Communication highlighted as focus moving forward after recent city manager discussion

After Tuesday’s special meeting, which included a 1 hour, 15 minutes closed session with the Princeton City Council and City Manager Theresa Wittenauer, the City Council emphasized better communication moving forward to avoid what recently transpired.

The council ultimately chose to keep Wittenauer as city manager after more than 100 people attended the meeting and 10 people commented in support of her, despite entering Tuesday’s meeting with the possibility that it would break closed session with a vote on her future.

The council didn’t take that vote, instead, Princeton Mayor Ray Mabry said the council was confident with plans made to move forward, with the emphasis on better communication.

“In our conversation with Theresa, we’ve come to a good agreement of what we move forward with, that’s going to continue to have better communication on the side of the council members, including the mayor,” Mabry said. “And Theresa also is going to communicate with us if we have any concerns.”

The council did not address much about what led to the meeting being called, other than to say Wittenauer had not had an evaluation in two years and there were “some concerns,” but none cited specifically.

For her part, Wittenauer puts together a weekly report that she will continue to do, Mabry said.

Former Princeton mayor Joel Quiram spoke during Tuesday’s meeting, bringing up concerns that the City Council doesn’t meet one-on-one with the city manager to ask questions or get updates from her. He said council member Jerry Neumann was the lone council member who meets regularly with Wittenauer, and he also was a vocal supporter of the job she’s done heading into Tuesday’s meeting.

“I have to say without any reservations that Theresa has done an amazing job with what she has available to her,” Neumann said. “She can manage a budget better than anybody I’ve ever met and we have succeeded in so many ways because of her conservative way that she manages the budget, the way she prioritizes money to provide for projects that are truly important and we have a group of employees that worship her. And what can be better than that?”

Council member Hector Gomez said he still has some items he intends to work through with Wittenauer, but he has kept tabs on the city through a different method.

“They say I don’t come visit, I do,” Gomez said. “I go visit sites where city workers are working. They may not know it when I do things evaluating a little differently and I do come to the office. I’m pretty involved despite what’s been stated here before.”

Makransky said Tuesday he thought the closed session “hacked out a lot of things” and he said the council couldn’t fully express what the meeting was about because it felt an obligation not to speak on personnel matters. He said he supported Wittenauer for the two years he’s been on council. Makransky, however, will have one more meeting on council and then Don Saletzky will take his seat in May.

Council member Mike McCall said he received four to five emails and a couple of phone calls, but encouraged the public to reach out to him directly in the future when it has questions or concerns.

“In the future, if you want to voice your opinion. Call us. Email us. Text us. That’s what our numbers are there for,” McCall said. “I try to call everyone back. Sometimes we’re busy at work and we have to get to you later, but again, this was handled wrongly. I apologize to Theresa as well. This is kind of an embarrassment the way it ended up. But I think it got blown out of proportion, that we could have worded things differently. ... ”We’ve agreed, we’re going to move forward. It’s the right thing to do."

Heading into Tuesday, Neumann, on the council, and Wittenauer expressed shock at the agenda for the meeting, drawing a public reaction on Facebook and the attendance it did. Each council member made mention of the meeting being handled poorly on its end. Mabry, noting that other council members also requested the meeting, took responsibility as the council’s face for what transpired Tuesday and apologized to Wittenauer and her family publicly.