Ann Arbor City Administrator Neil Berlin announced this week that the city has decided to continue its search for a new chief of the Ann Arbor Police Department, even though it had narrowed down the list to five finalists last month.

Since Carl Ent"s resignation last January, the position has been occupied by former Deputy Chief Walter Lunsford acting as interim chief. The search commenced following Ent"s resignation and reached January of this year without a decision.

"Even though they were all good candidates, they did not seem to be a very good match," Berlin said. "The goal is to have a police chief at the earliest possible moment, but the right person."

The Police Executive Research Firm, a national organization, was hired last year to recruit from a national pool of applicants, eventually choosing 52 applicants for the position. PERF then submitted 14 semi-finalists, from which five were selected for extensive interviews in January, but city officials felt none were a good fit.

Berlin said that at this point the former candidates were not going to be reconsidered.

Mayor John Hieftje, who participated in the questioning of candidates earlier this year said the city wasn"t comfortable with the applicants.

"We are a unique community," Hieftje said. "There are lots of issues that deal with students, diversity when we started to look into backgrounds we didn"t see them."

Marcia Higgins (R-Ward IV) said she felt the characteristics Ann Arbor was looking for weren"t evident in the first applicants.

"We were all a little disappointed in the process," Higgins said. "I don"t believe that some of the things we were looking for and for the community were represented in the people."

Higgins said she is upset the upcoming search will take money from other programs.

"This certainly was one issue I was hoping to see resolved," Higgins said. "Now we"re looking at possibly another eight months and I don"t feel that is acceptable."

Higgins added, "I"m not pleased at having to allocate more money on a search I felt would have been done by now."

One of the issues spoke about at last month"s "State on the City" address by Hieftje was the budget cuts. Yet Hieftje said it would be less a cost to the city to reopen the search than to have chosen the wrong individual.

Jean Robinson (D-Ward I) said she is looking forward to assisting being part of the new process and the selection of an applicant will assure stability in the department.

"When you have any position open for a period of time, it"s problematic," Robinson said. "Employees always look forward to a new person who represents stability.

For now, city officials said that Lunsford will remain interim police chief.

Hieftje said he hopes that by reopening the search, applicants who were unavailable in the first round would consent to be in the new pool.