Palmer’s top administrator to step down from post in May

PALMER — At the start of May, the city manager will step down.

“My employment agreement right now runs through May 1, and there are some options to renew it and I’ve basically, for personal reasons, chosen not to exercise those options,” Palmer city manager Doug Griffin said Monday afternoon.

He said the decision took him some time to make. He wanted to get through the city’s budget process, which wrapped up Dec. 10, 2013. But at the end, he said he still wasn’t sure.

“I hadn’t totally decided, but I talked to my wife over the holidays, so I did give them notice right before the end of the year,” Griffin said.

Griffin came to the city Oct. 4, 2010, which means he will have put in three and a half years by the time he wraps up the job in May.

“It’s been a great experience, but I just think that maybe it’s time to kind of dial it back a little bit here,” he said. “I don’t know I’d use the word burnout, but I got the opportunity to maybe step back and take the summer off and maybe even, if I can finagle it right, go into semi-retirement here.”

Griffin said that in his time at the city, he’s accomplished a lot of what he wanted to, but it hasn’t been easy.

“We have some pretty big responsibilities here with running an airport and a major water and sewer system here,” Griffin said.

During his time with the city, Griffin’s wife has divided her time between Palmer, and Anchorage where their children and grandchildren.

“It was hard for me to compete with my two granddaughters,” Griffin said.

For a time he lived in an apartment in downtown Palmer. His stay there included an odd experience in October 2012 when he ceded his parking space to a group of police officers clad in hazardous materials suits who’d set up a tent to cover them as they took down a meth lab discovered operating in the apartment next to his.

After that, Griffin said, he bought a Colony-era house elsewhere in town.

“At that time I thought I would probably be staying a little bit longer,” he said.

But, aside from the burnout factor and a chance to spend more time in Anchorage, Griffin said his retirement account has been doing great lately with the booming stock market.

“A lot of things just kind of changed. Life changes,” he said. But with the gains in his retirement account came the idea that, “well, maybe I can live without having to work full-time.”

Griffin said he’s going to have to figure out what to do with that house he bought here.

The city’s also going to have to decide on the process to replace him.

“I don’t know if they’re going to be able to go through the process of hiring my successor in the four months that I gave them, but they could certainly be well on their way to doing that,” he said.

In the past, local municipal bodies have done the work of finding candidates on their own. Some, however, have hired headhunting firms to seek interested candidates on their behalf. That’s the process that ended with John Moosey as manager of the Mat-Su Borough.

“I don’t know how they’re going to go about recruiting and hiring my replacement, but I know that they’re going to get right on it,” Griffin said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.