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Effort to fill county's top job falls short

By GREG HAMILTON
Published June 25, 2006

Congratulations, Charles Saddler. You have just become a hot issue in the upcoming races for County Commission.

Officially, Saddler has only been offered the position of county administrator, the top nonelected job in Citrus County government. But the board's action last week was much more than a simple job offer. It will be fodder for the candidates for months to come.

That's because this is no ordinary job. The administrator is the top of the food chain, the person to whom the senior department heads all report and look to for guidance and as the buffer between all county workers and the commissioners.

He is the board's point man on the county budget, both its creation and its implementation. He will oversee such major initiatives as the $30-million takeover of the FGUA sewer and water systems; $140-million of road projects in the next couple of years; shifting to a force of paid firefighters; an office space crunch that will cost millions, not to mention the cost of fixing the mess with the last office building the county erected in Inverness.

Progress Energy will soon announce whether Citrus will get a second nuclear plant, a 10-year, $3-billion project that will be a huge concern in the county; there are a truckload of major commercial and residential developments in the pipeline. Oh, and there is this road project called the Suncoast Parkway II.

He will be the lead contact on those projects and initiatives such as the expansion of the hospitals. As the face of the county, the administrator sets the tone of the relationships with the cities of Crystal River and Inverness and other local governments and state agencies.

As has been said many times, Citrus County is at a crossroads. It is laying the foundation today, quite literally, for what it will become over the next 20 to 50 years.

The county needs someone on top of his game, a recognized superstar in the world of management techniques and municipal budgeting, someone who has successfully navigated the challenges of a rapidly growing county and state and who can offer innovative ideas.

In short, the commissioners need a visionary, the Lee Iacocca of county government. Instead, they hired Mr. Mom.

OK, so this is a harsh assessment. Sorry. But the stakes are just too high to be sugar-coating matters.

Saddler seems to be a nice enough fellow. He won over four of his five future bosses in interviews last week. He made a favorable impression on senior county staff by asking questions that indicated he had done some homework.

And that is good, because he may have been the only person involved in the hiring process who did any.

On Tuesday, the commissioners offered Saddler the job. On Wednesday, the County Commission chairman, Gary Bartell, was hearing some new information about the circumstances surrounding Saddler's last full-time job, as a county administrator four years ago in a county of 25,000 people in Washington state.

This was information that Bartell and the other commissioners certainly should have known about well before they met with Saddler. That it came to light so late in the game, after the job had been offered, is yet another reason to question the process the board used to choose its new CEO.

Thursday morning, Bartell was meeting with Saddler and asking - belatedly - for an explanation about why he left his last job. You might think this would be one of the first questions a job candidate would be asked in an interview, but apparently it was news that Saddler had been fired. Saddler told the local press he left Washington to return to Florida after the birth of his twins to live in a house in Polk County that carried no mortgage. He has been a stay-at-home dad since then.

Saddler's explanation about some questionable financial matters in Jefferson County satisfied Bartell sufficiently and by week's end, the negotiations for a contract were proceeding.

A March 26, 2002, letter from a Jefferson County commissioner gives Saddler a glowing review, right up to the part where it mentions the commission "found it necessary to exercise the severance provision" of his contract.

Minutes of the commission meetings leading up to the decision on March 18, 2002, to fire Saddler indicate "budget shortfalls were seriously discussed." On March 11, there was talk of a hiring freeze and cutting the pay of elected officials. A week later, he was gone.

Shouldn't someone on the commission, however, be the least bit concerned that this information was not conveyed to them earlier either by Saddler or by the consultant?

Shouldn't the commissioners be concerned that their new hire has been out of work for four years (not counting the one month that he has been employed by the tiny town of Dundee in Polk County as an interim manager)?

While being a stay-at-home dad is a noble thing to do, that is not the best preparation for someone about to take over the extremely demanding job of running Citrus County. Being out of the game for so long is fine if you are, say, a bricklayer. But in a dynamic field such as county administration, it is a huge handicap.

Saddler is six years removed from any substantive work in Florida. An awful lot has happened in government on the state and local level since then, when he was the interim manager of Polk City.

Laws are changing every day, literally, as the governor signs bills that were passed during the last legislative session. The rules governing growth management, utilities, local sources of water, impact fees, bonding, concurrency, wetland protection, public records and everything in between have shifted dramatically since 2000.

It is assumed that the new county administrator, as an outsider, will have a steep learning curve on local issues, places and people. It will be troubling enough for senior staffers who are belly deep in some very big-ticket matters to have to guide their new boss not just through the details of the ongoing projects but also catch him up on the political and historical background.

But Saddler will also have to become instantly knowledgeable on what has occurred in the last six years in Tallahassee and throughout the state, because all of it impacts Citrus.

Commissioners also should be asking just how the consultant, the Mercer Group, came up with this shallow pool of candidates.

Besides the out-of-work Saddler, there was a woman whom Bartell recalled having been involved in turmoil at her previous career stops; a 28-year-old fellow from Wisconsin who may be a rising star but who is not ready to take over a lead role; and a guy from Ohio whose reason for wanting the job was to move to a warmer climate.

The commissioners paid good money to a consultant to take the politics out of the hiring process, and the presumption was that this headhunter would scour the nation for the top talent. Is this group of candidates truly the best of the best in the business, or just the best of the resumes on the consultant's desk?

Last week, I suggested that the commissioners had a couple of very qualified people right in their back yard: assistant county administrator Tom Dick and Inverness City Manager Frank DiGiovanni. Neither man had applied for the job, for understandable reasons, but that did not make them any less qualified.

Compared with the short list of candidates that the consultant presented, I maintain that Dick and DiGiovanni are still the best options. But that no longer matters.

There is one more name that should not be forgotten as the administrator hiring saga plays itself out: Richard Wesch. Fair or not, Saddler will be compared with his predecessor at every turn.

For the county commissioners, especially the three who voted to fire Wesch, the comparison will be very simple. When they tossed aside Wesch, the understanding was that they would find someone better. Saddler is now that guy, and their political fates rest with his job performance.

If a controversy blossoms over the way the consultant came up with his short list of finalists and over how much he did or did not know and share with the commissioners about their backgrounds; if it develops that the circumstances of Saddler's dismissal from his last job are truly alarming, the sort of things that cause the board to rescind the offer; the commissioners will face the political fallout of having bungled this extremely important mission.

[Last modified June 25, 2006, 03:57:32]