Reflecting on your career, what first drew you to local government, and what kept you there?
Before I ever set foot in a city hall, I worked construction, including a stretch on a residential basement crew, hauling aluminum forming panels by hand. I still keep a steel concrete-form pin on my desk. It reminds me that real work respects real constraints: the forms have to be square, the pour has to set and the wall either stands or it doesn’t.
More than anything, I was drawn in by the chance to make a real impact, to do work that mattered and, frankly, to build a meaningful life around it. Local government offered that in a way few careers do, because it’s the level of government where the abstract becomes physical. A policy decision becomes a repaved street, a new park, a building that goes up. You can see and touch the results, and so can the people you serve. That immediacy is rare.
What kept me there for forty-six years across seven cities was the variety and the proximity to consequence. No two days were alike, and almost nothing I did was theoretical. It’s honest work, in the way that pouring a foundation is honest work.
Which project or initiative are you the most proud of from your time as a city manager?
Saving Tucson’s water future. When I arrived, Tucson had just voted to shut off its only sustainable water source. Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project was coming out of taps discolored and foul-smelling, and two water directors and a city manager had already lost their jobs over it. Yet the city was serving a million people on an aquifer good for roughly 40,000, and voters had chosen to keep draining it rather than trust the alternative.
I assembled a team of specialists and we fixed both failures: technically, by recharging the CAP water through a groundwater basin instead of forcing it into aging pipes; politically, by rebuilding trust from scratch. I took out a full-page newspaper ad apologizing to the community, launched a water quality program called “At the Tap,” and spent months handing out treated water at community events, proving the product one conversation at a time. We put the measure back on the ballot, and it passed. The full story is told in Tucson Water Turnaround, published by the American Water Works Association. I’m proud of other work too, not least successfully managing Culver City’s renaissance, where we drew Apple and Amazon Studios into the community and built Culver Connect, a municipal fiber network. But Tucson is the one I come back to.
What did you find most fulfilling about the role of city manager? How did it evolve over time?
The most fulfilling part was being the generalist who orchestrates specialists, holding the whole picture while the experts go deep. A city manager is one of the few people in the room responsible for how every piece fits together, from a budget line to a council majority to a resident’s pothole.
The role evolved considerably over my career. Early on, the job was largely operational and technical: deliver the services, balance the budget, keep the trains running. By the end, the center of gravity had shifted toward the political, the strategic and above all the relational. Increasingly, the work was about legitimacy: earning and holding the trust that lets institutions function at all. That’s a very different job than the one I started in, and frankly a harder one.
What leadership qualities do you believe were most critical to your success as a city manager?
Two principles have guided me more than any leadership framework.
The first comes from the Tao Te Ching: flow with the direction of the stream rather than against it. The real skill isn’t strength; it’s discernment, reading where the current is actually going. Most failed initiatives I’ve watched over the years weren’t bad ideas; they were good ideas pushed against the current.
The second is simpler and took me longer to absorb: you can only change yourself, not others. A manager who internalizes that stops wasting energy trying to remake people and starts focusing on his own conduct, judgment and restraint, which is the only thing he actually controls.
Beneath both is something I’d call constraint-respecting discipline, the same instinct as that steel pin on my desk. Hire well, listen more than you talk, stay the calm center when the room isn’t and never confuse activity with progress.
How did you manage work-life balance as a city manager?
Honestly? Imperfectly, and I’d be suspicious of anyone in this profession who tells you otherwise. The council-manager system doesn’t keep office hours, and for long stretches the job was effectively around the clock.
What made it sustainable was two things. The first was my wife, Patti, a partner who understood the demands and grounded me outside of them. The second was a handful of restorative practices I protected jealously, chief among them a weekly round of golf, its own quiet lesson in patience and in playing the course in front of you rather than the one you wish you had.
My honest advice to younger managers is to build those anchors before you think you need them, and to treat your health and your closest relationships as non-negotiable line items, not the slack you cut when things get busy.
How did you engage with the residents of your city/cities? Any memorable experiences?
My philosophy was simple: be accessible to everyone. I kept an open-door policy, and I returned every phone call and answered every email promptly, with no exceptions, whether the message came from a council member or a resident upset about a pothole. People can tell the difference between an institution that hears them and one that merely processes them, and that responsiveness was the foundation of every
bit of trust I ever built in a community.
