AuthentiCity FM | Local Government Leadership

We came home from the ICMA Annual Conference in Long Beach with full suitcases and a lot to unpack.What does it take to sustain a career in local government without losing the judgment, perspective, and relationships that make us effective? Our session on sustainable leadership sparked some candid reflections about the five margins we all need to protect, the ones we tend to sacrifice first, and the people in our lives who care enough to tell us what we need to hear.The conference offered plenty to think about. Simon Sinek demonstrated the power of receiving difficult questions with grace, while historian Jon Meacham brought a welcome dose of historical perspective to an era that can feel uniquely uncertain. Both reminded us that leadership requires the ability to look beyond the immediate moment.And then there were the hallways, where so much of the magic of ICMA happens. Old friends, new connections, unexpected conversations, and the occasional reminder that local government is a remarkably small world. We celebrate the leadership of three ICMA presidents and reflect on the humbling experience of meeting people who actually listen to our podcast. Apparently, we're not just talking to each other.There is no shortage of issues demanding attention in our profession. Public finance, artificial intelligence, policing, land use, and the changing economics of development are all shaping the conversations local government leaders need to be having. We have plenty of ideas for where AuthentiCity FM goes next.Perhaps the most powerful perspective of the week came from city leaders in Ukraine, who spoke about the extraordinary responsibility of maintaining essential public services through another winter of war. Keeping water flowing, children learning, and homes warm is familiar work to anyone in local government. Doing it under the constant threat of war offers a sobering reminder of why that work matters.This episode arrives on Election Day. We hope you vote.Chapters00:00 Unpacking Long Beach05:08 Our session in Ballroom A08:48 The five margins12:42 Which margin disappears first17:25 Thanks to the people who name our gaps18:38 Simon Sinek and the art of the hard question22:26 Jon Meacham and the rearview mirror25:30 Hope for the American experiment26:42 Sit up front, with one caveat33:13 Honoring three ICMA presidents41:49 A milestone ahead48:30 The most human moment of the week57:47 Closing and a reminder to voteMusic licensed through Soundstripe.Code: THLCXGAVWDTPDHLN

Bayside, Wisconsin is a village of about 4,400 people on the shore of Lake Michigan. Andy Pederson has managed it for more than twenty years, and later this month he becomes president of ICMA. We sat down with him before the annual conference in Long Beach to talk about what a small place teaches about leading at a much larger scale.Much of the conversation lives where jurisdictional lines start to blur. Andy walks through the partnerships Bayside shares with its North Shore neighbors, from a consolidated dispatch center to a shared fire department and an IT team that now serves several communities. Each one had to improve the service, hold or lower the cost, and prove it could last. Trust sits underneath all of it, built slowly and kept with care.We also talk about staying. Long tenure is rare in this profession, and Andy describes what fit feels like when the community, the staff, and the board keep asking more of you. He also shares why he keeps raising his hand to serve, and how board service changed the way he sees his own elected officials.For anyone heading to a first national conference, there is a generous stretch of practical advice. Andy's counsel to his own assistant manager is to keep it small, say hi, and take the one open seat at the lunch table. We add a few favorite openers of our own.Andy offers an early look at the theme he will carry into his year as president, built around the word we. Then he turns the questions on us, asking what each of us believes now that we would have argued with a decade ago. The answers move through the weight of the chair, the cost of saying yes to everything, and the boundaries that protect public servants.There is plenty of Midwestern fun along the way, including Brewers legends, a Friday fish fry confession, and a long-promised trip to a cheese castle.00:00 Welcome and a stop in Bayside02:16 From law school to the village hall05:24 Why a small community11:31 Twenty-two years in one place13:37 Why give back to the profession17:30 Hallway conversations and an open invitation19:39 Icebreakers for first-timers28:15 What the ICMA president does31:19 Reconnecting the membership33:58 Showing up in every state38:36 Wisconsin and Illinois, together47:04 Up north, fish fry, and the cheese castle53:06 Andy asks the hosts1:00:54 Making local government cool1:03:27 Looking two and three years ahead1:08:35 Sit up front1:10:16 Andy's final wordMusic licensed through Soundstripe.Code: JCDGU5WQKUPPX7XY

