The sole official action item — accepting Gaa’s resignation after 4 ½ months on the job — was quickly approved with no council or public comment. Councilor Gary Thompson was the sole dissenter, and after the meeting, he said he voted that way because he believed Gaa should have been terminated and not allowed to resign on his own. According to Mayor Joel Greer, who has now assumed the role of acting city administrator for the second time in less than a year, Gaa will remain on paid administrative leave until March 10, the day before his six-month probationary period would have ended, and he will be paid out for his accrued vacation.

From there, the council moved on to discussing the hiring process for finding Gaa’s full-time replacement and whether a search firm should be contracted to seek out candidates. Last summer, the city received 13 applications for the position and was close to utilizing the consulting firm GovHR to widen the net before changing course during a meeting on June 26.

City Human Resources Director Jill Petermeier stepped up to the podium to ask the council which course of action they would prefer to take and said two of the three Requests for Proposals (RFPs) the city received during its prior search after former City Administrator Jessica Kinser’s resignation do not have expiration dates on their pricing. GovHR, on the other hand, did have an expiration date for its price, and Petermeier indicated that they would need to check with the company to see if the offer still stood.

Councilor Mike Ladehoff described the internal search process from the previous cycle as “less than optimum” and felt the city should do something different to find the right candidate. The quote GovHR provided at the time would have cost the city $24,500 for a 14 week timeline, and Councilor Greg Nichols, who was elected in September, said he felt a search term could be a useful tool.

City of Marshalltown Human Resources Director Jill Petermeier addresses the council about options for hiring a consulting firm to search for a new full-time city administrator during a special meeting on Thursday night.

“In my experience, I’ve used search firms a lot. They cut down a lot of the overhead work and cull a lot of (candidates who) maybe look good on a piece of paper until they really get into the details a little bit more, and I know we’re gonna have a full plate with everything else,” he said. “So my recommendation would be to outsource the first row, basically bring us back like four or five qualified candidates for our specifications and move forward from there.”

Greer added that search firms like HRGov often have a “digital Rolodex” of people who might not otherwise apply, including some from outside of the area and the state. Ladehoff did warn, however, that the GovHR process takes between four and six months, and in his view, that may have been one of the reasons the council opted against using the company last time as they wanted to make a hire in a shorter time frame.

“I see this as a top leadership position, so I”m not expecting next week to hire somebody qualified,” Nichols said.

It was then that Ladehoff, after apparently bringing up the idea before in closed session, first publicly suggested hiring Police Chief Mike Tupper as the interim city administrator.

“We’re right in the middle of budget season, and I think we could look outside the box just for a second. I think Mike Tupper would make a good candidate to bring in for city administrator, interim, until such time,” Ladehoff said before he was cut off by Nichols, who called a point of order that they were considering the hiring process and not the appointment of an interim administrator, the next item for discussion.

As discussion returned to the hiring process, Councilor Barry Kell expressed his agreement with the concept of hiring a search firm and asked Petermeier to verify whether the previous offers still stood while potentially considering additional firms.

“I would have to put another RFP out to see if we get more, where I could visit with Holly from LynchDallas, and the three we have, we could use right now. But if you want me to search for more, we’d have to put another RFP out. So that would be about a 2 ½ week process that we did last time,” Petermeier said.

She noted that the council could take either path — working with one of the three firms who have already submitted quotes or seeking out more.

“I just don’t wanna do what we did last time,” Ladehoff said.

Thompson asked Petermeier if GovHR was the lowest priced of the three, and she responded that it wasn’t — GPS would have cost $23,500 with a 14 week timeline, and Hinson Consulting was 10 weeks at $15,900 but with less overall involvement than the other two. She noted that the city utilized GovHR on the non-union employee compensation study and found the company “easy to work with” and “highly recommended.”

Kell suggested providing Nichols and fellow new Councilor Mark Mitchell with the previous proposals to help bring them up to speed. Although no formal motion was made, the council seemed to form a general consensus around using GovHR if their quote was “in line” with the old price, and Nichols asked Petermeier to check with them to confirm it.

City Clerk Alicia Hunter then sought clarification on the funding source, and Thompson said he would be OK with using Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) dollars to pay for it. Petermeier told Kell she would reach out to GovHR promptly and hopefully have an answer on the quote before a potential special meeting on Monday night.

