Jackson gears up to replace planning position
The business end of Jackson County Planner Gerald Green’s departure — who will be in charge of finding a replacement, what the timeline might be — was a necessary topic of discussion at last week’s county commissioner meeting, but commissioners prefaced the logistics with a unified lament over his leaving.
"Gerald was and still is recognized by his peers and colleagues around the state as a senior-level planner,” Chairman Brian McMahan read from a two-page written statement he’d prepared.
Green will be leaving his position with Jackson County May 15 to start work as executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Commission in Knoxville, which handles planning issues for the city of Knoxville and Knox County as a whole. The job will be a step up in both pay and responsibility — Green will oversee a staff of 22 compared to the 1.5 positions under him now — but last week he told The Smoky Mountain News that his decision to leave was also spurred by lack of administrative support for his department and lack of enforcement of the regulations it created.
He’ll be a hard person to replace, commissioners agreed, but the quest to do so will begin immediately. The job has already been listed, and a search committee will likely form soon to weed through the applications and bring the top picks before the full board of commissioners. A commissioner or two, the county manager, the economic development director, the human resources director, the planning board chair and a planning department staff member should sit on the committee, County Manager Chuck Wooten recommended to the board.
“I consider this position to be one of the key positions in county government, and the Board of County Commissioners will have a very active role in the selection process, conducting the final interviews and making the selection,” McMahan said.
The position will likely take two or three months to fill, Wooten said. In the meantime, he said, he will work with John Jeleniewski of the planning department and Permit and Code Enforcement Director Tony Elders to address any planning issues that arise in the interim. The planning department won’t be recommending any new ordinances while the director position is vacant, Wooten said, but he doesn’t believe Green’s departure will much affect the trajectory of the Cullowhee zoning standards, which commissioners were set to vote on May 21 — though that timeline could be extended to their June 4 meeting — and commissioners might vote on the cell tower ordinance as well, as it has already cleared the planning board.
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To help accommodate for the workload until Green’s replacement get started, a half-time position in the department that had been slated to go full-time with the start of next fiscal year has been accelerated to become fulltime as of last week.
However, a new planning department position that had been included with the proposed 2015-16 budget will likely be delayed, Wooten said, until after the planning director is chosen.
“We’ll have it in the budget,” he said. “It will be there but we will not advertise or fill it until the new person’s on board.”
At its May 19 work session, commissioners will look through the list of planning tasks and committees that Green agreed to leave in order to decide on priorities going forward.
What they said
The recently announced departure of Planning Director Gerald Green dominated commissioners’ comments at the beginning of their meeting last week. Here’s what they had to say about Green’s 4.5 years as department head, which touched on everything from landslide mapping to collegiate student housing to groundwater absorption.
“His wealth of knowledge and planning issues, his ability to administer very technical ordinances — and even more importantly, his ability to articulate himself well and to communicate in an effective way to a sometimes not-so-receptive audience of property owners — were the very reasons that I and the 2010 Board of Commissioner chose Gerald as our county planner.”
— Chairman Brian McMahan
“I was really impressed with him. I hate to see him go. I think it says something about the job he did in this county if he’s able to take a job in Knoxville.”
— Commissioner Boyce Dietz
“My sincere wishes go out to Gerald Green, and I wish him the very best in all his endeavors.”
— Commissioner Charles Elders
“I knew Gerald for two years when he was county planner and I was an employee of the Southwestern Commission, so we were colleagues before I became a commissioner, and I was aware firsthand of what an outstanding job he was doing for Jackson County.”
— Commissioner Vicki Greene
