The evaluation of candidates and finalists for the county manager position with original documents from the review committee.
On January 31, 2025, I sent the below CORA request to the Park County Custodian of Records for the specific materials I was requesting:
On March 4, 2025, I received every document I’d requested, though the Application Scoring Rubric came with redactions. However, the redactions were specific to candidates for the county manager position who were not ultimately identified as finalists. CRS Title 24 allows the redaction of non-finalist candidate data.
The first document was the Park County Application Scoring Rubric.
At the end of November and the first part of December 2024, there were fifteen applicants (applications received), and of those, eight were eliminated, and seven were identified as finalists.
Before the first interview of the finalists on December 17, 2024, Dustin Stambaugh, the highest-ranked finalist on the Application Rubric, withdrew his name for consideration. Not long after, he was hired as the City Administrator of Fairfax, Iowa.
If you want to review each candidate’s bona fides, I included them here.
The applications were reviewed by a six-member committee, three commissioners, Dave Wissel, Amy Mitchell, and Dick Elsner; the Assistant County Manager, Cindy Gharst; and two “volunteers,” Emmy Glancy West, Public Affairs Officer, and Leni Walker (See Note 1), former (circa 2000) commissioner. (Note: The first interview committee included seven members; Commissioner-elect Jason Gemmer was allowed to participate.)
Interestingly, Commissioner Wissel did not fill out application scoring sheets. No reason for this has been forthcoming.
Here’s the tabulation of the scores on the Park County Application Scoring Rubric:
I will assume the numeric figures are the average for the aggregate scoring from the six review committee members. The notation “Military” next to Meyer’s name is interesting, as it may indicate that Meyer’s score was increased by the five or ten additional points some review committee members added for Veteran’s Preference Points. The notations next to the other candidates may indicate where their particular strengths were.
I am reluctant to reveal how individual review committee members scored the six finalists’ applications. However, I will say that Leni Walker (Dave Wissel’s choice to be on the committee) gave Lucas Meyer (See Note 2) the highest points (50) assigned to him by a reviewer, though Amy Mitchell was right behind her, giving Meyer a 49. All other review committee scores for Meyer didn’t go above 34.
Other observations from the Application Scoring Rubric are notable. Commissioner Jason Gemmer appears to have misunderstood the assignment. Besides leaving scoring boxes blank on every evaluation sheet, his highest score was 15, and he gave that score to five of the six finalists. He also holds the distinction for providing the fewest points to a finalist—only 7 points for Nathan Bish.
Curiously, Amy Mitchell did not provide a scoring sheet for Brandon Heacock. Perhaps that scoring sheet was mistakenly redacted, or she didn’t offer one. I don’t know.
However, the County’s final scoring and ranking from the Application Scoring Rubric is more curious.
I duplicated the scoring process in Excel, assigned the points given to each candidate by each reviewing committee member, averaged the totals for each candidate, and ranked the candidates. However, the Excel totals were different than the county’s.
I have communicated with the Park County Custodian of the records about the discrepancy and have not received a response. That office was very responsive to my original CORA requests. I believe I will get an answer to my latest query. And I admit that I may have made an error along the way, either in the math or in assuming how they made their final calculations.
On April 1, 2025, I received the Custodian of Records’s explanation concerning the above discrepancy. The difference was due to master sheet scoring rather than individual sheet scoring and veteran preference points. Also, my calculation that Navarra scored higher than Meyer was correct.
The evaluation of the candidates’ applications and the first culling to select seven finalists are of minimal value—or are they? Indeed, a properly completed application responsive to each of the requirements of the posted job position should be valuable. I know it was when I was a division director with the City and County of Denver. Is it helpful to understand the county’s evaluation of Meyer’s application, which ranked him third among seven but fifth in my duplication of the scoring and ranking? Indeed, in my assessment, Meyer ranked below the two candidates who would end up as the two ultimate finalists besides Meyer.
I will next look at the First Interview Tallies and Sheets provided per my CORA request. While the application evaluation is helpful, the interviews are more so. The meat and potatoes of each finalist and the reviewers come through in the interviews. Perhaps between the lines, we see one finalist manipulating the process and some of the reviewers willing to buy, hook, line, and sinker that manipulation. Or, maybe the manipulation came from both sides, the intended gullible audience being the taxpayers of Park County.
Notes
Note 1: Walker is perhaps best known for unsuccessfully proposing in 2007 a $75 to $100 flat tax on all properties to augment funding for Road and Bridge. She was also a central character in the Theater of the Absurd.)
Note 2: Meyer’s application described his prior jobs with 500 to 600-word descriptions of duties. Those hyperbolic descriptions would raise a red flag for any competent manager seeking a new hire. If, for instance, the job title was budget analyst, and the applicant offered a recap of duties, maybe up to fifty words, that would be good. That would be expected. 600 words, on the other hand, would gild the lily, would be an attempt by the applicant to substitute inane volume for substance, an attempt to make of the job something it wasn’t.
Meyer’s application also contains over 1200 words related to what he calls job-related training. Imagine that. 1200 words. And it is training. It’s online training, specifically BAS Prism via the federal government and BOP training via the Bureau of Prisons. Generally, to be eligible for promotion, you must complete these little gems in a specified period. These are short subject-matter courses you log into, maybe take a test after you’ve read the material, and if you pass the test, Voila, you click a button, and you can add the item to your resume. You can go through six, seven, eight, or more subject-matter topics in one sitting.
