Worcester City Manager Search Has Just Begun, Mayor Backing Batista

WORCESTER, MA — The search for a new Worcester city manager has barely begun, but on Wednesday Mayor Joe Petty threw his weight behind acting City Manager Eric Batista.

Speaking on the Talk of the Commonwealth radio show, Petty said he would support not pursuing a nationwide search for a new manager and removing the "acting" part of Batista's title.

Worcester has yet to even start the nationwide search for the next city manager. At-Large Councilor Khrystian King is in charge of finding a firm to do the search, and said the city hasn't yet hired one — let alone received any resumes apart from Batista's.

King said the search needs to go ahead as planned to allow for public input. The last time Worcester hired a city manager — Ed Augustus Jr., who stepped down at the end of May and now works at Dean College in Franklin — the city council hired the internal candidate.

"The importance of a participatory process that allows for community input is important to set the standard parameters for the office," King said Wednesday morning when asked about Petty's remarks.

Other councilors agreed that Worcester should go through the search process.

"There's no reason why we would forgo a hiring process, which seems like a basic standard practice anywhere and, most importantly, why would we forgo a community process that allows for residents to have a voice," At-Large Councilor Thu Nguyen said in a social media post.

"As a sitting city councilor, I stand firm on the commitment we made and that we owe to the community to conduct *a complete* city manager search. Anything less than that, isn't respectful of the community process and it continues to set a really bad precedent," District 5 Councilor Etel Haxhiaj tweeted Wednesday morning.

The Worcester City Council is in charge of hiring, evaluating and firing the city manager, who wields a lot of power in City Hall. The role of a city manager in Worcester is more akin to traditional mayors — except in Worcester, voters don't have direct control over picking who holds the office.

Both Augustus and predecessor Mike O’Brien were picked with varying levels of public input, according to an analysis by blogger Nicola Apostola. O'Brien was hired by the council in 2004 after about four months of deliberation, and with no nationwide search, according to records compiled by City Clerk Nikolin Vangjeli.

Augustus got the job in a slightly wider search. In 2014, Augustus was an executive at Holy Cross, and agreed to take over for O'Brien on a nine-month contract, planning to return to College Hill at the end. The city did hire an external search firm at a cost of $37,000 and found three candidates: former city solicitor David Moore and officials from Taos, New Mexico, and Edgartown. Augustus later applied for the job and got it just as his nine-month contract was about to end.

Petty was among the councilors who voted to hire Augustus, and Batista was a longtime Augustus staffer before taking the helm in June as acting city manager.

The Council voted to hire Batista as acting city manager on April 5. A week later, the council approved creating an ad hoc selection committee, and hiring a search firm to find candidates. At a July Council meeting, King reported that the city had only received one application from a firm, and so the city issued a new bid. King said Wednesday his Municipal and Legislative Operations Committee will discuss hiring a firm based off the second bid likely in September.