January 26, 2006

By Robert Mihalek

Eric Swansen, who has 15 years experience in local government, started his job as Village manager last week.

Eric Swansen sees his role as Village manager as a facilitator, helping community members to create a vision.

“You get a chance to do your best to help the community understand what it is,” he said in an interview last Friday in his new office in the Bryan Community Center.

The role of a facilitator, he said, is listening to people and creating “meaningful opportunities” for people to participate. Swansen, who is the new Village manager, also said a facilitator brings forth a diversity of opinions, then creates options that are available and helps the community implement the options.

“Take the support, enthusiasm and vigor that was responsible for great success and find that next cause,” he said.

For instance, he said, “there’s probably 20 different ways to devising potential land use schemes for the environs of Yellow Springs.”

While discussing an issue such as growth, the facilitator in Swansen comes out. In the interview, he talked of how the community can grow while preserving green space around Yellow Springs and supporting downtown businesses. Villagers need to be mindful that these are all goals and work with others to find common ground, he said.

“You can accomplish both if you put your mind to it, and you can have your cake and eat it too,” he said.

When asked about the legacy he hopes to have in Yellow Springs, Swansen said, “I hope people at the end of the day see me as a person who brought people together.”

He also said that his goals are Council’s goals. “They are the people who have been elected by the community to represent them,” he said, adding, “My success or failure is the ability to accomplish those goals.”

Swansen, who is 39, started in his new job last Tuesday. He replaced Rob Hillard, who resigned last September after nearly five years with the Village. He is the ninth man to serve as Village manager, including interim managers, since the Village Charter was approved by voters in 1950.

He will make $75,000 a year, plus benefits. The Village also agreed to pay his moving expenses from Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he and his wife, Shelley, had been living. He and Shelley have been married for two years.

Making a ‘meaningful difference’

Swansen has more than 15 years of experience working for local governments. He worked as a senior management analyst with the city of Shoreline, Wash., where he reported to the city manager, from 1998 to 2003; a senior management analyst with the community development department of Deschutes County, Ore., from 1994 to ’98; and a management analyst in the public works department of Lacy, Wash., from 1991 to ’94.

He also served several internships in municipal and federal government positions between 1986 and ’91.

After growing up in a small college town in Illinois called Lake Forest, he earned a BA in political science from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and a master of public administration from the University of Washington.

Swansen said his career path has allowed him to understand the difference between various levels of government. In smaller communities, he said, you receive “instant feedback,” which “makes my job easier.”

It also helps him understand the community’s values, which, he said, need to be “reflected in the organization and services” of the Village.

Every day is different when one works for a small community, he said. There’s a “huge variety of things you have to work on,” he said.

He described the Village employees as “generalists” who are asked to do a lot of different tasks because the organization is small. “I think we have a group of folks who are really motivated,” he said of the staff.

Swansen said he had a great liberal arts education that “gave me a chance to find out who I am.” What he discovered, he said, is “I get motivated by making a positive difference and helping people.”

Being motivated to make a difference and being a public administrator go hand in hand, he said. He has said that through public service he can “make a meaningful difference.”

He said his job is fun because “I have to draw upon so many different skills” that he’s developed in other posts “to find solutions for here and now.”

A learning experience

Swansen has served one other stint as manager, when he ran the city of Farmersville, Calif., from 2003 to 2004. He resigned from the job after a proposed utility user tax failed in the November 2004 election.

As the city manager in Farmersville, Swansen faced a financial crisis in which his predecessor had overestimated the city’s balance, or surplus, by $928,000. According to Swansen, during his first week on the job, he and a new finance director discovered that the previous manager had failed to share financial audits with the city council and had never reconciled the city’s budgets based on the audits.

“We all had to communicate and talk and work together,” Swansen said of the staff.

The city had to increase utility fees “considerably” and had to find two new revenue sources, he said. But Swansen said one of those sources, the utility user fee, which he described as the more important of the two, failed at the polls.

Swansen said the failure of the tax meant that Farmersville was facing cuts in its police department, which was the only thing left to cut. By resigning, Swansen has said, he helped the city avoid reducing its law enforcement budget.

The experience in Farmersville, he said in the interview last week, taught him the importance of “creating a story with budget documents,” and of ensuring that you spend a lot of time helping the council understand the complexity of the budget, the tradeoffs that have to be made and the “true costs of getting things done.”

Budget documents tell a story, he said, by explaining where money is coming from, where it is going and why, and what the budget will look like in five years.

He described the Village budget situation as tough, because the government has a “small amount” of discretionary funds. The Village has to “put money in places where it will provide the most return to the community.”

He said the Village’s capital plan needs more details, including descriptions of projects and explanations of how those projects will affect service levels. This will help the Village prioritize its capital needs, he said.

‘Welcoming feeling’

In December, before he came to Yellow Springs to interview for the manager’s job, Swansen told the News that he had been looking for work in a small community that has a “high quality of life,” something, he said, Yellow Springs offers.

During last week’s interview, Swansen said he loves “that you can walk everywhere.” He called downtown great. He also highlighted the variety of architecture in town, noting that you “turn a corner and there’s a beautiful old building.”

“It’s nice to have that heritage, pride of place,” he said.

Though people don’t yet know him, Swansen said, as he’s walked around town people are friendly, offer a smile and say “hi.” It’s a “really welcoming feeling,” he said, adding, “Both my wife and I said, ‘Wow, that’s something you don’t get everywhere.’ ”

Contact: rmihalek@ysnews.com