Words of Advice: Help Choose a City Manager

The City Council’s City Manager Search Committee is seeking public input.

Its consultant, Municipal Resources, Inc., has developed a survey to help the committee better understand what experience, and perhaps more importantly personality traits, may be most important in searching for the next City Manager.

The survey is open through March 31st. It can be found here: http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?B490FCE4B5F6E8EEB3.

Anyone can participate. It is mostly anonymous. The survey starts by asking if you are an elected official, City employee, or concerned resident. So, if you are an elected official, and check the box, it might not be hard to figure out who you really are. There aren’t that many of you, and we know what districts you represent.

The survey allots about 3000 words for answers to open-ended questions such as:

It is smart advice to use every one of those 3,000 words. By comparison, this article is about 300 words long. How will anyone keep to only 3000, when give the opportunity to share a “pearl of wisdom” with the next City Manager?

This is a chance to spout about everything wrong with the City. It is also a chance to remind the search committee of how fantastic Portland is.

Should the next City Manager push for goats as a green alternative to mowers?

Go on for a few hundred words about your favorite park and how it must to be saved. Outline your plan to end homelessness. Demand a living wage. Demand an end to gentrification. Wax poetically about the working waterfront and Autumn foliage. Push for paving the duck pond, or for letting the algae grow. Make the case for goats over mowers.

Hopefully the search committee will receive some memorable material.