Marion’s pool of town administrator candidates continues to evaporate and the heat is now on for the town to find a successor as the current town administrator prolongs his stay past his March 15 retirement date.
Interviews for the two candidates for town administrator were canceled on March 25 after one of the two finalists withdrew her request for consideration for the position.
Lisa Green, the assistant town administrator for the Town of Whitman, dropped out of the lineup on Monday, leaving the Board of Selectmen with just one candidate, Adam Wilson, the current town administrator of Aquinnah, a small town with a population of under 400 residents on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
According to about-to-retire Town Administrator Paul Dawson during a Tuesday follow-up with The Wanderer, the appointed five-member search committee will reconvene on Friday, March 29, to cull through the resumes of the other applicants vetted by the Town’s consultant, Bernard Lynch, whom the selectmen hired to assist in the search for Dawson’s replacement. Having Wilson come all the way from the island just for the selectmen to hold one interview, Dawson said, wasn’t worth the effort at this time.
“We’re going to have the search committee meet again and see if they can come up with anybody else that, perhaps, they may have overlooked,” said Dawson. “My understanding is, the consultant is bringing in others to interview and that meeting will be held under executive session.”
Around noon on Tuesday, the Board of Selectmen posted a meeting for Wednesday, April 3, for 3:00 pm in the town administrator’s office so Lynch can present the names and resumes of other potential candidates. Should one or more suitable finalist(s) be chosen, the board will reschedule a date to hold final interviews with Wilson and at least one other candidate.
Thirty-seven expressed interest in the job back in February, and the search committee pared that stack of resumes down to a shortlist of four finalists; however, Dawson reported during the March 19 Board of Selectmen meeting that two of those finalists had withdrawn their names.
Dawson announced in November that he would retire in March after 12 years, but he agreed to remain in the town administrator’s office until his replacement in chosen.
By Jean Perry