Lacey City Council to negotiate contract with Rick Walk to become permanent city manager
Lacey City Council voted unanimously Thursday night to enter contract negotiations with Rick Walk to be the next city manager.
Walk has been the interim city manager since former manager Scott Spence departed earlier this year to be the city manager of Astoria, Oregon.
Deputy Mayor Malcolm Miller made the motion to authorize Mayor Andy Ryder to enter contract negotiations with Walk, and before the council voted, council member Carolyn Cox inserted a quick comment.
“I think we’re making an excellent choice, if the vote is positive,” she said.
After the vote, Ryder told The Olympian that the city went through a hiring process that included a nationwide search and in-depth evaluations of the applicants. Walk was one of those applicants, he said.
“We feel he is strongly qualified to lead the city into the future and we’re excited to be working with him,” Ryder said.
Ryder said negotiations shouldn’t take long and the contract and his official hire will come back before the council soon.
Missing from this process, however, was a chance for the public to meet the other finalists. The city was set to do that in early April when two finalists withdrew from the process, one announced they had found another job, and another was dealing with a family emergency and could not attend in person.
With only two finalists who could attend in person, the city decided to pause the process and seek feedback from a consultant about next steps. Ryder said the city was “confident in the information we received.”
If Walk is named city manager, one of his first acts will be to hire someone to fill his former job as director of community and economic development.
Walk first joined the city in 1999 as a project planner and was named the Community and Economic Development Director in 2008. Before his time in Lacey, he worked in city and rural county planning in Douglas County in central Washington.
Walk earned his undergraduate degree in urban and regional planning from Eastern Washington University in Cheney, near Spokane.
This story was originally published May 11, 2023 at 8:47 PM.
