Midlands city seeks police chief for the second time in 2024, hires new top administrator
The city of Cayce has hired Jim Crosland as its new city manager, removing the interim tag from his title six months after he was initially tapped for the role.
Crosland’s hiring, which was unanimously approved by Cayce City Council on Wednesday, comes amid a time of high turnover for some of the top jobs in the city of nearly 14,000 across the Congaree River from Columbia, including Police Chief Herbert Blake who resigned last week after less than three months in the role.
“We’re thankful that you’re here and we will continue to stand by you,” Mayor Elise Partin told a room of more than a dozen police officers attending the meeting Wednesday night. “We are going to make it through this together.”
City council members gave no update on the search for a new police chief, despite discussing the matter during a closed-door executive session, but said the city would address the city’s police officers in a meeting Thursday morning.
The city voted to appoint Crosland to the role permanently, but did not approve a formal contract. A city spokesperson explained council would approve the city manager’s contract at a later date. Crosland received a pay bump when he was promoted to city manager in the interim and will keep that same salary now that he’s in the role permanently, Partin said. City officials would not provide information about Crosland’s compensation.
Crosland’s official hiring comes nearly six months after the city parted ways with Tracy Hegler, who’d served as the city manager since 2018. Just a few weeks before that, the city’s police chief Chris Cowan left his role in Cayce for the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law, joining a grant-funded program to support law enforcement agencies with professional development and leadership training.
Hegler left her role with the city a month after she’d guided Cayce’s staff through a difficult process to pass its annual budget. The “mutually agreed voluntary separation” between Hegler and the city was reached behind closed doors in a four-hour executive session. Crosland, who was the deputy city manager at that time, was chosen to lead in Hegler’s absence.
Crosland, a native of the Columbia area, has been with the city since 2016, serving as the assistant director of the police department. The department was once part of a unified public safety department that included the fire department, but was dissolved into two different departments in January 2022.
Cayce operates under a council-manager form of government, meaning that the city council is responsible for things like passing ordinances and adopting a budget while the city manager carries out those ordinances and handles day-to-day city operations.
This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 8:22 AM.
