Escambia County Commissioner Jack Brown has notified the Board of County Commissioners the names of the five finalists for the assistant administrator job.
Former Pensacola Police Chief David Alexander, III is among finalists, as is assistant Pensacola airport director Matthew F. Coughlin.
The other finalists are James Mallon, Albert Penksa and Jason L. Ward.
Brown’s selection committee consisted of Janice Kilgore with Navy Federal Credit Union, Keith Hoskins with Gulf Power, Chip Simmons, former Assistant County Administrator and current Deputy Chief of Operations for the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department, and Brown.
The county is currently in the process of conducting background, credit and reference checks.
If you study the Escambia County organization chart as currently posted to the county’s website, you see that the staff is organized into three groups that might generally be described as a “bureau” consisting of mostly related subordinate departments. The chart can be found at the link below:
https://myescambia.com/docs/default-source/sharepoint-administration/organizational-chart.pdf
The position seems custom made for Chief Alexander as it was before him for Chief Simmons to include that one of the four departments supervised performs the Animal Control function “inside” city limits. Chief Alexander seems an ideal candidate for this position.
Above and beyond Chief Alexander’s obvious professional qualifications for the position, he extensive community service after-hours and broad respect among city residents and business owners should work in his favor too.