Wayne Cauthen, the former city manager of Kansas City, Missouri, has resurfaced. He's a finalist for the same job in Savannah, Georgia.
Savannah's search for a city manager has hit a rough patch, however. A member of the City Council there says the search firm that produced Cauthen and other candidates did a "miserable job." Among other things, the search firm apparently failed to mention that Cauthen left our City Hall with a security escort.
Cauthen's supervised departure took place on November 19, 2009, when Mayor Mark Funkhouser, who had called for Cauthen's exit two years earlier, finally lined up the votes to make it happen. Cauthen later negotiated a buyout of his contract, which ran until October 2011.
Ousted in KC, Cauthen is feeling employable again. But some Savannah officials are grousing that the local newspaper did a better job vetting Cauthen than Affion Public, the search firm, did. The Savannah Morning News reported on Sunday that Cauthen lost his job in Kansas City "largely because of ongoing budget problems and the council's lack of confidence in his fiscal oversight."
The newspaper also cited a 2007 story in The Pitch, which examined Cauthen's travel expenses. On a couple of occasions, the city appeared to pay for expenses that Cauthen incurred while traveling for pleasure.
The warts on Cauthen and other finalists -- one wrote a book about the music of the Ku Klux Klan -- have some Savannah leaders thinking that they need to find a new batch of contestants. "In my personal opinion, these are not the best candidates in the nation that could be city manager of Savannah, Georgia," Alderman Tony Thomas told the Morning News.
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