Council committee endorses CAO candidate shortlist; Duckworth's replacement to be revealed soon

With outgoing chief administrative officer David Duckworth’s last day just over a month from now, city council’s executive committee endorsed a confidential shortlist Monday of candidates who are in the running to replace him.

The committee voted unanimously, 14-0, in support of a final shortlist of candidates who will undergo a second round of interviews next month. However, the recommendations still require council’s approval at their regular meeting Tuesday.

Mayor Jeromy Farkas confirmed there are three final candidates to replace Duckworth, who has been the city’s top administrator since 2019.

“I, for one, am looking for an individual who can inspire confidence in our city administration, who can highlight the great work that’s being done, as well as work more closely with the community,” Farkas told reporters after Monday’s meeting. “We want a city manager that’s responsive to community concerns, accountable to the public, and more than anything else, accountable to make sure that every single tax dollar is spent wisely.”

The CAO, formerly called city manager, is the highest ranking administrative position at the City of Calgary. They oversee all city departments and the executive leadership team, though they technically report and answer to city council.

Calgary’s new chief administrator will come into the job with a “blank slate,” Farkas said, as they take the reins of a corporation that includes roughly 15,000 employees and a roughly $5-billion operating budget.

The CAO is the only city staff member that council hires directly.

“This is a good time for a natural renewal, a natural examination of our priorities,” the mayor said. “We’ve developed our strategic plan around public safety, around essential infrastructure, around affordability, and now we need that top city official to be in place to execute.”

Duckworth’s departure was announced at a news conference last April. His last day will be Dec. 1.

While the announcement was precipitated by months of speculation that some council members wanted to terminate Duckworth in the wake of a second failure of the Bearspaw South feeder main and a damning third-party report about management of the city’s water assets, Farkas denied at the April news conference that Duckworth was being forced out of the role. He called his departure, rather, a “mutually agreed” transition in corporate leadership.

Contradicting that statement, though, is that Duckworth’s contract doesn’t end until mid-2027. He will receive 16 months of severance and had a base salary of $410,000 last year.

To find a new CAO, council struck a recruitment subcommittee this summer and retained Boyden Canada, an executive leadership consulting firm, to assist with the search.

Ward 3 Coun. Andrew Yule, who was nominated to chair the subcommittee, said 228 candidates ultimately applied for the job.

In early September, the committee reviewed the resumes of leading contenders, with a focus on candidates whose qualifications related most closely to the profile established for the CAO position, Yule said. From there, the list was whittled down and the committee interviewed leading candidates over two days last week.

The shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in mid-November, Yule said — shortly before council meets for a days-long budget deliberations.

“We’re needing good leaders,” Yule said. “This council wants to move on a lot of items, and so we need somebody who can step in and take the bull by the horns. We’re a major, multi-billion-dollar company that needs strong leadership at the top in order to look at our strategic priorities and make sure that action is happening in the organization.”

Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness, the subcommittee’s vice-chair, said whoever council ends up hiring, the new CAO will need to be given a clear set of expectations.

“If council doesn’t have that answer, no matter who we put in, they will be in a challenging spot,” she told reporters. “So council, again, needs to do our work to make sure whoever we hire is successful.”

With council potentially still in the midst of budget deliberations on Dec. 1, Yule said it’s likely that an interim CAO will be appointed internally for a brief period immediately after Duckworth’s departure.

“But it really depends on the candidate and whether there needs to be any sort of issues cleared up with their current employer,” Yule said, adding council hopes to announce the new CAO before the end of November.

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