[0:27] Okay, you guys ready? Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for being here. We certainly appreciate your time.

[0:34] participating in this civic event of our public work session.

[0:40] On the agenda for now, we're going to have two agendas.

[0:45] First is a special call meeting, and we'll conduct that one first.

[0:49] After that, we will have our work session.

[0:52] But for this meeting, this is a special call meeting,

[0:55] and the meeting is the appointment of Sherry Hobson,

[0:59] Matthews as our incoming city manager so again I'm calling this meeting to order

[1:06] let's go right down the line now roll call that the record show that all our

[1:12] president accounted for and councilman Gaynor is viewing us remotely and we'll

[1:21] move to item C which is comments from our citizens do we have any comments

[1:25] that's at this time.

[1:28] Seeing no movement, we'll move right past the public hearings

[1:32] and go to item E, which is the item for discussion. And that is the appointment of Sherry Hopson

[1:39] Matthews as our incoming city manager, the approval of the professional services contract

[1:46] and the approval of the city manager employment contract.

[1:53] And just so everyone knows who she is, she'll be sitting on her front row and I'll do a

[1:59] brief introduction just shortly.

[2:03] So we'll have our city attorney to share any of the information that you'd like to share

[2:10] in this talk.

[2:11] Sure.

[2:12] Mayor and council, you have in front of you a couple of different agreements.

[2:16] One is the city manager employment agreement.

[2:19] That's the employment agreement.

[2:20] take effect once the City Manager is appointed and assumes the role of City Manager.

[2:27] We also have a consulting agreement that we've put together for kind of the interim time,

[2:32] which allows the tops of Matthews the opportunity to kind of get to know our staff, set out goals and priorities,

[2:39] both in the short and long term, before she actually takes over the rent as City Manager

[2:45] and effective on Eric's retirement.

[2:48] And then, in addition to that, you have a resolution which essentially codifies or resolves

[2:55] the city's acceptance and the powers under the Charter.

[3:01] It's passed through a couple of drafts with those employment agreements.

[3:04] I'm happy to answer any questions you may have seen this morning.

[3:07] We made one slight change to the consulting agreement,

[3:11] and I'm happy to answer any questions that arise from that.

[3:16] I will read through the recommendation.

[3:18] The recommendation is to appoint Sherry Hobson-Matthews as city manager effective September 11th,

[3:24] 2026 at 5 p.m., approve professional services contract allowing the retention of Sherry Hobson-Matthews

[3:32] as a consultant during the transitional period, and to approve the employment contract for

[3:38] Sherry Hobson-Matthews for employment as city manager, the background.

[3:43] With the current city manager retiring on September 11,

[3:48] 2026 at 5 p.m., the city has engaged in extensive search for a new city manager,

[3:55] the charter vests, the mayor and council with the authority to appoint city manager

[4:00] to serve as the city's chief executive officer.

[4:04] After a view of the numerous candidates, the city announced Shariah Hobson-Matthews as city's sole finalist.

[4:11] The attached resolution formalizes Ms. Hobson Matthews' appointment as of September 11th

[4:19] at 5 p.m. and allows the city to enter into agreements provided per as below.

[4:27] The contract for professional surfacers for consulting agreement with Ms. Hobson Matthews

[4:34] to allow her to provide the Mayor and Council with an efficient transition of the city's

[4:39] leadership and to allow Miss Hopson Matthews to the opportunity to begin

[4:45] certain short and long-term priorities. The employment agreement provides for the

[4:51] execution of employment agreement for Miss Hopson Matthews. It details her

[4:56] salary benefits as well as her long-term employment. The cost for the

[5:03] consulting agreement will be paid through will be paid through

[5:07] The cost for the employment agreement will be approximately equivalent to the cost for the position.

[5:14] Any adjustment is expected to be within the contingency built into the mayor and to the city manager budget, not the mayor's budget.

[5:24] It's consistent with our comprehensive plan and the attachments that you have are of the resolution, appointing Sherry Hobson Matthews,

[5:34] professional services agreement and employment contract so at this time we will open the floor

[5:41] for discussion. Four questions from council.

[5:54] I have a question and just a quick question from the

[5:58] actual employment contract section six it reads the mayor council shall provide the employment

[6:08] with a written job evaluation at the time of our review

[6:11] and shall determine whether any adjustments

[6:13] in conversation provided the city manager should be made,

[6:17] provided it was super.

[6:19] Can we define that?

[6:20] And then at the option of the mayor council,

[6:23] this is my real concern here.

