Jane Howington doesn’t appear to be taking her final month as Kalispell’s city manager lightly.
Howington, who is leaving at the end of December after two years to take the city manager position in Newport, R.I., presented a de facto wish list at the Nov. 28 city council work session. The list of projects she would like to give direction includes trying to prepare next year’s general fund budget; finding a suitable project for the West Side Tax Increment Finance funds; stabilizing the street maintenance fund; and deciding the future of the city airport.
“I’m not going to be sitting back relaxing,” she told the Beacon. “I’m really pushing both council and staff pretty hard for December.”
Last week Mayor Tammi Fisher appointed the selection committee that will search for the sixth city manager in Kalispell’s history. Committee members Dennis Beams, Lex Blood, Kari Gabriel, Patti Gregerson, Tom Jentz and Jayson Peters will review applications, conduct preliminary interviews and narrow the list down to five to 10 recommended applicants. Fisher has said she hopes to have the new city manager hired by May or June.
Fisher confirmed the city has found a candidate to fill in as interim manager and is negotiating compensation details before the hire will be announced.
Howington said her goal this month is to establish “a bit of a gameplan for probably the first six months of 2012.”
A number of projects are in the works and she would like to make headway in these last few weeks so “everybody knows where we are on those projects and where we’re going, and so that the city won’t fall behind at all or let things drop through the cracks” during the transition.
“We’re going in a great direction. The city is in really stable shape,” she said. “We can stay pretty healthy weathering the storm and be ready and have a lot of things in place for when the economy starts bustling again.”
Howington is already working on next year’s budget and it appears she will have three new employee salaries. On Nov. 28, the city council said it wants to keep the three firefighters who were funded by a FEMA grant. The grant expires in September. She is also looking at reorganizing the city’s way of dealing with employees’ sick leave.
The discussion about the future of the city airport will reach the forefront once again at a work session on Dec. 12 when a consultant who has been conducting a site analysis for the city will present a status report. Howington said she would follow with a report presenting the “fiscal impact of various decisions and see where the council wants to take it.” Depending on what the council decides, legislation could come at the Dec. 19 meeting, she said.
Howington said she would support using the West Side TIF funds to spur economic revival in select areas. The funds are scheduled to expire, or sunset, in March.
“It’s one of the few tools the city has to help economic development,” she said. “But I’m not the decision maker. It’s up to the council to decide if that’s something they want to do or not.”
One such project being proposed is a public parking lot where the old Gateway Cinema Movie Theater used to be located. A piece of city land near the former Gateway West Mall would be traded with property on a floodplain that cannot support a sound structure, Howington said. This would “remove the eye sore of the dilapidated building and put in parking.”
Howington hopes to establish a resolution of intent for the future street maintenance fund, which is “the one fund that we really haven’t gotten stable and sustainable.”
Howington said she would present a nonbinding resolution of intent on Dec. 5 that would raise money for repairs and equipment from businesses and residents.
She also introduced a plan on Nov. 28 to change the parking commission from being a separate body to an advisory board as a way to save money being lost when either of the commission’s two employees are not at work.
A few months ago, Howington asked police Chief Roger Nasset to conduct a survey of other communities to find out if Kalispell would be better served by a consolidated public safety department. She said Nasset would present his findings before she leaves.