The unexpected departure of the District of Sechelt’s (DOS) chief financial officer Victor Mema this week has left the District without any permanent senior staff.
On Monday, Mema gave one week’s notice of his intent to leave the DOS to take a job in Nanaimo, making his last day effective Aug. 28.
He will become the City of Nan-aimo’s new finance director as of Sept. 8.
“That was unexpected,” Sechelt Mayor Bruce Milne said this week.
Mema was the last of the permanent senior staff at the District. Currently the DOS has an interim CAO, Bill Beamish; an interim director of development services, Mike Vance; and an interim corporate officer, Gerry Van Der Wolf.
A personnel committee has been appointed to find permanent replacements for the senior positions and Milne said it will now be tasked with finding a new financial officer as well.
“It looks to me like it will be a four to six-month search for those senior positions. Some of them might come a little earlier, some of them closer to the end of that, but it’ll be about six months before we get the whole team in place,” Milne said, noting his council has to talk about whether or not an interim chief financial officer is needed.
“We’ll be moving as quickly as we can on that entire senior management team, but we really haven’t made the decision about the next, say, two months.”
Milne said the District’s manager of financial services, Linda Klassen, will be able to “manage the department and all of the operational issues” until a new senior person is hired.
Mema told Coast Reporter that although many other senior people have left the District lately, “timing has nothing to do with my departure from Sechelt.”
“I have been looking for a place that will allow me to have my family together and Nanaimo provides me that opportunity,” Mema said, explaining that the move will provide more work and university opportunities for his children.
