A City Manager

Mediating pickleball noise disputes, shepherding communities through thorny decisions, and practicing radical pragmatism with Martha Bennett, city manager of Lake Oswego, Oregon. What is it that makes public hearings so noxious? And what's the difference between "Big P" and "Little P" politics? 

BOOK ALERT!
You may be aware that I’ve written or co-written five business books, including The Power of Moments and Made to Stick. I’ve got a sixth book out now called RESET: How to Change What’s Not Working. It’s a book intended to help you and your team get unstuck, to overcome the gravity of the way things have always worked. Learn more about the book and order it here. You can also listen to it on Audible and at Apple Books.

Got a comment or suggestion for us? You can reach us via email at jobs@whatitslike.com

Want to be on the show? Leave a message on our voice mailbox at (919) 213-0456. We’ll ask you to answer two questions:

• What’s a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean?
• What’s a specific story you tell to your friends that happened on the job? It could be funny or sad or anxiety-making or pride-inducing or otherwise. Just a good story you want to share.

There’s a 3-minute time limit on the ...

Transcript

Dan Heath: Let me say something provocative and then I'll have you either agree or disagree with this. I think the city manager role is the most important job that most people haven't heard of. Agree or disagree? 

Martha Bennett: Well, I do believe that most people haven't heard of it. Most people in America think their city government is run by the mayor. And in probably 40% of cities in America, their city is run by the mayor. But in the rest of the country, most cities are actually run on a day-to-day basis by a city manager and you probably have no idea as a resident of your community what your city manager actually does. 

Dan: Martha Bennett is the city manager of Lake Oswego in Oregon. It's a suburb just south of Portland. So here's a quick civics lesson. In America, cities are typically run in one of two ways. There's the strong mayor system where a mayor runs the city and a council is the legislative branch. Then there's the council-manager system where the city council hires a professional city manager to handle day-to-day operations. That's Lake Oswego's approach. They still have a mayor though. 

Martha: The mayor has a really important community organizing and political coalition building role in the organization. He sets the city council's agenda. He represents the city. I think of him as like the head of state of the city. But I run the city on a day-to-day basis and I'm hired by the city council as a whole so I work for a majority of the elected officials as opposed to just one elected official. 

Dan: Now further complicating matters is that the mayor is actually on the city council and leads it. 

Martha: So you partner with the mayor because the reality is that none of the work of the city gets done unless a majority of the city council agrees that we need to do that work. Most times, that's pretty easy, right? No one really has a strong disagreement about us providing water to the community or us treating the sewer that comes out of all of our homes.

Dan: Right. These are not, like, partisan issues really. Everybody wants their trash picked up. 

Martha: Yeah, sewage is the least partisan issue on the planet. There's no ideology involved. It's just a pure sanitation issue. 

Dan: But what happens when people do disagree vehemently? That's coming up.

I'm Dan Heath and this is What It's Like To Be... In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession: an NBA referee, an archeologist, a camera operator. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today we'll ask Martha Bennett what it's like to be a city manager. We'll talk about why she tries to avoid public hearings at all costs, what late-night phone call she dreads the most, and why she can't gossip about anyone in town ever. Stay with us.

Lake Oswego is home to about 41,000 people. The city runs departments that manage the libraries; parks and rec; public works; fire and police. The median home price is about $800,000 which is twice the national average. But Lake Oswego did not begin as an affluent suburb. It was originally an iron working town. But in the first half of the 20th century... 

Martha: The folks who owned all of the property that was part of the, the iron mine and the ironworks decided that since there was a lake right in the middle of town, they would change their concept of the town from a iron working town to a place where people might vacation in the summertime. And they subdivided the area around the lake and people built little cabanas and Portland families came here in the summertime. And since then, we've been mostly a residential community. A very big retreat from Portland even though we touch Portland 'cause there's a big hill with a forest on it between us and Portland. And it's kind of an interesting place because it's old and new all at the same time. 

