This newspaper's Friday headline “Manager Search Plods Along” may have said it all about the lack of progress the mayor and city council are making in naming a permanent city manager. For at least two meetings they have been debating how many people (not necessarily who) should be appointed to a search committee that will narrow the field of applicants to the handful from which they'll choose.

This endless soap opera of indecision is almost reminiscent of the arguments during the Paris Peace Talks three decades ago over the shape of the negotiating table. While it may have once been joked that the current mayor and council couldn't agree on what to put on a pizza for dinner, it now seems clear that they can't even decide what to have for dinner, and in at least one or two cases, if they are even hungry.

While councilor Matthew Smith came up with information for a job ad (and apparently resumes are coming in) and councilor William Graney has a list of a handful of community leaders (and one has to ask if they are just window dressing, despite possibly being told they are not) to sit on a search committee, little more has been done publicly to move this process along.

And that in itself is a major problem. While they get bogged down in the minutia, many of the city's departments are either leaderless or have little direction.

The mayor and city council need to pick up the pace when it comes naming a permanent manager (current Interim City Manager Michael Long or not). While some may take great glee in the possibility in reducing the city's management overhead with the departure of several senior department heads, the city is losing a chunk of valuable institutional memory all at once, as well as leaders in several key departments.

In just six months Auburn will have lost their city manager, fire chief, interim fire chief, planning director and everyone in their legal counsel's office. Usually such hemorrhaging in leadership is either due to a catastrophic disaster or political massacre /witch hunt.

What may be most remarkable about this whole process, with the number of members of city council, including the mayor, who talk about the need for themselves to have more power when it comes to decisions for the city, is that they are in essence farming out their power to a subgroup of appointees on the manager's search.

One can only wonder if they just don't want to do the heavy lifting, aren't capable of doing the job they should be doing or more importantly are looking to appoint a search committee for political cover. Whatever the reason, it is time to dispense with the idea of a search committee and cut to the chase by their doing the heavy lifting of the search process they were not willing to pay a search firm to do.

Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be e-mailed at cozguytho@aol.com