Difficulty seen as opportunity for NLV finalists

As the Albert Einstein saying goes, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

It’s a credo the next North Las Vegas city manager must embrace.

The cash-strapped city — mired by past crises, horrific headlines and likely other skeletons its relatively new leaders have yet to unpack — is hiring.

North Las Vegas has chosen two finalists for the position.

John Patterson, city manager of Casper, Wyo., has applied. He has been in that role since 2011, having previously served as chief administrative officer in Ogden, Utah.

The other finalist is the woman who has been serving as acting city manager since June, Qiong Liu.

Seven people applied, and three city employees — the mayor’s chief of staff, the city attorney and the city finance director — narrowed down the applicant pool.

Former Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, who is now the director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, and Rob Lang, UNLV director of Brookings Mountain West, also read applications and offered their thoughts.

Chris Stream, director of UNLV’s School of Environmental and Public Affairs and an associate professor in public administration and policy, said cities conduct searches in a variety of ways but typically outside reviewers of applicants are individuals who live in the city.

Netting Reilly and Lang’s expertise for free is smart, he said. It’s a way of bringing the prestige and experience of a consulting firm — which some cities hire for big searches — without the price tag.

On top of that, the city manager position has an in-depth, sharp hiring packet. Stream, who said he has looked at hundreds of job postings for city mangers, said the hiring packet was one of the best he had seen.

The packet doesn’t shy away from the job’s difficulties. It highlights them. One of the first sections describing the position is headlined “Opportunities and Challenges.”

The applicant is told he or she will be expected to make decisions in a “highly visible and at times controversial and political environment.”

Doing this type of national search with well-thought-out assessments is an effort to raise the profile of the gig, Stream said.

“Typically the road to the city manager is you don’t start in a big city or a stable city,” Stream said.

“Clearly North Las Vegas is at the bottom of the desirable jobs. They are financially unstable, they’re economically unstable. They’ve had turmoil. They’ve had conflict in the City Council, and whenever you have community instability and council instability that’s the first two criteria for getting fired as a city manager. It’s hard to keep your job in communities that are really unstable, tumultuous.”

That doesn’t mean the city can’t leverage its red flags as assets.

“You would want someone that clearly saw opportunity in dismay, in obstacle,” Stream said. “You can see crisis as opportunity — that’s an interesting person.”

Reilly agreed.

“For a good manager it provides a unique opportunity to make some important inroads in making North Las Vegas a success story,” Reilly said.

For that reason, Reilly was surprised that only seven people applied. He expected the job to garner more attention as it would be appealing to seasoned city managers looking to finally take risks or for bright, young administrators hungry to make their name.

The search committee picked three finalists — but one person took his name out to avoid having it get out that he had applied. The two remaining applicants now will do public interviews with the City Council.

The city manager serves at the pleasure of the council.

In many big cities, power lies with the mayor in a structure that’s known as mayor-council, where the mayor can override council decisions.

But North Las Vegas has a council-manager style of governance, meaning the city manager has a lot of power in an executive role.

The structure is often compared to how a CEO answers to a board of directors.

The city’s internal candidate notes that she has strong ties to the community and has served North Las Vegas “through both good times and bad times.”

Liu’s background is as an engineer, coming to the Las Vegas Valley in 1999 to work as Las Vegas’ transportation planning manager after work in the private sector with engineering firms.

She came to North Las Vegas in 2005 to work as the city’s deputy public works director.

In 2013, she became the deputy city manager, and in June she started serving as interim city manager. She has eight years of private-sector experience and 22 years in public service.

Reilly said he had worked briefly with Liu while acting as a consultant for the city, and she wasn’t shy about pointing out issues or speaking up.

“You don’t want a ‘yes’ person. That’s the worst thing you can get. You want someone who is going to challenge you,” Reilly said. “It doesn’t mean you’re always going to follow that — but God you really need that. Those checks and balances are so important.”

Patterson is no stranger to public controversy.

In February, a councilman sued him alleging he had held secret meetings in an attempt to derail the embattled councilman’s election campaign, according to the Casper Star-Tribune. Patterson denied the claim.

And in June, a different councilman wrote a letter to the newspaper asking for Patterson’s resignation.

At that time, another councilman defended Patterson, saying that councilman wrote a letter to the newspaper because the council supports Patterson and doesn’t want him ousted. The headlines surrounding the Casper city manager were the result of vendettas, he said.

“It’s a highly political job being city manager,” Stream said. “City managers can get themselves in a lot of trouble.”

Contact Bethany Barnes at bbarnes@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861. Follow @betsbarnes on Twitter.