City leaders ready for annual retreat

Published 10:16 am Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Austin City Council’s biggest order of business at its upcoming council retreat will likely be discussing what to do about a new city administrator.

Council members are dedicating at least an hour during one of its two 3 1/2-hour retreat sessions next month to talk about their expectations for a city administrator.

Council Member Jeff Austin proposed spending a third session just talking about the city administrator position during the council’s work session Monday.

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“We need to dedicate a significant amount of time to this,” he told council members.

A city administrator is just one of several issues the council hopes to review during its annual retreat, when it looks over last year’s accomplishments and sets goals for the current year.

The council unanimously fired Hurm in December after making public the results of Hurm’s latest job evaluation, which was completed in September and shared with the council in November. Though the council and Stiehm found Hurm did an acceptable job in following council wishes, communicating with the public and fiscally managing the city, department heads found Hurm’s job performance “unacceptable with respect to the staff supervision and department heads,” according to the evaluation.

Department heads said Hurm did “not properly manage the goals and expectations of city departments, would not accept and share responsibility for decisions made, and, further, stated that he did not effectively communicate pertinent information to their departments.”

In the evaluation, Hurm indicated he was surprised by how critical department heads were and said he would have liked to communicate with them to rectify the issues. Mayor Tom Stiehm said the council was likely to take its time in dealing with the issue.

Another issue the council will discuss includes ways to be involved in Vision 2020. Council Member Roger Boughton brought the topic before council members with a suggestion to potentially approach the state Legislature and ask for a Local Option Sales Tax for Vision 2020, similar to the sales tax Austin collects for flood mitigation efforts.

The council retreat will take place at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 11, at the Mower County Senior Center and 5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Ruby Rupner Auditorium at the Jay C. Hormel Nature Center. Council members likely won’t discuss 2014 goals until after the retreat.