Council Moves Ahead With Expanding City Management

Jay Barrett/KMXT
At last night’s Kodiak City Council meeting, an ordinance approving the hire of an assistant city manager was moved forward. Aimee Kniaziowski explained why she needs help in the city manager’s office:
“I certainly support this. We’re certainly a large enough community as I mentioned on Tuesday. What this will allow is more work to be done and I can move from daily triage to actually getting some of these key things done,” she said.
She said the new position would be assigned to perform human resources and risk management duties, as well as oversee other projects for the city.
The motion, which would change city code to create the position of assistant manager, passed on a 4-to-0 vote, with Councilmen Gabe Saravia and Randy Bishop absent.
The pay range for an assistant city manager would fall between about $87,000 and $131,000. Earlier in the meeting citizen Betty McTavish said creating another high-level position within the city is not a wise move fiscally.
“That definitely would not reduce costs of running the city, but increase them,” she said. “We have businesses closing all the time in our city. I just looked online and there’s 45 homes for sale. This does not look like an active, vibrant city to me. So we need to be really good stewards of the citizens’ money.”
The ordinance will next come back before the council for a public hearing and a final vote at the next regular meeting, scheduled for August 28th.