High hopes for Santa Rosa city manager

In early December, a couple months after he arrived from El Paso to be Santa Rosa’s new city manager, Sean McGlynn was still trying hard to understand why the city government got such a bad rap.

He’d spoken at length with dozens of people - council members, business and civic leaders, city department heads, public employee union representatives, community groups and regular residents - trying to understand the root cause of what many have called the dysfunction at City Hall.

Then he saw it with his own eyes.

A woman was standing in the courtyard outside the City Council chambers at 2:35 p.m. on a Thursday, frustrated that every door she tried was locked. She needed someone in code enforcement to sign off on an issue at her rental property so new tenants could move in that weekend.

But the counter hours at the Community Development Department ended five minutes earlier, a consequence of budget cuts years earlier. Returning the next day wasn’t an option, either. City Hall is closed every other Friday, also a consequence of earlier budget cuts.

“It absolutely crystallized for me a lot of what I was hearing and witnessing,” McGlynn said last week. “There’s something just not acceptable about that situation.”

Four months after taking the helm of the region’s largest city, McGlynn, 48, is under no illusions that he has all the answers to what ails the City Designed for Living. But he’s seen enough to convince him that the city government needs retooling. His goals over the next year are to help the city refocus on serving residents, restore some of the services slashed after the recession, and rebuild a culture of collaboration between city departments and with the community.

“I think we’ve closed ourselves off in a lot of ways,” McGlynn said. “We’re in the process of reopening our doors.”

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When he was hired by the previous City Council, then-Mayor Scott Bartley called McGlynn an “out-of-the-box” choice for the position.

Some privately wondered whether McGlynn, who had little experience as a city manager and none working in California, would be up to the challenge of leading a city with such political divisions and financial challenges.

But so far he’s winning wide praise as an energetic, personable leader and collaborative decision maker who is working hard to build strong relationships inside and outside City Hall.

“He’s really been doing a good job of getting the lay of the land,” said Councilwoman Julie Combs. “I think he’s making a whole lot of people feel very hopeful.”

Before he even arrived in September, McGlynn asked city officials to send him lists of people who could help him more deeply understand the community and the issues facing it. Jonathan Coe, president of the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, was one of those with whom McGlynn met.

The two discussed issues such as the downtown business climate, homelessness and the opportunities surrounding the arrival of commuter rail service in 2016, Coe said.

“I think he brings a new perspective and a breath of fresh air, and both of those are valuable,” Coe said.

Community groups also like what they are hearing. McGlynn accepted an invitation to speak in October to members of Santa Rosa Together and the Neighborhood Alliance. The response was overwhelmingly positive, said Santa Rosa Together organizer Hank Topper.

“I think most people were really impressed by him and his openness,” Topper said.

It wasn’t just talk. When questions came up about whether Santa Rosa Together could use a city facility to host a speaker to discuss community engagement, McGlynn made sure it went forward, Topper said. Paul Leistner, Portland’s Neighborhood Program Coordinator, will meet with city staff Monday and then give a free talk from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Finley Community Center.

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McGlynn grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a University of Pittsburgh anthropology professor.

When he was a young boy, his father took the family to live in the British Virgin Islands for year while he competed his dissertation on the culture of the descendants of one of the first freed slave communities in the islands.

The experience made a deep impression on him. After studying theater at UCLA, he returned to the Caribbean on a Fulbright scholarship to study theater in Jamaica. He later opened a theater company in Pittsburgh, where he met his wife, actress Kathryn Smith-McGlynn.

The couple moved to New York in the mid-1990s, she focusing on her acting career and he eventually entering the nonprofit arts community by working for the New York City Opera.

Then Sept. 11 struck. McGlynn and his wife were both working in Manhattan on that fateful morning, and couldn’t get in touch with each other for over an hour. They eventually found one another safe on that chaotic morning, and later, like thousands of others, walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge, stunned and bewildered. The attacks and response to them helped drive home for him the value of public service.

