Two finalists for the Haines Borough manager position have withdrawn their candidacies, including Dennis Koenig, the La Jara, Colo., city manager who came under fierce public scrutiny when community members were made aware of crass posts Koenig made on a public social media page.
Finalist Ken Decker, county administrator of Caroline County, Md., also withdrew from the running after reading media coverage of the assembly’s committee-of-the-whole meeting last week.
In an email to the Mayor and assembly members, Decker expressed his disappointment that the assembly “discussed candidates’ perceived qualifications and shortcomings in open session.”
“Releasing names – or even bios – of finalists for appointed positions is common. Evaluating candidates in public is not. The local law in Haines making hiring a rodeo is unique. As the assembly, this law also is fully your responsibility,” Decker wrote.
Mostly Decker was upset with the assembly’s failure to “get ahead of this” when the stories were published.
“Had I been on the other side of this fence, my first instinct after reading the story would have been, ‘We need to call the recruiter and get ahead of this,’” Decker wrote. “Recognizing the problem – and taking action – would have gone a long way to convincing me the assembly is ready for a top-drawer manager. For what it’s worth, I have always believed leadership is less something we hire and more something we attract by being leaders ourselves.”
With Koenig and Decker removed from the pool, two finalists were slated to travel to Haines for in-person interviews: William Seward, director of auxiliary and recreational boating safety for the Coast Guard in Miami, and Mark Karet, administrative services director for Hillsborough County, Fla.
At Tuesday’s assembly meeting, the group went into a closed-door session for nearly an hour before emerging to say they would also bring to Haines two semi-finalists who hadn’t made the initial cut: Kate Fjell, assistant to the city manager in Boonville, Mo., and Kevin Opple, director of operations at a naval station in Everett, Wash.
Assembly members offered no public explanation for the choices beyond a brief statement from member Margaret Friedenauer. “We evaluated the remaining candidates, but we still wanted four to come (to Haines for in-person interviews), and we talked about qualifications and this is how we ranked them,” Friedenauer said.
“And that’s about all we can say,” Mayor Jan Hill added.
The assembly also selected two alternates in case more candidates withdraw: Paul Dauphinais, executive director of the Alaska Public Offices Commission, and Susan Jensen, operations manager for Anchorage’s Bayshore Owners Association.
Last week, the assembly met as a committee-of-the-whole to whittle down the pool from the 10 semi-finalists selected by executive search firm Brimeyer Fursman to four. When the CVN published public crude posts from top-ranking finalist Koenig’s Facebook page, community members not only called for Koenig’s dismissal as a candidate but questioned the competency of a search firm that didn’t check social media pages.
“I am appalled by the comments made by Dennis Koenig,” planning commission chair Rob Goldberg wrote to the assembly. “Bigotry and racism are a cancer on our society. We don’t need them here. I urge you to drop Dennis Koenig immediately from the list of candidates. Do not pay to have him come here for an interview.”
“As for the work of Brimeyer Fursman,” Goldberg added. “How much did we pay them? Can we get our money back?”
The assembly voted in December to hire Brimeyer Fursman for $27,500 (plus expenses not to exceed $10,000) to search for the borough’s next manager and police chief.
In an email to the assembly, former Mayor Stephanie Scott called the revelation of Koenig’s posts “embarrassing and painful for all concerned.”
“I would like to recommend that you strike Koenig from the list of candidates, and that you respectively request a discounted fee from Fursman — or some other compensation for the embarrassment that their selection has caused you,” Scott wrote.
Planning commissioner Heather Lende and her husband Chip submitted a joint letter stating they were “shocked” by Koenig’s posts. “Clearly a person who is publicly racist and sexist is not the person to lead our community,” they wrote.
The Lendes also faulted Brimeyer Fursman for their failure to check social media pages before submitting a list of semi-finalists to the assembly for consideration.
“In this day and age, a social media check is often the first one done. The firm we contracted for $37,000 to search and vet manager candidates did not, apparently, even do a quick Google-Facebook search. (And if they did, and still short listed him, that is even worse.)… We ask that you do not pay this firm for such shoddy, and potentially very harmful, advice, and that we begin the manager search again without them,” the Lendes wrote.
The assembly did not publicly discuss its contract with Brimeyer Fursman at Tuesday’s meeting.
Some assembly members heard the community’s response, and discussed eliminating Koenig from the finalist pool before his withdrawal.
“I think it is time to realize that for whatever reason it may have been, the community is not happy with the candidate and will not let it go further. We have to deal with it. Mr. Koenig is discredited and any efforts to resurrect him will prove detrimental in many ways,” assembly member Tresham Gregg wrote to his peers.
Assembly member Friedenauer said it was particularly significant in discussing Koenig that his Facebook posts were public, and that he confirmed they indeed were his.
“I think some of Mr. Koenig’s public Facebook posts express intolerance and a lack of discretion – two things that made me seriously question whether he would still be a good candidate for borough manager. And we heard from several members of the community who felt the same way. He removed himself from consideration before the assembly had a chance to discuss it, but those are the concerns I would have raised if we had,” she said.
Assembly member George Campbell, however, thought residents overreacted. “Our community likes to call themselves ‘open’ and ‘friendly’ and ‘we don’t want racism,’ but yet the slightest mistake anybody makes and we are just ready to tar and feather them and assign them with a label, because we are not willing to look deep enough to say the guy has bad taste. It’s not racism,” Campbell said in an interview Tuesday.
Koenig has worked as city manager for a town of 800 in Colorado since 2011. He also owned and managed Koenig Construction in Meeker, Colo., from 1997 to 2011.
“(Koenig) went from the Marines to the lumber industry to construction, and just think about the guys in construction around Haines and think about the guys on the fishing fleet of Haines. They are kind of a rough crowd. They will post things we consider in very bad taste and they don’t think anything of it. Does it make them racist or sexist? No, it makes them have bad taste in jokes,” Campbell said.
Campbell also said due to his age, Koenig probably doesn’t understand how Facebook works or the far-reaching nature of the Internet.
“This guy hasn’t been growing up on the Internet,” Campbell said. “Did I want him as a manager? I don’t know. The problem we’ve got is that the people who are really, really good managers, they’re not going to come to Haines. They are looking at this circus we call a community, how our government works, and how stupid our assembly is, and they’re going, ‘Hell no.’”
Regarding the simultaneous search for police chief, which headhunting firm Brimeyer Fursman is also spearheading, one of three selected finalists has also dropped out. Christian Carelli, who rose from dispatcher to sergeant in 18 years with the University of Michigan campus police, withdrew from the running.
Interim manager Brad Ryan hopes to replace Carelli with Gerald “Ed” Casey, chief of police for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles from 2012-2014.
Police chief and manager finalists will be in Haines May 13-14 for public receptions and interviews.