Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home City Council voted to hire Raymond Towry as city manager Monday evening.
The offer is contingent upon completion of a background check and approval of a contract by the council and Towry, who is public relations and recreation director for the City of Ephrata, Wash.
The council Monday interviewed the candidate for the position a third time. Following a second round of publicly held interviews on Sept. 19, the council decided not to hire one of two finalists; but decided not extend an offer to Towry at the time.
Council members entered an executive session, which is closed to the public, on Sept. 21 to discuss the candidate. In open session, the council invited Towry to return for a third interview.
The council held the third interview Monday, Oct. 3, in an executive session. Returning to open session, the council voted 6-1 to offer the job to Towry.
Voting yes were Diane Gerson, Greg Mahler, Mayor Jim Gourley, Dave Trask, Jeff Goodwin and James Goble. Ryan Underwood voted no.
“I still remain of the opinion that Ray Towry would be an excellent city manager,” Goodwin said. “I like his experience. I like his education, and I just feel like he’d do a great job for the city.”
Underwood cited Towry’s “degree of inexperience” as his biggest concern, “with the new City Hall project that we’ve undertaken, as well as a few others that will inevitably be coming up here in the next little while, with elections coming up.”
“Again, just a big concern is that level of experience that is very important this season.”
Gourley agreed that Towry is lacking experience as a city manager.
But, he added, “I think we have a plan that could mitigate that, I hope, so we could go forward with a mentoring program. It’s always a question for experience level.”
“We’re going to support our new city manager,” Gourley said. He asked the councilors to confirm that, one at a time. Each councilor said, yes.
“So we have seven in support of doing everything we can to help our city manager go forward at this time,” Gourley said.
“I think we’ve tarried with this long enough. I hope we can get him on board right away and start working on some of the issues we have, like our new City Hall and economic development and some of the things that we need to take care of within our city.”
Towry said he’s excited.
“I just think that there’s just a lot of opportunities for Sweet Home to move forward. I think the council wants to do that, and I think it’ll be exciting to be a part of that.”