Ron Holifield has spent more than forty years in local government. He started in the city manager's office, then moved into the chair and went on to build the companies and networks that serve the profession, including SGR and Civic Marketplace. He no longer does city management, but he still calls himself a city manager. In this conversation, we talk about what that identity asks of people, and why the profession needs to remember where it came from.Ron traces his path from an internship in Lubbock to small-town Texas to Garland, where he wore a bulletproof vest for a year and was eventually fired. That experience taught him how isolating a forced exit can be, and how rarely the profession shows up for its own in those moments. It also gave him the belief he has carried ever since. It's not about me, it's not about now.From there the conversation widens. We talk about servant leadership as a working philosophy, the leadership pipeline the profession hollowed out after 2008, and why the best way to keep emerging leaders may be to prepare them to leave. Ron makes the case that the defining skill of a manager is the ability to engage, inspire, and lead people. We also explore why innovation needs room to fail, how councils elected by district can learn to serve as one body, and what it would take to equip elected officials for greatness.At the center of it all is a question the profession has been slow to answer. Who are today's Cookinghams? City management began as a reform movement, built by people who believed government could be truer, cleaner, and finer. Ron believes we have stopped telling those stories. He argues that the sewer plant operator keeping a city alive, and the council that protected public harbor access centuries ago, deserve the same telling.This is a conversation about camaraderie, courage, and the long view of public service.00:00 Welcome Ron Holifield01:09 From Lubbock to Sundown03:03 Leaving the Chair, Keeping the Lens09:01 Servant Leadership Out Loud17:20 The Road to SGR20:40 The Pipeline We Lost32:30 Who Are Today's Cookinghams?41:07 Connecting Beyond Communicating47:31 Innovation and the Freedom to Fail53:46 Equipping Elected Officials for Greatness1:03:08 Ron Turns the Questions Around1:17:53 The Last Word Music licensed through Soundstripe.Code: RFMCVJPBXZTHGTPN

We are back. The return came wrapped in a run of eighties movie references, because of course it did, and underneath the fun was something real. After a few weeks of stepping away to enjoy the end of summer, we sat back down to do the thing leaders rarely allow themselves to do, which is stop long enough to notice what the pause was teaching us. This episode is part homecoming and part preview, a conversation about rituals, return, and the quiet renewal that comes from slowing down.We start with what the last five weeks actually held. A shadow from the past that resurfaced without warning. A week among 1,500 strangers at a conference far outside local government, where being a complete beginner turned out to be its own kind of gift. Two and a half days of full immersion with the newest members of the ICMA board, and the surprising speed with which shared purpose turns strangers into friends. Different experiences, one throughline about belonging and the value of seeing familiar work through unfamiliar eyes.From there we circle back to the ideas that stayed with us from our end of summer episodes. History rhymes. What feels like unprecedented instability has arrived before in different clothes, and the profession has always found its footing. Judgment, we keep returning to, is a form of civic infrastructure worth protecting.Then we turn toward what is coming. The ICMA conference in Long Beach and how to make a room of thousands feel human again. The questions we cannot keep deferring about how communities will pay for what they have promised. And a line one of us wrote while working through it all, that nostalgia is not a business plan.This is a return episode and a road map for the season ahead, made for anyone who has felt the pull to slow down and wondered what waits on the other side of the pause.CHAPTERS00:00  Opening03:13  Why Leaders Rarely Let Themselves Stop12:05  The Episode That Stuck15:52  Sometimes We're Our Own Worst Enemy21:35  From Telling Stories to Building a Living Lab24:41  Why Conferences Still Feel Like School33:00  Navigating a 6,500-Person Conference36:58  Mike's Masterclass in Making Friends37:40  Change Agents and the Meaty-Topic Challenge39:40  The Future of How We Pay for Everything40:56  Reform, Reckoning, and Doing Less43:37  We Built It Long Ago and Never Rebuilt It46:03  Nostalgia Is Not a Business Plan48:12  Not a Hobby AnymoreHOSTSPhil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, IllinoisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, MinnesotaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete StrategicWebsite: www.aretestrategic.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: UQ1GVTQBOR9IE5UBFollow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