I also believed a city manager should be visible and present but never the star of the show. The job is to make the elected officials and the community successful, not to be the personality. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you’re not concerned with who gets the credit, and it’s important that the credit goes to the Council, not to you. So I showed up: at neighborhood meetings, at openings, at the difficult forums as much as the celebratory ones, and I did far more listening than talking.
What were some of the most significant challenges you faced as a city manager in California?
California concentrates nearly every hard problem in local government into one place. The housing affordability crisis sits at the top, and it’s more structurally tangled than the public debate usually allows. Supply-side reform is necessary but, on its own, insufficient to solve affordability. Layered on top are CEQA’s friction, the fiscal architecture left by Proposition 13, the relentless pressure of pension and
CalPERS obligations and homelessness, which strains every city’s capacity and conscience at once.
But the deeper challenge, the one underneath all of those, was the erosion of institutional trust. Increasingly the hardest part of the job wasn’t solving the problem; it was being believed while you solved it. Governing well means very little if the public no longer extends institutions the benefit of the doubt, and rebuilding that legitimacy is the quiet, unglamorous work I’d point every California manager toward.
What emerging trends or challenges do you think current city managers should be prepared for?
A few, and I’d weight them in this order.
First, the legitimacy and information environment. The crisis of institutional trust isn’t a passing mood; it’s structural, and it’s amplified by an information landscape that rewards outrage over accuracy. Managers will need to think seriously about how their institutions earn credibility in that environment.
Second, artificial intelligence in government. I’m now working directly in this space, and I can tell you it’s coming to public administration faster than most cities are prepared for, in records, in service delivery, in how staff spend their hours. Managers who engage early and thoughtfully will have an enormous advantage over those who wait.
Third, energy and climate realism. The transition is real but slower and more physically constrained than the rhetoric suggests; managers serve their communities better with clear-eyed analysis than with either alarmism or denial.
And underneath all of it, the perennial fiscal squeeze and a tightening labor market for the talent these institutions depend on.
Looking back, what do you wish you had known when you first became a city manager?
That you can only change yourself, not others and that real influence comes from that acceptance, not from resisting it. The work got easier, and better, when I learned to read the flow and move with it. I also wish I’d understood sooner that the job is built on trust far more than on technical competence. You can be right and still fail if you haven’t earned the standing to be believed. The technical mastery is the price of admission; the relationships and the credibility are what actually let you accomplish anything.
What advice would you give to someone entering the city management profession today?
Read widely and far outside the profession: economics, history, how institutions and human nature actually work. The managers who stand out are the ones who bring a genuine intellectual framework to problems, not just a binder of best practices.
Find mentors, and become one. Master yourself before you try to manage anyone else. Guard your integrity and your independence fiercely, because they’re the whole asset; the day you trade them away you’ve lost the only thing that made your counsel worth having. Take care of your health and the people who love you; the job will take everything you let it.
And learn the patient discipline of discerning the flow. This is a profession of the long game. The instinct to force things will betray you; the discipline to read the current and move with it will serve you for an entire career.
What are some accomplishments from retirement you’re most proud of?
It’s early days. I only stepped down at the end of 2025, so I’ll answer honestly rather than grandly.
I’ve launched Nachbar Urban Strategies, an advisory practice that brings forty-six years of experience to bear for a wide range of clients and challenges, across the public and private sectors. As much as anything, I hope colleagues still in the profession will come to see it as a resource, a place to find a sounding board who has likely faced some version of whatever they’re working through. Applying that
hard-won pattern recognition from a new vantage point has been deeply satisfying. I’ve also taken on an advisory role with a GovTech startup working on artificial intelligence in the public sector, which keeps me close to where this profession is heading. And I’m serving on the Urban Land Institute’s Housing Council, which keeps me engaged with a community thinking hard about one of the defining challenges
facing our cities.
The accomplishment I’d put first, though, is less professional: Patti and I just finished a thirty-day rail trip across Europe. After a career that didn’t always leave room for that kind of time together, doing it well felt like its own form of success.
