Say no to the status quo: Demand a national search and external hire for Eugene city manager

by Ted M. Coopman

Eugene City Manager Sarah Medary announced her retirement effective at the end of 2025. She served briefly as interim city manager before City Council gave her the job in 2019. She previously led Public Works. The city did not conduct a search for the city manager position, so there were no other candidates.

Outgoing City Manager Jon Ruiz chose Medary for the position. Ruiz’s claim to fame was tearing down City Hall with no replacement and squandering tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on plans for a new city hall that would never be built as well as leasing commercial space for city staff scattered all over downtown, making accessing services a nightmare.

As a decades-long city employee, Medary was the ultimate insider, highly invested in the status quo and maintaining Ruiz’s consolidation of power. The city manager runs Eugene, not the city council or mayor. The city council only has one employee – the city manager. Everyone else works for the city manager.

The city manager and her team control city council via the managers and staff who report directly to the city manager. They are the ones who provide city council the information to make decisions. Despite Medary’s claim that she has no “agenda,” the information her team provides is carefully curated, steering council toward the desired outcomes – whatever the “plan” senior staff have concocted.

The current state of the city is largely the result of Medary’s management since 2019. Do we really want more of the same? Can we even survive another six years of this?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Many observers were baffled when Medary decided to promote Public Works Director Matt Rodrigues to a newly-created and highly-paid second assistant city manager position in the middle of a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall. With her announced retirement, the strategy becomes clear.

Senior Assistant City Manager Kristie Hammitt is set to “inherit” the City Manager position, where Rodrigues will likely stay on as assistant city manager. Word is the long lead time for Medary’s retirement is to provide ample opportunity to grease the wheels of Hammitt’s coronation, a campaign that apparently is already underway. The good news is this also leaves plenty of time for a national search.

Insider out

Internal hires can maintain organizational knowledge and the established network of managers and senior staff can help keep processes and procedures going smoothly. Internal hires know how things work. The problem is their investment is in “how things currently work” (or not work) and the personal relationships that can come at the expense of making the best decisions.

Internal hires’ knowledge base of the how the city has operated is deep but narrow. In addition, there is the tendency to honor the legacy of how things were done by their predecessor. If your organization is a successful, well-run machine, that’s great. But that is not Eugene’s city government. The Ruiz legacy is of a technocracy that provides only the information needed with the required spin for city council or the public to make the “right choice” as defined by management.

Ask yourself, are those choices working for you?

The shallow state

The Ruiz/Medary legacy is one of a management and senior staff that largely view elected leaders and the public as Eugene’s annoying tenants who need to be placated and controlled. There is little or no accountability for the work done (or not done) or the outcomes produced. Numerous expensive appeals of half-baked, reality-challenged policies have changed nothing in how the city operates.

Those staff at the lower levels of the city’s bureaucracy I have talked with express frustration, albeit in hushed tones, in-person or on the phone, with a “don’t share this” caveat. Sound familiar? Staff feel they are not listened to and that their on-the-ground knowledge has little or no impact on management’s priorities or decisions.

Instead, so-called solutions to address our most pressing problems seem focused on performing for peer cities and other public managers and professionals, placating progressive activists, or chasing state and federal money.

Rules are created for the private sector that the city itself ignores. Fees and added conditions are imposed, rules and laws selectively enforced, and serious public health and safety issues ignored. The result is we are bleeding out our economic base and corroding our social fabric. In my experience, most staff do their best and truly care about their jobs and serving the public. However, it is hard to excel in an environment that values performative compliance and virtue signaling over quality work.

Hire outside the box

The city just hired Rich Hoey, who recently served as assistant city manager in Olympia, Washington, as director of Public Works. Hoey already has proven to be a competent and caring director. He recently requested to speak to our neighborhood association (Jefferson Westside Neighbors) and personally jumped in to help with several neighborhood issues.

Hoey’s decision to apply for the position demonstrates that Eugene can attract competent outside management. Hoey has none of the baggage of an internal hire and a fresh take on how to run a department. More importantly, he is not a product of, or beholden to, the Eugene technocratic machine.

The name of our pain

Unwinding the corrupt processes and the anti-business progressive activist Democratic Party of Lane County’s domination of city council politics will take time and effort. Still, by bringing in a competent outsider to take control of city operations we can start to break the cycle of the self-serving, self-perpetuating vortex of s— (literally, if you live, work, or own a business in downtown or west Eugene) that has run a great small city into the ground.

We can do better. But the people of Eugene need to wake up and take action to demand a national search and outside hire to clean house.

Contact the mayor and city council (email also goes to management) and tell them you want a national search for the best candidates and not a social promotion for city manager. Email them at MayorCouncilandCityManager@eugene-or.gov.

Western Exposure is a semi-regular column that looks at issues and challenges from a West Eugene perspective – a perspective that is often ignored or trivialized by city leadership and influential groups and individuals largely based in south and east Eugene. 

Western Exposure rejects the fauxgressive party line, performative politics, and “unicorn ranching” policy in favor of pragmatism focused on the daily experiences of residents and small businesses in Eugene—and West Eugene in particular.

Ted M. Coopman has been involved in neighborhood issues since 2016 as an elected board member, and now chair, of Jefferson Westside Neighbors and has 30+ years experience as an activist and community organizer. He earned a Ph.D. in Communication (University of Washington) and served on the faculty at San Jose State University from 2007 to 2020.

Ted’s research on social movements, activist use of technology, media law and policy, and online pedagogy has been published and presented internationally and he taught classes ranging from research methodology to global media systems. He and his spouse live in Jefferson Westside with an energetic coltriever and some very demanding and prolific fruit trees.