If Matt Zimmerman had followed his childhood dreams, he might have ended up as a freight-train engineer instead.
“I don’t know why, but I thought it was neat,” said Zimmerman, who was hired today as Emporia’s newest city manager. “I loved hearing the whistles.”
City management, however has had more than its share of compensations. It’s a fascinating job, he said, one where he gets to do something new every day.
And now, for the first time, he gets to do it outside of Illinois. That means getting used to a very different pace than Zimmerman has been accustomed to.
“I don’t know that the pace is slower in Emporia, but they don’t worry about every little detail,” Zimmerman said. “That’s less true in the Chicagoland region, where it’s constant competition, everyone trying to make sure they’ve got their position locked in. I don’t sense as much of that here.”
Zimmerman, who is 46, grew up in Glen Ellyn, Ill. His father was a school principal while his mother was the recording secretary for the planning commission and the city council. That gave him a basic awareness of public service that he quickly put to use by going to work in the Glen Ellyn public works department after he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1982.
A desire to be more involved with policy and the encouragement of his city manager pushed him to get his master’s degree in public administration in 1989. He started working in the city office from that point on, getting his first job as chief executive in 1993. He has been at Prospect Heights since 2003.
“It’s a fascinating career,” Zimmerman said. “The best thing about it is there’s something new every day.”
That doesn’t always mean something unstressful. Before he came to Prospect Heights, the city had been having financial problems with its police pension plan. The Illinois state government had set a recommended amount to fund it each year, but since the 1990s, the city had first frozen its funding level and then cut it.
“It’s not illegal ... but the city does have to pay it on retirement,” Zimmerman said. “It’s easy to say ‘We’ll wait until later when we have money,’ but they never have money.”
Zimmerman emphasized to the city council that the situation couldn’t continue forever. The council eventually agreed and Prospect Heights began making cuts to cover the cost. Several city workers were laid off. City hall was closed two days a week. And the police department was closed to the public after 4:30 p.m. and on weekends except for emergencies.
The cuts have remained in place for two years now and Zimmerman said there’s not much chance they’ll be restored soon.
“I would say we’ll stay at this level until a new revenue source is found,” he said.
Zimmerman and his wife, Valerie, will have been married for five years this August. Between them, they have four children, one of whom lives in Sedgwick. Two of the others live in Atlanta and the youngest is enrolled in college in Illinois.
Valerie Zimmerman has an associate’s degree from the College of DuPage, a local community college. She is working on a bachelor’s degree, but is still deciding between sociology and elementary education as a major.
His early priorities, he said, would be to have some goal-setting sessions with the city commission and department heads, especially since there will also be one new commissioner aboard. Commissioner Ray Toso leaves office in April.
“Probably the biggest challenge for me currently is to know Kansas law,” Zimmerman said. “If you ask me about municipalities, TIFs and so in Illinois, I can probably give you an answer off the top of my head.”
Zimmerman said he considered Emporia an exciting town.
“One thing I was asked in the interview was how I would feel about moving from a more metropolitan area to one that’s more rural,” he said. “I said I don’t think that makes any difference at all. Everything we want to do is still there. It takes us an hour and a half to drive to downtown Chicago, and that’s the same time it takes to drive from Emporia to Kansas City.”
In his spare time, Zimmerman works around the house and reads. He recently finished an anthology of American Heritage articles and a book on the history of gold. He also runs a team in a fantasy baseball league.
The irony now is that Zimmerman, who once loved train whistles, is now moving to a city that’s trying to establish a “quiet zone” near the railroad tracks. He said he’d been through a similar situation in Elburn, though the council ultimately decided against taking measures to silence the trains.
“The required modifications were very expensive and would have eliminated left turns on the main drag,” Zimmerman said. “The village board thought that was a tradeoff they weren’t willing to make.”
“That’s government,” he added. “You have to figure out what priorities you want and what you can afford. There aren’t unlimited things you can afford.”
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