BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

Some 33 applications were received for the position of Los Alamos County Manager and 21 of them met the minimum job requirements, Council Chair Randall Ryti said at Tuesday’s  County Council meeting. A closed session will be held June 17 to go through the list. Ryti said Council will have all the qualified applications to review.

Once the number of candidates for the position has been narrowed down, in-person meetings and tours of the community are expected to be held June 24-25. On June 25 panels consisting of Councilors, the senior management team and members of the public, Ryti said. He said two or three names per Councilor needed to be submitted for the panel.

“At the end of the day on June 25, we’ll have a concluding closed session to make a selection and we are looking at a possible appointment July 13. That’s the schedule as of now and it’s all subject to continuing to feel like we’re making good progress on the process and that there’s no hiccups,” Ryti said.

One of the considerations Ryti said is how to have the in-person events so that they could be open to everybody. 

“We have to plan to have some way of restricting the crowd.  We had discussed potentially using Duane Smith Auditorium which has enough space that people could space out for the public town hall,” he said. “It would be a little different. In the past they have had more informal meet and greets but with COVID it’s probably going to be more of a presentation format because we’ll be a few days before there might be different restrictions in place.”