City manager’s pending departure sets up complex scenario for Roanoke City Council

A city manager steps down and the mayor replaces him. It’s a rare situation, but not unheard of in Virginia. 

The most recent example happened in Roanoke this week, when the city council unanimously accepted Bob Cowell’s resignation, effective June 7, then approved a resolution that makes Mayor Sherman Lea the acting manager, starting the next day.

Lea, whose term as Roanoke’s mayor ends in January, will receive no pay for taking on the city manager role, city officials say. The city has already engaged a search firm to find both an interim and a full-time executive to take over the top administrative job.

Changing city managers is not unusual. In a profession that, according to various studies, lasts less than a decade per location, and where the city councils are in electoral flux, it’s almost a given. Seeing a mayor move into the position is different, though, particularly with multiple assistant city managers who could potentially serve in the short term — and it can create complications, particularly with multiple council seats in Roanoke up for grabs this fall, said Karen Hult, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Public Administration and Policy. 

“What is somewhat unusual in an instance like this is that Mayor Lea is going to take over for at least an interim period,” said Hult, whose center studies and teaches government and public service. “It also makes good sense to me that they’re looking for not only a permanent replacement but also an interim city manager, because it’s a difficult job, especially with elections coming and all the coming open seats on the council.”

Given recent personnel issues exposed at city hall, a potential hire should have lots of questions for the council, Hult said.

“They certainly want to find out a lot more about what was going on and what led to the unanimous, without-discussion decision of the council to accept the resignation,” she said. “But as I understand it … there was quite a series of private work sessions, and it seems as though those might have had something to do with the range of personnel challenges that were in that office itself.

“And so I would certainly want to know more if I were a candidate for even an interim, but certainly for the permanent replacement.”

Roanokers will vote for a mayor and at least three city council seats on Nov. 5, and the mayor’s race will potentially leave another two seats vacant. Either a lame-duck council will select the next manager before then, or a new and largely inexperienced one will do it later. Both possibilities would raise difficulties, but top candidates would be most wary about being selected by one group, then serving at the pleasure of an almost completely different one, said Joe Turner, a former city executive who recently founded the interest group American Association of Municipal Executives.

“I can tell you right now, just generally speaking from a city manager perspective, that unless they’re going to capture lightning in a bottle, somebody who grew up in Roanoke or somebody who’s just got some sort of really intense, personal reason to be there … you’re not going to get a lot of good candidates … who are going to accept that position until there’s clarity as far as what’s going to happen with that governing body,” said the Wichita, Kansas-based Turner, who hosts the City Manager Unfiltered podcast.

“No city manager wants to take a job where they have a majority of the governing body that just hired them bouncing out of there and being replaced by somebody who was not involved in the process and who they don’t even know is going to support them.”

Up for debate

It’s been less than a year since the last time a mayor replaced a municipal executive in Virginia. In the small Wise County town of Pound, Mayor Brittany Carter took on the manager role part time on Jan. 25. The town council agreed to pay Carter $20,000 with no benefits until it can find a new manager, according to The Coalfield Progress.

But such an arrangement is rare. According to the Virginia Municipal League, the only other recent situation that came close was in Manassas. In September 2023, Douglas Keen was both police chief and assistant city manager, then became interim city manager two months later. The city selected an interim police chief while Keen is running the city.

In Roanoke, Cowell’s departure and Lea’s new second job have already become political issues. Mayoral candidate — and former mayor — David Bowers held a news conference outside city hall on Tuesday, where he said he thinks that Lea should not assume the executive job and that council should leave picking the new manager to the next city council. 

“The mayor is a friend of mine,” Bowers said, reading from a prepared statement. “He governs with a full heart [and] gives everything he’s got. But I had to let him know, and I want the public to know that in my opinion, the mayor cannot and should not serve as interim city manager.”

Lea did not respond to a request for a comment. But Vice Mayor Joe Cobb, who’s also seeking the mayor’s seat, said Thursday that the council needed to make a decision that didn’t leave the city in limbo while it engages in its search.

“I wonder if David would feel the same way if he were the mayor,” Cobb said. “David’s not on city council, so he’s not tasked with making this decision. We are, and … our hope is to have an interim city manager as quickly as possible. …

“The mayor, according to our city charter, has the authority to sign contracts and agreements on behalf of the city. Not saying that the assistant city managers don’t also have that authority, but it was also to try and sustain communication with the assistant city managers and with leadership staff to just make sure that we’re moving forward as smoothly as possible during this kind of unsettling process.”

The third mayoral candidate, Stephanie Moon Reynolds, an independent, sided with Cobb, a Democrat, in disagreeing with Bowers, who is running as a Republican after past years as a Democrat and an independent.

Whether Lea should be city manager for now “is a matter of opinion,” Moon Reynolds said.

“This seated current council unanimously voted to have the mayor step in as the interim and when I say interim, from where I sit, it is a temporary position until we are able to secure or appoint an acting city manager while we go through the process of hiring a new city manager.”

The body has enough experience and expertise to make the right choice, she said, and she doesn’t believe that potential council turnover will affect the quality of applicants.

“I think in a way for me, it may be a good thing, because then the city manager who’s coming in also still has, if you think about it, three of those who hired him are still in place,” she said.

Mayor over assistants

The city has three assistant city managers, including an acting executive who earlier this year was appointed by Cowell, and approved by the council, to replace the demoted Brent Robertson.

Angela O’Brien and former Roanoke Police Chief Sam Roman are the full-time assistant managers. Chris Chittum is the acting assistant, as of April. All have more than two decades of city employment but none are long-timers in their latest positions. O’Brien began in March 2023, and Roman joined her in July.