“After that event, you’re thinking to yourself, ‘You’re making an impact. Is there a way to make a bigger impact on people’s lives?’” he said.

At the time his work with the opera had him collaborating closely with New York City schools, which led to a position on the management team at the City of New York’s Cultural Affairs Department. The department had a $150 million budget to support the arts through its relationships with more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations, he said.

In 2008, he accepted the position as director of El Paso’s Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. He worked to establish the border city of nearly 700,000 people as the arts and cultural center of the Southwest.

The city’s arts and entertainment community had struggled to distinguish itself given its proximity to the vibrant night-life of Juarez across the Rio Grande. But under his leadership the city’s downtown arts festival, called “Chalk the Block,” grew more than five-fold. He also was part of a team that helped engage the arts community in a planning process aimed at revitalizing and bring new low-cost housing to the downtown core.

He was tapped to be a deputy city manager in October 2013, and served briefly as interim city manager during a leadership transition. His future unclear under the new administration, McGlynn began to look for other opportunities.

As parents of a 6-year-old boy, McGlynn and his wife were attracted to Santa Rosa for the quality of life as well as the nearby cultural opportunities in the Bay Area, he said.

The first thing he did when he moved to the city was to sign son Aidan up for the city’s soccer program and volunteer as a coach, he said. Most of his time outside work is spent with his family, he said. Intramural basketball season is now upon them and baseball will likely follow in the spring, he said.

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While he doesn’t claim to be an expert in any particular field of municipal government, McGlynn thinks that is actually one of his strengths.

“I’m a generalist. That’s my background,” he said.

His job requires him to switch from issue to issue on a regular basis while also being able to view the big picture of how an organization operates, he said.

It’s what allowed him to quickly see that something was amiss in Santa Rosa.

The city had cut its workforce aggressively in response to the post-recession revenue shortfalls. That painful process understandably put stress on city departments, causing them to focus on core functions and leaving them less inclined to work collaboratively, he said.

“When you cut something so severely, everyone sort of lives in their silos,” he said. “We have a fabulous team, but sometimes they haven’t been working together to achieve a common vision.”

McGlynn is hesitant to delve into policy priorities just yet. He notes that the city is holding a public meeting on Jan. 27 to discuss its financial position and gather public input, both of which are meant to inform a key goal-setting session for the City Council in early February.

But he has launched several initiatives that suggest he strongly values transparency and open government. One is a year-long planning process he’s calling “Reimagining CityBus,” which aims to rethink the way city transit services operate given the pending arrival in late 2016 of the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit train.

He has also told staff to brainstorm ways to make it easier for residents to transact basic business with the city. Whether it’s getting a dog license, paying a parking ticket, buying a bus pass, or just paying water bills, McGlynn wants to create more ways for people to easily conduct those transactions, said I-T Director Eric McHenry.

He has also strongly supported making public information more readily available to all residents through a new budgeting application and an upcoming open data initiative that will create databases anyone can access, McHenry said.

“Some people in the past have said, ‘We don’t have to put it up. It would just cause more work for us.’ Sean is ‘No. Just put it up,’” McHenry said.

Privately some city staffers wonder how long the honeymoon period will last. They note that while McGlynn has demonstrated a stronger hand than his predecessor in managing City Council questioning of staff, there have been few divisive political or policy debates to really put those skills to the test. Proposals that increase counter hours for the public or eliminate the every-other-Friday-off schedule could also prove unpopular with staff.

And while he’s proving himself a good listener and quick study, there have also been times during council meetings when his knowledge gaps have been apparent, such as when he struggled recently, albeit with good humor, to explain the structure of the city’s sales tax rate.

Mayor John Sawyer, who wasn’t on the council when McGlynn was hired but now works closely with him, said what impresses him most is that despite the steep learning curve and huge pressures on his time, McGlynn seems enthused by the challenges ahead.

“Given where we are, where we’ve been and where we need to go, that kind of optimism is vital and elemental to us moving forward,” Sawyer said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.