By LINDA HARRIS

Staff writer

STEUBENVILLE — Months from having to choose a new city manager, City Council has scheduled a get-to-know-you meeting with the five candidates for the job.

The current office holder, Jim Mavromatis, plans to retire in March. Mavromatis, a Steubenville native with a long career in law enforcement, has managed the city for the past 10 years.

Council has scheduled a special meeting Thursday for the initial interviews — due to the holidays, three applicants will meet with council through Zoom. The other two candidates, both local, will appear in person.

No names have been released.

The meeting, which will include discussion about a proposed revision to the table of organization that included pay raises for a handful of employees, will begin in council chambers, then move to the conference room where they can do the interviews behind closed doors.

Councilman at large Joel Walker said if they do narrow the candidate pool down that day, “we can … make sure they come in for in-person interviews.”

“The interviews (need) to be done next week due to the timing,” said Walker, who is spearheading the search process. “Jim is leaving in March and our goal is to have the next city manager in place before he leaves for a smooth transition. If for some reason we don’t find the right person out of this group, it still gives us time to search for the person we believe will be the (right fit) for the job.”

Council, meanwhile, gave Wastewater Superintendent Chuck Murphy the go-ahead to instruct engineers to use drone technology and 3-D laser scanning to assess structural conditions at the wastewater treatment plant administration and digester building instead of a bringing in a lift that would allow for a visual inspection.

Engineering consultant Eric Fallon, senior project manager with Verdantas, said crews determined using a lift on the riverbank isn’t feasible or safe.

“Using a lift like (they’d originally proposed) is not even possible,” he said. “There’s too much risk, which was a concern of ours early on.”

Fallon told council the 70-year-old building is “showing signs of structural failure in some key spots,” with chunks of concrete falling from the building

“Luckily, no one’s ever been underneath them (when they fell),” he said. “There are visible cracks and separation in the joints, and we’ll be able to actually compare and hopefully take a proactive approach in areas that are out of alignment, out of plumb, that are maybe not visible to the naked eye and would have been missed during a traditional inspection.”

The technical scans will provide a higher quality data than they could have gathered using the naked eye, he added, so despite costing about $42,000 more to do he said it will be a cost savings since “every square inch” will be evaluated, giving the city a more complete picture of what’s happening now as well as a benchmark for future concerns.

“We’ll be able to tell discrepancies even down to a quarter of an inch on every surface we see,” he said, adding they’ll be able to identify the most pressing issues as well as “problems for tomorrow” that the city may want to get in front of at some point in the future.

“Even though there is a cost increase, (you’ll) appreciate the increase in the amount of data you’re going to get and the quality of the data,” he said, adding it would be “virtually impossible” to gather the same data by putting someone on a lift, “and just the man hours involved to even attempt to do that would be astronomical on the price.”

“That’s where we think it’s a good investment for the city to have this data. It will serve you well into the future,” he said. “Once you have these scans, whether it’s us doing it in the near future for the structural assessment, or something you want to do three, five, 10 years down the road, whether it’s us or a future engineering firm, that’s a piece of data you’ll be able to give them, and they’ll be able to hit the ground running with and you won’t have to recreate that again. ”