Tisbury has found two candidates for the town’s highest official position, its town administrator.
The finalists are Sonia Alves-Viveiro, city manager of Edison, New Jersey, and Joseph LaCivita, general manager of Watervliet, New York.
The finalists have been named as Jay Grande is set to retire from the job on January 1 following 11 years of service.
The town select board, however, also expressed interest in expanding the search for a successor, and voiced interest in local candidates, as well as having a higher number of finalists.
Bernie Lynch of Community Paradigm Associates, LLC, hired by the town to assist in the search, presented the finalists at the board’s meeting on Tuesday. He told the board that the search committee began with 22 applicants and selected three finalists, one of which dropped out on Sunday.
Both candidates have been to the Vineyard before, Lynch said, and they have experience in positions similar to that of a town administrator.
Alves-Viveiros currently serves as the city manager of Edison, New Jersey. She has previously been the city manager of Englewood, NJ, as well as business administrator in Maplewood, NJ. She is interested in relocating to Southeastern Massachusetts, as well as to the Cape and Islands region, Lynch said.
She is also fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Joseph LaCivita is currently the general manager of Watervliet, New York. He has served as director of planning and development in Colonie, New York, and as the senior vice president of the New York State Development Corporation.
Lynch was confident in the two finalists and very pleased with the initial applicant pool that Tisbury received. He did tell the board, however, that finding someone qualified to run a town is harder than it used to be.
“It has been a very challenging time to fill these types of positions,” he said. “It wasn’t unusual to have 20, 30, 40 people, and sometimes even more in some communities, applying for these positions. Now we see much smaller pools, [and] don’t necessarily have the array of qualified people, the numbers and quality, that we did during the ‘90s and the early 2000s.”
A search committee in Tisbury also faces certain challenges. “Tisbury is a smaller community, on an Island, and with a very expensive housing market — that had an impact, certainly, on the pool that you had,” Lynch said.
A difficulty in finding candidates comes despite the fact that turnover atop town government is fairly common in Massachusetts, according to Lynch. In around the last half a dozen years, he said, roughly three-quarters of communities in the state have had a new town administrator or town manager. “That’s been primarily a generational change that’s been happening as the older generation has moved out of the positions,” he said.
Board members did not voice their opinions on either candidate, but they did have some concerns about the search results.
Member Roy Cutrer told Lynch that he would have liked to see a Vineyard-based candidate, and that he wants the next town administrator to serve a relatively lengthy term. “I’m hung up on local applicants. I’m hung up,” Cutrer said. “I don’t want to be in a position where we hire a town manager for a year, two years, three years. If we hire a town manager for a short period of time, we have failed.
“And not considering our local applicants, not giving the board the ability to consider the local applicants, is to me — I’m going to just say — a misunderstanding between the board and the search committee,” he continued.
Lynch told Cutrer that the committee received an application from one local candidate who did not meet their requirements for professional experience.
He also said that a local candidate is just one factor to consider, and that the search committee was intentional in its final selection. “[Locality] should not be the only qualification,” Lynch said on Tuesday. “I agree that if we hire somebody who only stays with us for a year or two, we have not succeeded.”
“I think the committee was interested in only sending these three on,” he also said.
Member Christina Colarusso called the committee’s reduction from 22 to two candidates “a little disheartening,” and was interested in contacting a next-best name from earlier in the search process to have three finalists.
Chair John Cahill expressed interest in expanding the search for a new town administrator, which would occur after the board interviews Alves-Viveiro and LaCivita next week. “We can turn back and say to the search committee and Bernie [Lynch] … that we want to expand the search again,” he said.
Lynch recommended the board move forward without eliminating any finalists. “If there are still questions you can make decisions, but you don’t have to reject anyone,” he said.
The select board voted to accept the candidates presented and proceed in the selection process.
On Wednesday, Alves-Viveiro and LaCivita will visit Tisbury for separate hourlong interviews with the board, according to Lynch. They will also tour ongoing projects in town, he said.
In a statement to The Times, Alves-Viveiro reacted to being named a finalist to run Tisbury’s government. “I’m honored and excited about being a finalist for Tisbury. Having visited a couple of times, I know it is a wonderful, resilient and vibrant community,” she said. “I’ve also spent time understanding the challenges and opportunities the role may present, and I believe my experiences both professionally and personally align with the community goals.”
LaCivita was not immediately available for comment.
Cahill said on Tuesday that the town’s goal is to make an offer to a candidate by the end of the year.