Dan: That is so interesting and, and with those kind of long-term reconfigurations or, or, or long-term changes in vision, what role does the city manager play in that? 

Martha: Well, the city manager's often the person who gets to execute the community's decision, right? The city manager's the one who sits down and says, "Okay. Well, we wanna build a vibrant downtown. Let's bring the best thinkers that we can find together to help us figure out what we need to do. Let's develop a capital plan for that. Let's develop a public process so that we can hear what folks in the community are thinking about and what they're hopeful for and what they're concerned about so that as we develop our plans, whether the plan is building a brand new park or whether the plan is buying up property for redevelopment or whether the plan is changing our streetscape, we feel like we have the best thinking and a lot of community support and a great financial plan to make it happen." 

Dan: I have to say I'm skeptical that the average citizen of a community, really any community, would have anything meaningful or useful to say about these kind of long-term planning issues. Doesn't it ultimately have to be, like, an enlightened set of city council members or city managers or other, you know, maybe local developers that can kinda think in 10 or 20-year terms? 

Martha: Yeah. And in fact, I think sometimes it's even challenging for city council members, right? Because they are often in office for four-year increments. 

Dan: That's a good point. Yeah. 

Martha: Getting residents involved in long-term thinking is extremely hard.

Dan: 'Cause they probably can't articulate what exactly they want. They don't even know what it's possible to want. 

Martha: Yeah, and I think we also all walk around with a lot of fears. I have this theory that most of us fill in blank spaces with dark, not with light. 

Dan: Ooh. Now, that's a great line. 

Martha: Thank you. When we think about the future, we have a hard time imagining it as better than the present. 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: Right? Because we have concerns about our ability to control change. Most of us don't like change because we don't like that sense of not being in control, even though the older I get, the more I realize the less control I actually have, even over myself. But I do think people have hopes, right? And I think if you can get people to articulate their hopes, you can build consensus around a long-range plan, even if folks have concerns about the implementation sort of details, as it were. And I do think that part of the job of a city manager or anyone who's involved in local government over the long haul is to remind people of what their hopes are in terms of how we communicate about specific projects. 

Dan: And what makes a city manager's job difficult is that people have different hopes and interests. 

Martha: Yeah, and it feels like that's the challenge of working in government always, right, is how do you balance the collective good, the good of the community, the good of all, against the individual good? How do you do as little harm to individuals as you can, uh, while moving your community or your organization in a positive direction? 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: Because almost everything we do comes with a price, right? The question is, who gets to pay the price? 

Dan: I wanted to ask you about that in particular. Like, how often do you think the decisions in front of you are ultimately zero-sum? Like, for, for somebody to gain, somebody else in the community has to lose. 

Martha: You know, I don't know that they're that frequent, but they feel more frequent. So I'll tell you a small story about something that did happen here in Lake Oswego. So a few years ago, probably a decade ago, we had a couple of underused tennis courts in the oldest and sort of most beloved park in the community, and pickleball was starting to be a sport that was played. And so- 

Dan: Oh, dear. 

Martha: ... we said, "Well, golly gee, these courts are not being used for tennis, and we're seeing increased demand for pickleball." So we took these two tennis courts and we converted them to six pickleball courts. And it was a pretty popular decision at the time, and we saw an increase in activity, and I would say it all went merrily along until the pandemic. And during the pandemic, outdoor recreation is one of the only kinds of recreation people could get. And so the use of those pickleball courts went from maybe, you know, three or four groups of pickleball players out there playing three or four times a day to these pickleball courts were full basically from sunrise to sunset. And about that time, we started to hear from the neighbors, and the neighbors were like, "This is actually literally driving us crazy, the sound of- ... the pickleballs.”

Dan: (laughter)

Martha: And, you know, I, I think I had that reaction too, Dan, when I first heard from them of, "What do you mean it's driving you crazy?" And then I went out there for a couple hours and, and listened to the- 

Dan: Good for you for getting the ground truth... you know? 

