DANA POINT : $10,000 Voted for City Manager Search

The City Council this week appropriated $10,000 and set a 120-day deadline to recruit a replacement for City Manager William O. Talley.

Half of the money will be used to hire a recruitment firm to help find a replacement, with the rest spent on advertising, brochures and other expenses, Mayor Mike Eggers said. The council hopes to announce its selection by May 12.

“This is not a full-blown recruitment process,” Eggers said. “Those normally cost $25,000 and up. We have limited the cost of professional help to $5,000. The City Council will be proactive in the process, and we hope to do much of the interviewing ourselves.”

In 1988, Talley was hired as city manager on a private contractor basis because he had already retired from Anaheim city government and was collecting a $7,558 monthly pension from the state’s Public Employees Retirement System (PERS).

Talley, the only city manager the 3-year-old city has had, will have to give up the job because Dana Point failed to win him an exemption from state laws barring him from collecting both his state pension and his $99,500-a-year city manager’s salary.

Based on the recent experience of San Clemente--where 235 people applied for its assistant city manager job--Eggers predicts the Dana Point job will lure hundreds of applicants.