Earlier this month, the four people hoping to be next Metro's next chief operating officer spent an hour introducing themselves to, and answering questions from, Metro employees.
Their personalities were clearly defined – Wes Hare was the quiet facilitator and leader, Scott Lazenby was enthusiastic and innovative, Jim Desmond was the agency veteran and deal-maker.
The fourth finalist, Ashland city administrator Martha Bennett, introduced herself as such:
"I come from a long line of extraordinarily loud people."
An outspoken staff leader? At Metro?
Bennett wasn't proposing to just escape the shadow of Michael Jordan, the agency's first COO whose tenure, generally regarded as successful, was marked with a reputation for being soft-spoken and patient.
She was proposing to forget it completely.
And while Metro Council President Tom Hughes wasn't in the room for that Aug. 11 question-and-answer session, he got the message – and agreed with it. Hughes announced this morning that he was nominating Bennett to be the agency's next chief operating officer.
If confirmed by the Metro Council, she'll start Oct. 31.
Hughes said his nomination rejected the conventional wisdom that if things are going well, you promote from within.
"I think we're doing a great job, I think we're on a trajectory to reach a new level both in terms of public awareness of what we do and support from our partners around the region to work collaboratively together," Hughes said.
"I felt that it was a good idea to have somebody bring in a fresh look at what we were doing and how we were doing it," he said, "not with the idea that we need to change but to validate what we're doing right and to propose alternatives when we're not."
Her arrival could mark a culture shift for Metro, an agency that prides itself on working as a patient regional facilitator.
"Honesty and straightforwardness, in a world and in a profession where we're used to people talking around issues and being chronically nice to one another, is refreshing," Hughes said. "The fact that she was blunt and straight talking is something people are going to admire about her. The downside of that only applies to people who don't like to hear the truth."
In an interview Wednesday, Bennett said her candor is less about bluntness and more about being direct about approaching issues – and doing so in a way that people can understand.
"We work on highly complex technical issues, and we forget that people don't talk about Goal 5," she said. "It doesn't come up in normal conversations among humans, so we have to talk about things like stream quality."
Bennett has served six years as Ashland's city administrator, working in an environment that Hughes called challenging. Conservative Southern Oregon values clashed with the city's college students and artistic culture, Hughes said. Add to that a longstanding ethos about the city handling responsibilities traditionally managed by the private sector – Ashland runs its own hospital, power company, cemeteries and fiber optic network – and you have a small city that in some ways mirrors the myriad responsibilities that Metro manages.
"Local government in Ashland is something that people really pay attention to and care passionately about," Bennett said. "They demand we deliver excellent services and demand we engage them. It can be very challenging."
The Ashland fiber optic network is an example of that. Launched in the late 1990s after private companies were slow to deliver broadband to the city, the Ashland Fiber Network delivers cable and Internet to about 40 percent of the city's market, Bennett said.
She said the management of that organization has parallels to Metro's visitor venues, such as the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and the Oregon Convention Center, areas where the public service is sometimes competing with the private sector.
"The benefit of that is you're able to provide it as a public service, with public ethics, trying to do it at a low cost and with high quality, but the challenge of it is it's a rapidly-changing market and we're making our decisions in public," she said. "The competition can just read the newspaper to find out what we're going to do."
But private sector involvement was one of the reasons Hughes leaned in Bennett's direction. He said she collaborated well with the business community, served on the board of directors for the local chamber of commerce and on the boards for several local nonprofits.
Before her 2006 arrival in Ashland, Bennett served as the executive director of the Columbia River Gorge Commission. That board manages the land use decisions for property, both public and private, in the gorge, and works with several federal agencies, two states and six counties to protect the area.
"The lessons there, about how you work with counties and the states to accomplish the overall objectives of the scenic area are parallel," she said. "That's what Metro does, and has to do to be successful."
The Metro Council is scheduled to vote on Bennett's nomination on Sept. 8. If the council approves of Hughes' pick, Bennett will start to transition to her new position over the coming months, and Hughes said she'll likely attend a meeting in late September for all Metro staffers.
Bennett would be the agency's second chief operating officer, a position created after a restructuring of the agency's charter was implemented in 2003. Jordan, who held the position from its inception, left in March after being appointed to a similar statewide role by Gov. John Kitzhaber. Longtime Metro Attorney Dan Cooper has been serving as acting chief operating officer since Jordan's departure.