{"id":103205,"date":"2017-10-11T12:55:02","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T18:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-hires-police-officer-as-new-hr-director\/"},"modified":"2017-10-11T12:55:02","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T18:55:02","slug":"cortez-hires-police-officer-as-new-hr-director","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-hires-police-officer-as-new-hr-director\/","title":{"rendered":"Cortez hires police officer as new HR director"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Matt
Matt Cashner<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The city of Cortez has hired Matt Cashner, a patrol sergeant in the Cortez Police Department, to replace Gay Hall as its human resources director.<\/p>\n

During the city council\u2019s Sept. 26 meeting, City Manager Shane Hale announced that Cashner had accepted the job offer after an interview the previous week. Former director Gay Hall retired at the beginning of September, he said. Despite having no experience in an HR position, Cashner was offered the job over multiple candidates who did have experience, according to Hale, who was on the interview board.<\/p>\n

Out of the people who applied for the position, six finalists attended an interview on Sept. 20, Hale said, including two internal candidates and four from outside the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had \u2026 some really good candidates, some really smart, highly qualified people,\u201d Hale said at the council meeting. \u201cIt was great to see Matt stand out among his peers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cashner stood out because of his reputation among Cortez residents after more than 20 years as a patrol officer, Hale said.<\/p>\n

According to personnel information acquired by The Journal, Cashner has received above-average scores on all his annual performance evaluations for the past 10 years. Since 2009, he has consistently been rated as \u201coutstanding\u201d in his relations to the community, and several evaluations mentioned letters of appreciation from people he has worked with.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is a very good ambassador for this department and the city,\u201d the comments for his 2017 evaluation said.<\/p>\n

Cashner said he decided to apply for the position because he saw it as \u201ca good career move.\u201d According to payroll information released by the city in January, Cashner earned $30.75 per hour as a patrol sergeant. Neither he nor Hale would comment on his starting salary as HR director.<\/p>\n

Cashner said he believes his experience as a police sergeant has given him people skills that will be valuable for his new job.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s prepared me as far as conflict resolution,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople think policing is about the cops showing up to an incident and giving someone a ticket. \u2026 It\u2019s more about trying to help people resolve issues, and I think that will be a big part of this job.\u201d<\/p>\n

He still has a few more shifts at the police department before he leaves, but he said he has already started to study Colorado\u2019s labor laws in preparation for his new position.<\/p>\n

Cortez HR assistant Debbie Speer said the city tries to hire internally as much as possible. Hall also had no HR experience when he was hired, she said.<\/p>\n

Hale said he was confident the current staff would be able to train the new director on software and city policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you need most in a director is someone people trust,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are some technical things he\u2019ll need to catch up on, but I think he will get up to speed on those.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that in city government, \u201ceverybody knows (Cashner)\u201d as a smart and honest person, and he believes he will do the job well.<\/p>\n

His first day as the HR director will be Oct. 23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sgt. Matt Cashner replaces Gay Hall<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[21,318,13,51],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-103205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-cortez","tag-cortez-municipal-government","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-police"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103205"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=103205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}