TIFID manager

By The Standard Staff - 01/23/2008

Sometimes the best way forward is to go back and start over, and a good recent example is Butte-Silver Bow’s decision to restart the search for an administrator to oversee the Tax Increment Financing Industrial District.

Six candidates were interviewed in early January, but officials announced last week their intention to re-open the position and advertise regionally to attract more candidates.

That’s good news for Butte. This is a very important position, and as we said in an earlier editorial, it’s critical to fill it with an experienced, well-qualified candidate. We would encourage officials to advertise as far away as Seattle and Salt Lake City and also to target professional associations for local economic development specialists.

The job of filling that industrial park west of town with solid basic industry employers that will provide jobs to support families is arguably the most important task facing the county right now. And if the $45,500 salary being offered is not enough to attract the kinds of candidates we need, county officials should seriously rethink their plan to split this position in two and also hire an economic analyst for $30,000. One highly paid administrator with the right combination of skills could well be more valuable than two lower-paid employees lacking the knowledge and experience to be effective.

Of the three finalists who agreed to let their names be made public during the first go-around, only Kristen Rosa had the appropriate academic background with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and a master’s in business administration from Seattle University. The others had bachelor’s degrees in journalism and social work.

And while academic training is no guarantee of competency, it’s at least a sign that a candidate has acquired the high-level quantitative reasoning skills needed to analyze complex business plans and long-term contracts and to perform the necessary due diligence to distinguish between fly-by-night schemes and solid proposals.

Butte-Silver Bow gets all kinds of queries from prospective businesspeople, and the county desperately needs someone who can skillfully and efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff. Former TIFID administrator Russ Connole’s degree in environmental science and horticulture didn’t serve us very well.

This job search was mainly re-opened because one of the candidates, county Commissioner Charlie O’Leary, is also chairman of the TIFID board, and a member of his board was on the job selection committee.

That’s clearly a conflict of interest, and fortunately the staff recognized it as such before any job offers were made, rather than after.

But no matter the reason behind this fresh start, we see it as a positive development and encourage officials to cast as wide a net as possible and allow enough time for word of the job to spread.

They should also be sure to tell applicants that their names will most definitely be made public if they become finalists for this 100-percent publicly funded job. Prospective candidates who have false expectations of privacy just might not have enough experience with the public sector to be well-suited for this job. Everything about local government is public, or at least it should be.