The Powell Valley Hospital is going back to the beginning with its CEO search after the candidate they chose to offer the job to could not come to an agreement on the offer.

“We offered the job to a candidate, we couldn’t come to an offer of agreement, so we’re opening that back up,” hospital board chair R.J. Kost said.

To allow for the time necessary to do the search without being absent a leader, the board also voted to extend CEO Terry Odom’s contract through the end of June.

The hospital had come up with three finalists for in-person interviews, then picked the top choice of those three, all of whom were employed at health care organizations, had experience at critical care access hospitals and were from the Rocky Mountain region, in a mid December executive session.

Now that they’re back to the drawing board, Kost said the plan would be to take January to accept applications, do online interviews in February, by the end of February, early March be ready to narrow it down. That would lead them to doing a few interviews onsite, make a decision on who to offer the job to.

Kost cautioned that even on acceptance it would be four to six weeks before a candidate could start as they would likely have to wrap up their current job and move.

“At earliest it would be the first to second part of June to wrap this up if everything goes as planned,” he said. “So we’ll just move forward, look to the next round.”

Odom announced last summer she would be retiring in the first quarter of 2023, with plans to help with the onboarding of a new CEO.