M Focus on: Public Works
Pictured is uptown Denison, Iowa. (Photo provided)
Denison plans for the future By JANET PATTERSON | The Municipal
The city administration of Denison, Iowa, found itself in a bit of a dilemma last year when two key employees of the public works department decided to retire within a short time of each other. The announcements got City Manager Terence Crawford thinking about succession planning. “We’re a small enough city right now that we deal with our succession planning mostly through open lines of communication.” Those open lines have worked well for the government of the city of about 10,000 nestled in the Boyer River valley in west central Iowa. So, when Doug Wiebers, the city’s public Terence E. Crawford, works director, and Dave Nemitz, a 44-year City Manager and employee and long-time Denison street comEngineer missioner, decided to retire within months of each other, the communication lines became extra important. The main concern when the retirements were announced was getting people in place before the tough Iowa snow-removal season. “Winters tend to wear on our public works people,” Crawford said. He also noted that one of the advantages of being a small municipality is the contacts that people have with others in the community. Those have helped in finding people to step into the vacancies that retirements create. But the small community also means small departments suffer when even just one employee is gone. Nemitz’s retirement in the
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spring of 2020 left the city’s public works department with only six workers and one supervisor. Crawford said the city came out of that transition in good shape. The new public works director, Eric Martens, was director of maintenance at Smithfield Farmland Foods, the largest employer in Denison. The new street superintendent worked for Crawford County, maintaining secondary county roads around the Denison area. “He had created spreadsheets on all of the county equipment from the day it arrived until it was retired,” Crawford noted one of Mike Vogt’s strengths when applying for the Denison street superintendent position. In the ongoing conversations about succession planning for the public works department, Crawford said the city considers not just the ability to do the jobs as they open but also ensures candidates and current employees have the proper certifications to make the transitions smooth regardless of the time of year. In the public works department, making sure that they always have adequate employees with a state commercial drivers’ license is important. But public works was not the only department that focused the Denison city government on succession planning. The manager of the city-owned Boulders Conference Center decided 2020 was time to step back from her position, and the city library’s assistant manager and children’s librarian both reached retirement age.
