After a closed-door meeting Monday afternoon, Ridgefield Mayor Ron Onslow said the City Council knows who its next city manager will be.
The council will name one of two high-profile candidates for the city’s top administrative job at its meeting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at City Hall. In the meantime, city staffers will work on a contract proposal, which will also go up for a vote at the meeting, Onslow said.
The remaining finalists are Clark County Commissioner Steve Stuart and Vancouver Police Department’s assistant chief, Chris Sutter. Onslow couldn’t say which one the councilors want, but he was confident they’re prepared to deliver a decision.
“It was a great meeting,” he said. “We talked a great deal about the candidates and we talked about the contract.”
Sutter declined to talk about the situation with The Columbian until the hire has been announced, and Stuart didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a previous interview with The Columbian, Onslow praised each of the finalists and said he was excited to hear what staff and residents think of them.
Sutter, 52, served as Vancouver’s interim police chief for about a year after former Chief Cliff Cook resigned amid a number of controversies. Last fall, Sutter applied to fill the position permanently, but the city went with James McElvain instead.
Sutter joined the department in 1992. Since then, he’s worked in a variety of areas, including patrol, investigations, internal affairs and as a detective sergeant in the Child Abuse Center (now known as the Children’s Justice Center).
Stuart, a 42-year-old Ridgefield native, is the lone Democrat among Clark County’s three commissioners. He’s served on the board for a decade, and in November, Stuart announced he wouldn’t run again, expressing his disillusionment and frustration with the job.
The new city manager will earn a salary in the range of $105,000 to $125,000. He also will move into a position with a short and rocky history.
Ridgefield hired its first city manager, Bill Curtis, on an interim basis in 2000. Just five years later, the city had already gone through five managers following a slew of controversies and temporary hires for the position.
One of those managers, George Fox, was fired about a year into his four-year contract. But the contract stipulated that Fox could be fired only if he were convicted of a felony or gross misdemeanor, so he fought back and walked away with a $247,500 severance package.
Fox’s successor, Justin Clary, then led the city through a period of growth until he left for an engineering job in Bellingham with Maul Foster Alongi. The last manager, Phil Messina, resigned in November after less than a year on the job.
