BREAKING: Casper City Council Taps Gillette Administrator For New City Manager
The Casper City Council intends to hire Gillette's city administrator for the vacant city manager job, Mayor Kenyne Humphrey said Tuesday.
"We have offered the position to Carter Napier out of Gillette, and I'm really looking forward to hopefully getting a chance to work with him, Humphrey said after a work session.
"We would look forward to him joining us sometime in July," she said.
The decision will need formal approval at a regular city council meeting.
Napier will fill the vacancy left when former City Manager V.H. McDonald resigned April 6. Assistant City Manager Liz Becher has been serving in that position.
Napier is from Casper and is a former assistant city manager.
"I think what Carter brings to the City of Casper, one, is already the experience of already working here and having relationships that he's built in the past," Humphrey said.
"A lot of the staff will be familiar with him," she said. "A lot of the business community is familiar with him. And in fact I received a lot of feedback from calls from individuals that, you know, were hoping that we were seeking him out."
The council chose Napier by looking at the results of the nationwide executive search in 2015 that named McDonald as a finalist to replace former City Manager John Patterson, Humphrey said.
"What we did was basically looked at the runner-up (Napier)," she said. "It made it very easy. One of the benefits was the cost savings by not having to do another search firm, and a unanimous council."
Napier's salary will be $195,000, she said.
"He has a lot of experience. We offered him a wage that was comparable to previous managers, and it was an incentive for him to come back to his home town, so we're pretty honored to have him looking at us."
Napier will arrive in Casper about three months after city government was roiled with criticisms from women who said the police department was slow to investigate alleged sexual assaults; the disclosure of a Fraternal Order of Police survey of its members who voiced deep concerns about then Police Chief Jim Wetzel; the resignation of Councilmember Todd Murphy; the sudden retirement of McDonald; and Wetzel's resignation.
Napier has about 20 years of experience to guide him, according to his resume submitted to the City of Casper in 2015.
He earned a bachelor of arts in history with a minor in business administration from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1995. He earned a master's degree in public administration from the Romney Institute of Public Management at BYU in 1998.
After an internship with the city of Longview, Washington, he returned to Casper in 1998 to work as an assistant to City Manager Tom Forslund until 2003. The City of Riverton hired him that year to be its city administrator until 2011 when he took a similar position in Gillette.