Coherence was the note the summer kept building toward, the thread that holds when everything else is pulling apart. This is the conversation about what that thread is actually for.We close the season with Bob O'Neill, former executive director of ICMA and one of the most respected thinkers this profession has produced, for an hour that keeps returning to a single idea, that the power that matters most in local government is the power to convene.Bob makes the case that local government is the last fully functioning level of government we have, which means the work of rebuilding civic life is going to bubble up from communities rather than arrive from anywhere else. That puts the manager in an unfamiliar seat. Writing a check used to solve most problems, and it rarely does anymore. What the moment asks for instead is someone who can bring a room together, hold a hard conversation inside a set of shared values, and keep it grounded when the forces nobody controls start to pull.Along the way we get into the traits that carry a leader through disruptive change, from anchoring an organization around mission and values to becoming what Bob calls the chief meaning officer, the person who keeps reminding everyone why the work matters at all. We talk about working across the lines on the map, the boundaries drawn long ago for taxation that no longer match how communities actually live. We talk about reverse mentorship and the handoff already underway, because the next generation is watching how we carry the work far more closely than they are reading any job description.There is a night at the White House and a conga line, because Bob tells a story as well as anyone in the business. And underneath all of it runs a steady, hard-won optimism, the belief that this profession has met moments like this before and found its way back toward the middle.Chapters00:00 Closing the summer and what coherence is for01:40 Welcoming Bob O'Neill07:35 The last fully functioning level of government09:19 When facts get treated as partisan18:03 We have been through disruptive change before20:38 The chief meaning officer27:22 The social network that keeps you steady35:50 The biggest power is the power to convene41:15 The four traits that matter most45:30 Putting meaning back into the work47:59 Three reasons for optimism53:10 Reverse mentorship and blending the generations56:24 A night at the White House1:03:14 ICMA, and why the network is the whole point1:10:18 What better looks like for the profession1:21:31 Welcoming people in and generational work1:29:44 Closing thoughtsGUESTBob O’NeillLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-o-neill-5206a010/HOSTSPhil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, IllinoisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, MinnesotaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete StrategicWebsite: www.aretestrategic.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: S9H34SYCGYLJ18VLFollow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

Some conversations wander. This one converges. After a summer spent working through truth and trust and the discipline of holding more than one version of what's real, we follow those threads to where they lead, which is coherence, and the clarity and curiosity that keep it alive.Coherence is the thread that holds when the forces you do not control try to pull everything apart. Clarity is what it brings, the center of gravity that lets you keep moving on ground that will not sit still. Curiosity is what keeps both sharp, because the moment we decide we have all the answers is the moment we stop asking the questions.None of this stays abstract for long. It lives in the hard conversation a supervisor keeps postponing, in respect offered freely and the harder truth that respect is not infinite, in what the 140-character world has quietly trained out of us. And it lives in the small acts of presence that cut through the noise. Ten days without devices. A cooler of ice cream carried through a public works garage after the storm. The conversations that only arrive when you finally slow down and sit with someone.Chapters00:00 Introduction06:16 The road into coherence, and where Phil planted the flag11:11 Coherence as the thread, and a community becoming capital C Community13:39 Clarity, the pogo ball, and the center of gravity18:23 Living it, or seeing it only in hindsight21:39 Curiosity as the skill you sharpen31:28 Curiosity, humility, and the joy that keeps you going34:39 Getting selective about the noise38:51 Good faith, bad faith, and the lost guideposts41:16 Respect given, and whether it's infinite49:10 Analog by choice, and ten days without devices59:15 The recipient of coherence, and a look aheadHOSTSPhil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, IllinoisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, MinnesotaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete StrategicWebsite: www.aretestrategic.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: BHRUQAMPUEGCKSLGFollow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

