Silverton Voters to Decide City Manager's Fate in November

Silverton voters will decide Nov. 3 whether the city manager must live inside city limits. Until then, City Manager Cory Misley is staying with his parents after leaving a Silverton home at the end of July, while a charter amendment sits on the ballot. 

City Charter Section 22 requires that the manager, within one year of appointment, “shall become, and remain during tenure, a resident of the city of Silverton.” Misley started Oct. 16, 2023. The one-year window closed in 2024. The residency rule remained in force when he moved.

The City Council took up the matter at its Sept. 2 meeting. Members approved a motion accepting “the unique circumstances concerning the City Manager’s recent residency change in the context of the referred ballot measure to amend the City’s Charter.” If the amendment fails, the motion says the city manager “shall re-establish residency within 30 days."

Council President April Newton said Misley sold his house. He planned to lease it back but could not do so for an extended period, has not settled elsewhere, and is staying with his parents while looking for his next place. 

“All of this was done with full transparency,” she wrote. Other city managers, she said, have been allowed to live outside town temporarily because of life circumstances.

Newton said the proposed charter change is a separate question about future hiring: whether requiring residency will make it harder to attract and retain qualified managers. Because of the November vote, she said, Misley asked to wait before his next housing step.

"If the measure passes, he can look more broadly. If it fails, he knows he has 30 days to establish residence back in town."

The residency debate did not start in September. At the Jan. 6, 2026, Charter Review Task Force meeting, City Attorney Ashleigh Dougill said the live-in-city rule is not in the model charter and can hurt recruitment. Silverton housing costs, she said, can be significant and can limit the candidate pool.

National figures show Silverton’s rule is not universal. The International City/County Management Association’s 2018 Municipal Form of Government Survey found 41.3% of responding local governments had some form of employee residency rule. Of those that did, 51.7% applied the rule to the chief administrative officer — about one in five responding governments overall. 

A later ICMA survey of managers found 52% lived in the community they served. Among those who lived there, 57% said their city required it. Forty-eight percent said a residency requirement had discouraged them from applying for a job. 

ICMA has identified four states that have banned municipal residency requirements: Georgia, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio. The other 46 states generally allow cities to impose a residency rule, limit the power of home-rule or charter cities, or set a distance standard instead of a hard city-limits line. 

The National Civic League model city charter and the League of Oregon Cities model charter both say the manager need not live in the city.

If voters keep Section 22, the city manager must live in Silverton, and the council’s September motion gives him 30 days to return if the amendment fails. If they repeal the requirement, future councils can hire without that limit. The house sale and temporary stay with family form the backdrop. The charter language is the vote.