On Friday, Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild announced that the secretive selection process for the new city manager had come to an end and Michael Ortega would fill the position.
The City Council held a closed meeting earlier in the week and voted unanimously to give the job to Ortega, who currently serves as the Cochise County administrator for seven years. Ortega got his start in Pima County government in the Transportation Department and claimed he was going to move from Cochise County at the end of this, his seventh year.
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Ortega said he was “excited to be a part of exploring” Tucson’s “tremendous potential.”
Ortega has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Arizona.
Community activist, Scott Egan, from Barrio Hollywood questioned the process employed by the City. According to Egan, “The Mayor and Council, in response to public pressure, formed a citizens committee last October to review potential candidates. For almost six months they were left in limbo. There was no direction or guidelines given, no objectives or schedule submitted, no public discussion ensued.”
Only after community members began to question when the process was going to proceed, according to Egan, “the city went into overdrive and all of a sudden a public and a committee meeting were scheduled. Members of the committee, busy but community-oriented individuals who had generously volunteered their time without compensation for a thankless job, were completely blindsided. Several members could not accommodate their schedules to such a last minute maneuver and could not attend.”
Reportedly, the committee was only able to review two of the forty candidates, who had applied for the position. Those two candidates had been chosen from the pool of forty by a consultant.
Although the committee has chosen the second candidate, Mary Jacobs, assistant Sierra Vista city manager in a 6 – 5 vote, the Council instructed City Attorney Mike Rankin, known as the shadow mayor, to offer the job to Ortega.
“I have known a number of the people on the citizen committee, some for quite a long time. And while we have not always agreed with each other (thinking people have a tendency to do that) I have a great deal of respect for them. Anyone who watched their first meetings discussion in trying to navigate their way through the terrible conditions created by their appointers should have been impressed by their thoughtful deliberations,” wrote Egan. “Their appointments to the committee is probably the only good decision the Mayor and Council have made in the whole process.”
Egan concluded his letter, “If the city proceeds with the farce as it is, the new city manager appointee will take their position under a dark cloud of suspicion. The city’s credibility as already at an all-time low. If you don’t think it can lower, don’t bet on it.”