During an interview with NBC 25 after a Sept. 13 Mott Community College Board of Trustees meeting, chair Andy Everman provided this explanation for why the Board of Trustees decided to appoint its own internal ad-hoc committee to hire a permanent president rather than use the typical step of hiring a search firm that specializes in finding candidates for executive level positions in higher education:

“The board looked at the prices for that, and we’re concerned about how much it costs to do that, and they want to try it in house with our HR department, our resources at the college, our board attorney, our members looking through that,” Everman said.

Well, let’s consult the tape. At about the 27:36 minute mark at that meeting, Trustee Jeffrey Swanson and Everman both indicate that they don’t even know how much it would cost to hire a search firm.

“How pricey are these (firms)?” Swanson asks.

“We don’t know, when you go through each one of them (the proposals), they did not give us a price,” Everman responds.

At about the 28:08 mark, Swanson then makes a motion to not use any of the search firms and instead establish an ad-hoc committee to do the search. At the point the motion is made, both Everman and Swanson have publicly said they don’t even know what the costs would be to use a firm.

At the 30-minute mark, Mott Assistant Vice President of Human Resources Kristi Dawley is allowed to address the board. She points out that the firms did, in fact, provide cost estimates in their proposals in the packets in front of board members. Everman and Swanson either both missed that, or both didn’t even review the proposals before deciding to use an ad-hoc committee. The absolute most generous I can be here would be to suggest that Everman and Swanson may have both quickly skimmed the costs after it was pointed out to them the information was in their packets, so I guess they technically could’ve glanced at the prices in the minute or two between acknowledging they didn’t know and voting on a motion. But both CLEARLY had no idea what a search firm even costs before a motion was made and supported, so to suggest that the board made this decision based on their worries about “cost” is not credible when that wasn’t even information at least two of the four trustees who voted for this cared to find out or discuss publicly. This is another decision that appears to have been made before the public meeting even took place.