Martha: Yeah, but it's, it's percussive, right? It's like, okay, how would I feel if my neighbors' kids had drum sets outside my home office? 'Cause that's the other thing that happened is these neighbors, they had been going to their offices, and then the pandemic happened, and not only did the pickleball courts get overwhelmed, but these folks were home all the time. And the things they were saying, like, they were hearing the sounds of pickleballs being hit even when there was no one playing. I could start to see it. Like, I get it. 

Dan: And so what do you do in a situation like that? 

Martha: Well, in that situation, the council... First of all, we have an advisory board that provides advice to the city council on, uh, parks services. They asked the Parks Department to give them a recommendation about things they could do. I will say we initially started by trying to mitigate the impact on the neighbors. So we put up these batts that absorb sound, and we limited hours, and we worked with the pickleball club to s- help sort of organize the play a little bit more to try to, try to reduce the impact on the neighbors. We gave the neighbors some quiet hours, so you weren't allowed to play pickleball on Sunday mornings, for example, so that you could sleep in. 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: And ultimately, it wasn't enough. The neighbors just were so bothered by it that they kept coming back, and the the city council probably had a year's worth of meetings talking about pickleball. They sent staff off to do examination of other locations in town where maybe we could relocate the courts, and so ultimately couldn't find another location. We talked about moving the courts to another park, and that just inflamed another neighborhood that had been listening to the conversation that the city had had with the initial neighborhood, and so ultimately, the city council voted to close the pickleball courts. It was- 

Dan: Oh my gosh. 

Martha: It was terrible, and it was terrible for everyone 'cause we probably have, you know, 500 people in the pickleball courts, but it was also clear- 

Dan: That, that just feels wrong to me. I mean, it couldn't have affected more than 10 or 12 people in earshot, could it? I mean, are they just that loud and that powerful? 

Martha: I think it was the intensity of the impact on those people. I would say it, it probably was a really intense impact on about 10 homes in the community, so if you assume to two to four people in every home, so we're probably talking 25 to 40 people. But the impact was so severe on those people that the city council was like, "Well, we can't do that to our friends and neighbors," 'cause ultimately-... one of our obligations to our community, is to make sure this is a safe place to live and if they don't feel safe- 

Dan: But they live right next to a tennis court. I mean- 

Martha: Yes, but tennis is not noisy. So, Dan, we've become very interested in any experiments that are taking place in the pickleball community to have quieter equipment, and they are working on it. I will say, this is not an issue only in a community like Lake Oswego. I find when I talk to my city manager colleagues and friends in other places, they tell me they're having the same kind of issues. 

Dan: That is so interesting. And what a great slice of life, you know, because that's a classic example where you've got this small faction that's intensely motivated and interested against a more diffuse public interest. And it seems like a lot of times with those dynamics, the small faction wins, for better or worse. 

Martha: Yes, and of course, the reality is when you're in the moment, you are just doing the best you can to weigh the benefits and costs to various folks and you don't really know what the actual right thing to do is. 

Dan: Hey, folks. Dan here. I read a review of the show recently where somebody was saying that they'd listened to every episode of the show and that even the jobs they were tempted to skip, because they seemed boring, they always found interesting. And I just wanted to say, that's part of our secret mission on the show. I mean, we're not making a show where we cherry pick the weirdest or most dramatic jobs in the world, you know, "This week, a venomous snake milker." This is a show where we're trying to surface the drama and the humanity in jobs of all kinds, even the ones that seem mundane on the surface. So anyway, thanks for noticing that. And actually, if you do know a venomous snake milker, will you let us know? Maybe we'll make an exception. And now, back to the show.

At the heart of Lake Oswego is a lake. It's called Oswego Lake. It's the city's crown jewel, the community's defining feature, and that might explain why a question in recent years over who does and does not have access to the lake has divided the city. 

