The Portsmouth City Council agreed unanimously Tuesday to pursue a hiring firm to select the city’s fourth permanent manager in as many years.
Members made the decision to present “a united front” after previous differences they’ve worked through since last week, when members were split on whether to appoint Interim City Manager Mimi Terry to the position or pursue a hiring firm.
“We have decided that we’re going to go forward with a unified front,” said Vice Mayor Lisa Lucas-Burke, adding that she hopes Terry will apply for the position.
Terry is the city’s former chief financial officer who was hired as interim in January after a majority of the newly elected City Council fired Tonya Chapman six months into the job. She also served as interim city manager when the City Council terminated Angel Jones last summer before Chapman’s appointment. Terry previously said she was fired by Chapman.
The city manager is effectively the city’s CEO, tasked with carrying out the council’s vision, developing a budget, supervising city employees and selecting department heads. The traditional process for hiring a city manager typically involves a job advertisement, a narrowing and vetting of qualified candidates and interviews with finalists.
“I’m gonna vote yes in the spirit of this council being one body and the realization that the votes aren’t there to make a decision on the city manager tonight,” said Council member Bill Moody. Last week, Moody supported appointing Terry to the position, though he was vocal during his reelection campaign about the need for a proper hiring process.
“I will stick by what I said at the last meeting that I support Ms. Terry and I’m very confident that she will, at the end of the day — after the expenditure of 20-some thousand dollars of taxpayer funds — that she will come out on top,” Moody said.
Council members have said they expect hiring a firm would cost around $20,000.
Council member Mark Whitaker said Tuesday it’s “about process, not performance.” Whitaker was also the council member who led the vote to terminate Jones last year before pushing for Chapman’s appointment the following week.
Mayor Shannon Glover said Terry is a “consummate professional who has worked and earned her role,” adding that he agreed the decision should be a united one.
But for Terry, Tuesday night felt familiar. She told The Virginian-Pilot after the meeting that it feels like “Groundhog Day,” referencing the brief period she served as interim before City Council appointed Chapman without a hiring a firm.
“(I’ve) been here in this position same time last year,” she said. “It felt like Groundhog Day, all over again, where I was there, doing the job, and they decided to move forward with someone else, not following the process, but moving forward, which put me in the same position.”
As of Tuesday night, she’s not sure whether she’ll apply for the job. But she also said she understands the decision.
“It’s all fair. If we want to make sure that we don’t do what has been done in the past, then I have to understand this is just the process you go through,” Terry said.
Given the upheaval in the city manager’s office over the last few years, Terry recently requested an additional three months of severance if fired without cause as interim. Her current contract, signed in January, grants her three months of severance if terminated without cause. However, upon signing it, she was also receiving almost $47,000 of severance from her previous departure from the city, according to her contract.
Terry, whose salary is $210,000, said she’s the lowest paid acting city manager across Hampton Roads. She added that she didn’t ask for everything she could’ve when hired in January, such as a housing stipend, for example.
“I took a reduced everything because I love Portsmouth. And I should have covered myself better in my ask,” she said.
Terry said she hasn’t been informed whether she’ll be granted the additional severance coverage, which she requested from the personnel committee that consists of Glover and Moody.
“My dedication to the city is because I love the city. No question,” Terry said. “We’ve got to take our citizens higher. But Portsmouth has such a stigma and I’m fighting to remove the stigma so they can really see Portsmouth.”
Natalie Anderson, 757-732-1133, [email protected]