Some leaders spend an entire career learning to stay out of the way. This conversation is with one who chose the opposite. Booker Hodges, police chief in Bloomington, joins us for an hour that circles back again and again to the thing holding all of it together, which is trust, and how little of the job works without it.We start where he started, with the mentors who shaped him and a coffee-stained Dartmouth degree that taught him something about wearing accomplishment lightly. From there we get into the values underneath the department. He built the whole thing on a single word, respect, and he means it as something every person is owed rather than something they have to win. It shows up in how his officers talk to the community, in who makes it through hiring, and in why he interviews everyone who meets the bar instead of trusting a test to sort them.The middle of the conversation turns to the pressures reshaping the work. We talk about hiring for character and training for competence, about building an organization around the generation that will soon be most of it, and about why a century-old civil service model keeps producing good test takers instead of good officers. We get into the technology arriving faster than the guardrails, the privacy we surrender with a single unread click, and the harder question of who is actually overseeing any of it.Near the end, he names the threat he thinks too few people are willing to discuss out loud, and what political violence does to the quality of the people willing to serve. And he brings it home to the one relationship a city cannot afford to get wrong. Trust between a manager and a chief is the whole job, and everything good a community gets from its government tends to grow from there.00:00 Introduction02:19 The profession chose me04:12 Mentors and the coffee-stained Dartmouth degree07:49 Bringing a new generation into the work11:28 Beards, tattoos, and a changed profession13:27 The one value that runs the department16:38 Why young people choose the badge18:41 Building the organization around the next generation22:43 Technology, privacy, and who oversees it26:15 Surveillance and the data we give away31:15 Proactive or reactive, and why staffing decides it35:16 Hiring for character, training for competence38:50 Why he doesn't trust civil service42:46 Life outside the badge and being hood famous44:56 Telling the story before Hollywood does55:36 Clear expectations and backing your people57:34 The threat nobody's naming, political violence1:02:00 The question Booker has for city managers1:12:21 The one relationship a city can't get wrong1:14:05 Trust is the whole jobGUESTBooker Hodgers, Police Chief, Bloomington, MinnesotaYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BPD_MNFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/BloomingtonPD.MNHOSTSPhil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, IllinoisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, MinnesotaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete StrategicWebsite: www.aretestrategic.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: TFW8CPPXLXTQMLTYFollow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

This week we welcome Brent Messer, who spent eight years as chief information officer for the city of Chattanooga before moving to Info-Tech Research Group, and we welcome back Jerry Driessen, our first returning guest, whose career runs through some of the largest technology operations in local government. Together we spend an hour asking what the role of technology in a community actually is now that AI has arrived, and what it asks of the people who lead.Much of the conversation circles the person in the room whose job everyone assumes they understand. The old picture of the technologist keeping the lights on and answering the call when the printer breaks has very little to do with what the work has become. We talk about the vernacular that separates a partner from a vendor, about the seat where strategy actually gets decided, and about why the first call regarding the future so rarely reaches the person who will have to make that future work.From there we get into failure, and the strange comfort of a system that performs poorly without ever quite breaking. We look at why the public sector learned to move slowly, what shifts when a community starts thinking more like a startup, and where the partnerships hiding in plain sight actually live. There is a running argument about whether to buy technology or build it, and a metaphor about a tiger that nobody in the room can shake.Underneath all of it sits a question about trust and whether it was ever as solid as we remember. We work through public safety as a living laboratory, from the calls we answer to the systems we have never thought to question, and we sit with how expansive the change ahead might be. What it asks of us is a willingness to let go of how things have always been done, at a moment that may not come around again.CHAPTERS00:00 Introductions02:15 Brent's thirty years in and around public sector tech07:10 What to look for in the next technology leader09:50 The printer call, the first call, and partners not clients13:22 Buy before build becomes build before buy16:18 Risk aversion and the case for failure22:22 The vanilla ERP problem25:20 What keeps a CIO up at night, and advice for small communities31:01 Staying ahead, and being sold a bill of goods36:36 Thinking like a startup and the fake structures we built41:47 Data governance without the fear47:47 Public safety as a living lab57:00 Skepticism, broken trust, and why trust keeps cycling1:01:09 When transparency gets weaponized1:03:54 Collisions and who's doing something worth watching1:09:06 Talking to the people who hold the purse1:13:02 Storytelling and leaping before you're left behind1:18:50 The last word and the systems worth keepingGUESTSBrent Messer, Info-Tech Research GroupWebsite: https://brentmesser.com/Website: https://www.infotech.com/profiles/brent-messerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbmesser/Book: Value-Driven: The CIOs Handbook for Digital Transformation and Innovation in the Public Sector (https://a.co/d/0cZpLsgI)Jerry Driessen, CelonisWebsite: https://www.celonis.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-driessen-6997222/HOSTSPhil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, IllinoisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, MinnesotaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete StrategicWebsite: www.aretestrategic.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/Book: ordinary: Harnessing the Power of Or in Everyday Moments (https://a.co/d/0cGQsoZV)Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: 9KW4BMZQ1AWJ9P6FFollow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

