On the heels of Town Manger Kate Fitzpatrick’s retirement announcement, the Select Board has begun the process to find her replacement on a quick timeline of five months.
The first step will be to hire a consultant to help identify candidates and bring them in for review. The board is waiting for responses to their request for quotes, which it hopes to have in hand by Dec. 2. Select Board Chair Kevin Keane said a key requirement for the consulting contract is to have had 10 successful placements for similar roles in the past.
“We’re moving on this,” said Keane. “We’ll pull together a search committee. Then starts the talking and the searching.”
The Select Board is responsible for hiring the town manager, but a seven-person search committee will lay out the qualities and experience they would like candidates to have and will review all submissions before presenting finalists to the board in March. The committee will include the chair and vice chair of the Select Board, the chairs or designees of the Planning Board, School Committee, Finance Committee and the Human Resources Advisory Committee, and one Town Meeting member who will be selected from a pool of applicants.
“We just voted on the charge for this,” said Keane. “It will be posted online soon, and people can apply.”
Keane said with the help of the consultant, the committee will take its checklist of requirements and develop it into a job description that will attract highly qualified candidates.
“We want to identify what works well for the town and what makes it unique,” he said. “Not every town is well run. We want to look at what has worked well for Needham and pursue other avenues as well.”
Keane said he encourages all qualified candidates to apply. “This is a great opportunity to see the breadth and depth of the expertise that is out there. I want to see them all.”
The board plans to make a final decision April 1, 2025, then begin contract negotiations with an intended start date of July 7, 2025. Fitzpatrick’s contract was extended to fill the gap between the end of her tenure and the new town manager’s first day.
“We didn’t want this to be a campaign issue,” said Keane of the hiring deadline. “I want it done before the election.” Election Day in Needham is April 8, 2025.
He said hiring a town manager is the most important job the Select Board has, as that individual is the “muscle and tendons of how we work the town.”
“The Select Board might be the engine, and the wheels are the departments. The way we engage is to go through the town manager. And to do it any other way is chaos,” said Keane. “You have to respect the mechanism [the town] has set up.”
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