Brooksville could have a new city manager hired within the coming weeks. The City Council during its regular meeting on March 17 whittled its list of candidates down to five and set the timeline for the interview process. Five of the 38 applicants for the position, which was first posted on Feb. 4 and closed on March 10, were chosen by the council for background checks and to potentially interview in person. The final selection will be made at the council’s regular meeting on April 7.
The five finalists are Andrew Hyatt, Timothy Day, Lisa Hendrickson, Dale Walker and Brooksville’s community development director, David Hainley, who is currently serving as interim co-city manager with public works director Richard Weeks. The city manager job became vacant in January when Charlene Kuhn resigned just 13 months after being hired.
If the five applicants chosen pass their background checks, they’ll come before the council on Saturday, March 29. First, they will answer questions from the council in a public meeting that day, then they’ll meet individually with each council member for round-robin questioning.
With each council member given a week to review all the applications, they all came into the March 17 meeting prepared with a list of their top choices. Initially, the hope was to come up with three consensus picks. Mayor Christa Tanner, as well as council members Louis Hallal and J.W. McKethan, each had Hainley and Hyatt in their top three. McKethan and council member Betty Erhard both had Day among their first three, and Walker was Erhard’s top choice. Vice mayor Thomas Bronson declined to provide a list, but did push for going with five rather than three.
There was discussion about holding a special meeting to conduct the final vote, fearing that some finalists are likely conducting their own job hunt and could be lost to another city. However, several council members are attending a conference in Tallahassee on April 1 and the logistics simply didn’t line up.
“I understand wanting to get this to happen, but if somebody wants to be a city manager here in Brooksville, I think we have the greatest city in America,” McKethan said. “If they want to take another offer somewhere else, that’s OK with me, because they obviously weren’t the right fit. Because we have a big passion for the city and I think if they’re just going to take another job; I get it, it’s a job. But also, we need the person that we’re going to be hiring to be passionate about the City of Brooksville and want the improvement. “They might be job hunting, but I hope that after they meet with us and they interview with us, they could wait a week for us to discuss, think about it, come to the public, discuss as a council at our next regular meeting and have a decision by then.”
Another topic brought up to the council on March 17 was yet another chapter in the saga of the Majestic Oaks. In February, the development, which will include a sports academy at Brooksville Country Club, finally gained an exemption from the wastewater moratorium that it had sought since last summer.
Majestic Oaks was approved for a new utility service agreement, replacing the original one from 2005 that the city had said expired, and for an exemption for up to 687 residential units and 75 commercial units.
On March 17 that utility service agreement was presented for approval by the council. However, at the last minute Majestic Oaks asked for the agreement to be amended to cover a five-year phasing plan to build the 900 units the property had been zoned for in 2022.
“The problem I’m having with it is we agreed as a council to 687, with all of the hubbub that we went through and all of the hoops that you guys had to jump through to give them that utility service agreement, and were they aware that it was 687 that we were agreeing to and now they’re coming back asking for the total 900?” Hallal said. “I don’t really think that’s a fair shake unless I’m missing something here.”
“We are very invested in the city, working together,” Dallas Evans of Metro Development, the developer working with Majestic Oaks, said. “We don’t mean to keep moving the goalposts or anything like that. It was just from the beginning, speaking with city staff, we had talked about the two-part, first reinstating the 687 units, because at the time when we started this that was the only option available. And then coming back later to fill in the remainder of the 900 units allowed under zoning.”
Rather than approve a utility service agreement that will immediately need revision, the council opted to defer the issue until all changes are made. Still, the late timing of the requested revision in the wake of what seemed like a done deal a month ago rankled several members of the council.
“We’ve been told for months that this project is going to end,” Tanner said. “This council has bent over backwards for this project and every time at 4:30 the day before a council meeting, when I’ve asked last week, ‘Are we good to go; Yes it’s been submitted. There’s been no issues. Great.’ And 4:30 again. This is like the third time there has been a change, and you keep telling me this project is going to end, this project is going to end. I thought you all were closing on this project in February.
“… This is frustrating. This is extremely frustrating. This council has acted in good faith the entire time for this project and it cannot be said of the same. And you are not going to paint this council to act like we have not supported this project, because we certainly have. And here again, everything’s changing and I don’t know how you can ask us to operate in good faith.”
