The Haines Borough Assembly bucked the staff’s choice for manager on Saturday, voting 4-2 to offer the job to Coast Guard veteran William Seward over Mark Karet, a planner and development director with more than two decades of municipal experience.
Three groups – one comprised of assembly members, one of department heads and one of citizens – took turns Saturday interviewing the four manager finalists before converging to hash out the pros and cons of each one.
After an hour of discussion, it was clear Seward and Karet had risen to the top over finalists Paul Dauphinais, executive director of the Alaska Public Offices Commission, and Kevin Opple, director of operations at a naval station in Everett, Wash.
While the assembly appeared to put more emphasis on hiring a candidate with a winning personality, staff lobbied for experience.
Richard Fursman, president of the executive search firm Brimeyer Fursman that the assembly contracted with to facilitate the hiring process, urged group members to use “gentle” critiques.
“We want to be real sensitive and try and use more affirmative (language). It’s kind of like when your mom said, ‘Well, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,’” Fursman said.
Seward, a Kodiak-born Tlingit, has served in the military for the past 28 years and is currently a Coast Guard director of auxiliary and recreational boating safety in Miami, Fla. During his assembly interview, Seward repeatedly emphasized his creative problem-solving skills and penchant for helping his staff succeed.
The assembly responded strongly to an answer Seward gave to a hypothetical scenario in which the borough is responsible for sewage backing up into the homes of three residents. If the insurance company told the manager not to admit fault, how would he deal with the homeowners?
“If this answer hits you the wrong way, I’m probably not the guy for this job,” Seward began. “I was groomed by the Coast Guard with core values: honor, respect and devotion to duty. Those are our core values and that is what I will bring to this job. I know the insurance companies are trying to preserve their capital – I mean, that’s what they are in business for – but I don’t work for the insurance company. The insurance company works for me. We pay the insurance company to have a contract with us to provide coverage. The right thing to do is apologize to the homeowner and make it right, make the repairs and go from there.”
The Small Boat Harbor expansion project came up during the interview, and Seward praised how the assembly has handled the controversy. “I think you guys have done a good job debating that issue. I think you guys were sound for proceeding forward. The minority just needed to be educated,” he said.
“People have to be able to forgive and forget and just know that you’re not going to be able to win every single battle,” Seward continued. “That’s how democracy is. Be thankful that we’re able to have these kind of frank discussions. The freedoms that we have – diplomacy, democracy – is something precious. So if you get upset about it, it could be worse. We could have a dictatorship.”
Seward also said he wasn’t afraid of rolling up his sleeves and doing his own work, as opposed to only delegating to staff. “If there’s a memo to be written, I don’t make my secretary do it, I don’t staff it out, I write my own memos,” he said.
Assembly member George Campbell said he felt Seward had “a very high level of integrity,” while others praised him for being “compassionate,” a “great fit” for the community, and “a quick learner.”
“When he talked about loyalty you could just see it coming right out of him; he’s a very loyal person,” assembly member Mike Case said.
Assembly member Diana Lapham said she thought Seward would do well in heated situations. “He’s a Coast Guard helicopter pilot and he has saved many, many lives out of Kodiak. And it kind of hit home to me that he has gone through extreme pressures…the coolness, the calmness that it takes, all of it equated out to grace under fire,” Lapham said.
Assembly member Tresham Gregg said in an interview after the meeting he supported Seward as manager because “his personality was very innovative and genuine.”
“He was a humanist in spite of his military background. I think he really genuinely wants to help individual people as well as communities,” Gregg said.
Assembly member Ron Jackson said he questioned Seward’s authenticity, and agreed with the citizen group’s assessment that Seward gave canned, “textbook-y” answers to many questions.
The citizen group consisted of Kyle Gray, Carol Tuynman, Tom Morphet, Debra Schnabel, Scott Hansen and Jim Shook. The department head and staff group consisted of Jila Stuart, Krista Kielsmeier, Brad Ryan, Patricia Brown and Josh Dryden. Clerk Julie Cozzi sat in on two of the four interviews with department heads, including Seward’s.
While the staff group found Seward to be “compassionate” and “humble,” chief fiscal officer Stuart, who served as staff spokesperson, stressed his lack of municipal experience. Stuart voiced apprehension to continued statements by the assembly praising Seward’s positive personality traits.
“I think if we were picking someone to spend a year on a desert island with, he would maybe be hands-down someone that people like. But there are a lot of hard skills that go into this job. It’s a technical job. And I feel like it would be an uproad battle for him, and I feel like it will be a lot of work for staff to teach him how to be a municipal manager, because he doesn’t have any experience doing that,” Stuart said.
Deputy clerk Kielsmeier said she was put off by Seward when he publicly praised the headhunting firm Brimeyer Fursman at Friday’s meet-and-greet event. The assembly hired Brimeyer Fursman for $27,000 (plus up to $10,000 in expenses) to find Haines a new manager and police chief.
“He lost me last night when he gave so much praise to the consultants. I think he tells us what we want to hear,” Kielsmeier said, questioning how the assembly felt they could evaluate integrity based on a couple of conversations with a person.
