When the new council holds its first meeting Dec. 3, it will be
asked to either approve a new police chief or select between two
top candidates for the job, City Administrator Jay Baksa said.
New council may select next police chief at Dec. 3 meeting
Christopher Quirk – staff writer
cq****@************ch.com
GILROY
When the new council holds its first meeting Dec. 3, it will be asked to either approve a new police chief or select between two top candidates for the job, City Administrator Jay Baksa said.
The new council, including three new members, will convene in closed session to appoint a new head of the Gilroy Police Department, ending a sometimes-secretive, six-month search process. While Baksa would not give details about the candidates, he said that only four of the 51 original applicants were still being considered. None of four candidates are Gilroy officers, councilman-elect Perry Woodward said.
Baksa would not confirm that the remaining candidates were from outside the department and would not say whether the candidates were from cities in California or what their current positions were.
The candidates are a “very diverse group” with career experience ranging from “having had chief experience to having had major command experience in major cities,” he said.
The chief position was posted in June and during several months the city-hired search firm reduced the pool to eight applicants. These candidates were then interviewed Nov. 13 by about 20 people on three panels. The panels had 50 minutes with each candidate and made recommendations that helped Baksa and Assistant City Manager Anna Jatczak decide which four candidates to interview again the next day. In picking one or two top candidates during the next two weeks, Baksa and Jatczak will check references and could visit candidates at their workplace.
The panels were made up of about six people each, split among community members, city department heads and area law enforcement organization heads, including a police union representative, Baksa said.
“The more people we have involved, the more ideas and thoughts we get on” candidates, he said.
However, Baksa said he would not say who was on the panels because he did not want them to reveal who the candidates were. Revealing that the candidates were looking for a new job could subject them to retaliation from their current employers, he said.
Though the hiring process is nearing an end, council members still disagree on whether they should be considering chief recommendations so soon. During a closed session this summer, councilmen voted 4-3 to have Baksa choose a preferred candidate before he retires at the end of December.
If the city had the next city administrator recommend a police chief, the process would not have started until March or April – when the next city administrator should be on board – Mayor Al Pinheiro said. This would have meant the chief would not be hired until the summer and there could be a six- to eight-month vacuum of leadership, he said.
“We’re trying to keep things going as smoothly as possible,” he said.
Yet, some councilmen and some councilmember-elects said the process could create trouble.
“If you put a police chief in and then put in a new council and administrator, there could be a disconnect,” he said. “If it were me, you would start with the top down. It seems to me that we’re going out of step.”
The search firm could have prepared a slate of candidates for the new administrator, meaning that a decision could have been made within a few months, Woodward said.
In the end, the process worked because the applicant pool was unusually strong, said Baksa.
“They go in cycles,” he said. “We were just lucky to hit a high point on that cycle.”
Baksa said he was originally undecided about whether he or the next city administrator should choose the police chief. The high-quality candidates he interviewed changed his mind.
“I could have gone either way,” he said. “Now, having gone through this process, I’m glad we did.”
