ELKINS — City of Elkins officials have been meeting in recent weeks with the city attorney for Westover about potential charter changes that would result in the creation of a city manager position.

Tim Stranko serves as Westover’s general counsel on a retainer basis and is a member of the West Virginia Bar as well as the Morgantown Planning Commission.

Stranko first visited Elkins on his own dime to offer Elkins City Council his expertise and knowledge of municipal law. The public was not invited to the meeting.

“The council decided then to contract or to hire Mr. Stranko to come in and provide a lot of information up front for these discussions that they want to have ongoing,” Elkins City Clerk Jessica Sutton said.

Stranko was retained for $6,400 to include consultations, memo-drafting and related research, a move which was approved during an Elkins City Council Finance Committee meeting on Dec. 2.

“He’s been a municipal attorney for years and years, and he’s helped facilitate charter changes for other municipalities around the state in the past, Lewisburg being a good example,” Sutton said. “He has a lot of experience, he has a lot of expertise in this type of area so we asked him to come in and just kind of provide some of that information as far as what our options are.”

Stranko has broken the discussion down into separate topics for individual sessions with the city.

“In the first session, we focused a lot on the governmental body, which would be council. How can you structure council? What are the options and what are some of the pros and cons with these different options?” Sutton said.

In the second private meeting, he and the city focused more on the executive branch of government, including the strength of the city mayor and the benefits and downsides to adopting a city manager government.

“Now there are a lot of other things that are going into his education and that will be part of the conversation moving forward,” Sutton said. “Things that are included in the charter, like when the election is held, whether or not you want elected officials to be nominated or do self-nomination, if you want to keep the same number of wards and if you want elected officials to have to reside within particular wards. All of these types of things he’s kind of educating council and the (administrative) officers on right now.”

“Once we get (the sessions) done, the intention is to hold at least one, and likely more, public forums different from just a formal public hearing,” she said. “We really want to be able to engage with the constituents and see what their feelings are about these things… having some public sessions before it’s ever really drafted into an ordinance that would then go through Rules and Ordinances and then on to Council.”

If Stranko is required for any additional legal services outside of what he has been retained for, the city will need to determine payment and costs again at that time, according information provided by Sutton Stokes, the city’s external affairs specialist.

The city’s interest in changing to a city manager style of government was initially brought to light during a 2018 meeting of the Rules and Ordinance Committee, wherein officials discussed the potential benefits of creating the city manager position.