Martha: So, remember I told you that the town is a real estate development and... The thing that Oregon Ironworks morphed into is called the Lake Oswego Corporation and they actually, uh, own all of the property around Oswego Lake. And they own and operate a dam that keeps the lake at a certain elevation, and lake property is pretty valuable. And there's about 600 to 700 folks who own property out on the lake, and there's another, oh, six or seven thousand folks who have access to, uh, a private easement. So they, they're sort of like little private parks where you could get in the lake or launch your kayak from one of these easements. And the city owns a few parks along the lake. But over the years, we've always thought that the lake was private. But we still have parks along the city's lake. And about 12 years ago, a group of folks who wanted to swim and kayak in the lake sued the city, demanding that, well, 'cause we have a, not only do we have parks, but we have a park rule that says, "You can see the lake, but you can't get in the lake from our parks because the lake is private." 

Dan: Oh, okay, that's what I was curious about. Yeah. Okay. 

Martha: Well, about 12 years ago, they sued us, uh, to say that that rule was illegal because the water is public. And we've actually been in litigation since 2013, um, with a variety of parties over whether the lake is public or private. 

Dan: Recently, the judge ruled that the lake has to be considered public and that the city must provide access to the lake from one of the city parks. The city council decided not to appeal the ruling. 

Martha: I would say of all the things I have worked on, there's only been maybe one or two other incidents where you feel like there's no way to actually bridge the divide in the world views between the folks who feel that the lake is private and should remain private and the others who believe, you know, and part of this is in the West, water is something that we've literally fought wars over. And so folks who believe that every body of water in the West should be public and that we have an obligation to allow folks to use the lake. 

Dan: So with this kind of divisive issue, I mean, leaving aside the merits of either side, what effect does it have on your work? Like, are you in the crossfire of all this or do the elected officials have to deal with it more so than you? 

Martha: Well, I feel like the elected officials, um, of course are the ones who are on the bullseye, right? They're the ones who actually have to make the decision about what we're gonna do and there's, there's really nothing that any city manager can do to save them from that, and I know that they all know that they ran for office knowing that these are the kinds of decisions that they were gonna confront. And in fact, maybe not even knowing but wanting these kinds of decisions to be things that they get to confront. What happens is that it consumes all of the emotional energy that the city as an organization has. And so as a city manager, what you end up doing is helping your elected officials navigate the process. You have to help create meeting spaces and times, you have to provide information, you have to create opportunities for public feedback in a way where they still sort of have the space to make the decision that they need to make. 

Dan: I have to say, this is interesting to me because I think my impression coming in was the city manager had this kind of just operational expertise and you make the trains run and you get the trash picked up and make sure the sewage is being dealt with appropriately.And in this conversation, it seems like there's also this other flavor of the role that's almost more like a, a mediator, you know, just balancing different interests. 

Martha: Right. So cities fundamentally, we provide services that enable people to live close together, whether it is the essentially insurance services that we provide through public safety departments or whether it's sanitation or drinking water or transportation or... I joke about parks are the places we all go so that we don't kill our neighbors 'cause we live so close together, we need to get out and get away from each other a little bit. City managers have to keep in mind that sometimes the conflicts about what it means to live in community are big, um, but sometimes they're small and that our jobs are to help people succeed in their community, right? And so sometimes, yeah, that means that we make sure the sewage treatment function is well funded and that we're complying with regulations. Sometimes we do that work. But that's not really the hard work, 'cause I think everybody agrees on that. It's the work that we do where we're helping people address an important community issue where people don't agree, that's the important work that we do as city managers. How do we help communities navigate conflicts? 

Dan: It seems like what you and your, your peers have such a knack for is to take things out of the philosophical layer and into the particular, like this dispute over the lake. Like, it's very easy to imagine two sides on their soapboxes. One is respect for private property and one is equity, and I mean, you could debate that until the end of time. Uh, but, but if you just kinda reframe it and you're like, "Hey, can, can we come out here? We already have this park that abuts the lake. What if, you know, we just let people swim in this area? Like, could we get consensus arou-" You know what I mean? It just, it transforms the issue from something that's an emotional trigger to something that's more logistical and practical. 

