photo by: Screenshot/City of Lawrence

City Manager Craig Owens, front row, addresses the Lawrence City Commission on Tuesday. Seated behind him are Assistant City Manager Brandon McGuire, left, and Assistant City Manager Casey Toomay, right.

As Lawrence looks for a successor to City Manager Craig Owens, one of his assistants will be stepping up to lead the city on an interim basis starting next month.

Owens announced earlier this week that he would be using the rest of his leave starting on May 1, and that Assistant City Manager Casey Toomay would then take over as acting city manager.

“Since I announced my departure in November, my team has been working to prepare for this transition,” Owens told the City Commission on Tuesday.

Toomay has been one of Lawrence’s assistant city managers since 2014 and worked as the city’s budget manager and in other positions before that. While she hasn’t spent her entire career in Lawrence, she did get her start here as a University of Kansas alumna and an intern in the city attorney’s office. In her current role, she helps oversee multiple city departments, including finance, human resources, information technology, police and fire/medical services, according to the city’s personnel directory. She also serves as the city’s LGBTQ+ liaison.

“We look forward to having Casey Toomay be our acting city manager,” Mayor Brad Finkeldei said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Toomay’s time as acting city manager will last until the new city manager starts. As the Journal-World reported, the City Commission began narrowing down a pool of 60 applicants earlier this month, and Finkeldei said Tuesday that a hire might be made in a little over a month.

“Based upon our current timelines, we hope maybe to select a new city manager by the end of May, with a start date sometime in the summer,” Finkeldei said.