Bluffton announces pick for new town manager. Here’s who got the offer
Bluffton’s Town Council voted Monday to offer an Upstate administrator, Stephen Steese, the position of town manager.
After the council met in closed executive session for over six hours Monday, Bluffton Town Council member Bridgette Frazier motioned to offer Steese the position. Steese is administrator of the City of Easley, S.C., according to his Linkedin profile. Steese and town officials will negotiate his starting salary, Frazier said.
Steese was among four candidates for the position, Bluffton Mayor Lisa Sulka said Monday. The council interviewed three candidates in person and one over Zoom, she said. Had it interviewed three candidates, the council would have been required by law to announce the finalists, Sulka acknowledged.
Monday’s meeting and vote, in which none of the potential candidates was publicly named, happened just a few months after Town of Hilton Head Island officials were sharply criticized for the secret way they poached Town Manager Marc Orlando from Bluffton. In the wake of Hilton Head’s hire, officials across the county promised to be more transparent when hiring top officials. Sulka promised to hold a public search process for the next permanent town manager.
But as The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette reported less than three weeks ago, Bluffton officials quietly paid a Greenville-based headhunting company to start the town’s search.
Over the past two weeks, Bluffton Town Council held five special meetings, all in executive session, to discuss the town’s search. Town officials have made no public statements nor provided the names of finalists for the job.
According to the S.C. Freedom of Information Act, the names of the final three applicants under consideration for a position must be made available for public inspection and copying. Current interim Town Manager Scott Marshall, who told a reporter he applied for the job, was the only candidate the public was aware of.
Called after Monday’s meeting, Bluffton Town Council member Fred Hamilton said the council planned to interview four candidates Monday, but one candidate “backed out before the meeting.”
Hamilton said there were no public statements about potential candidates because “every time we had someone we thought was going to be in the top, they got a job somewhere else.”
Hamilton said officials chose Steese because of his performance in Monday’s interview. He said Steese was “very polished” and “could pick up the ball and run with it right away.”
“We were expecting to having a final list of three (candidates), but there wasn’t any sense in going further,” he said.
Stephen Steese
Steese has served as Easley’s city administrator since 2015, according to his Linkedin profile.
Easley hired Steese in a process similar to Bluffton’s, according to a report in The Greenville News. Easley Mayor Larry Bagwell said he had planned to release the names of three finalists for the job, as required by the Freedom of Information Act, but the council decided to make the decision in a meeting after narrowing it down to two on a numerical ranking.
Steese, according to The Greenville News, is a native of Florence and earned two degrees from Clemson University — a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in public administration.
Before heading to Easley, he worked as city manager for the cities of Woodruff, S.C. and Roxboro, N.C.
This story was originally published April 26, 2021 at 6:28 PM.
