- March 28, 2024
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Maitland won’t have to look far to fill its vacant city manager seat. The person they want to hire is already sitting in it.
The Maitland City Council came to an informal agreement last week that Acting City Manager Sharon Anselmo should take up the city manager seat for good. She’s been filling the city’s top spot while also maintaining her duties as assistant city manager since the Council voted to remove former City Manager Jim Williams from the position on March 28. Williams was officially fired April 25.
“I think we should be looking for an assistant city manager. I think we already have a city manager, that’s my opinion,” said Councilwoman Joy Goff-Marcil during a May 28 discussion about the next step in the hiring process for a new city manager.
Consensus from the majority of the City Council followed, as they agreed to forgo hiring a headhunter to seek other candidates and instead have the city attorney work out an employment agreement with Anselmo.
Mayor Dale McDonald said hiring a headhunter to look for other applicants for the job would be discounting the relationship the city has built with Anselmo over her 15-year career in Maitland.
“It’s like we’ve been dating somebody for 15 years, and we finally decided we wanted to settle down,” McDonald said. “And we’re effectively telling that someone that, oh yeah, we want to go to Match.com for a few dates and see if we can find somebody any better.”
Council members Mike Thomas and John Lowndes agreed that if the Council already knew Anselmo was the right person for the job, hiring a headhunter would be a waste of time and money.
“I think it would be tremendously difficult for someone to come in here and beat Sharon Anselmo out for the job, so I’m not sure that we wouldn’t be just wasting everybody’s time to go through that,” Lowndes said.
Anselmo has served as the city’s assistant city manager since 2012. She got her first job working for the city in 1996 as a senior accountant, and has worked her way up through a variety of positions since then, including finance manager, finance director and management services director.
“She’s on the job, she does more than is asked from her, and she has the history of Maitland at her fingertips,” Lowndes said. “We talk about the city of Maitland that it has a certain history and character, and Sharon understands that. I don’t know that anyone else coming in is going to understand that.”