photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024.

Story updated at 3:52 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 7:

The consultant who will assist in Lawrence’s city manager search will soon hold his first meetings with city leaders, and he’s coming straight from a search in a college community that some people here may recognize.

He’s Doug Thomas, the executive vice president of recruitment and leadership development at the consulting firm SGR, and the college community he’s helped in recent months is Waco, Texas, which is searching for a new city manager to take over once its current executive resigns in February.

Waco is somewhat larger than Lawrence – about 147,000 people to Lawrence’s 97,000. But it is also a college town like Lawrence, and one that fans of University of Kansas sports are familiar with. It’s home to Baylor University, whose teams compete against KU in the Big 12 Conference.

Lawrence Mayor Brad Finkeldei told the Journal-World on Wednesday that Thomas was still in Waco, but that he would be in contact with city leaders after that and set up meetings with them.

“We don’t know quite the timeline yet,” Finkeldei said. “We don’t have the dates he’s going to be here yet. I do expect that to be in the coming weeks.”

When Finkeldei took a few moments to tell the other city commissioners about Thomas on Tuesday night, he highlighted Thomas’ experience in college towns. Finkeldei said that before Thomas became a consultant, he had 25 years of experience as a city manager, and he’d worked mostly in communities with colleges and universities.

A closer look at Thomas’ city management experience shows that he held the top job in two cities, serving for more than 10 years in each one.

One of them is Alma, Michigan, where he worked from 1989 to 2003. Alma is a town of under 10,000 people and is not home to a state university, but it does have Alma College, a private liberal arts school.

The other city where Thomas worked, from 2003 to 2015, is Lakeland, Florida, which has not one but three higher education institutions. Two of them are private colleges — Florida Southern College and Southeastern University — and the third is a public STEM education institution, Florida Polytechnic University. Lakeland is much closer to Lawrence’s size than Alma, with a population of about 120,000.

When Thomas comes to Lawrence, he should be meeting with city commissioners individually to kick off the search, Finkeldei said at Tuesday’s meeting. But those will be far from the only meetings that will take place early in the process. He’ll meet with “basically whoever we tell him to meet with,” Finkeldei said, and Finkeldei encouraged his fellow commissioners to come up with lists of people they’d like Thomas to hear from.

On Wednesday, Finkeldei said some of the stakeholders Thomas might be speaking to in these early meetings would be city employees outside of the senior management level; representatives from KU; neighborhood associations; economic development organizations such as The Chamber; and the Lawrence school district and Douglas County government.

Finkeldei also encouraged the commission to start thinking about what else the search process should entail as it develops over the next few months.

As the Journal-World has reported, Lawrence City Manager Craig Owens announced in early November that he would be leaving in the spring, and the City Commission voted on Dec. 16 to award the contract for the search to SGR in an amount not to exceed $28,419. Finkeldei had previously told the Journal-World that the search process could take three to four months. That’s similar to Waco’s timeline for its search, which began in September and is now in its final stages, with interviews of four finalists being held this week.

The City of Waco on its website touted its search process as a national or even international search, saying that it had received applications from 70 candidates “representing 24 states and two countries.” Of its four finalists, two are internal candidates — Waco’s deputy city manager and assistant city manager. The other two are from within the state of Texas: the COO for the Texas Division of Emergency Management and the outgoing city manager of Brownsville.

Before the Lawrence City Commission had settled on SGR, Finkeldei said that any of the search firms would start by getting a sense of the community’s opinions, but that the search could take different forms depending on what the commission directs the firm to do.

“When you look at any of these proposals, the first thing they do is do a 360, talk to the commissioners, talk to the community, maybe do a survey, maybe do all sorts of other things as we direct them to do,” he said at the commission’s Dec. 9 meeting.

He reiterated this week that the City Commission will do a lot to shape the search process, and that Thomas was going to look to the commission for guidance.

“He basically said, ‘We do it however you guys want,'” Finkeldei told the Journal-World. “There’s a lot of possibilities… he’s done it lots of different ways over the last 10 years, and so he’s looking for us to give him direction.”

The commission will be discussing the process in more detail in the coming weeks and having conversations with Thomas about what they could do to get community feedback. That will help inform an eventual position description and ads for the job, Finkeldei said at Tuesday’s meeting.

As for what he’d want in the search process, Finkeldei told the Journal-World Wednesday that “I don’t have a firm opinion.”

“I’m waiting to hear what others on the commission would like to see,” he said.

He had mentioned the possibility of town hall meetings or surveys to gauge what the public wanted in a new city manager, and he said that Thomas would be able to suggest more things for the commission to try.

“He’ll give us suggestions of things he’s done,” Finkeldei said. “… Sometimes they do surveys, sometimes they don’t; sometimes they do town halls, sometimes they don’t; and that’s really going to be up to the five of us to give him direction on.”

However the process develops, Finkeldei wanted the commissioners to know that Thomas was there to help them get the necessary information “to make your best decision,” not to lead it himself.

“As he said to me,” Finkeldei said at Tuesday’s meeting, “he’s our consultant and he’s working with the five of us.”