Port Arthur District 4 Councilmember Harold Doucet has asked for discussion about the search for a city manager at Tuesday’s scheduled meeting, but said it’s simply to make clear the process for a final selection.

Needed, he said, is to make the guidelines for that selection plain both for councilmembers and the public.

Councilmembers at their March 26 meeting could not come to consensus in selecting among four finalists for the job. However, Doucet and Councilmembers Kaprina Frank and Raymond Scott insisted that the council had agreed to choose using a point system that would have broken a tie among two candidates — Hani Tohme and Natasha Henderson — who each drew three first-place votes during an executive session.

Instead, the council voted 4-3 to continue the search for a city manager, which began Dec. 6, by adding more candidates to the pool of 18 who had initially applied for the job. The city has since posted advertisements seeking additional candidates by April 17.

The councilmembers who voted in the majority March 27 said the points system was only for guidance, not for making a final pick.

“I’m not interested in beating a dead horse,” Doucet said of his intention for a discussion. “We need to look at things that went wrong and what contributed to it.”

That way, he said, the council can vote and not later have “amnesia” about the process for making a final selection.

“No one is going to have to explain it to the citizens, but the citizens will already know,” Doucet said.

Councilmembers had pared the initial list of 18 applicants to four finalists, who were interviewed Feb. 27 in an open meeting at City Hall. Initially, the schedule called for a final selection to be made March 17, later amended to March 19 and continued to March 27.

“This time we are going to move forward and make sure everyone understands what we are doing,” Doucet said. “We are going to bring about more transparency.

“We’re going to find some way to make sure we all agree.”