Martha: You're so nice for saying that. I think city managers tend to be radical pragmatists, right? It's like- 

Dan: Yeah. 

Martha: ... "Well, uh, okay, so we have to make, let people swim. So what can we do to make it safe? What can we do to let folks know that once they get into the lake, this is the only place they can get out? They can't trespass on people's private backyards." 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: "What can we do to make sure there are life jackets available so nobody has a crisis where we need to, you know, send out our rescue boat?" So I do think that is a hallmark of the profession, that we go from these conversations about big ideological frames into quickly like, "How do we actually make this work-" 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: "... in a way that we address the basic needs of the people that we're working with?" 

Dan: City manager for president. I'm calling it here first. 

Martha: Yeah. 

Dan: This is the energy we need. 

Martha: No city manager would ever do what it takes to get elected president. 

Dan: So if you had a room full of city managers, what are 10 flashpoint kind of issues that they would have in common? Like pickleball you said was probably one. 

Martha: Yeah. Like- Yeah. 

Dan: ... backyard chickens has got to be one. 

Martha: Yeah. Anything involving noise, for sure. Um, pickleball, backyard chickens, uh, barking dog ordinances. Uh, we would all have dealt with those at some point in our career. Uh, yeah. What time does your concert or party ordinance go into effect so that neighbors... Uh, anything related to neighbor-on-neighbor conflict, if that makes any sense at all. 

Dan: It's so interesting how many of these are noise-related. I'd never thought about that. 

Martha: Yeah. And you know, uh, it's spring right now and we joke here at the City of Lake Oswego that pretty soon people are gonna open the windows of their homes and they're gonna discover problems they didn't know existed. And it happens every spring, just like pollen. 

Dan: The noise comes in and you've got a new set of things to contend with. 

Martha: And all of a sudden my code enforcement officer is a lot busier than he was just a few weeks ago. 

Dan: Is your role one where you get calls or texts at 10:00 at night about some particular emergency or, or is it a little more buttoned up? 

Martha: Oh, yeah. That happens. Uh, normally I get calls from my department heads if, if things have happened and- 

Dan: And then are you sort of like something happens in their department that they're worried is gonna set off political issues and you become the conduit to the political people? Is that the idea? 

Martha: Yeah. To make sure the city council members are informed about the issue and that if they have questions about what's going on. So city council members, elected officials are often, they're expected by their neighbors and constituents to know, uh, what's happening in the city. 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: And they never want to be caught off guard for something that's surprising or controversial or shows up on the 10:00 news. So yeah, a department head will call me and say, "Hey, this thing just happened and there's media present." And then I will hop on the phone or text, um, all my elected officials to make sure they know, "Hey, this thing happened and we have media present and I will let you know more as soon as I can get you more information." 

Dan: Hmm. So can you ever truly be off the clock- ... when you're the city manager? 

Martha: No. 

Dan: No. 24/7. 

Martha: Um, and you’re thinking about work even when you're not at work. 

Dan: What impact has this job had on your personal life? 

Martha: I think first of all, you don't get to have a private life in your own community. I mean, yes, you can close the blinds of your house and, and nobody needs to know what movie you watched or what you had for dinner that night. But I remember one time when I went out for dinner at a local microbrewery in a place I worked, and I made the mistake of making a smart-alecky comment about one of my elected officials.

Dan: Mm. 

