It’s not often
Councilors aren’t saying what went wrong or why, and Luttrell isn’t commenting, either. Perhaps the only way the public will find out is if Luttrell exercises his right to a public hearing before the council. However, Mark Broth, the city’s legal counsel in this matter, indicated to Valley News staff writer Nora Doyle-Burr that no malfeasance on Luttrell’s part was involved in the council’s decision to part company with him, which was made following a performance review earlier this month. As a result, it appears that the city will owe Luttrell severance pay equal to half his $125,000 annual salary.
Councilor Karen Liot Hill summed up the situation this way: “Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out in this case.” That is indisputably true, but as the council looks to the future, it also should be asking itself whether the process that resulted in Luttrell’s hiring was flawed. We believe it was, because neither the public nor city staff played any role in a search that was conducted with all the transparency of a National Security Agency operation. No doubt the wisdom of the crowd can be overstated, but it can also provide valuable insight to inform the decisions of elected officials — and sometimes save them from making a costly error.
As our colleague Jim Kenyon noted at the time of Luttrell’s hiring last August, the city manager opening in Lebanon attracted 65 to 75 candidates. A search firm narrowed the list to about a dozen names and forwarded them to the council, which chose five or six candidates to interview before settling on Luttrell — after a single, 90-minute session with him. No members of the public were involved in the search, nor was the public invited to meet the finalists. Key city staff members apparently met Luttrell only after he had been appointed. It’s not even clear if councilors ever spoke to officials in Somerset, Mass., where Luttrell had most recently worked and where his contract as town administrator had not been renewed after seven years on the job.
Councilors cited two main reasons for this approach: first, that hiring a manager — in effect, the city’s chief executive — is the most important thing the council does, and that councilors are elected to make that decision; and second, that any public component to the search process would rule out candidates who did not wish their current employers to know they were job hunting.
The first reason is not a convincing one for running a closed search. If hiring a manager is the most important thing the council does, then it needs to have as much information at its disposal as possible when it makes its decision, including the expertise brought to the table by department heads and the reaction of ordinary members of the public. Ultimately, of course, the council retains the final say, but its choice would be more broadly informed.
The second objection carries more weight. Opening up the process may indeed deprive the city of some able candidates. But that doesn’t outweigh the great benefit of involving the public and staff in the process. Apart from this direct input, the council could benefit from seeing first-hand how manager candidates interact with the public — a key function mastered by Luttrell’s respected predecessor, Greg Lewis.
Beyond that, because councilors are ultimately responsible to the people who elect them, accountability demands that their constituents have the information needed to evaluate their actions, including hiring a manager. Relevant information in this regard would include who the council considered for the job as well as who it hired. Were women or minority candidates given a fair chance? Did the council look beyond the field of municipal administration for outside-the-box candidates? What process was followed to narrow the field and vet the finalists? All these questions have implications for judging how well councilors are doing their jobs, which is just as important as how well the manager is doing his.