Trust keeps moving. Across the last several generations, it lived first with the people we knew, then with the institutions we built, and now it is settling somewhere new again. In this episode, the three of us are back around the table together to follow that movement and ask what it means for the people who serve communities every day.We start with the numbers. The institutions Americans once leaned on now sit near the bottom of the confidence rankings, and local government has watched its own standing slide from the high marks it held for decades. That is where the conversation begins. We look at how the information environment fractured from a handful of trusted voices into millions, how credentials and ratings and the letters behind a name carry less weight than they once did, and why transparency so often creates visibility when what we were hoping for was trust.From there we get practical. We work through the technology that now sits between local government and the public, from license plate readers to facial recognition to the apps parents use to track their teenagers. Each one raises the same quiet question about the line between serving people and watching them. We talk about the pull to use data to prove a point rather than to do the work better, and what it costs a community when we try to build trust the way we did in 1996 and expect it to land in 2026.We close on the part that holds through all of it. Trust has become personal, earned in the ordinary work of showing up and following through. The question we leave with you is a working one. What are we actually doing to help people trust us, and what would it take to become the institution our neighbors count on when they need it most?00:00 — Introduction: What Trust Means Today03:22 — The State of Institutional Trust08:12 — Media, Information, and Credibility14:50 — From Institutions to Networks18:06 — AI, Public Information, and Old Models24:44 — Credentials and the Cost of Trust42:16 — Trust, Transparency, and Progress48:30 — Public Safety Technology and Surveillance58:08 — Life 360, Leadership, and Employee TrustMusic licensed through Soundstripe. Code: RZZD75QLQFTYF90N

We are calling this one our midlife crisis episode, and not just because we hit episode forty. Phil is off recharging with his family, so it is just the two of us wrestling with something we have circled for a long time, the role that time itself plays in how we lead. We start with a simple distinction that changes how you see everything else, the difference between an event and a pattern. A pothole, a council comment, an inbox, these are events, and most of them do not deserve the urgency we give them. The harder work lives further out, in the structural horizon of one to seven years, and further still, in the civilizational shifts most organizations never think to name. We use a growing hospital, a fleet of self driving cars, and a piece of rope stretched across a road to ask whether our tools for seeing the future are still built for the world we are actually living in. We talk about the quiet risk of leading competently in the wrong direction, what our interns need from us that is different from what we needed twenty years ago, and why the institutions we trust most are sometimes the last to notice they have become the dinosaur. We get into workforce loyalty, the strategic plan nobody wants to own, the idea of the manager as chief meaning officer, and a line from Corri's writing that captures the whole thing, the noise does not disappear, but you stop being governed by it. By the end we land somewhere honest about what this summer's work on discernment is really trying to build, the capacity to notice what is coming before it becomes an event we are forced to react to. Phil, we missed you. Come back soon.00:00 Midlife Crisis and Leadership Reflection03:02 Understanding Temporal Literacy05:35 Events vs. Patterns in Leadership08:39 Navigating Technology and Time Horizons11:42 The Impact of Institutional Growth14:32 Curiosity and Technological Adaptation17:17 The Role of GIS in Local Government20:12 Innovating with AI in Local Government23:06 The Future of Workforce Education26:04 Leading in a Technological Revolution36:31 Navigating Uncertainty in Community Action37:47 Workforce Evolution and Future Skills43:07 The Role of Technology in Government47:50 Rethinking Governance and Strategic Planning55:20 Engaging the Next Generation of Leaders01:04:28 Embracing Change and Future Perspectives