Concord City Councilors didn’t want to be in this situation — preparing to publicly undo an appointment they made to the zoning board just days after unanimously approving it.

To Judith Kurtz, it’s unfair to the appointee, Mary Rose Deak.

“The intent of our process is to not do what’s happening right now,” said Kurtz, an at-large councilor. “It feels awful to me.”

At their Monday meeting, the council voted in support of Deak and other appointments to city boards as part of its consent agenda. Normally, if a nominee’s name comes up on the agenda, it means they have already been vetted by either the mayor or the city manager, an endorsement that councilors rely on.

It meant Kurtz was surprised, “like every councilor was,” she said, to have people reach out to her after the fact, raising profound concerns with Deak’s appointment, including her propensity to share conspiracy theories online and at public meetings about secret nanotechnology. Kurtz, and other councilors said constituents also reached out to them, saying Deak had threatened them. Deak has been arrested in Concord on more than one occasion, and has been convicted of resisting arrest and negligent driving, according to the New Hampshire court records.

Kurtz followed her standard process for weighing this appointment: she read through Deak’s resume and City Manager Tom Aspell’s nomination. Neither raised any red flags. She doesn’t make a habit of Googling each candidate or looking through their social media, and she’s not sure she wants to.

Looking back, Kurtz said the process unfolded as it usually does, but something was missed along the way.

Depending on who oversees the appointment, City Manager Tom Aspell and Mayor Byron Champlin have both said they meet with every candidate who applies for an open committee position to ensure they are qualified and a good fit — Kurtz said Aspell affirmed to her that he met with Deak before nominating her. Councilors then get to view nominations privately for a month or more before the public does, so that they can ask questions behind the scenes.

It’s meant to respect the privacy of those who volunteer for city service. If there are any concerns about someone, they don’t have to be hashed out publicly.

And yet that is now happening.

It’s prompted some councilors to push harder for the appointment process to be changed. Others view the situation as an anomaly.

To Michele Horne, this isn’t just about Deak or the zoning board.

“The process has to change,” she said.

While the Penacook councilor said she should have investigated city manager’s nominee more closely, the effort to walk back this appointment proves a point she’s been making since joining the council last year, that nominations shouldn’t be up to just one person.

Horne wants a committee or panel, which could be led by the mayor, to handle committee applicants. She also thinks nominations should become public a month in advance, giving more than the three to four-day window that’s currently in place.

At-large councilor Amanda Grady Sexton wants a committee to look into potential reforms to the system. She also supports the idea of candidates to the zoning and planning boards, which have decision-making power of their own, having a public hearing.

“It’s clear that there needs to be greater scrutiny on volunteers who apply to serve on boards and committees,” she said in a statement.

Committees are formed at the discretion of the mayor or are established in city ordinance. While other suggestions by Horne have been taken up at city hall, including the creation of a list of all vacancies across city committees and a still-in-the-works online application portal, Champlin opposes more systemic changes to how board members are selected.

“The system works. I think it’s a good system,” Champlin said Thursday. “This situation is an anomaly, not the norm.”

To the mayor, a reconsideration vote of Deak’s appointment, as anticipated at the next council meeting, is the appropriate remedy.

East Concord Councilor Jeff Foote took a similar stance.

“This isn’t something we can’t resolve,” he said. If one of the hundreds of appointments made each year were undone, he said, “That’s a pretty good batting average.”

Foote defended Aspell.

“A lot of this is timing,” he said, noting that the city’s budget process had just wrapped up. “People make mistakes.”

After being asked in advance of the meeting by the Monitor about Deak’s nomination, Champlin said he did speak with the city manager about the nomination. He would not detail what they talked about.

Neither Aspell nor Deak responded to a request for comment.

Kurtz isn’t sure where she lands on changing the appointment process, but she’s considering it seriously. Making policy that works for every situation is harder than reacting to a single one, she said.

“We’re all thinking about all of this,” she said. “We all would have preferred to figure this out privately.”

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.