The Sisters City Council plans to wait until July to start looking for a new, permanent city manager.

Andrew Gorayeb, interim city manager, said he knew of no plans by the council to start the hiring process earlier. Mayor Brad Boyd said the council May 2 voted 5-0 to delay a search until after the budget season.

“We are not going to try to do a search for qualified candidates in-house,” Boyd said. “We’ll either go to the League of Oregon Cities or an outside firm and have them help us find qualified candidates.”

Boyd said the council does not have a deadline for having a new manager in place.

“We want to find the most qualified person who fits well with Sisters and so, from my perspective we’ve got a great ‘limited duration’ city manager who is doing a great job, and the council is getting used to him,” Boyd said.

“So let’s not rush the search for a permanent person. Let’s do the job right and have public input with all the candidates and make that hire once.”

The July meeting will come more than three months after Eileen Stein resigned as Sisters city manager on April 1, taking with her 11 months of severance pay and benefits, totaling more than $108,000.

The resignation caused waves among the five-member City Council, with two councilors voting not to accept her resignation and claiming they’d been left out of the discussion about Stein’s employment. Catherine Childress and David Asson, the dissenting councilors, wrote in an open letter before Stein’s resignation that the other three city councilors had been privately negotiating her resignation since early March. Asson suggested the process by which Stein’s resignation was garnered was a likely violation of public meetings law.

Boyd said he is hopeful the council will be able to come together to find a top-notch city manager.

“I’m certainly hopeful. We’re working pretty well together. There are always little bumps and stuff,” he said. “From my perspective it’s important that whoever we hire permanently gets a 5-0 vote. No one wants to take a job with a 3-2 vote or a 4-1 vote. … Coming to a consensus is more important than putting an arbitrary date on it.”

Stein’s contract only called for four months’ severance. Instead she received one month for each of the 11 years she spent running Sisters.

Stein served 11 years as city manager of the 2,000-population community. For her service, she received severance pay totaling more than $75,500, as well as more than $5,000 in accrued vacation pay and 11 months of health insurance.

According to an email from city finance director Lisa Young, Stein’s severance, which totals $108,124, was not budgeted for the 2012-13 fiscal year. Because it was paid out in a lump sum rather than over several months, the money had to be taken out of four funds over two fiscal years. But Young noted in her email that there was no net budgetary effect to the overall 2012-13 budget.

Earlier this month, the council passed a supplemental budget adjustment for this fiscal year, moving $92,902 to personnel services, mostly from the general fund, but also from the water, street and sewer funds. The $15,222 remainder of Stein’s severance will be paid out of the 2013-14 fiscal year budget.

Sisters operated with a $8.98 million budget in the 2012-13 fiscal year. Stein’s total severance of $108,124 was worth a bit more than 1 percent of the total budget.

In her email, Young noted that because of the April 1 payment to Stein, the city was briefly out of compliance with Oregon budget law, which would be noted in the city’s annual financial report but would not result in any penalty.

Gorayeb was hired as the “limited duration” city manager a week after Stein’s resignation. He’s now been heading up the city for five weeks, and has a set term through Aug. 10. He earns $6,733 a month.

“We have a great staff and people are working hard and we’re accomplishing great things,” he said. “I’m really enjoying the work.”

He said the city’s budget committee recently passed a 2013-14 budget, which is expected to be approved and adopted at the next council meeting.

“I’m in the process of doing some things that should substantially save money with the debt service expense, for the current debt held by the city of Sisters,” Gorayeb said. “The budget does have the expenses associated with the severance paid to my predecessor and the budget is balanced, and it will go forward positively. So factually, everything’s OK.”