Reese Cook Named as New Sweeny City Manager

The Sweeny City Council appointed Reese Cook as its new city manager Tuesday.

Cook is a life-long resident of Sweeny and the surrounding area and is currently an engineer at Phillips 66, several city council members have said.

“This young man comes to us with a lot of good ideas,” Council member Sandra Blaine said. “He is (currently) responsible for a large job at Phillips 66, and I am sure he will be great for the the city.”

The council informed Cook of his probable selection via telephone during a closed executive session in its Tuesday meeting, Blaine said. And Mayor Jeff Farley said after the meeting he expected Cook to give Phillips 66 two weeks notice of his resignation on Wednesday. Cook’s official start date at City Hall remains unclear.

The public vote to name Cook as the new city manager came immediately after the closed session and was 5-1, with councilman Neal Bess as the lone dissenter.

“This guy should not have even made the first cut,” Neal told the Herald after the meeting. “He has no city experience and has got to be trained while he’s on the job.”

Blaine said she and the other four council members acknowledge Cook’s lack of experience, but are confident he was the best choice of the 37 applicants.

“He will, certainly, have to learn some things, but I am sure will have no problem with that…” she said. “He’s a degreed engineer, and he has done very well on his job at Phillips. He knows our area well, and has many good ideas for the city. Plus he’s just got a great personality for this job.”

Beside, Blaine said, only one of the other candidates cited experience as a city manager, and his salary requirement was beyond the city’s budget.

“We wanted to interview him, but salary was a big issue. Our city just cannot afford to pay what others are asking,” she said. “Also, he was from out of state and would have had to relocate.”

(Out of respect for applicants who may not have informed their current employers of their pursuit of this position, the Herald does not intend to request names of candidates besides Cook.)

Neal said he asked the other council members to hold off on hiring Cook to give applicants with city manager experience more time to come forward.

“Our former city manager (Cindy King, who resigned the post August 1) left us with a list of 57 job duties that the city manager has to handle. That’s a lot of jobs, and they aren’t easy for someone with no experience,” Neal said.

Blaine said she and the other city council members felt it was important to hire someone right away because a few of the other applicants had dropped their names from the running in recent weeks.

“I just don’t think we could have waited any longer. If we had, we might have had no one left to interview,” she said.

The Herald looks forward to getting to know Cook in the coming days, and we intend to include an interview and profile of him in our Inaugural e-Edition coming Dec. 6. We pray The Lord will bring those plans to fruition.