[6:25] The governing body may define detailed written goals

[6:28] and performance indicators that the body determines.

[6:33] Is that just giving us a lot of options there?

[6:36] because everything else is shall.

[6:37] We shall do this.

[6:39] So what is required is the evaluation in the annual.

[6:47] What I wanted to give some flexibility,

[6:49] and we did this with Eric's contract,

[6:51] is flexibility on exactly how we're defining goals

[6:55] and opportunities.

[6:57] And so that's why there's flexibility

[6:59] that's built into the latter half of that paragraph

[7:01] as opposed to inflexibility at the top.

[7:04] The shalls came from the prior agreement.

[7:09] We certainly could make them maize, but my understanding was...

[7:12] Well, I like the flexibility of having, ensuring that she gets an annual review, I think it's been beneficial to her.

[7:19] And to all of us, the maya, I think, gives us some flexibility, so thank you for pointing that out.

[7:27] I guess we just kind of continue with what we've been doing with this current city manager's best practices.

[7:31] This is kind of what we want to do.

[7:32] but I think having a retreat where we kind of define all that annual it should

[7:38] be our expectation going forward just to set everyone up for success I don't want to

[7:43] agree and we could do that offline if there's material changes that we need

[7:50] to make to this contract tonight how does that affect things in terms of don't

[7:54] we have to we have to make a decision on the contract tonight we do we don't

[7:59] have to make a decision on the contract tonight if they're there are

[8:02] material. Well, what do we do? What we don't have to? Well, the consulting agreement, right? It is

[8:07] effective. The employment contract. The employment contract, if we have some

[8:11] direction, we can take it back. I can just include in the resolution what

[8:16] changes made by council as to form if they're simple. If it's something that

[8:21] we actually deal with, that we need to negotiate, we throw this on to the next

[8:26] council meeting, which I think is the 9th, 8th.

[8:29] That doesn't set back her starting date.

[8:33] I guess the start date is the, yeah, Z11 at 5 o'clock.

[8:39] And we would allocate plenty of time for her to review

[8:42] and check with her council as well, right?

[8:45] Yeah, of course.

[8:46] Because I don't know the number that I don't know if I should,

[8:49] if they should all be talking about tonight or...

[8:53] Over here, you've got a number, a number of different things that I think we ought to address on this.

[8:59] You can share those to me.

[9:01] Okay, so are you done?

[9:04] I'm interested.

[9:06] Let me just, before you do, so you want a clarification of May and Shell?

[9:11] I'm good to go on what Bill said. If everyone else is good to go.

[9:14] Okay.

[9:15] The writing in here is fine with me.

[9:16] Okay, so for instance, the first one here is that we have this fixed term that ends August 30th,

[9:26] 2029, right, in the election cycle, and there's nothing in there about renewal or it just ends.

[9:36] And so I'm wondering if it would be better if we had some kind of a automatic renewal

[9:45] or a 90 or 800 day notice of non-renewal just so there's not something strange that ends up happening there.

[9:54] Oh, that's interesting.

[9:55] It's right in the middle of an election cycle, you know.

[10:01] I don't know best practice on that though.

[10:03] Best practice to be is an automatic renewal.

[10:05] so we have we have it's a three-year an annual term three three years with

[10:10] automatic renewals we can we can add an additional renewal I need to of course

[10:15] speak with Matthews if she's willing to do that we can do that four-year

[10:20] automatic renewals annually it's a three year three year we could add a fourth year

[10:26] you could add a fourth year yeah

[10:42] So there's different ways you can do it. And I don't want to set up my successor, but I'll tell you in my case,

[10:51] I talked to you about it early and you extended my original three-year contract by four years.

[10:56] So I think the key, and I think on her behalf, she will be interested as early as possible to get a sense of

[11:04] If you're happy that you let her know that by doing an extension well before you get close enough that

[11:12] the city manager has to start looking for the next shot.

[11:15] I understand. Okay, so it's flexible.

[11:17] And I don't believe it's her, but I don't have a stake in this, but I know the feeling of wondering whether you're going to get your contract renewed.

[11:24] Okay.

[11:24] You know, I think during an annual evaluation, you could kind of take that up, and I appreciate

[11:34] what you did that for me.

[11:36] I think to that point, we could also revisit that particular details in that.

[11:43] Like year two, year three, before we get to year four, we can say, hey, we see the trajectory here.

