More later. But for now, here’s the letter of resignation.
UPDATE 9:24 p.m.: Randy Oliver held a press conference today to announce his resignation as Peoria City Manager effective February 15. No council members nor the Mayor were in attendance. When asked why he’s leaving, he responded by saying, “I have other things I want to do.” When asked “what other things,” he said “consulting.” Later in the conference he elaborated, saying that he used to do consulting work and enjoyed it, but it required him to travel a lot. Since he had young children at the time, all the traveling wasn’t so good. Now that his kids are grown, his wife can travel with him when he does consulting work.
He had a lot of very nice things to say about Peoria, about the City’s staff, and even about the Council and Mayor. He said “the power of Peoria is in the people,” and emphasized how much he likes Peoria and will miss the people and neighborhood groups here. He also gave a lot of credit to his staff for his accomplishments, repeating several times that the good things they’ve done have been a “team effort.”
When asked if he was resigning because he would have been fired anyway or because he was being bullied to leave, he said, “the Council and I have a wonderful working relationship,” and, “I never get bullied.” He did allow that you can’t please everyone, certainly not eleven people. He considers an 8-3 vote a landslide. Interestingly, though, he also said during the press conference that it’s his policy to not disagree publicly with the Council.
I asked him about recent reports that he interviewed for a job in McKinney, Texas. I said that often when you’re looking for another job, you don’t want your current employer to know, but then asked, now that he’s tendering his resignation and secrecy is no longer necessary, does he still stand by his story that he has not been seeking employment elsewhere? He’s usually pretty smooth at answering questions, but this one seemed to make him stammer a bit. He said that he’ll have to work with recruiters in the future, and thus, “I don’t want to get into what I may or may not have done and what they may or may not have done.” He said he didn’t think the issue was germane to his resignation announcement.
He’s giving 30 days notice in order to provide time to train an interim and/or permanent replacement, resulting in a “smooth, orderly transition.” He was asked what he felt his biggest accomplishments were. He listed off a few things: the “new doctors’ building on the med school campus,” “annexations that have increased our tax base,” the Southtown property sale, the “noise impounds and boots” (referring to the City’s policy of impounding cars that violate the noise ordinance and booting cars that have unpaid parking tickets), the Museum Square deal (even though it’s not built yet, he pointed to his efforts to get Caterpillar to agree to demolish the Sears block instead of the city), and the special assessment along Radnor and Wilhelm roads.
The question now is, what happens next? Some people think Planning and Growth Director Pat Landes would be a good choice for an interim or possibly permanent City Manager, while others are saying that retired Caterpillar executive Henry Holling is likely to get the nod for the interim. Mayor Ardis said, “We [the council] will meet next week to try and select an interim [City Manager]. I imagine we’ll do a national search similar to what we did when we hired Randy,” for a permanent replacement.