Matt Zimmerman of Prospect Heights, Ill. will be the next city manager of Emporia.
The Emporia City Commission called Zimmerman to offer him the job this morning at $115,000 a year. Zimmerman accepted instantly.
“I think Matt Zimmerman will bring enthusiasm and excitement to this position,” Mayor Jim Kessler said. “I think that was the key thing. We certainly had qualified candidates all the way down. That made it a difficult proposition.”
“I liked his enthiusiasm and genuineness,” Commissioner Tom Myers agreed. “He didn’t have a lot of pretension. He’s just a genuine, enthusiastic, great guy.”
Zimmerman’s contract calls for him to give 45 days notice before taking a job elsehwere. However, he told the city commission this morning that he may be able to start by Monday, April 16, if his city council agrees.
He and his wife Valerie will come to Emporia over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend to look for houses.
Zimmerman is the city administrator of Prospect Heights, Ill. Valerie Zimmerman, is completing a bachelor’s degree and hopes to finish it at Emporia State University.
Zimmerman has been a chief executive somewhere in Illinois since 1993, first at Manhattan, then at Elburn and finally at Prospect Heights. Prospect Heights itself is a new city of about 17,000 that recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.
This will be his first job outside Illinois.
Myers said that he and his own wife had had dinner with the Zimmermans and that he was equally impressed with both of them.
“His wife is just a warm and genuinely delightful person,” Myers said. “There’s always a place for the city manager’s wife in the social aspects of the job, so that was definitely a plus.”
Zimmerman 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. Prior to going into city administration, Zimmerman worked in the Geln Ellyn public works department.
His time in Prospect Heights has not exactly been a placid one. He came in when the city government, 10 aldermen and a mayor, were bitterly divided against each other. Voters responded by cutting the board in half through a referendum, which gave Zimmerman his chance to get in on the ground floor, rebuilding relations between the city council and its departments.
“Getting people to carve three nights out of their very busy schedules wasn’t easy,” he said in an interview last week. “But it worked out very well.”
In the mid-1990s, Prospect Heights fell behind in making the state-mandated payments to the police pension plan. Attempts to get the voters to approve tax increases failed and Zimmerman and the city government wound up laying off a quarter of the city’s workers to cover the cost. In addition, 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 emergency calls.
Prospect Heights has about a 22 percent immigrant population and about 40 percent of its housing stock is rental housing, familiar situations for Emporia. The city recently put in a rental housing code requiring landlords to pay an annual fee and open their property to yearly inspections.
Emporia’s prospects for commercial and industrial development attracted Zimmerman to the job. His visit to Emporia last week impressed him with the city’s willingness to develop as a team, rather than pitting downtown against other regions in town.
At a forum last Tuesday, he described his management style as a participatory one, trying to get advice from all the departments that might be affected by a decision. But leadership, he said, went further.
“If you have a good hard-working staff, you need to show them you know what you’re doing, that you’re commited to getting the work done and that you’ll work the long hours, too,” he said at a Tuesday night forum in Emporia. “You need to show them you’re just as much there as they are.”
He holds a master’s degree in public administration from Northern Illinois University.