[11:50] they may be ready to move, they may not be ready to move that person and then we

[11:54] can make a decision at that point in time. We should we'll know the last year

[11:59] of the contract so probably not something that we need to put in an

[12:03] automatic renewal now. I think we should have that discussion a year from now or

[12:07] two years from now or three years from now we can say hey this is what we

[12:11] decided to do because the world changes so quickly. We didn't know what we

[12:14] didn't know when we brought Eric in. It just gives us maximum flexibility as

[12:19] as well, right?

[12:19] This current contract down to three years, August 32 and 29.

[12:23] 229, yeah.

[12:24] And then before in 27, 28,

[12:27] we should be making the decision.

[12:30] I wouldn't want to get to August, 2029,

[12:34] and not know up until the automatic renewal.

[12:37] We should probably do our due diligence

[12:38] well in advance of that.

[12:40] And so this should force our mechanism to say,

[12:43] there's no automatic, so we need to go do something.

[12:46] The next one is that,

[12:47] Well, let me just add, I think legally, you can't buy newer councils coming in.

[12:55] Future councils, right, and that's why the term is annual with an automatic renewal.

[13:01] Just the term sheet I got was three years, that's the term that I put in the agreement.

[13:06] But certainly council wants to have some kind of mechanism, we can do that.

[13:09] I think the mechanism that was intended was just this check-in, this annual check-in.

[13:15] But again, if we want to do something else, that's what we can.

[13:18] We also check in after automatic renewal.

[13:21] Absolutely, yeah.

[13:22] At least we'll be able to check in when it's after given news.

[13:26] Just a little hug.

[13:30] You're next.

[13:32] No release of claims.

[13:34] So if there ends up being a payout,

[13:38] those cities pay out some sort of standard,

[13:41] usually that there's a release of claims.

[13:43] If we do a six month,

[13:46] you know, if there's a severance.

[13:49] Yeah, so one issue is we can't ask somebody

[13:53] to release prospective claims, so future claims

[13:56] that have not arisen.

[13:58] We can't require that to be done.

[14:00] Now, I will say in the normal course of negotiations

[14:03] and working through an event where a severance is triggered,

[14:09] there is a discussion regarding that severance provision.

[14:14] and the waiver of claims, and that would ordinarily be done at that time.

[14:19] So we're not waiving our right to trade.

[14:24] That's right.

[14:26] The

[14:30] next thing is that apparently cause is effectively not defined, is undefined a little bit,

[14:39] because it says shall include but not limited to, and maybe we ought to be putting in there

[14:44] things like clear things like misappropriation of city funds, falsification of records, breaches of the charter, and our city banal policy.

[14:55] So cause is defined as professional misconduct among others.

[15:00] Issues and professional misconduct is defined. Willful disregard of express directed by mayor

[15:04] and council. Refusal to abate reasonable lawful orders in

[15:09] mayor and council. Willful neglect of duties, violation of the city code of ethics.

[15:14] Do you not think that's too loose? I don't, because I think it defines a pretty

[15:21] wide breadth of conduct that would arise from creating cause.

[15:26] the kind of balance that you have to play when you're defining causes you don't

[15:31] want to be too particularly targeted because there are circumstances that

[15:35] may be outside of that that if you use broad statements would capture it but

[15:41] if you use precise language may not so there is a balance that you do want to

[15:46] play to make sure that you're keeping broad language obviously if there is

[15:50] specificity it's very important that this council tell me and we will make

[15:55] sure that's in there right it's not like we have to choose broad or specific we

[16:01] can choose both I think what happened with mr. Johnson's contract and it was

[16:09] just a lot of it just wasn't as robust as his contract or better at Morris I think

[16:15] that's maybe where a little bit of our fear comes from it's we want to make

[16:19] sure this works for her for the citizens so how much we started from

[16:26] ground floor on this contract right ground floor but plus we exchanged some

[16:32] kind of templates early on it's just kind of talk about what are what are kind of

[16:38] negotiable points.

[16:42] Any other questions? Comments or concerns?

[16:50] Okay. I haven't heard from council.

[16:53] Chair will entertain a motion.

[16:56] How are we doing all three at once?

[17:00] Suggestion from city attorney?

[17:05] Actually let's have three separate motions. So appointment, independent,

[17:11] it consulting agreement motion to

[17:17] the point Sherry having Matthews the

[17:21] city managers effective September 11th

[17:24] 2026 at 5 p.m. second well motion and

[17:28] second on the floor do we have any

[17:29] discussion here none all in favor that

[17:33] be known by raising your right hand to

[17:34] sing aye. Aye. Oppose the same side. Motion passes. Welcome.

