They’re one step closer to finding the next Mower County administrator.

Within the next several weeks, Mower County will be meeting with finalists to assume the role of county administrator and replace retired Mower County Coordinator Craig Oscarson.

The Mower County Board made a motion to hold interviews on Monday, Nov. 19 with five finalists, their identities so far remained confidential because of protections under Minnesota law, according to Gary Weiers, a management consultant from David Drown Associates Company who handled the hiring process.

A question was raised on whether the identities of the five finalists could be released once the interviews were scheduled, to which Weiers said that any discussions of the new county administrator finalists needed to be done in a public meeting setting.

“Once you’ve named a finalist, that is public information,” Weiers said. “Their acceptance is not required.”

However, the county expects to release the names of the five finalists sometime today and thus would make the names public information, according Denise Barthels, county administrative assistant.

Weiers stated that there were 24 applicants who applied for the job, and from that, 11 candidates were semi-finalists. There were 12 originally, however, one candidate withdrew themselves from consideration. From those 11, the commissioners ranked their top choices based on an identifying number given to a candidate. Based on their choices, the commissioners made the following rankings:

Candidate no. 7 was chosen four times

Candidate no. 2 was chosen twice

Candidate no. 5 was chosen twice

Candidate no. 11 was chosen twice

Four candidates (1,3,8,9) were only chosen once

After initially ranking the candidates, it was advised to have one more finalist added to the list in case one candidate decided to drop out. The commissioners again decided to narrow down their list by rankings again and this time added candidate No. 8.

By the end of the meeting, commissioners Jerry Reinartz, Tony Bennett, Polly Glynn, Mike Ankeny and Tim Gabrielson all decided that the following candidates would be invited down to Austin for interviews:

Candidates 1, 2, 5, 7, 8 and 11.

The Austin Daily Herald will update readers with another story once more information on the candidates are made available.