So far, Oak Park officials acknowledge they are two weeks behind in their search for a new village manager. That doesn’t sound so bad. Not so bad until you sort out the multiple walls the village and its finalists might still crash into between now and the next manager’s arrival.
There’s the lost opportunity for transparency and active community involvement. Proffered public meetings at the start of the rushed process were a bust, owing to a lack of adequate notice. Now there’s talk of a “stakeholders committee” of notable denizens who would be sworn to secrecy. Not a big help. Makes us long for the Sunshine law provisions in Florida that made the hiring of former Oak Park manager Tom Barwin in Sarasota an interesting and open book.
Then there is the concurrent slating process for next spring’s village board election. Is the village president, now at the helm of the search process, running for re-election? Would the powerful VMA slate him if he chooses to run? What about the rest of the board? Might a candidate for the manager’s post think twice about this uncertainty?
We haven’t even gotten to giving notice, contract negotiations, time to relocate, the holidays, the actual spring campaign. All told, we’d be further ahead if the board just hadn’t fired Barwin.