Acting on widespread community and council support, Durham City Council unanimously agreed to appointed P. Lamont Ewell, currently assistant city manager of Oakland, Calif., to the position of Durham city manager at its May 19 meeting.
The appointment of Ewell, who will be the first black person to hold the position on a permanent basis, ends a nine-month search to fill the position left vacant by Orville Powell, who retired after 14 years. The city manager post is widely considered to be Durham's most important and powerful government position.
"Mr. Ewell really fits the bill," Mayor Sylvia Kerckhoff said. "We think he and Durham will get along beautifully."
Kerckhoff's assertion parallels the apparent cross-community agreement that Ewell is uniquely suited for the job.
"I do not like to just bounce around or submit applications for the fun of it," Ewell said in a telephone interview. "When I submitted my application to Durham, I had determined that it was a very good match for me and my skill sets, and it looks like the people of Durham agree."
At the top of Ewell's list of qualifications is the nature of his current home city, Oakland, Calif. Its population of 390,000-nearly twice the Durham population-is considered one of the most diverse in the nation.
Howard Clement, council member and chair of the search committee, said Ewell's "apparent kinship" with Durham brings Clement "a great deal of pleasure and confidence."
"At one point during the course of the community forum we held a few weeks ago, [Ewell] said he closed his eyes and said he could easily imagine he was in Oakland because of the kinds of questions that were generated on the floor," Clement said.
Ewell said the transition to a smaller city is one of factors that most excites him.
"Oakland is an extremely complex city, one that is quite demanding," he said. "A 12-hour day is a good day. If anything, I look forward to a smaller community where I can focus on issues rather than plugging the holes."
Many consider Ewell's background and ensuing leadership style as among his most salient and distinctive qualifiers.
After growing up in what he dubbed "the toughest neighborhoods" of Compton, Calif., Ewell began his public career in 1975 when he became a firefighter.
In 1991, he made a national name for himself when he assumed the Oakland fire chief post and adeptly handled a devastating fire that struck the city just two weeks later.
"[Ewell] truly is a rising star," said Paul Miller, a Durham council member. "People over the years have had confidence in his ability. That's how he has moved up the ranks."
Several issues-such as the selection of a new police chief and attention to Durham's proposed landfill-are widely identified as issues Ewell must address immediately upon his anticipated July 1 arrival.
But beyond these two issues, Ewell was hesitant to pinpoint any target areas, preferring instead "to wait and first assess the community's needs."
The new city manager did say, however, that the improvement of Duke/Durham relations is one of his priorities.
He was "very intrigued," he said, by an article he read in a Duke publication claiming that the University does not want its "town/gown" relations to become as bad as those at Yale University. He identified the community interaction between Oakland and nearby University of California at Berkeley as a possible model and suggested that entertainment resources such as a large movie theater might draw Duke students out of the Gothic Wonderland.
"One of my objectives is to make Durham more of a college town where people feel comfortable leaving campus and enjoying some of the amenities downtown," he said.
Clement concurred that Ewell's selection could lend new energy to improving Duke/Durham relations.
"Duke will play an important role in [Ewell's] orientation process because it is such an important resource," he said. "Hopefully, the folks at Duke will be receptive. Certainly, [President Nan Keohane is] the most town-conscious president I've seen in a long time."
Earlier in the selection process, political observers speculated that the city council, with its eight-to-five black majority, might be unduly influenced by race in their choice. But Ewell's approval appears to transcend racial divisions.
"It was clear to me that the city council would pick an African American," said David Smith, chair of Friends of Durham, a Durham political organization. "But, on the other hand, I went and heard him speak, and he was very good. He deserves the full support of the community."
Council member Kimball Griffin said the council's unanimous public approval had been planned almost three weeks in advance. The council, he explained, wanted to demonstrate a show of solidarity in the wake of the Durham Board of Education's racially split superintendent election in February.
Griffin said the council voted by secret ballot during executive session immediately before the Monday meeting. At that time, Ewell earned a majority victory over his competitor, Mary Strenn of San Fernando, Calif., but the vote was not unanimous. Council members subsequently passed a motion to make the approval unanimous at the public meeting.
"We wanted to make the vote unanimous because we didn't want to make it look like four or five of us were mad that he was picked," Griffin said.
The decision to make the public approval unanimous, Council member Floyd McKissick said, represented "a very strong symbolic gesture of unified support for the preferred candidate."
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