County eyeing assistant manager resumes
By Steve Herring
Published in News on September 5, 2014 1:46 PM
Nearly 35 people have submitted applications to become Wayne County's first assistant county manager.
County Manager George Wood said that once the submission period closes next week he will read through and rank the applicants.
He said he expects to hire someone by the end of the month.
Wood said he would whittle the number down to five or six to interview.
"It is still open and I am getting resumes every day," Wood said. "We have had a good response. I thought we would have good interest. This is a good-sized county. You have a lot of counties in North Carolina that are far smaller than Wayne County. You can have somebody in a smaller county who wants to come to a county like this for some period of time to be the assistant manager."
Wood said that ideally he would like to hire someone who would bring a lot of experience to the job.
"That is not to say I would rule out someone who is extremely strong in management skills, but needs to learn some of the other areas of county (operations)," he said.
Wayne County commissioners early last month cleared the way for the job when they reclassified the Office of Emergency Services director's position.
The OES director's office has been vacant since late May, following the retirement of Joe Gurley, who has since been appointed to the commission.
Wood told commissioners at that time the opening had provided an opportunity to merge the office with that of an assistant county manager.
Gurley had been making about $90,000 a year and Wood suggested a salary range of $81,165 to $126,590 for the assistant county manager. However, it could be more, depending on the person's experience, he said.
While OES director, Gurley also oversaw other areas including the county airport and animal control.
"Essentially, I am just expanding on that to add maybe four or five more," Wood said. "It will probably be clusters, like all of the public safely stuff with the exception of dealing with the sheriff. To me, the relationship between the sheriff and the county manager is critical. I don't think you can delegate that to an assistant manager. That is my philosophy on it. But if you take public safety, basically OES was over all of that."
"Now when something big happens, obviously I will be involved," he said. "If we were to have a tornado or something like that I am going to be involved. I am not that hands-off."
Wood said he also would stay closely involved with the Board of Education and any business involving financial matters.
"To me the manager needs to be involved in that."