City of Flin Flon chief administrative officer Glenna Daschuk will be stepping down from her position in a year - and city council is already hard at work looking for a replacement.
At the July 7 city council meeting, council approved entering an agreement with Davies Consulting Group (DCG), an Edmonton-based firm, to help find a replacement for Daschuk after she steps down. DCG has requested a flat fee of $29,000 to find a suitable candidate.
“She has let us know, as she promised to do - she gave us 12 months notice. Certainly this time next year, maybe a couple months earlier, she’ll be stepping down from the CAO role,” said Mayor Cal Huntley.
“That is, if we find somebody - if we haven’t, then we’ll have to have a conversation.”
DCG has worked with several communities in Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories to find new administrators.
“We feel confident that we can conduct and complete this assignment successfully on behalf of the City of Flin Flon and are excited at the prospect of working with council,” reads a letter to council from DCG.
Daschuk, who has also served as the City’s treasurer, became the City’s chief administrative officer in 2017 when former CAO Mark Kolt retired from the position.
Other key city jobs, including the director of public works and City treasure posts, remain open. Huntley said if the search for a CAO goes well, council will then recruit to fill those positions.
“We haven’t been actively pursuing a treasurer at this point in time - we wanted to see who we would get for the CAO first. We have been actively recruiting for the director of works and operations. We had a couple of possibilities that have fallen through,” Huntley said.
“We’re going to fill the key positions first. The director of works and operations, given we don’t have a huge amount of capital projects going on and our guys are doing a really good job of managing through that. We’re going to see how this process works.”
Huntley also didn’t rule out using outside consultants to find a qualified candidate.
“Our original time in hiring a director of works and operations, we struggled to get candidates who were qualified. If this recruiting works and we get the right person, it’s worth paying the dollars for,” he said.
