- November 4, 2024
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Palm Coast City Manager Jim Landon plans to retire in the spring of 2019, and the City Council is preparing to find his replacement.
The council at a meeting April 17 reviewed a list of potential search firms that would be tasked with attracting new city manager candidates. It narrowed the list from four to two — Developmental Associates LLC and Strategic Government Resources — and decided to invite those two to give a presentation before the council at a future meeting.
"It's always nice to have a presentation after you’ve down-selected the highest go-getters, just to see how they present, how they’re going to interact with this council," Mayor Milissa Holland said. "I think this council has been very specific on what they’d like to see in a search firm and the approach that they’re going to take. So, in my opinion, it’s a good first step to also identify how they’re going look at our goals and then work through this process."
Holland also said she'd like to see how the two firms chose the approaches that they'd laid out in their bids.
The other two firms had been Springsted Waters and GovHR USA. Those two were the lower scorers when Palm Coast City Council members evaluated all four of the firms through a scoring metric measuring the firms' experience and past performance, ability to collaborate and facilitate, ability to reach a broad target market, projected cost, and innovation and creativity.
When the scores council members assigned the firms were evaluated, Developmental Associates came out with an 88.6 out of a possible 100, Strategic Government Resources got 81 out of 100, Springsted Waters got 73.6 and GovHR got 67.4.
Of the four firms, Developmental Associates' bid was the least costly, for $24,725. Strategic Government Resources' was for $28,000, Springsted Waters' for $28,500 and GovHR USA for $27,500.
At the meeting, the council had the option to reject all of the responses and start over, pick a bidder, or narrow it down to two and invite them to give presentations — the option it ultimately chose.
"I’m not comfortable picking the firm we’re going to have to work with for months and months and is going to help us through this kind of a thing without hearing from at least two," Councilman Bob Cuff said.
The council voted unanimously to invite the top two firms in for a presentation. No members of the public spoke on the issue during the meeting's public comment period.