A message left for Roman on Thursday afternoon through a city spokeswoman was not returned. O’Brien would not be available to speak for about a week, the spokeswoman said. Messages left for Chittum on social networks were not returned.

Cobb, asked if the council felt that Lea as acting manager was a better option than turning to one of the assistants, said: “I don’t know that it was an either-or. I think we were just trying to think of a short-term option. We’ve got three ACMs. I think they each have different portfolios and they’re all relatively new to that position. … So I think that’s why initially we went with that option, I guess.”

The city manager job in Roanoke has been relatively stable since the late 1970s. Bern Ewert held the job from 1978 to 1985, and Bob Herbert’s tenure, which began in 1985, lasted 15 years. Jim Ritchie, who had been Herbert’s assistant, was interim city manager until Roanoke brought on Darlene Burcham, who followed with an 11-year run that ended in 2010.

Chris Morrill served from 2010 to 2017. When Morrill left, assistant city managers Brian Townsend and Sherman Stovall split his tasks in the interim.

Cowell, like his predecessor, will have held the job for seven years when he leaves next month.

Hult, the Virginia Tech professor, said her understanding is that the average city manager tenure is seven years.

David Trinkle, a Roanoke City Council member from 2006-2017, worked with Burcham and Morrill and chaired the council’s personnel committee when it hired Cowell.

“You would think there’s somebody there that could at least be an interim for a while,” Trinkle said this week. “The only other thought, potentially having gone through these hiring processes before, is maybe council ultimately wants to get an outside interim that can potentially become the city manager. 

“It’s pretty apparent they want somebody outside based on what they did.”

Hult said it was difficult to tell, given the information the city has released, why council members might have looked over the assistant executives. O’Brien was among Hult’s students as she recently completed her Master of Public Administration, but did not disclose to her any information about city hall dynamics, Hult said.

That said, Hult has followed the news and was aware that Robertson had been demoted. Robertson, a former Franklin County administrator and Roanoke County management and budget director, joined the city staff in 2019. He had been Roanoke’s assistant city manager for community development since 2020 and was finance director at the time Cowell demoted him after a subordinate alleged that he had verbally attacked and physically threatened her. 

“From the far outside without knowing anything about the details of what they were doing, [Robertson] would seem to be the most appropriate person to move into the interim position,” Hult said. 

“However, there clearly is something going on within the broader city manager’s office, and … the so-called toxic work environment that would suggest that there’s some concern about promoting anybody from within that office to move in, even as interim. And so that is my best guess of what’s going on, but that’s clearly not definitive.”

That incident followed the January resignation of the city’s parks and recreation director, Michael Clark, who wrote in a letter to Cowell and O’Brien that his department’s culture was one that was “free of passive aggression and intentional slight,” which he called a “stark contrast to the rest of the organization,” the Roanoke Rambler reported.

Good candidate, strong tenure

Trinkle and former council member Michelle Davis remembered Cowell as an impressive candidate following Morrill’s successful tenure, which ended when he left to run the Government Finance Officers Association. 

“He came across as somebody that could clearly expertly run the city without a lot of fluff, without a lot of drama and just get things done,” Trinkle said. Since then, “I think he’s done exactly what we thought he would.”

Davis joined the council in time to help select Cowell.

“I felt like Bob Cowell did a great job of keeping council informed and updated and ahead of decisions and new cycles and things that were getting ready to come out that we needed to be aware of,” said Davis, who spent one full term in office. “I felt like he was protective of council in that way. He never wanted us to get caught off guard.”

Both former council members said that Cowell provided strong leadership during the COVID-19 era. Cobb, who was on council during the pandemic, credited him with such ideas as a citizen council to decide ways to spend federal relief funds. He said he found himself grieving his departure.

“I found him to be really thoughtful in how we approached the pandemic, how we were taking care of our employees as well as the citizens, making sure that our service delivery continued to be the best that it could be,” Cobb said. “The National League of Cities and other government entities have commended Roanoke for modeling that kind of community engagement in that work. And that was the fruit of Bob’s ideas.”

Who’s next?

Cardinal News asked all three mayoral candidates what qualities they’re looking for in the next city manager.

“I am looking for a manager who is outgoing,” Moon Reynolds said. “I want the manager to be able to interact with the community. I want a city manager who pretty much could say he has an open door policy where he’s … out front. ”

She said that Cowell lacked those qualities, which could have drawn the community around him.

“But later on, and I have to interject that, later on he was trying to do a better job of that and go to some of the community meetings,” she said. “He would try to come out more but not as much in the workforce. I was so hoping he would go over to like public works, talk with the sanitation workers. That sort of thing is what I wanted Bob to do.”

Cobb said he wants a city manager who will continue to focus on compensating city employees, as Cowell did when he worked to increase the minimum wage to $15 and make public safety pay more competitive in the region.

“That’s a really important thing,” he said.

Cobb sees Roanoke in a good place economically, with a low unemployment rate and growth in health care, manufacturing and industry. A good city manager will sustain the momentum around the likes of the Riverdale development in Southeast, the Amazon distribution center, the multi-municipal collaborative Wood Haven Technology Center and the public-private biotechnology incubator labs under development, while developing pathways to small business success, he said.

Bowers, who was mayor between 1992 and 2000, then again for two terms between 2008 and 2016, prefers a city manager with “Virginia experience and executive experience.”

He added: “You’ve got to have a blend of being a visionary and being an administrator. I think we’ve had city managers who have done those things. You’ve got to be able to look at the big picture, and you’ve got to be able to take care of the details. That’s what a city manager is called upon to do, in my opinion.”