Olympia City Council promotes longtime assistant city manager Jay Burney to top post

A moment more than 20 years in the making came to pass when the Olympia City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to appoint Jay Burney to the city manager position vacated when Steve Hall retired in November.

Burney served as assistant city manager for 10 years prior to becoming interim city manager when Hall stepped down. He began working for the city in 1999 as an engineering technician and rose to deputy director of the public works department before transitioning to work under Hall.

Burney was considered a leading candidate for the job when the city began a national search late last year — Mayor Cheryl Selby said it was as though he began the process already standing on third base. She and the rest of the city council said Tuesday that his performance while leading the city through the novel coronavirus pandemic made the choice clear.

Council members voted in March to suspend the search for a new city manager because COVID-19 made it impossible to conduct the process the way the city wanted. Selby said the plan was for the top three candidates to do in-person interviews with panels of community members and employees, but that wasn’t possible under restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic.

The process is expected to come to an official end this week when the city council votes on an employment contract putting Burney’s promotion in writing.

“As we saw his leadership abilities come forward beyond even what we’d seen before the COVID-19 crisis, it became a no-brainer as we saw how he managed the crisis for the city,” Selby said.

“This council was definitely committed to doing a robust search not only for the community, but for whomever was chosen eventually, because they’d want to know they were part of a robust process. I feel in a way like Jay was robbed of that, because honestly, I feel like he would have been our choice.”

Burney became emotional at times Tuesday while addressing the council meeting with his wife by his side. Selby and Interim Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley brought her into City Hall just prior to the vote so she could share in the moment.

Burney did not initially pursue a career in public service, instead using his degree in industrial engineering to land a job with Boeing. Desiring more variety in his work, he took an engineering technician job in Olympia and quickly became hooked on the opportunities it afforded him to serve the community.

During his time as assistant city manager, Burney served as Olympia’s lead negotiator with the local police and fire unions, oversaw construction of the Hands On Children’s Museum and Olympia City Hall, and instituted an internal committee on diversity and equity. Over the past few months, he has been at the helm of the city’s COVID-19 response, including measures taken to mitigate the scope of operational and financial challenges caused by the pandemic.

“The hardest part of the job for any city official is working through an emergency or crisis,” Burney said. “It has been kind of a working job interview the past few months, working with department heads to plan closures, making sure staff is assured we have plans in place to communicate with them and the council at any point in time, and to keep us all in a good place where we have control of the situation.

“I was here during the previous recession, so I was able to lean on those experiences to quickly put into place some things to stem the tide, and I think council members took notice of that.”

Burney told council members Tuesday that if city managers in the region knew how dedicated and talented members of the Olympia city staff are, there would have been a line of applicants from City Hall to Tacoma.

“We have an amazing group of employees at the city who are dedicated to this city,” Burney said. “I’m thrilled to lead such an amazing group of people. It’s an emotional moment, because it’s a culmination of everything I’ve worked for over the past 21 years, and I’m ready to go.”

Burney won’t see his focus change to go with his new job title for at least a few months, as the COVID-19 pandemic will remain a top priority. He said that one of the most important lessons he learned from Hall was to work cooperatively with neighboring jurisdictions on major projects, which has been the calling card of Olympia’s pandemic response.

Once the region gets well into the recovery phase of the pandemic, Burney hopes to pick up some of the city initiatives paused this spring. Those include forming a strategy for implementing the homeless response plan created earlier this year, furthering the local climate mitigation plan, and pushing for more affordable housing in Olympia.

Selby said at the meeting that Burney’s mantra during the pandemic has been “We got this.”

“Now,” she told Burney, “we’ve got you.”