Mayor hires new city manager

In a rare split vote the city council voted to ratify the decision of Mayor Carl Florea to hire Ms Ana Cortez-Steiner as the new city manager.

Cortez received her Masters in Public Administration from the University of Washington and likes to call Washington home although she is originally from California and spent much of her early career in the Bay area.

In 1917 she took a position in Yakima as the Assistant City Administrator and Finance Director. She left that position to become the City Administrator in Helena, Montana.

Cortez had some difficulty in Helena and left that position with less than a year left on her contract.   

Council members were divided on the decision because several believed the community should have had a chance to meet the finalists for the position before the offer was made. There was also some discussion by Council members about the decision given the difficulties Cortez experienced in her position in Montana.

Cortez said she was hired to make changes to the way the city operated and had received good reviews on her performance. But there was resistance from some employees who did not like the changes. She voluntarily resigned her position and received a settlement and letter of recommendation.

In a telephone interview with the Echo on Friday of last week, Cortez had clearly absorbed the most important issues of Mayor Floreas campaign. She said she had never lived in a resort community that was so heavily dependent on tourism. She said she believed it was important to build our community as a community that all of our people could call home.

People who only come for a weekend are not invested in the community. We must find a way for all of those who work here can afford to live here. That includes the teachers, the nurses, the bus drivers, hotel workers and waitresses.

She said now we have to find a way to reopen our economy. We must insure our local residents that we are safe. That we do not become another hot spot for the infection to spread.

In discussing the issue of “workforce housing” as expressed by Mayor Florea, Cortez said she spent most of her working life in California.

“California is broken,” she said.

In San Francisco unless you are a millionaire you cannot afford to live in San Francisco. There is no diversity of housing. So people have to live outside of the city. Many are commuting as much as 3 hours a day. That creates gridlock. People live in their cars. The idea of a family unit that sits together and has dinner is out of the question because you are in the car. You pollute. You spend a lot of money on gas. You often don’t have the disposable income to take advantage of the other benefits of the local economy.

Cortez did say that commuting in from Cashmere or Wenatchee was not unreasonable. It is about choices.

You just cannot have a community that only has luxury homes or a high percentage of vacation homes without creating the problems that places like California.

“We must make sure that Leavenworth does not just become a playground for the city of Seattle,” said Cortez.

 Ana Cortez begins her position on Monday, June 1.