He was accessible. He wasn’t a micromanager. He seemed to enjoy working and living in Lebanon.
That’s a representative sampling of comments from Lebanon’s department heads when I asked them last week about working with City Manager Dennis Luttrell. No one I talked with, even under the condition that I wouldn’t use their names, had anything bad to say about their new and soon-to-be former boss.
We learned last week that the City Council voted behind closed doors on March 11 to fire Luttrell from his $125,00-a-year-job.
So why is he out after just six months?
Only the council can answer that. As usual, its nine members are not talking. The council, led by Mayor Georgia Tuttle, isn’t big on answering questions. Don’t bug us, we know what we’re doing, seems to be the prevailing attitude. Arrogance is not in short supply, you might say.
When it comes to filling city manager vacancies, the council has had plenty of practice, although that doesn’t seem to have improved its track record. By my count, Lebanon has cycled through close to 10 city managers, including interims who have served multiple stints, in the last 15 years.
Before firing Luttrell, the council asked department heads to help with his six-month performance review. It seemed a bit early to be passing judgment, but in recent years the council has been big on paperwork. Luttrell’s predecessor, Greg Lewis, who retired last summer, was a champion of government-by-color-charts, which might explain why he was such a council favorite.
Department heads were asked to score Luttrell from zero to three on such things as whether he “encourages teamwork” and “gives credit to people who deserve it.” The council also wanted to know how many meetings they’d had with Luttrell to discuss their department’s “portion of the outcomes-based work plan.”
The council is extremely proud of its 37-page “Outcomes and Work Plan” that’s going to make Lebanon a “sustainable community.” (Fewer empty store fronts on Route 12A might be a good place to start.)
Asking department heads to evaluate Luttrell was an odd request considering they had zero input into his hiring. As I wrote at the time of the announcement last August, the council intentionally chose to keep the city’s department heads out of the loop.
There wasn’t even a meet-and-greet session between department heads and the half dozen or so finalists for the job.
The council paid $16,500, plus up to $8,000 in expenses, for the Mercer Group, an Atlanta-based management consulting firm, to sift through 65 to 75 candidates. (If the city wants Mercer to search for Luttrell’s replacement, the firm has agreed to waive its fee but not out-of-pocket expenses.)
Regardless of whether Mercer is involved, the council needs to rethink its hiring strategy. On the last go-round, the finalists were brought in for private interviews with councilors. The public was given no opportunity to weigh in.
“The hiring of the city manager is the council’s most important job,” Tuttle told me at the time. “We are elected to make decisions.”
They just don’t like to talk about them. After firing Luttrell, the council directed questions to its labor attorney, Mark Broth, of Manchester. Broth told Valley News staff writer Nora Doyle-Burr that the council’s decision was not based on any malfeasance, such as the conviction of a crime, intentional misconduct or gross negligence.
So the public is left to wonder.
On Thursday, I bumped into attorney Barry Schuster, a former Lebanon School Board chairman and longtime city resident, at the downtown Witherell Recreation Center.
Schuster had several dealings with Luttrell when his law firm, Schuster, Buttrey and Wing, performed some pro bono work for the city’s Recreation Department regarding the Mascoma Greenway, better known as the rail trail.
“He seemed to be a productive leader of the city staff,” Schuster said.
Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin, who has held her job for 20 years, had met with Luttrell a couple of times. “He seemed like a very nice, low key, thoughtful and very experienced manager,” she told me. “I have no idea what did not work in terms of the council.”
Luttrell, 65, was the town administrator in Somerset, Mass., for seven years until his contract wasn’t renewed in January 2015.
Last week, Somerset Selectman David Berube told Doyle-Burr via email that he voted not to renew Luttrell’s contact because “he was not an effective town administrator.”
Berube also said that he was unaware of any Somerset Selectboard members being contacted by anyone from Lebanon before Luttrell was hired.
Since the council isn’t talking, it’s hard to know whether Luttrell did — or didn’t do — something that warranted his firing. But it appears he did make one mistake.
In October, he bought a house in Lebanon for $360,000 — to meet the city charter’s residency requirement.