Kim Zimmerman has a busy month ahead of him. He’s finished contract negotiations with the Haines Borough, and the assembly is set to review the terms of that contract during a special meeting on Wednesday. Then, he’ll have to schedule a visit once the borough does a background check.
When reached by phone Tuesday, he was also working on a Power Point presentation for a public meeting in Junction City, Kansas where he’ll be meeting residents of the city as a finalist for its city manager position. And the Pennsylvania-based military retiree said he’s also a finalist for a similar job in Colorado.
“I’m not putting all of my eggs in one basket,” he said.
One reason for that is that he has been a finalist for positions before and thought he was a shoo-in, only to have the hiring process collapse, like, one in Palmer in early 2024.
Zimmerman and one other finalist, Kolby Hickel, were in the process of negotiating a contract with the city when the council violated the Open Meetings Act during an executive session and chose to restart the process all over again.
And, the process of getting to a final offer in Haines has also taken months. Zimmerman said he applied when it first opened in July, but he didn’t hear anything back.
“So, I emailed and said ‘Hey, is this still open?’” he said. In the meantime, he was doing interviews with other cities and resigned from his current position as manager in Lewiston, Pennsylvania in late August.
“That’s why I haven’t just stopped and said Haines is it,” he said.
But, it is high on the list. Zimmerman said he and his wife have been trying to get back to Alaska. He was short-listed and interviewed as a candidate for Wrangell’s borough manager position in 2022.
Before that, Zimmerman was stationed at Joint Base Elemendorf-Richardson in Anchorage for three years. Then, he retired and moved to Fairbanks where he was in charge of a civilian program operating military housing on the Air Force base. But they had to leave Fairbanks to address an illness during the pandemic, he said.
“We loved it,” he said. “We didn’t want to leave.”
But, he said, there are some logistical and financial challenges to consider. One big one is salary, which Zimmerman described as not keeping pace with the cost of living in Alaska. He declined to share the final negotiated number in the contract the assembly is set to review this week.
But in addition to his salary, he said access to healthcare and housing were two other big considerations.
“Housing is hard to find up there,” Zimmerman said. “They’re supposedly going to put me up in a place to stay for 90 days, but you can’t bring pets and I’ve got my two beagles,” he said. “So that means the wife would have to stay back here with the beagles in our house, which means we can’t sell our house because she needs a place to stay. It’s going to be challenging.”
The assembly’s Nov. 12 decision to offer the job to Zimmerman has been controversial. The vote was split with some assembly members preferring finalist Hunter Rieseberg, of New Hampshire.
Testimony to the assembly, both written and delivered in person, came in mostly in favor of hiring Rieseberg, who has decades of experience in government.
Mayor Tom Morphet, who attended the meeting remotely, and assembly members Craig Loomis and Kevin Forster supported Rieseberg while Cheryl Stickler, Mark Smith, Gabe Thomas and Richard Clement ultimately decided in favor of Zimmerman.
Morphet at one point suggested offering the job to both men as a Manager, Deputy Manager split, which Stickler seemed amenable to considering. But Rieseberg said he has since withdrawn from consideration.
“Following the assembly’s recent meeting and their decision to hire another candidate … it seemed appropriate,” he wrote in an email on Tuesday.
Critics of the assembly’s decision say Zimmerman’s direct experience as city manager is lacking. He was city manager in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania for just over two years and served just over three years as city manager for Lewiston, Pennsylvania.
But Zimmerman pushed back against the idea that he’s less qualified as a leader because he has less experience running city and borough governments than Rieseberg. He said he often hears that question in interviews, particularly when people are pointing to a lack of experience in managing communities of a certain size.
“What does that mean?” he said. “How many years do you need before you’re a qualified leader? I’ve got 24 years active duty as an officer in the Army around the world. I did basically a city manager [role] in downtown Baghdad for 15 months for 12,000 soldiers. I’d like to know what they mean by experience as a city manager.”
He said the principles of good leadership don’t change.
“When you talk about the tenets of leadership alright, integrity, honesty, teamwork. Tell me what tenets of leadership change between managing 10,000 people, to managing 30,000 people – usually they don’t have an answer, because it doesn’t change,” he said. “It’s always just an excuse. Right now, I’m going from 8,500 to what – less than 2,000?”
Mayor Morphet, who weighed-in strongly in favor of Rieseberg, disagreed. He said he’s not convinced that leading in the military always translates well to leadership in the civilian world.
“We’ve had two [borough managers] who were retired military,” he said.
One, Bill Seward, served in the Coast Guard for nearly three decades before tackling Haines Borough’s management position. He lasted six months on the job before then assemblymember Morphet led the charge to get him fired after complaints of ongoing personnel issues with borough staff and that he took action without assembly direction.
The other, David Sosa, was a career Marine Corps officer who took the borough manager’s position in Haines in 2014. He requested to be released from his three-year contract and moved to New York in 2015.
“Managing a municipality and commanding troops are not, in my estimation or my gut, directly comparable situations,” he said. “There’s no clear chain of command in government. You work for the public, who [are fickle]. It’s not analogous.”
Morphet did say, however, that he’s open to Zimmerman being the candidate who “breaks the mold,” however.
“Maybe Zimmerman will surprise me. He hasn’t impressed me. He hasn’t proved himself to be a serious candidate. He seems like a guy who is kind of flitting around,” Morphet said.