The Greensboro City Council held a long closed session on personnel matters at the Tuesday, Oct. 19 meeting.

The City Council only has two employees, City Attorney Chuck Watts and Interim City Manager Chris Wilson, but the meeting wasn’t about them.

The council spent that time looking at resumes so that Wilson can go back to being an assistant city manager.

And the City Council has scheduled a virtual special meeting for 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 25. The time actually makes it a very special meeting since the City Council usually only meets that early in the day once a year at the annual retreat.

It is planned for the meeting to be entirely in closed session to consider the city manager applicants.

Mayor Nancy Vaughan said that the council hoped to have a new city manager hired by the end of the year.

Most people don’t enjoy job interviews very much, but imagine an interview where you have nine equal bosses.  Of course, you only have to convince five of the nine to hire you, but who would take a job knowing that they were hired by the slimmest of majorities.

David Parrish, who resigned as city manager on June 30, was hired by a unanimous vote of the City Council on June 5, 2018 after being interim city manager for just over a month.

Many in the community including some members of the City Council were surprised when Parrish announced in May he was resigning at the end of the fiscal year.

Parrish grew up in Greensboro and had worked for the city as a teenager.  He returned to Greensboro in 2012 as an assistant city manager.  When City Manager Jim Westmoreland retired on April 30, 2018, Parrish was the obvious choice for interim city manager. He had already taken over many of the day to day duties of the city manager while Westmoreland dealt with a serious illness in his family.

Westmoreland had been promoted from interim city manager to city manager in 2014 after Denise Turner Roth resigned to take a job in the Obama administration, and Roth had been promoted from interim city manager to city manager in 2012 when former City Manager Rashad Young resigned to accept a job as city manager of Alexandria, Virginia.

In fact, Young, who was hired in 2009 when City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson was mayor, is the last city manager who was hired from outside the city.

So, it’s been over a decade since Greensboro’s city manager was hired as the result of a national search.