South Tahoe city manager offered job in Washington
By Kathryn Reed
South Lake Tahoe City Manager Tony O’Rourke has been offered the same job in Yakima, Wash.
O’Rourke, who signed a three-year contract with South Tahoe that started in August 2010, told Lake Tahoe News he will take the weekend to decide about what to do regarding the job offer. He expects to make a decision early next week.
The Yakima City Council voted 7-0 on April 27 to hire O’Rourke.
South Lake Tahoe City Manager Tony O'Rourke has been offered a job in Washington. Photo/LTN
Still to be negotiated are the terms of the contract. It is possible if wages and benefits don’t meet O’Rourke’s liking, he could turn down the offer.
He said he would be talking with South Lake Tahoe’s council this weekend, too.
“A decision will be made soon. I want to be fair to both parties,” O’Rourke said.
There is no penalty per his contract if he leaves South Lake Tahoe early. He is “supposed” to give 90-days notice, but it is entirely up to the council when it would let him out of the contract.
However, on the flip side, had the council wanted to fire O’Rourke, he would have been entitled to nine months severance pay – 50 percent more than former City Manager Dave Jinkens had in his contract.
O’Rourke, 57, has been looking for another job for several months.
Earlier this month he told Lake Tahoe News, “For the long term I need to find a solution to this personal issue.”
While he has been a lightning rod in his short tenure in South Lake Tahoe, the council has had his back, collectively agreeing he has done what the city needed.
Nancy Kerry, who earlier this month was officially given the title that puts her second in command and the top city official when O’Rourke is out of town, on Friday night told Lake Tahoe News it would be inappropriate to speak about O’Rourke’s job offer until she had spoken with him and the council.
Mayor Claire Fortier, who also was not aware of the O’Rourke’s job offer until Lake Tahoe News called, said, “South Lake Tahoe will be fine. Tony has created a very strong senior management team that is very capable of filling the void until we have the next city manager.”
O’Rourke echoed that sentiment.
“We really have an outstanding senior staff,” O’Rourke said.
For the council and city as a whole, he said, “What they need now is more civility and consistency. The heavy lifting has been done.”
Is there any provision for him to pay the city if he leaves early? That sounds fair, doesn’t it?
Once again, taxpayers interests were clearly not represented at the table when bureaucrats negotiated the generous give-away terms of such a bonehead contract.
At this point, the best we can hope for is that he says “yes” & leaves promptly. With all the exposure of his contract & the Council’s idiocy, maybe the next CM won’t have such a lucrative deal. I wish I’d worked under contracts where I got a fat bonus if I got fired for poor performance or otherwise.
Am I missing something. When entities fire an individual before the contact is out, they are on the hook for paying large severances. So why is it that O’Rourke is able to just walk away from his contract without any consequenses?
does this means Vail already has the hole in the ground in the bag, or it has decided it’s not worth buying?
our current city manager came in and did a thankless job: partially cleaning up the overpaid ‘human resource’ mess…those of us (who think) in the private sector thank him for that.
Let us hope if it comes down to Dollars our current City Council wont kick up his contract to keep him. In a city that lays off Police and Fire employees cant keep roads repaired or find something to put in that big whole in the ground there better not be a pay increase here. Anyone who thinks Yakima , Wa. is a better place than Tahoe deserves to go there…
We should have hired him years ago, from my private sector view.
Agree with lou and fromform. Mr. O’Rourke has done exactly what he was hired to do: trim costs, streamline town systems, cut labor, cut nepotism, and generally put this town on a course of bettering itself. The entitlements were killing this town (and all of CA) and robbing it of any future. After doing the job he was hired to do (essentially a headcutter/re-org guy), how could anyone assume he would stay here? He was hired to be the “bad guy”, even though personally, he is quite the opposite. He is leaving this town because he completed the objectives set forth by a City Council which SLT voted in (5K +/- voters?) a full year early. Sounds like a job well done to me. Good job, Tony. Thanks and good luck to you and your family.
Five to Four!!! The Four beat the Five with content. Goody goody Four them.
So heapstack, aka, Airport Commissioner, where did he exactly cut any nepotism? Sounds like you’ve been talking intimately with the “headcutter/reorg guy” And do you know the people he cut were cut because they were the “most outspoken” in the organization and were specifically targeted because of that?
Don’t you have some meeting to go to in order to help the airport? You keep saying that and nothing has ever come of it.
just as long as he goes away, and take nk with you