Okay. I'll call this meeting back to order. Madam secretary.

RS26077. Consider a memorandum resolution approving the investment reports for the quarter ended 03/31/2026. Excuse

me. Okay. My apologies. Bear with me. Madam secretary, we needed to go back to item five.