Six months to the day after Gardiner’s previous city manager announced his resignation, residents can meet the lone finalist for the position at 6 p.m. Wednesday evening.

Christopher McLaughlin will meet residents for about a half hour before a regularly scheduled City Council meeting at Gardiner City Hall.

McLaughlin, 41, has been Topsham’s fire chief since 2018 and lives in West Gardiner, where he previously served as fire chief and has unsuccessfully run for Select Board several times. McLaughlin holds a bachelor’s degree in public management from the University of Maine and a master’s in public administration from Purdue Global.

Not all municipalities in central Maine hold public meet-and-greet sessions with prospective candidates; in Winslow, councilors chose to hire a new town manager earlier this year without a formal search process or any public input.

In Gardiner, though, Mayor Pat Hart said council members value the public input given at these pre-hiring meet-and-greet sessions, which have become a key step in the city’s selection process.

Council members interviewed eight of the 34 candidates who applied, and then chose three finalists. The other two finalists have since dropped out, leaving McLaughlin as the sole candidate remaining.

Hart said the city received several more resumes during this search than during the previous one conducted last fall, including from federal workers who had been laid off by the Trump administration.

Notably, Gardiner officials chose to forgo hiring a consultant for this search process, leaving interim City Manager Denise Brown to collect resumes. Eaton Peabody, the firm Gardiner and many other municipalities in Maine paid to conduct manager searches in recent years, closed just as Gardiner’s search began in June.

“The hard part is that it’s slow, just by the very nature of government and deliberative bodies going through this,” Hart said. “Having the amount of time pass meant that candidates were getting other jobs. They weren’t sitting around waiting for this particular job. People want to make sure that they take the opportunities that are in front of them.”

Gardiner’s previous city manager, Robert Peabody, announced his resignation on June 4 after just four months on the job.

He said his resignation was “in the best interest of the city and for myself.”

Peabody’s resignation was slated to become effective in August, per a 90-day notice clause in his contract, but he stopped appearing at city functions immediately after his resignation announcement. Brown stepped in as interim manager a week after Peabody’s announcement. It’s a job she’s held before: Brown served as interim manager during a five-month search before Peabody’s hiring.

Hart said the City Council could make a decision on McLaughlin’s hiring as early as its next regularly scheduled meeting, on Dec. 17.