It’s not quite official yet, but the Westlake City Council agreed through consensus Tuesday, Sept. 2 to name current City Clerk Zoie Burgess as acting city manager.
Burgess is an employee of Inframark Inc., a governmental staffing agency contracted with the city to provide management services. She has been at Westlake since 2019 and would take over on Saturday, Sept. 27, after the resignation of longtime City Manager Kenneth Cassel takes effect Friday, Sept. 26.
The council will hold a special meeting on Thursday, Sept. 11 at 5:30 p.m. to take a formal vote.
“I’m very excited,” Burgess said Wednesday. “I believe in continuity, and I believe this is the best way for the city to continue the momentum it has built up.”
For several years, Westlake has been the fastest growing municipality in Palm Beach County and one fastest growing in the state. It has been recognized in national publications as one of the top planned communities in the United States.
“I have total confidence that with Zoie as acting city manager, and with the rest of the team that is servicing Westlake, the city will not miss a beat,” Cassel told council members.
Cassel has guided the young municipality since its incorporation in 2016 under a contract with Inframark. For nearly a decade, he has balanced dual roles, managing both the City of Westlake and the Seminole Improvement District (SID), which provides most of the community’s infrastructure.
That arrangement, once seen as efficient, is now viewed by many in Westlake as a conflict that has outlived its usefulness.
Council members appeared to be in clear consensus at a Thursday, Aug. 28 special meeting and the Tuesday, Sept. 2 regular monthly session that they want to separate the two managerial roles, and that they want to hire a city manager who is not an Inframark employee.
However, it is expected that most of the city’s governmental infrastructure will remain in the hands of the contractor for the time being.
“We agree it may be time to carve out the city manager,” said Chris Tarase, Inframark’s president for community management, during the special meeting. “We’re willing partners to update the agreement — it’s almost 10 years old — and provide more transparency.”
Burgess said that the job would only be temporary.
“I’m ready for the challenge but only on a temporary basis,” she said.
Councilman Gary Werner expressed concerns at the special meeting about moving too quickly to name Burgess as the acting city manager.
“I felt it was important to go through a process… appear to be objective to the community,” he said Tuesday. “[But] I think Zoie has very good credentials and background. I’m totally in support of her.”
Prior to Westlake, Burgess was assistant manager for the Town of Lake Clarke Shores from 2015 to 2019. From 2007 to 2015, she was assistant to the city manager of the Town of Highland Beach.
Burgess grew up in Wellington, where she still resides with her husband and two children. She is a 2001 graduate of Palm Beach Lakes High School and holds a degree in public management from Florida Atlantic University.
Though she started college with an eye toward becoming an attorney, Burgess said she shifted because, “I wanted to be out there helping families and communities.”
Burgess, a certified municipal clerk — a professional credential recognizing advanced training in records, elections and municipal law — is pursuing the master municipal clerk designation. She also is a member of several local, state, national and even international organizations related to city management.
During the special meeting, council members heard from Dale Sugerman, who led their recent strategic planning sessions, that “the right candidate for Westlake will likely require $180,000 to $200,000, plus benefits.”
Sugerman warned that applicant pools are often crowded with unqualified résumés. “You’ll get everyone from restaurant district managers to franchise executives who think they can do the job. You need the right recruiter to filter those out,” he said. “A really good search will cost between $35,000 and $50,000, plus expenses.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, however, council members heard that the Florida City and County Management Association will do the search for free, “and provide us with as many candidates as we want,” Vice Mayor Greg Langowski said.
“I don’t want to rush the search for a permanent city manager,” Mayor John Paul O’Connor has said. “I want the city to do a robust search… and hire the perfect person. But the end goal is clear — a dedicated city manager for the City of Westlake.”
In other business, the council voted 5-0 to extend for five years the contract with Waste Management Inc. for the city’s solid waste and recycling collection and disposal.
Even though Coastal Waste & Recycling came in with a slightly lower bid, Cassel said that Waste Management was graded higher by a three-person committee asked to rank the bids.
O’Connor said that it would be “irresponsible” of the city to go through such a “massive transition” while the city manager position also is in flux. The difference “isn’t worth making the change,” he said.
The contract could be extended another two years, for a total of seven years.