[17:46] I can make a motion to approve professional services contract a lot for the retention of

[17:51] sharing ops and Matthews as a consultant during the transitional period second

[17:57] it's been motion and second to approve any objections to moving the question forward just

[18:03] clarification we're defining transitional period here from now until date until September 11th

[18:15] The other question is the objection to moving the question you're not all in favor they'd be known by raising your right hand saying

[18:27] Opposed the same sign motion passes

[18:31] Okay, make a motion to approve the employment contract for sharing Alps and Matthews for her employment as city manager

[18:38] With motion on the floor

[18:43] motion and second on board. Any further discussion?

[18:48] The objection to moving the question. Seeing none, all in place, will it be known by raising your right hand and saying aye?

[18:55] Aye.

[18:55] Opposed to the same sign. Thank you, Bruce. Okay. Again, welcome aboard. I'm going to ask that Sherry come up and we'll formally introduce her.

[19:10] And if you'll come to the podium, I'll let you come to the podium.

[19:13] So it is my pleasure to introduce the city of Norcross's incoming manager, Sherry Hopson Matthews.

[19:21] Sherry is an accomplished local government executive with extensive experience in strategic planning,

[19:28] organizational leadership, community development, budgeting, and public administration.

[19:34] And before joining Norcross, she served Henry County's government for more than a decade, that's a long time.

[19:41] including as county manager. She holds a master in urban and regional planning from Alabama A&M, but we won't hold that again.

[19:54] And her leadership has been recognized with several honors including the Jerry R. Griffin Excellence in Public Service Award,

[20:02] the Georgia City County Management Association Pillars of Excellence Award,

[20:08] and recognition as one of the Southern Crescent's top 50 women of influence.

[20:16] And Sherry is known as a collaborative, thoughtful, and results-oriented leader who values transparency,

[20:25] accountability, and strong community relationships.

[20:28] And her exceptional public service is well-known throughout the study.

[20:34] And we're excited to welcome her to the City of Noracoss and we look forward to her experience,

[20:40] her leadership and the vision that she will bring to the city.

[20:43] Please join me in welcoming my new...

[20:51] Mayor and Council, thank you all so very much, and to the community, thank you.

[20:56] I am truly elated to stand before you all as the incoming City Manager for the City

[21:01] of Noracoss.

[21:02] I will tell you that the path here has been nothing but delightful.

[21:06] I have had so many residents, business owners, community leaders reach out, and so I am extremely

[21:12] excited.

[21:13] So Mayor, Council, thank you all for seeing in me this leadership that I'm ready to bring

[21:17] forth and to work with the employees of the City of North Cross.

[21:21] I do have to pause because I think I am the reason y'all reached your limit for

[21:25] the number of individuals here this night, but I have a very strong village and so

[21:29] I certainly want to recognize my husband who's here tonight, my parents that are

[21:33] here as well.

[21:34] my daughter and her fiance and then I also have some Henry County people that

[21:40] are here that just absolutely lovely so thank you all for your support I am

[21:44] excited to be here I'm excited to set the standard and I'm excited to see what

[21:49] we are going to bring to the city of Norcross so thank you for trusting me

[21:53] thank you I certainly want to perform this evaluation Eric thank you for four

[21:58] years because that gives me a piece of my

[22:01] I don't even know if that is service or something.

[22:05] But again thank you all so very much and I will be here

[22:08] right early in the morning and I am ready to get started so

[22:11] thank you all very very much.

[22:12] Thank you.

[22:13] Congratulations.

[22:20] Congratulations.

[22:21] Thank you.

[22:22] Thank

[22:27] you.

[22:30] Thank you.

[22:31] Thank you.

[22:32] Thank you.

[22:32] See you in the morning.

[22:33] Thank you.

[22:35] Okay, that was the last agenda item for a special call meeting.

[22:40] We're gonna need some transitional period, I've been notified by Tecnic or

[22:45] we're gonna have to do some change over stuff.

[22:47] So again, thank you all for being here.

[22:51] We'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

[22:52] Motion to adjourn.

[22:53] Second.

[22:54] Motion second to adjourn.

[22:55] The objection.

[22:57] All in favor?

[22:58] Motion passes.

[23:00] Thank you all.

[23:03] for a moment there like that, that was quick.

[23:19] Thank you for coming.

[23:22] Thank you for that.

[23:24] Thank you so much.

Special Called Meeting of the Mayor and Council

Transcript