Having attended all three of the public input sessions scheduled to gather citizens’ thoughts on the city manager search, I’ll share some of my observations here.

I wasn’t terribly surprised at the lack of participation. Only 18 citizens in total showed up to two of the three meetings, with the first one being entirely without attendance.

I’m told the online survey got at least a couple hundred responses, but since it only ended on Friday, final numbers and results have yet to be released. You’ll read about them in a future news story.

It’s not unsurprising that the survey would have gotten much more participation than the in-person meetings. In our “connected” world, many people prefer not to connect with people so much as they prefer to simply fill out an online survey while they’re sitting on the couch watching a movie or sitting at the sports field in the lull between innings. As long as they’re participating some way, that’s OK. Maybe a lot of people have called their council representative personally and given their input, and that’s good, too.

Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was that at least one person at one of the meetings did not know the role of the city manager and how it differed from the mayor. This might be surprising to me because I have lived in this area, where most localities use the council-manager form of government, for my entire life, and my parents were heavily involved in local politics in Newport News, and my job covering City Hall pretty much dictates that I know how the city is governed.

However, many localities do not use the council-manager form of government. In the mayor-council form of government, the mayor is paid to run the city. Many people not from around here may not know what a city manager is or what one does. This may not have been a problem 20 years ago, but with such a high number of military people and other transplants now living in Suffolk, perhaps more people would get involved if they knew the role of the city manager.

Also to be expected was the fact that many of the thoughts individual groups came up with, and the collective thoughts of people at both events, overlapped quite a lot. Leadership and vision are especially desired by people from all walks of life and from all areas of the city, it seems. They also want education, infrastructure and economic development to be priorities. They want a city manager who has business and planning skills and a proven track record. They want an ethical city manager who is not a micromanager and is transparent, approachable and skilled at building consensus.

In some ways, then, it seems, they want a city manager who isn’t Selena Cuffee-Glenn. The last city manager wasn’t popular with most of the general public, especially not after her 14-percent raise that wasn’t done in the most transparent fashion and at least partially cost three former members of City Council their seats in the last election. Word of her leadership style leaked out of the tightened doors of City Hall, and many in the general public perceived her as a micromanager who attempted to control everyone and everything happening in the city.

Now that the input sessions are in the books and the results of the survey are being tallied, it’s time for the City Council to listen to the people and come up with some candidates that fit the bill. Any less means the waste of a lot of people’s time.