Elected officials met for the first time last week, looking to fill the shoes of the recently departed Oak Park village manager.
The village board is attempting to set an aggressive timeline to replace Tom Barwin, who left his post after five years on Feb. 29. If all goes smoothly, they want to hire a search firm by early May, start conducting interviews in mid-July and possibly extend a job offer to a candidate in August.
They’d like to get a replacement up and running within six months or so, to be able to help contribute to village hall’s upcoming 2013 budget deliberations. Trustee Ray Johnson said he hopes the search firm can help lead the process, so board members don’t get bogged down by the minutiae of the search, as they did back in 2006 when Barwin was hired.
“We were deep in the weeds on that stuff last time,” he said. “It was quite an intense process.”
Preliminarily, Oak Park wants to have a request for qualifications to send out to search firms in the first week or so of April. They’ll be looking to pick a firm in early May, and also hope to hold a public meeting to gather input on a new manager on March 19.
Depending on how search firms respond, they hope to have a job description ready to send out by June 1, a small handful of candidates to interview in the second half of July, and a finalist to extend an offer to sometime in August, with a possible start date in early September.
Trustees cautioned that all dates are up in the air, depending on how quickly search firms can work in the next few months.
