Durango City Council has approved interview teams to evaluate applicants for 32 positions across 14 boards and commissions.
Each team consists of two city councilors and interviews with applicants will be held next week, said Mayor Melissa Youssef.
Each team will be joined by the chair of the board or commission for which applicants are being interviewed, according to the City Council agenda packet.
The window to apply for vacant positions on boards and commissions closed April 30, according to a city news release. Board members whose terms expire on May 31 were required to reapply for open positions if they wished to continue serving.
Aside from the newly formed Financial Advisory Board, which will have seven members, the Firefighters Old Pension Fund (a board set to expire once it’s no longer needed) has the most vacancies, four, to be filled, data shared by Youssef shows.
The boards with the next highest number of positions to be filled are the Historic Preservation Board and the Design Review Board, each seeking three members.
Youssef said City Council aims to complete all interviews by the end of next week in order to appoint selected applicants at the next regular meeting on May 16.
City Council traditionally conducted all board and commission interviews as a body, but that took days of interviews and often went over schedule as some chosen applicants dropped out for various reasons, she said.
“It used to take us two to three full days to interview all the candidates that we would be interviewing and this will be a much, hopefully, more efficient process,” Youssef said.
She said by splitting into smaller teams, councilors don’t have to convene in a public meeting as a single body to conduct every interview one-by-one.
The revamped interview process is just one aspect of a major shake-up of how boards and commissions are organized.
City Council voted in April to approve a timeline for dissolving some boards and combining others in a reorganization meant to make the boards more efficient.
The boards and commissions reorganization will potentially reduce the total number of boards down to 15, but so far, 19 of 23 boards remain, Youssef said. The reorganization will save council and staff time attending meetings, and eliminate competition for capital project priorities and redundancies between boards, according to staff reports.
The interview teams will look like this:
- Councilors Jessika Buell and Gilda Yazzie will interview applicants to fill two positions on the Board of Ethics.
- Youssef and Councilor Dave Woodruff will interview applicants to the Business Improvement District and Library Advisory Board to fill one position on each board.
- Buell and Woodruff will interview applicants to fill one position on the Creative Economy Commission and to seat the new seven-member Financial Advisory Board.
- Councilors Olivier Bosmans and Yazzie will interview applicants for three positions on the Design Review Board and two positions on the Planning Commission.
- Bosmans and Buell will interview applicants for two positions on the Durango Airport Commission and one position on the Local Licensing Board.
- Youssef and Yazzie will conduct interviews with applicants to the Election Commission, which has one position to be filled, and the Land Use Board of Adjustment, which has two positions to be filled.
- Bosmans and Youssef will interview applicants to fill four positions on the Firefighters Old Pension Board.
- Bosmans and Woodruff will hold interviews to fill three positions on the Historic Preservation Board.
- Youssef and Buell will interview applicants to fill two positions on the Retirement Board.
cburney@durangoherald.com