Martha: And it was back to me within 24 hours. I had even looked around the restaurant and be like, "I don't know any of these people, so I'm gonna make this smart- comment." Well, the truth is that my council meetings are televised, right? And so I might not know who that person sitting behind me is, but they might know who I am. And so you have to be very thoughtful about what you do and say in your own community. It's a very intimate relationship you have with your community. So the other thing I would say is that level of notoriety can spread to your family. You know, there'll be articles about the city in the newspaper or on social media and, uh, one of your kids' friends may have parents who have an opinion about it and they might say something and then that kid will say something to one of your kids. And so, you know, your whole family has to be in it. 

Dan: Oh, gosh, I didn't think about that. That whole, like, echo chamber, yeah. 

Martha: Yeah, your whole family has to be in it. And I was the child of a city manager, that's the other true confessions part of this, um, and moved- 

Dan: Oh, no way. 

Martha: Yeah, I know. The, it's a, it's a genetic illness. 

Dan: Wait, it's a f- it's a, it's the family business? 

Martha: I, you know, we talked about public policy issues at my dining room table my whole life. Like, I'm not sure, until I was in the working world that I understood, like, what an impact it had on my life. 

Dan: One of the things she learned early on as the daughter of a city manager is that the job requires you to move around fairly regularly. 

Martha: The average tenure for a city manager is probably five years. I don't know, it used to be about five years, it might not be that long. When I was a kid, I went to three different school systems, uh, before I graduated from high school and my kids have been to three different school systems. And so I think your family has to be willing to change. Uh, you know, I kind, kind of started to love the smell of a cardboard box from time to time. It's like, it's time to put my stuff in a box. 

Dan: So is that the career ladder for city managers? That you have to keep going to bigger and bigger communities? 

Martha: I mean, I mean, e- that's one way to approach it, yeah, is to go from smaller, less complex organizations, uh, or communities into bigger ones, and there's certainly a lot of folks who do that. The other thing is because you work for a majority of elected officials, uh, sometimes you just, they need somebody new. 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: And, uh, y- hopefully when you're the manager, you recognize it before they do 'cause if they recognize it before you do, then you don't necessarily leave the way you wanna leave. 

Dan: Martha May have had to move around a lot as a kid, but being a second generation city manager does have its advantages. 

Martha: The best thing about having your dad in the profession is you have a built-in mentor. Oftentimes stuff comes up and you actually can't talk to anybody about it. Right? You can't talk to your staff because they're affected. You can't sometimes talk about it in public 'cause there's litigation going on. You certainly can't talk about it with your elected officials 'cause heck, they might be the cause. But there are times when that phrase, "It's lonely at the top," is actually true. So when your dad's in the profession, you at least have somebody you can call and even if you can't tell him about the actual details of the situation, he gets it. 

Dan: He understands. 

Martha: So you always have somebody who's your best buddy when things go wrong. 

Dan: So Martha, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Let me fire away here. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean? 

Martha: Big P politics. 

Dan: Big P politics, okay. 

Martha: Big P politics. So people in my profession, we stay out of candidate politics. Uh, in, in fact, ICMA has a code of ethics and it explicitly prohibits us- 

Dan: ICMA is? 

Martha: Uh, the International City/County Management Association. It's the leading professional association for people who are city or county managers. And we have a code of ethics that say we never get involved in candidate politics because we work for who wins. And it doesn't matter what level they work at and you need to be able to work for who wins whether or not you voted for them or not. And so, uh, big P politics is what happens when you get into partisan politics or ideological politics or candidate politics. So little P politics are things like, well, how do we navigate letting people on Oswego Lake? Those are little P politics. 

Dan: What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a city manager? 

Martha: Okay, I have two answers to this. I have the serious answer and the smartass answer. And, the serious answer is “officer involved shooting”. There's just absolutely nothing good about any time one of your police officers is involved in an incident that involves a gun. And the trauma that's gonna persist in your organization afterwards, no matter what happens in the actual incidents, is pretty profound and it's highly disruptive. It also is super disturbing in the community and you're gonna be dealing with the fallout from an officer involved shooting for a really long time. You know, part of what you do as a city manager is you worry about your employees and your people all the time, especially the people like firefighters and police officers who... and actually public works crews who you send into dangerous situations all the time. It's something that really feels like a burden that you have to bear and you don't have any control over it.

