Interim Administrator Richard Lewis presented a list of “six-month goals” to the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners at their July executive session this week.
Among Lewis’s requests to the board was to grant him power to appoint Interim Finance Director Cathy Hartesvelt as permanent finance director. The board will consider empowering Lewis to do this at their regular session Tuesday.
“Last month, you put the finance director back underneath the administrator. But are you ready for me to move forward with the next step? Which is to make someone permanent (finance director),” Lewis asked. “If you say ‘yes,’ I’m appointing Cathy.”
The finance director position has been vacant since the last director, Sean Cowan, resigned in October 2023. Cowan stayed with the county for less than five months. He said that he left because of insufficient “resources, authority, staff (and) executive support.” Since his departure about eight months ago, Hartesvelt has served as its interim director.
Although Hartesvelt is currently just the interim finance director, she has headed the department longer than anyone else. She also served as interim director for six months from December 2022 to June 2023 after another finance director, Jared Prince, left.
Managing the department for so long might make Hartesvelt an obvious choice for the position. Commissioner Melinda Lautner evidently thought so when she tried to amend a separate board motion in February to name Hartesvelt finance director, a motion that she ultimately withdrew.
“She has the experience of everything that happens in this building and this county,” Lewis told the board Tuesday. “She’s been doing this for almost two years. If she doesn’t know what’s happening in this department, I don’t know who does.”
However, former county Administrator Chet Janik cautioned the board against promoting Hartesvelt in March. Janik, who had been hired by the county as a consultant with the Michigan Leadership Institute to lead the search for a combined administrator/ chief financial officer (CFO), argued that the next administrator should choose the new finance director.
“Probably the most critical person that the new administrator will have to work with will be the finance director, and you have to make sure that person is comfortable with whoever’s in that position,” Janik told the board in March. “I think if you name someone as finance director now before you go through the search, it goes against the grain of what you said you were going to do.”
Janik believed that naming Hartesvelt finance director would fuel the rumor among county staff that the clerk’s office is still in control of the county’s purse strings. Hartesvelt started in the clerk’s office and is a longtime friend of Clerk Michelle Crocker.
These rumors could have some substance: September 2023 report by the county’s advisory firm, Rehmann, suggested that the transition of duties from the clerk’s office to the finance department was still incomplete.
After underwhelming interviews for the administrator/ CFO position, however, the county board seems to be changing directions. Some commissioners appear to have concluded that it will be too difficult to find someone for this role, and they may need to separate the administrator and CFO roles again. This means that the new administrator and finance director may not work together as closely as previously thought.
“Whatever title you want to give that (next) administrator is fine. You can put ‘CFO’ on it, or ‘the king of cards.’ The administrator is still held accountable no matter what title you give him. The key word is ‘administrator,’” Lewis said.
The county has also been paying Crocker and Deputy Clerk Jennifer Zywicki $250 stipends per week since December 2023 to prepare the county budget, manage payroll, and work with Rehmann on the county’s 2023 audit. The board started paying Crocker and Zywicki after Cowan left to ensure these functions were still being done.
Lewis wants to put an end to these stipends by Sept. 13 after the county’s fiscal year 2025 annual budget is completed. He also stated his intention to upgrade the finance department to use BS&A Software, moving towards automated processes recommended by Cowan.
Lewis, a former Traverse City mayor, was appointed Leelanau County’s interim administrator in late March. He was supposed to occupy the position until the board found a full-time replacement for the previous county administrator, Deb Allen, who stepped down April 12 to make way for a new administrator with a “deep” financial background.
Last month, the county board hoped to hire a qualified candidate for a county administrator/ CFO position. But by June 14, the board had interviewed seven candidates and was not ready to extend a job offer to any of them. So instead, the board extended Lewis’s term through Dec. 31 “or before in the event a new administrator/ CFO is hired by the county.”
County Board Chairman Ty Wessell said that the board will discuss how they “want to define, or redefine, the administrator position” at a future meeting, but not at the July 16 regular session. The board previously stated they would resume the search for the next administrator in mid-September and fill the position by December.
