The city council emerged from a special closed-door meeting Friday with a vote to confirm its support of City Manager Mark Freitag.
Mark Freitag
According to an announcement released Friday, the council publicly registered a “vote of confidence in support of the city manager, wishing him well” on a motion made by Council President Paul Benson.
A vote of confidence is a statement that the majority of a body of elected officials continues to support and approve of a leader, such as a city manager.
It followed Freitag’s daylong tour Wednesday of the UW-Whitewater campus and his participation in a town hall-style forum at the university. It was part of an interview process for the position there of vice chancellor of administrative affairs. He is one of four finalists.
Freitag’s job search outside City Hall went public last week when UW-Whitewater announced finalists for the vice chancellor job on its website. He said in Wednesday’s publicly broadcast forum that he had been involved in the application and interview process for the job since January.
Freitag has been Janesville’s city manager—the city’s chief administrator—for nine years. Friday’s closed-session council meeting was billed as allowing the council to discuss his employment with the city.
This week, prior to Friday’s closed session, city council members told The 69 they believed the council continued to support Freitag’s leadership.
The closed session also came a week after some downtown business operators blasted Freitag at a city council meeting over his decision not to reinstate a salon owner who had been a voting member of the public steering committee that runs the city’s downtown Business Improvement District. The BID is a special taxing jurisdiction for the downtown.
Freitag is allowed by law to have the final word on city committee appointments or reappointments.
The council last week upheld Freitag’s recommended appointments to the BID’s governing board, although a majority said they would have preferred Freitag to uphold the BID committee’s recommended appointments, which included the downtown salon owner Freitag opted not to reappoint.
Council members said they accepted Freitag’s committee member recommendations because the majority of BID members said they would OK the change.
