Closed-door meetings surrounding the hiring of a new county manager will continue, La Plata County commissioners decided Thursday.

County officials are “ready to reopen” the search for a new county manager, Human Resources Director Kelli Ganevsky told commissioners during a “Board Discussion Time” meeting, which is publicly noticed.

They will use the same process used earlier this year, when commissioners abandoned consideration of the five finalist candidates for the job, chosen from a pool of nearly 100 applicants.

In that process, a group of county department heads narrowed the candidates to five and conducted preliminary interviews before introducing them to the public and commissioners in a two-hour meet-and-greet event at a local pub. Final interviews of the five candidates later were conducted in executive-session meetings.

A decision in January to pass over all of the candidates also was made in executive session, resulting in a pending legal claim between the county and The Durango Herald that seeks a court’s review of the audio tapes from those meetings to determine if the state’s open-meetings laws were violated and portions of the tapes should be made available for public inspection.

Still, Ganevsky on Wednesday told commissioners the selection process they were using is “pretty solid.”

Commissioner Bobby Lieb pushed to close the process further, eliminating the meet-and-greet session with the next round of finalists for the post.

Lieb said a public reception for locals to meet the candidates is “a waste of time and money.”

Fellow commissioner Kellie Hotter disagreed.

“Sometimes you see different things than you see in a staged interview,” Hotter said.

White suggested money might be saved in the process if the event was held in the commissioners’ meeting room rather than at a private venue.

Ganevsky said the last meet-and-greet event cost little, with the county footing the bill for only a few appetizers and the local attendees purchasing their own fare.

Commissioners will determine a date and venue for the meet-and-greet after the next round of applicants is narrowed to a short list of finalists, said Joanne Spina, interim county manager.

Meanwhile, new applicants will be sought through advertisements posted on various government association websites, job search websites, in The Denver Post and The Durango Herald. They hope to hire and have a new county manager on the job by the end of May, Ganevsky said.

hscofield@durangoherald.com