Milwaukie hires interim finance director

By Matthew Graham

The Clackamas Review, Mar 9, 2010 (2 Reader comments)

Milwaukie, faced with entering a budget-development process with no finance director or city manager, hired an interim finance director last week.

The city hired Andrew Parks, who has more than 25 years of experience. He has served as a city administrator, an assistant city manager, a chief financial officer and a finance director and worked with West Linn; Bremerton, Wash.; Madras; and Bend.

“Andy’s wealth of experience really set him apart,” said Mayor Jeremy Ferguson. “He has been in several municipalities in Oregon and Washington and every reference that we verified spoke very highly of him. He was also very competitive in his contract.”

Ferguson said bringing in a finance director was the city’s “top priority.”

“Andy hit the ground running,” he said. “He was prepared with a proposed budget calendar which I haven’t heard any opposition to … His proposal is sound, it meets all our legal requirement and I know he’s already working on it, for our next work session, we’ll actually have some goal-setting discussions.”

Indeed, at last week’s meeting, Parks got right down to work when asked if he wanted to make any introduction to the council.

“As far as staff and myself coming into this process and trying to facilitate putting together a $40-to-$50 million budget and not really knowing you … I think it’d be very helpful to myself and maybe you as a group as well as the rest of the management team to have a little bit better understanding of exactly what the goals are of the council and what you may be having to trade off to accomplish certain things that are of a higher priority,” he said. “The recession being what it is, the expectations of your citizens being what they are and looking at your budget right now, particularly the general fund, it’s not the type of thing you’re going to see as sustainable. You have a fund that’s been spent down in the general fund balance well over a million dollars. That’s not something we can do again, so we’re going to have to figure out how to address that … and minimize any negative impacts.”

Parks was hired on a six-month contract of $11,000 a month.

The previous finance director, Ignacio Palacios, quit in December. Former City Manager Mike Swanson was going to lead the process, but city council voted not to renew his contract in January.

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