So the smartass answer is public hearing. I feel like public hearings are the worst form of public engagement. And when you're in them, someone's gonna win and someone's gonna lose. And usually when you're in a public hearing, folks are either in favor or opposed to something that's gonna happen. So let's say there's a public hearing about whether a Walmart's gonna go in, or whether we're gonna allow chickens in your backyard. It doesn't matter what it is. 

Dan: Mm-hmm. 

Martha: It's set up to be a confrontation. It is the worst form of public engagement on the planet. And by the time you get to them, you've failed to resolve whatever the underlying cause is. And I will also say they never make government look good. We never, like, build trust with the people we serve in a public hearing.

Dan: So it's almost like part of your job is to avoid needing a public hearing. 

Martha: Yeah, is there any way to solve this problem so we don't end up in the actual sort of legally required conflict resolution process? 

Dan: Oh, wow. That's super interesting. 

Martha: If you ever wanna watch torturous, horrible public meetings, just find one where they're having a public hearing over anything related to land use. And you will just see everyone at their worst. And I will say most residents are also at their worst in those settings because we've set them up to be at their worst, right? We've told them they're either gonna win or they're gonna lose, and so they behave like they're in a contest. 

Dan: So if there's a teenager out there who's motivated by this conversation and wants to get on the path to becoming a city manager, what do they do? 

Martha: You know, most of us got bit by the bug at some point, and here's the bug. Local government and city management is the place where you can work on policy issues, those things that might motivate people who are drawn to politics or who really are thinkers about the role of government in society. But you can also apply it and see the results. So, you get to marry the theoretical with the practical, and you get to see the results, right?

And so, a long time ago, I, one of the reasons I ended up in local government is I worked for a US senator. I loved it. The work was heady and I was young, and DC is a great place to be if you are young and you wanna make the world a better place. But I did some work and the Congress was coming to an end, and all of the bills I'd worked on died in conference, like every single one of them. And I realized at that moment I was gonna do the same work for two more years to get my bills passed. And then after my bills pass, uh, they were gonna go into rulemaking in a federal agency, and that was gonna be there for two or three years. And then it was gonna be passed down to state and local government that would implement it, and it was gonna be two or three more years. So I was gonna work on this really cool public policy stuff, and it was gonna be a decade before I knew whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Well, in local government, you don't have to wait that long. So you can see the results of what you do relatively quickly. It's pretty exciting stuff. 

Dan: Martha Bennett is the city manager of Lake Oswego, Oregon. When you hear the title city manager, the manager of a whole city, you think power. And it is a powerful position, but it's constrained power. As the city manager, you likely work for a city council, a multi-headed hydra of a boss, where many of those heads hate each other, and the sheer sweep of departments you have to manage, from sewage to parks to police, it strains your ability to shape and direct the work.

And meanwhile, your entire job hinges on providing services for thousands or even millions of people, many of whom want the same things, safe parks for their kids and clean drinking water, but they're not always in sync, as we heard. Sometimes pickleball lovers face off against annoyed neighbors, aspiring kayakers take on lake property owners.

I should say, by the way, that Martha understands full well that other cities have stickier problems, homelessness and crime and housing shortages and more. But even as the problems vary, the dynamics are similar. How do you balance the needs of people who can't all get what they want? That's the constrained power of a city manager. It's not a job for showboats or zealots. It's a job for pragmatists who hold their egos in check while trying to improve the cities they serve.

Translating the city council's vision into action, adjudicating neighborly conflicts, managing the basic business of a city, and trying to steer a community toward a better future. Folks, that's what it's like to be a city manager. A shout out to recent Apple podcast reviewers, BWS7, IndyJoy, KPinAr, The_KBV, PBIATC, and NVSG. Boy, heavy with the acronyms this time.

This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.