The biggest shakeup at the City of Falls Church’s City Hall ln better than a decade was executed by City Manager Wyatt Shields this week, but unlike cases in the distant past, this one includes no firings but two key new hires in a bloodless reorganization aimed at enhancing City Hall’s capacity to serve the public in accelerated times.
Shields announced the two new hires will come into leadership roles just beneath him as assistant city managers. Jenny Carroll, the current director of the Mary Riley Styles public library, and Andy Young, the City’s current Environmental Sustainability Coordinator, have been hired to be deputy city managers.
Carroll will oversee five departments of the City, the library, information technology, Human Resources, Housing and Human Services and Recreation and Parks.
Young will oversee two departments, Public Works, and Community Planning and Economic Development Services (CPEDS).
Meanwhile, Cindy Mester, the stalwart and ubiquitous deputy city manager for 18 years, will become the Director of Community Relations and Legislative Affairs, focusing on federal and state partners in grant opportunities and working with community group partnerships.
With Carroll’s new position, Marshall Webster, a 22-year employee of the City and current Library Adult Services Supervisor, will become the interim library director.
The new changes will go into effect this Monday. They were first announced in an online confab with key City department heads this past Monday and Shields has been engaged in an full-court effort to inform all the City departments directly over the week. He briefed the News-Press at City Hall Tuesday.
Shields said the two principal goals of the organizational changes are to provide additional executive level support “to drive process improvements” and “to provide additional executive level support to the Department of Public Works and Community Planning and Economic Development Services to help coordinate the significant community projects that are being managed by these two departments, including over $90 million in transportation grants.”
Moreover, he said, the benefits of these changes will “reduce the number of direct reports to the City Manager from 11 down to seven,” from the directors of finance, police, communications, emergency management and community relations and legislative affairs.
It is the second major shakeup of City Hall since Shields took over the job as City Manager in January 2007. Almost immediately upon his coming to the job, the Great Recession and all it meant at the local level hit.
But in 2012 he was able to engineer a City Hall reorganization that had the effect, he said, of undoing a lot of the less-than-productive reforms that had been instituted in the late 1990s by short-lived City Manager Hector Rivera, who did the first major overhaul designed to create a level of bureaucracy between the City Manager and City departments.
This latest move, he said, is an improvement on the changes he instituted in 2012, removing the tendency to get “down in the weeds” with policy decisions and to delegate more among groupings “that make sense” with “more normal structures.”
Among the major challenges, he said, are the recruitment of a new police chief with the announcement earlier this month that Chief Mary Gavin will be leaving, and to manage the work load in the Department of Public Works as millions of dollars of state and federal grants to the City have come in to deal with transportation and flood mitigation efforts and other infrastructure improvements as a result of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Federal Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
In Falls Church, Shields told the News-Press, these include the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plans to come right through the center of Falls Church in a route (eastbound) down Broad Street, up N. Washington to the East Falls Church Metro and out Sycamore to Seven Corners, the HAWK signal lights along West Broad, North Washington St. streetscape improvements from Great Falls St. to the Arlington county line, including to water, sewer and curbs, set to begin next spring, and improvements to the intersections on Route 7 and Haycock at Chestnut Street and Mustang Alley.
Jenny Carroll has worked for the City since 2007 and was promoted to library director in 2017. At the library, Shields said, “Jenny has demonstrated a great knack for developing staff capacity, assembling effective teams that are creative, take risks and constantly learn and adjust.”
Young started with Falls Church one year ago having obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School. With the federal General Services Administration he oversaw $14 billion in design and construction activities across a portfolio of more than 365 million square feet, and led implementation of a new project management IT system for more than 5,000 employees and contractors. He previously managed the FBI’s nationwide real estate portfolio totaling 20 million square feet of space, directing 500 employees and contractors.
Meanwhile, Mester will now focus on the Tinner Hill site and walk, the S. Washington Street Transit Plaza, Creative Cauldron, and the Falls Church Arts and Humanities Council. She will continue her work on Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance for community accessibility and fiduciary oversight of the employee pension program.