Citizen group member Shook disagreed with Stuart, stating he got the feeling Seward was “quite intelligent” and could learn quickly. “When we asked him questions, he didn’t have to think very much. He didn’t have to try to formulate something that would sound good,” Shook said.
Stuart interjected: “Because he had a buzzword for every answer.”
Staff leaned much more toward Karet, who offered examples of how he dealt with major controversy in Daytona Beach, Fla., when a big hotel developer clashed with residents and environmentalists.
Karet works as administrative services director for Hillsborough County, Fla. He previously worked as planning manager, community development manager and community development director for several other municipalities. He holds a bachelor’s degree in public affairs from George Washington University and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Florida.
Karet emphasized his listening and communication skills, and how he would be an unbiased and impartial decision maker. He also acknowledged past mistakes, such as being a more totalitarian, “everyone-should-fall-in-line” leader but eventually evolving to a more inclusive leadership style.
The citizen group expressed concerns about Karet’s quiet, calm demeanor. “Maybe there’s a certain meekness about him, a certain folding that might take place if there are strong personalities in the room,” said Gray.
Citizen group member Shook said Karet seemed “unsure of himself,” “nervous” and “wasn’t comfortable at all.”
While the group agreed Karet ranked high for experience, he scored low on the “fitting into the community” scale, they said.
Assembly member Campbell said he also saw an issue with Karet’s confidence. “Having somebody with leadership skills to me is very important because we don’t want someone who is afraid to make decisions,” he said.
Chief fiscal officer Stuart said she was disappointed with this feedback from the assembly and citizen groups, because the staff unanimously expressed that they were impressed with Karet and had confidence in his abilities.
Library director Brown said she took Karet’s quietness to mean he was a good listener, and said she was impressed with his answers about personnel issues.
Stuart questioned the assembly’s focus on wanting a “leader,” because while the manager is the leader of the staff, he or she is not the leader of the assembly or the town. “I think borough managers can get in trouble when they feel like they are the leader of the community, the leader of Haines, because that’s not their job. They’re not elected by the people. That’s your job,” Stuart told the assembly.
“I’m afraid we may pass up someone – not necessarily him – who brings a lot to the table as far as administrative skills, personnel management skills, municipal management experience because we’re looking for someone with a firm handshake who dresses well and makes good jokes and can fit in at parties,” she added.
Stuart said Karet was the only candidate she interviewed “that my shoulders won’t slump over if I find out that they are our new manager. Because there are three candidates that I think are going to take a lot of work from staff to train, basically.”
Toward the end of the joint discussion, as Stuart listened to the assembly, she said she was in “a state of shock” regarding the dissonance between the staff’s and assembly’s thought processes and favorites.
“We got in here and it’s a different story. I’m trying to process that… It makes me think you guys are looking for something different than what we’re looking for,” she said.
After the roughly 80-minute joint discussion, the assembly went into a closed-door session for more than an hour, and emerged to vote Seward in by a 4-2 margin. Assembly members Jackson and Margaret Friendenauer were opposed.
In an interview after the meeting, Friedenauer said her first choice was Karet. “Ultimately, the staff has a really good handle on day-to-day tasks that a manager needs to be equipped to do, probably better than the assembly,” she said. “I weighed the staff input heavily because we asked them to be involved. It was important for me to give it due weight.”
Jackson said he also preferred Karet over Seward. “I felt like he was the person who could come in to Haines and be willing to talk to people and work through the public processes in a manner that would lead to some relation-building. I didn’t get the sense that (Seward) had extensive work with the public. In the military, I think the public is a different kind of public.”
Gregg said there was some pressure in executive session to come out with a unanimous vote. “That opinion was expressed and it was debunked,” Gregg said. “Others came forward to say it was better to say what you really feel. Even though I was at first advocating for unanimous, I changed my mind,” he said.
When interviewed after the meeting, three assembly members said there was no discussion about postponing the decision to a later date or going back to Fursman to ask for more candidates.
Seward said during his interview he could start on June 20. He said he would accept the low end of the salary range ($95,000) because he is new to municipal management.
Seward holds a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics, though the borough’s advertisement stated, “Qualified candidates shall possess a bachelor’s degree in public administration (master’s preferred) or a closely related field.”
Seward was the only finalist without a master’s degree.
One aspect of Seward’s background that was not addressed was his filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1995, a fact headhunter Fursman included in written materials he provided to the assembly.
Assembly member Jackson said he didn’t ask about the bankruptcy because it happened more than 20 years ago. “It’s a personal thing. He didn’t bankrupt the Coast Guard. I didn’t think that was relevant.”
Seward said via email the decision to declare bankruptcy “wasn’t done without great reluctance.”
“My wife Cary and I were just starting out. Our financial obligations were based on both of us working. We were then blessed by the pregnancy of our first son. Unfortunately, the pregnancy became delicate and our physician told her to limit her activity to ensure a healthy birth. She was forced to take a leave of absence which cut our income in half. We were unable to keep up with our debt and we reluctantly sought legal advice which led to the bankruptcy,” he explained.