Interim city administrator discussion

With the council in agreement on how to proceed with the hiring process, the focus then turned to the task of hiring an interim city administrator to fill the void in the meantime. After Kinser’s resignation last May, the council hired Bob Fagen, who had previous experience serving the cities of Cumming, Des Moines, Spencer, Pleasant Hill and Altoona, to serve for a period not to exceed three months, but he departed less than two months into his tenure.

Ladehoff reiterated his previous call to appoint Tupper, who has served as police chief since 2011, as the interim city administrator.

“He knows the town. He knows the personnel. He manages the biggest department that we have with around 45 people, and I would like to give him a shot at this and see if he sinks or swims. But I think he’ll probably swim,” Ladehoff said. “He has the confidence of people in Marshalltown, so my recommendation is to go ahead and hire Mike as our interim city administrator.”

Nichols asked what the council was looking for in an interim city administrator and voiced his preference for someone who “was really strong on budget” especially considering some of the recent changes in state law regarding tax levies and good at coordinating city projects, working with people and advocating for the reauthorization of LOST in the upcoming special election.

He then compared hiring Tupper as city administrator to appointing himself as the chief of police.

“I have neither the experience nor the qualifications nor the expertise to do a good job, and basically I can probably keep the seat filled (and) hot, but in the end, I don’t think the results would be what we want, what we need,” Nichols said. “From my perspective, we need a comprehensive, experienced (individual), somebody who can work with the numbers.”

Greer reminded the council he had the authority, on his own, without council approval, to hire someone on a contract or hourly basis up to $49,999.

“It’s not gonna cost that much, but I do intend to hire somebody. We need somebody now with that help,” the mayor said. “So even if we had an acting city administrator and not the temporary acting one that I am, I doubt we’re gonna find somebody with that kind of financial background to step in, like, tomorrow, and do it.”

Long term, however, Greer expressed his preference for a candidate with more of a financial background. Because the job isn’t a civil service position, Thompson said it was “his understanding” that multiple people could be hired on short-term contracts as long as they did not exceed the $49,999 threshold, and he wondered if the discussion was worth having if Greer was already engaging in conversations with potential interim candidates.

Nichols reiterated his preference for an experienced interim administrator who is retired as they could end up holding the title for as long as six months. Ladehoff then reminded him that Fagen was a candidate who fit that bill and ultimately turned out to be “less than optimum.”

“The pool of people out there, with that type of experience, I would doubt is there,” Ladehoff said.

Councilor Jeff Schneider called Fagen “a nice guy” who simply didn’t have enough time to get up to speed and added that because of Tupper’s familiarity with the issues Marshalltown is facing, he would bring that context to the role on day one. Kell noted the “sting” of having the same conversations the council engaged in just over six months ago but said they were the right conversations to have.

“To find one to hit the ground running day one is a needle in a haystack. The GovHR approach is more of a regional (approach), so then you get someone potentially out of the city but well experienced to get up to Iowa Code, all that,” Kell said. “It just presented the strong probability that it would take months to get up to speed, and then what did we really gain out of that process? In the end, we get someone up to speed about the same time the formal search is finalizing. We tried it. I echo what Jeff and Mike are talking about with Chief Tupper. The city desperately needs some semblance of stability. This is the second time we’ve been in this position. The city’s largely been without a city administrator for the past year. We know where those gaps have shown to be problematic, and I think that’s where that stability that Chief Tupper has shown, the respect that the community has for him would shine through also in the city administrator position, and he would be that leader that city personnel could continue to do their job and know someone has their back.”

Kell added that he felt city employees have been largely “on their own” over the past year. Citing the fact that Tupper still has his own job to do as police chief, Mitchell suggested three possible candidates for the interim role — former city councilor and current Marshalltown Christian School Administrator Bethany Wirin, former Marshalltown City Clerk Shari Coughenour, and former city council and county treasurer candidate Mark Eaton, who frequently attends council meetings and comments on agenda items.

Greer then asked Al Hoop, the only councilor who had not spoken up, if he had any input, and Hoop said he didn’t feel the city could go without someone in the position.

