About

I've spent nearly fifteen years as a municipal manager and administrator in New Jersey, leading communities that ranged from about 1,900 residents to 30,000, and staffs from thirteen people to a few hundred. For a few years I stepped out of municipal management to serve on ICMA's executive staff as Northeast Regional Director, an association role working across eleven states on the policy problems facing the profession. I've written about the field before, including for Public Management Magazine. That's the résumé version, and it's here so you know I've actually done the work I write about.

What interests me is the seam between policy and practice: the space between how government is supposed to work and how it actually does, on a Tuesday, with a short-staffed office and a council meeting that night.

I've had hard councils and harder years, and I've been fired along the way. In between, I've had good towns and good experiences; most of my career has been spent in just two communities. The profession's failures are public and its successes are mostly invisible, which is a strange way to make a living and part of what I write about.

I tell audiences at my presentations that if I offer a piece of advice, it's usually because I learned it the hard way — by getting it wrong first. That's more or less the whole premise of this site. I'm not writing to tell you how to do the job. I'm writing about a profession I've spent my career in, that I care about, and that I think deserves better than the mythology it's started telling about itself. Some of what I've learned might be useful. Some of it is just the view from someone who's been in the chair.

If you're in this work, or thinking about it, I hope it's worth your time.

— Jerry Giaimis