Austin City Council to move forward with two candidates in city manager search
Brian Platt, one of the finalists for Austin's city manager hiring process, dropped out, according to a Sunday post from Mayor Kirk Watson’s office.
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Brian Platt, one of the finalists for Austin's city manager hiring process, dropped out, according to a Sunday post from Mayor Kirk Watson’s office.
The mayor's office confirmed to KXAN that it will not pull in additional applicants and will move forward with the two candidates still in the process.
KXAN’s NBC affiliate in Kansas City received council documents which showed Platt had agreed to remove himself from consideration in order to negotiate an extended contract for his current position, KSHB reported.
“It should come as no surprise that there’s competition for a quality candidate once applicant names have been publicly released. That is the challenge as we work to balance the reality of recruiting and hiring top talent with our commitment to transparency as well as following state law,” said Watson on Friday.
T.C. Broadnax of Dallas and Sara Hensley of Denton, Texas are still in the running for the position.
Stark difference in process
The last time the City of Austin hired a new city manager, which was in 2017, the process was much different.
"The city had voted to keep the whole process of hiring someone a secret, which they thought would make it more attractive to candidates, perhaps from the private sector who weren't as used to transparency as those who work in the public sector," said Elizabeth Findell who covered city politics in Austin during that hiring process. She is now the Texas reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Findell said even though the city didn't disclose the names of anyone involved in the interview phase, she was able to identify some of the candidates by catching people in a hotel lobby, snapping photos of people coming and going from interviews and using social media.
After realizing it would be difficult to hide the identities of candidates, some of the interviews were moved behind security gates at the airport, Findell recalled. It raised concerns even from some council members about whether the process violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.
"I tried to go after them, eventually tracked them down at the airport, where they were conducting these interviews in a conference room behind the airport security where we couldn't get to them," she said.
It was later determined that the firm doing the search had even instructed some of the candidates to consider disguises, Findell said.
Council Member Leslie Pool was one of the city council members involved in that 2017 process and said this time around it was "very important" to her that it be done differently. She said there was no push back from any members of council that the process be transparent and that names of the final candidates be published.
"What's been really important to us is that we've had a very transparent process and we've seen that through and through with this city manager search," Council Member Vanessa Fuentes added. She was not involved in the 2017 process.