photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Clockwise from top left are Lawrence city manager candidates Majed Al-Ghafry, Joe Fivas, Michael Kovacs and Joe Lessard, pictured at a meet-and-greet event on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.

Lawrence has made an offer to a city manager candidate, Mayor Brad Finkeldei told the Journal-World on Wednesday, but negotiations on the contract are still in progress.

It’s now been almost two weeks since the City Commission voted to enter into negotiations on the city manager hire, and Finkeldei said Wednesday that the city made an offer to a candidate last week and has been negotiating details of the contract since then with legal counsel and its consultant, Strategic Government Relations.

“We hope to wrap up those negotiations very soon and then schedule a final vote and announcement shortly thereafter,” Finkeldei said.

As the Journal-World has reported, the city narrowed a pool of more than 60 city manager candidates to five finalists, one of whom dropped out, and the vote to begin negotiations with a finalist was taken on May 22. Which finalist the city would be negotiating with wasn’t revealed at that time. Finkeldei said then that an announcement might come within a week, but on Wednesday he said that first assessment was “overly optimistic.”

For that reason, he said he was hesitant to put a timeline on when the current negotiations might conclude.

The four city manager finalists were Majed Al-Ghafry, currently manager of DeSoto, Texas; Joe Fivas, currently manager of Cleveland, Tennessee; Michael Kovacs, currently manager of Fate, Texas; and Joe Lessard, who currently works as a consultant and whose most recent city manager job was in Ashland, Oregon. The fifth finalist who dropped out of consideration before the candidates’ in-person visit to Lawrence at the end of May was David Vela.