Missoula County Commissioners named two new administrators on Thursday; Chief Administrative Officer and Elections Administrator.

Chris Lounsbury will be taking over the County Chief Administrative Officer position now held by Vickie Zeier, while Bradley Seaman is the new County Elections Administrator.

Zeier will be retiring in May after having served the county for 30 years.

Lounsbury described the duties of the CAO.

“You can think of them as the chief ‘convener’ for the county,” said Lounsbury. “They’re the ones that make sure all the right people are in the room when we’re dealing with various issues from things like permitting to storm water to a new elections building. They also serve as the chief liaison between the county commissioners and all their department heads and the elected officials here in Missoula.
Lounsbury said he was looking forward to several upcoming projects that county has planned.

“There are a lot of amazing projects that are coming down the pike,” he said. “We’re exploring the possibility of the federal building should the federal government give that up. It would give us an incredible opportunity to potentially blend some services with the city to make more convenient one-stop shopping for people who are coming in to do various businesses. We’re also looking at some very cool new tools about budgeting and recruitment to get information out to citizens in new and hopefully useful ways, so I’m looking forward to all of that.”

Lounsbury’s annual salary will be $130,728.

Bradley Seaman, the former interim elections administrator, will now be the permanent head of the elections division, is replacing Dayna Causby. Seaman described his duties.

“I’ll be overseeing a lot of different roles for the county involving candidate filing, petition processing, planning for and running elections both by mail and polling place elections for all of our election cycles,” he said.

The county recently obtained a new election center located on Russell Street that, according to Secretary of State Corey Stapleton, has issues with access for vehicles off the busy street.

“We have a big push goal to be able to utilize this space for the primary election,” he said. “It will let us calibrate and provide even better services in the November general election. It will also be a great experience when we can get people in and start to see the investment the county has made. Just in case, we do have a backup plan in place. We still have a lease on the fairgrounds location. It too will be under construction, but that’s something we know we’ve worked with in the past, and so we know we can use that as our backup plan.”

Seaman’s annual salary will be $81,120.

 

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