Assistant City Manager for Operations

The Assistant City Manager for Operations is the executive accountable for everything you can see and touch in a city: the roads, the water system, the parks, the public buildings, the fleet of vehicles that collect trash and maintain infrastructure. When services fail, the ACM for Operations is in the room explaining what happened and what's being done about it.

The capital program is a major ongoing responsibility. A mid-size city might run $50–$200 million in annual capital spending on road reconstruction, water and sewer infrastructure, parks improvements, and facility projects. These programs involve dozens of active projects at any given time — in design, under construction, in procurement, or in commissioning. The ACM for Operations is not managing individual projects (project managers and department directors do that) but is the executive accountable for overall program health: delivery on schedule and budget, appropriate prioritization, and alignment with council-adopted infrastructure goals.

Day-to-day service delivery is the other constant focus. Residents call about potholes, broken streetlights, water main breaks, overgrown park facilities, and inadequate stormwater drainage. Department directors manage the operational response, but the ACM for Operations sets the performance standards, monitors whether they're being met, and addresses systemic service failures that individual department managers haven't been able to fix.

Coordinating across operational departments requires managing competing priorities. A street reconstruction project may conflict with a utility's water main replacement schedule. A parks facility expansion may depend on an IT infrastructure upgrade. The ACM role is the coordination point for these dependencies — ensuring that different departments aren't working at cross-purposes and that joint projects have clear governance.

The council relationship is active. Infrastructure investment decisions involve significant public money and visible community impacts. The ACM for Operations presents capital program updates, explains service delivery performance data, and provides technical guidance on infrastructure policy questions that city councils routinely encounter.

Education:

• Master of Public Administration (MPA) — standard in council-manager government at this seniority level
• Bachelor's or master's in civil engineering, public works management, or urban planning with MPA supplement
• ICMA Credentialed Manager (ICMA-CM) strongly valued
• APWA (American Public Works Association) credentials, including the Public Works Executive (PWE) certification

Experience benchmarks:

• 12–18 years of progressively senior local government experience
• Department director experience in at least one operational department (public works, utilities, transportation)
• Demonstrated capital program management at scale — delivered programs of $50M+ total value
• Personnel management of large workforces including represented employees and labor contracts

Technical domains (breadth expected, not depth in all):

• Water and wastewater utilities: treatment, distribution, regulatory compliance
• Transportation: pavement management, traffic systems, transit coordination
• Stormwater: MS4 permit compliance, green infrastructure, flood management
• Facilities management: energy performance, building systems, maintenance programs
• Fleet: lifecycle costing, electrification transition planning

Program and project management:

• Capital Improvement Program development and budget management
• Design-build, design-bid-build, and CMGC delivery methods
• Federal and state grant compliance for transportation and infrastructure funding
• Asset management systems: GIS-based infrastructure inventory, condition assessment, lifecycle planning

Leadership competencies:

• Cross-departmental coordination under time pressure (emergency conditions)
• Building engineering and operations staff toward shared service goals
• Council communication: technical subjects explained clearly for policy audiences

Infrastructure has become one of the dominant topics in local government, driven by a backlog of deferred maintenance, federal infrastructure funding that flowed to local governments through IIJA, and growing recognition that aging water, transportation, and utility systems carry significant risk. Cities are investing more in operational departments and in the executives who lead them.

The IIJA infrastructure funding — over $1.2 trillion in total federal investment — has created real work for operational city managers in the form of grant-funded capital projects that require project delivery, compliance management, and reporting capabilities. Cities that can execute these programs are capturing the funding; cities that can't are watching it go to larger or better-staffed jurisdictions. ACMs for Operations who can build grant delivery capacity within their portfolios are valuable partners to city managers navigating this landscape.

The retirement wave in public works and operations management is significant. The physical infrastructure professions — civil engineers, public works directors — skew toward older demographics, and replacement hiring has lagged. That creates advancement opportunities for professionals willing to step into director and executive roles with less seniority than previous generations required.

Climate policy is reshaping the operational departments. Fleet electrification, green infrastructure investment, building decarbonization, and stormwater management for intensifying precipitation events all require operational managers who can execute technical transitions while managing costs and workforce change. The ACMs who can lead these transitions are in demand.

The city manager pipeline runs through operations. Many city managers in mid-size and large communities came up through public works, utilities, or community development before moving to assistant manager roles. An ACM for Operations who delivers capital programs consistently, maintains service performance, and builds credibility with elected officials is positioned well for city manager candidacy.

Dear City Manager [Name] and Search Committee,

I'm applying for the Assistant City Manager for Operations position with the City of [City]. I've been Director of Public Works and Utilities for [City] — a community of 120,000 — for the past five years, managing a combined department of 180 employees and an operating budget of $24M, with capital project authority over approximately $35M annually.

The operational accomplishments I'm most proud of are the ones that required sustained cross-departmental work rather than single-department execution. Our downtown utility corridor project required coordinating water, sewer, stormwater, and transportation reconstruction in a single right-of-way — one of the first times those four programs had been sequenced together rather than executed sequentially over a decade. It required a lot of uncomfortable scheduling conversations and some compromise on individual program timelines, but we delivered $18M of infrastructure investment with a single major traffic disruption rather than four. The council noticed.

On the operational side, I inherited a pavement management program with a 58 PCI citywide average. We're at 67 now, with a CIP strategy that the council has sustained for four consecutive budgets because the performance data tells a clear story about return on investment.

I hold an MPA from [University] and a PE in civil engineering — I find the combination genuinely useful in translating between technical staff and policy audiences. I'm currently pursuing ICMA-CM credentialing.

I'm interested in [City]'s portfolio specifically because of the scope of your capital program and the complexity of your water infrastructure challenges. That's the kind of work I want to be leading.

Thank you for your consideration.

[Your Name]