Herald Reporting Error Brings Forth New Information on Sweeny City Manager Hire

In a, now corrected, post shortly after last night’s Sweeny City Council meeting, we said that the council’s vote to hire a new city manager was unanimous. It was not.

Councilman Neal Bess called The Herald this morning to say that he cast the lone dissenting vote.

Our reporting error occurred because, during the council’s closed session to discuss the hire, several people representing the Herald stepped outside City Hall to visit with city staff and other meeting attendees and did not immediately notice the council chamber doors re-open. By the time we returned to the room, the, very quick, public vote on the hire had already taken place. The meeting adjourned shortly after we returned, and we asked several city staff and council members to bring us up to date on the city manager vote. We were told that a new city manager had been hired. We did not, unfortunately, think to ask if the vote had been unanimous and, given the jovial, cordial spirit of the council members as they left the council chambers, simply assumed the vote had been unanimous.

That was, very much, a rookie reporting mistake, and we apologize.

Alas, in our phone call with Neal this morning, he explained his reasons for voting against the new hire, and we intend to share those in another post tonight.

And that leads us to yet another “error” we made, the reason we are not sharing Bess’s objections now.

We use quotation marks above because, while many journalists would call what we did an error, we do not necessarily agree.

But, what we did does, journalistically speaking, require explanation here:

We agreed to Mayor Jeff Farley’s request to keep the new city manager’s identity under wraps until at least Wednesday night, giving the man a chance to respectfully submit two weeks notice of his resignation to his current employer.

Given that the man’s name had already been discussed, and voted upon, publicly, the mayor’s request was an awkward one for us. But, with no other reporters being present during the vote, the Lord moved us to agree to the embargo (that’s the news business’s term for temporarily withholding information from a story at the request of a source).

We agree that it is good and right that the new city manager be afforded opportunity to separate from his current employer in a cordial, respectful and peaceful manner.

But, that said, we do caution the Sweeny City Council, and all other public officials, to always be mindful that things they say and do in open session are, immediately, a part of the public record and subject to immediate public discussion in ways that they may not intend or desire. We pray this will be a learning experience for Farley and others on the city council and, that in the future, they will approach their hiring announcements differently.

We respectfully submit that, perhaps, it could have been the city council itself, and not the Herald, that declined to “go public” with announcement of the hire before the new city manager had informed his previous employer. There are certainly ways to do this that are practiced routinely by other city councils. (Some city’s even have these practices as written policy.)

It certainly would have been proper, legal and reasonable for the council to discover, in private session, that there was sufficient support for the hiring decision, privately let the candidate know he could safely resign his current position, and then meet again — even in a special called session, if need be — in a few days to publicly record the vote.

And, we feel called to add this observation: that the council didn’t take that approach, combined with Bess’s lone objection to the hire, will likely be interpreted by some of the council’s constituents, as a sign of, potentially unhealthy, discord among the council. We can just hear the comments at the tables of Bulldog Cafe and the aisles of Stewarts Grocery now: “They really should have talked about this more, until they were all fully in agreement on the choice. What was the rush?” (Bess did point out in our conversation this morning that the city received 37 applicants for the job.)

Alas, given our agreement to not disclose the identify of the new city manager until tonight, we will also wait until that post to share Bess’s stated reasons for his vote against the hire. (And, in the meantime, we will attempt to reach the mayor and/or other city council members to find their reactions to Bess’s reasons, and include any responses in our post tonight.)