Barrington Village Manager Jeff Lawler plans to retire in spring
Barrington Village Manager Jeff Lawler plans to make another attempt at retirement in the spring.
Lawler, 66, has been Barrington's village hall boss since 2009. He unexpectedly wound up in the job about two weeks after leaving as the village's police chief through an early retirement incentive package.
He said he plans to retire sometime in the spring, with the village in stable financial shape. Lawler will have logged about 44 years with Barrington - a tenure that began as a patrol officer - when he departs.
"I've been thinking about it for a while," Lawler said. "It's primarily triggered by age. If you reach 65, you start to think about it. At 66, you start to think about it a little bit more. And there has to be an end point in someone's career. And this seemed like a good end point, rather than where I started over here when we were laying off a bunch of people."
Barrington village board members last week hired Northbrook-based GovHR USA as a consultant to recruit candidates to replace Lawler. Under the contract that'll cost Barrington a minimum $17,000, GovHR will search through a pool of manager applicants before presenting finalists to the village board.
Village President Karen Darch was Barrington's top elected official when Lawler started as manager in 2009. She said he knows Barrington "backward and forward," in part from knowledge gained as an officer on the streets when he began work in 1975.
Darch said a good staff and committed community volunteers are a couple reasons the Barrington village manager's job should be attractive to potential candidates.
"We're looking for someone to be the next village manager and bring his or her strengths and experience and style to the village," Darch said. "Things have changed a lot here in the last few years and Jeff's been a big part of helping some of that happen, sort of the vitality that we're feeling as a community. And so I think we have set up a nice environment for the next person."
Lawler worked his way up at the Barrington Police Department, becoming acting chief in December 1996 and getting the job permanently in early 1998. He pulled double duty and received his first taste of the village manager's job in October 2003 in an interim capacity after Curt Allison ended a 92-day Barrington stay with a $97,962 separation agreement.
Barrington Trustee Ryan Julian, who joined the village board in 2017, said he's been impressed with Lawler since he began working with him.
"I think we've changed the way the village is viewed, I hope, at least I believe we have, in that we're a lot easier to work with than we were 10 years ago," Julian said. "And I think you look at the development downtown and that's proof of that. People want to come in here. They want to be part of the community."
Village documents show Lawler with a base salary of about $150,000. His work in Barrington made him eligible for the village's police pension fund and the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund.