As the Palm Coast City Council seeks to hire its next city manager–its sixth in seven years–it is again repeating a pattern that has undermined confidence in the process, either for the council or the eventual candidate, thus giving the better candidates pause even though the last opening for the job drew 112 applicants. The council may yet succeed in hiring one of them by fall. If it does so, the candidate will be sure of only one thing: that the majority hiring him will vanish in less than a year.
