Career Summary
People ask me all the time – why are you a city manager? My answer is always the same – I really enjoy community service work and as a city manager I get to do just that every single day!
I’ve been fortunate to have been a local government employee in many places across the United States – small towns, big cities and thriving suburbs. Each place had its unique challenges and opportunities. My goal in each of those places was to make the community better!
When I worked as assistant village manager in a fast-growing suburb of Chicago (Algonquin, Illinois), I spent most of my time managing growth and we did our best to make sure that the residential growth created positive opportunities for existing residents. We developed an award-winning downtown revitalization plan that created dozens of new business startups, several new upscale residential developments, a beautiful riverwalk, inviting public spaces, façade restorations and popular community events. We developed a retail marketing strategy that generated over 4 million square feet of retail space, generated annual sales tax revenues in excess of $6 million dollars and made Algonquin a regional shopping destination. We also facilitated the development of The Algonquin Corporate Campus which is a great mix of retail, residential, corporate office and light industrial tenants. These programs created significant tax revenue for the city and great community pride. We used these revenues to build a soccer complex, trail network, wetland bank, improve infrastructure without raising taxes, and start a new public art program.
My tenure as assistant city manager with Surprise, Arizona was very different. I moved there in 2008 just in time for the Great Recession! Forty percent of all homes in the city went into foreclosure and we unfortunately laid off dozens of employees. This forced us to make significant budget cuts and combine multiple departments. While these challenges were enormous, we persevered and used this time to update our land use codes, streamline our development review process, and create thousands of jobs primarily in the climate economy sector. Surprise is definitely my “lemons to lemonade” story.
Fort Collins, Colorado was also a very different experience while I was deputy city manager. The residents of the city were very cautious about growth. We called our economic development department “economic health” to make that point! While in Fort Collins we developed a climate action plan, DEI plan, acquired open space, became a gold level bicycle friendly community, expanded our transit system, developed a connected open space network accessible to the entire community, and significantly enhanced our cultural events.
When hired as city manager of Bozeman, Montana I faced a new set of challenges and worked with stakeholders to address them. We developed a complete streets approach to a controversial road widening project, spearheaded the development of a regional sensitive lands protection plan, created a 1% for the arts initiative and incentivized the development of 1,500 affordable housing units.
Throughout my career, I’ve managed innovative award-winning organizations that emphasize excellent customer service, community engagement, partnership development, transparency, equity and inclusion, and bottom-line results. In every city I’ve been deeply engaged in the community and developed as many partnerships as possible.