It was less than 24 hours after councillors, at an extraordinary meeting Tuesday evening last week, agreed to an amended motion to allow for recruitment of an interim CEO/GM to start immediately.
The same motion, revised from the motion which moved to dismiss CEO Phil Stone and appoint Mark Dalzell as acting CEO a week earlier, also confirmed that it would be up to the council elected this September to appoint someone to the role permanently.
Cr Betts said the extraordinary meeting was called after Mr Dalzell expressed to her a desire to return to his role of director infrastructure.
He reportedly expressed this when withdrawing the resignation from Edward River Council he submitted on March 15, which the Pastoral Times understands was the trigger to the March 19 motion to dismiss Mr Stone.
While some have questioned the haste in which council has gone into recruitment mode, including Cr Shirlee Burge, Deputy Mayor Marc Petersen said it was necessary to instil stabilisation before the September local government elections.
“We are in a bit of a tight spot with a tight time frame,” Cr Petersen said.
“Mark Dalzell retracted his resignation from council to step back into his director of infrastructure role.
“The cogs are not turning as they should be in that department while he is acting CEO.
“We want to advance the community and get things back in order, and we only have four months until we go in to caretaker mode and five months until the election.
“In that time we need to stabilise the workforce and we need to do it quickly, and we need to wrap up some projects before we go into caretaker in August.
“While we are focusing on these other things (internal council matters), we’re not focussing on the community.”
Cr Petersen said the proposed schedule is for the CVs of potential interim CEOs to be gathered together by the end of today, with councillors given time to review them over the weekend and come back with a shortlist by Monday.
Councillors then hope to have a final list by the end of next week, so a decision can be made at the April ordinary council meeting.
“We need to find someone who can keep council and its staff functioning, but who can also lead and support council right up until we go into caretaker mode in August,” Cr Petersen said.
“If we were to score someone who, at the end of their maximum 12 month temporary contract, who would want to stay on that would be great.”
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