“I have nothing against Mike doing it. There’s plenty of officers that could watch his watch, so I have no problem with Mike doing it,” he said.

After Kell sought clarification on whether Ladehoff had made a formal motion to hire Tupper, Ladehoff did indeed make such a motion to do so with a second from Kell. Thompson then questioned whether the interim administrator truly needed past experience, citing the “knowledge base” of the department heads, or simply needed to be a project manager and facilitator who could help guide and assist the department heads and mentor the staff in the Housing and Community Development department, which has not had a director since Michelle Spohnheimer resigned last June.

With the motion on the floor to move forward with hiring Tupper, Thompson shared his “legitimate concerns” regarding such a decision based on knowledge he had gathered from interviewing 14 former MPD officers who left the department during Thompson’s first term as a councilor.

“Maybe the answer is what Joel said earlier. Hire two or three people at $50,000 a year to help the department heads and the rest of the staff, and we work through that,” he said.

Ladehoff asked Thompson about the timeframe on when the officers left, and Ladehoff called police work a “stressful job” that some people simply decide they don’t want to continue in after they’ve started. He cited a nationwide statistic of a 13 percent turnover rate in police departments each year around the country and said that while he didn’t like to see anyone leave, most people don’t have positive feelings about a job once they’ve left it.

“So if you take roughly a 45 person department over four years, we should’ve probably lost over 20, not 14, over 20 by the national average, and the Iowa average is actually higher than the national average because in Iowa, a lot of guys get into small towns to start their police work and then they work into the bigger towns,” Ladehoff said. “They feel like it’s not quite so much jumping into the ocean. So Mike is probably close to half what the national average and less than that for the Iowa average. Now that’s not something to complain about. That’s something to say ‘Good job,’ especially with the hiring that we have with police. It’s tough. It’s hard to keep ’em. It’s hard to get new ones. We all know that, so with our current police department, we’re averaging half the turnover that other departments have.”

Greer attempted to shut down the conversation as he felt it was veering closer into an evaluation of the department itself and the chief’s job performance, which he did not think fit the way the discussion should have been progressing.

“What I would suggest is (that) all of you are elected. You’ve got people that you listen to, people you answer to. You can, before this becomes a resolution that we get to vote on, get that input and vote accordingly,” Greer said. “So I’m gonna call it quits on this discussion. I think everybody’s had enough to say up here.”

With the public comment period open, Leigh Bauder wondered what the chief, who was in attendance but did not speak, wanted and whether he was truly interested in the position, and she also felt Mitchell’s preferred candidates had “intimate knowledge” of the city’s budget process.

“People may like them. People may not like them, but they do have the knowledge,” she said. “You guys are facing a huge mountain right now, not a molehill, but a mountain, with the pressure that you are looking at for the budget process.”

From there, a motion to bring back a formal resolution to hire Tupper as the interim city administrator passed 5-2 with Thompson and Nichols opposed. In a statement to the T-R, Thompson elaborated on his stance.

“Appointing the police chief as the interim city administrator would be detrimental to moving the city forward in this time of turmoil. I would prefer an outsider who would get a fresher start with moving the city forward,” he said. “When I found out that we do not conduct exit interviews with former employees, I took it upon myself to conduct exit interviews as to why these former officers left the city, and every one of them said they left because of the chief. They didn’t leave law enforcement. It wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t pay.”

After adjournment, Tupper indicated that he would serve in the position if called upon to do so, and he later responded to Thompson’s comments about turnover in the MPD under his leadership.

“Gary Thompson has not talked to me about any of this. He has never raised a concern with me. I have no concerns about my body of work in service to Marshalltown. Being a police chief is not easy. You will never make everyone happy,” Tupper said. “I stand confidently on 31 years of professional service. I have served honorably as a police chief for nearly 20 years. Gary Thompson will not be able to say anything that takes away from my successful and respected public service. I stand ready to serve Marshalltown at the pleasure of the city council. I’m not concerned about Mr. Thompson’s effort to slander my reputation.”

Tupper added that he has notified Greer of his intent to retire as police chief on Jan. 31, 2025, and he was not certain on whether he would serve in both roles if formally appointed to the interim city administrator position.

“I will defer that question to the mayor,” he said.

——

Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.

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