Three months after the firing of manager Debra Schnabel, Haines Borough officials have yet to begin the process of hiring a permanent replacement.

In July, the assembly decided to solicit community input on the role of the manager before moving forward with the hiring. A town hall meeting on the subject was scheduled for Aug. 6 but was subsequently postponed at the recommendation of Mayor Jan Hill.

“It was one of those weeks where all of a sudden we had too many meetings,” Hill said. It would have been the fourth borough meeting in as many days.

“Some of those meetings were time sensitive, but this one was not quite so time sensitive,” Hill said.

Borough clerk Alekka Fullerton has been filling in as interim manager since Schnabel’s May 19 dismissal. The expanded duties come with a 20% pay increase. In past interviews, Fullerton has said she is willing to continue serving as interim manager as long as she’s needed.

Hill said Fullerton’s willingness to remain in the position has lessened the pressure to find a new manager.

“It’s different when the interim manager only wants to do it for sixty days,” Hill said, adding that the borough seems to be functioning smoothly without a permanent replacement.

The town hall was initially proposed by Hill and Fullerton as a way to mitigate manager turnover.

Haines has a tumultuous history when it comes to borough managers. Since borough consolidation in 2002, the community has averaged a new, permanent manager hire every 1.8 years. Of the 10 managers since consolidation, four were fired or resigned to avoid being fired. Schnabel was fired after about three years.

“We don’t want to change the manager every time we change the assembly, which seems to be a perpetual problem,” Fullerton said in a July 2 interview. She said she thinks the high turnover rate comes from lack of clarity in the community about the manager’s role.

Hill said the plan is still to hold a community meeting to gather input before the borough moves forward with the hiring, but so far, the town hall has yet to be rescheduled. Hill said she expects the hiring will be a topic at the assembly’s Personnel Committee meeting on Aug. 25.

Personnel Committee chair Stephanie Scott said she is open to discussing the matter if that’s the will of the committee.

Both Scott and Hill said the hope is that the new manager will remain in the position for some time.

“It would be really nice if we could get a permanent manager,” Scott said, emphasizing the word “permanent.”

Hill said in her experience, it takes several months to go through the hiring process from start to finish, which means Haines likely won’t have a new manager until after the Oct. 6 election.