Search for new county parks director narrows to 4

The Madison County Conservation Board met in a special called meeting last week to narrow down the list of applicants for the open position for parks and recreation director.

“We’ve had a number of applicants that come in, but the thing we need to do tonight is try to narrow the list down to five candidates or fewer that we want to bring in for interviews,” said committee chair Milt Canovan.

The process started by having each of the five committee members list their respective top five candidates.

All five committee members had four certain names on their list: Steven Hill (from Crossville), Sean de Palma (from Miami), Matthew Martin (from Paducah, Ky.) and Angie Whisnant (from Springfield, Ill.).

County Human Resources Director Terica Smith put the job posting in various places to try to get the largest pool of applicants, and the committee said they were glad to have a larger pool than last time.

The last time they had to hire a director in 2020, they actually had to post the job twice because they weren’t satisfied with the pool of applicants from the first posting.

All of the four are appropriately certified to run the county’s parks, but Martin is the only one who currently serves in a parks and recreation director capacity. De Palma has been out of the park and rec business for less than a year, while the other two have been out a number of years but still working in municipal government.

No one on the committee has discussed salary scale or anything like that with any of the applicants, and they decided to call all four of the applicants on Sept. 4 for a series of 30-minute conference calls with each applicant separately to continue the interview process.

Nothing was officially announced at the meeting as far as how the process would progress past that.

Tony Ragland, the program director for the department who’s been serving as interim director since Chris Guerin resigned in June, pulled his name from consideration for the position.

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news