AuthentiCity FM | Real Stories. Bold Ideas. Better Communities.

We came home from the ICMA Annual Conference in Long Beach with full suitcases and a lot to unpack.

What does it take to sustain a career in local government without losing the judgment, perspective, and relationships that make us effective? Our session on sustainable leadership sparked some candid reflections about the five margins we all need to protect, the ones we tend to sacrifice first, and the people in our lives who care enough to tell us what we need to hear.

The conference offered plenty to think about. Simon Sinek demonstrated the power of receiving difficult questions with grace, while historian Jon Meacham brought a welcome dose of historical perspective to an era that can feel uniquely uncertain. Both reminded us that leadership requires the ability to look beyond the immediate moment.

And then there were the hallways, where so much of the magic of ICMA happens. Old friends, new connections, unexpected conversations, and the occasional reminder that local government is a remarkably small world. We celebrate the leadership of three ICMA presidents and reflect on the humbling experience of meeting people who actually listen to our podcast. Apparently, we're not just talking to each other.

There is no shortage of issues demanding attention in our profession. Public finance, artificial intelligence, policing, land use, and the changing economics of development are all shaping the conversations local government leaders need to be having. We have plenty of ideas for where AuthentiCity FM goes next.

Perhaps the most powerful perspective of the week came from city leaders in Ukraine, who spoke about the extraordinary responsibility of maintaining essential public services through another winter of war. Keeping water flowing, children learning, and homes warm is familiar work to anyone in local government. Doing it under the constant threat of war offers a sobering reminder of why that work matters.

This episode arrives on Election Day. We hope you vote.

Chapters

00:00 Unpacking Long Beach

05:08 Our session in Ballroom A

08:48 The five margins

12:42 Which margin disappears first

17:25 Thanks to the people who name our gaps

18:38 Simon Sinek and the art of the hard question

22:26 Jon Meacham and the rearview mirror

25:30 Hope for the American experiment

26:42 Sit up front, with one caveat

33:13 Honoring three ICMA presidents

41:49 A milestone ahead

48:30 The most human moment of the week

57:47 Closing and a reminder to vote

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Bayside, Wisconsin is a village of about 4,400 people on the shore of Lake Michigan. Andy Pederson has managed it for more than twenty years, and later this month he becomes president of ICMA. We sat down with him before the annual conference in Long Beach to talk about what a small place teaches about leading at a much larger scale.

Much of the conversation lives where jurisdictional lines start to blur. Andy walks through the partnerships Bayside shares with its North Shore neighbors, from a consolidated dispatch center to a shared fire department and an IT team that now serves several communities. Each one had to improve the service, hold or lower the cost, and prove it could last. Trust sits underneath all of it, built slowly and kept with care.

We also talk about staying. Long tenure is rare in this profession, and Andy describes what fit feels like when the community, the staff, and the board keep asking more of you. He also shares why he keeps raising his hand to serve, and how board service changed the way he sees his own elected officials.

For anyone heading to a first national conference, there is a generous stretch of practical advice. Andy's counsel to his own assistant manager is to keep it small, say hi, and take the one open seat at the lunch table. We add a few favorite openers of our own.

Andy offers an early look at the theme he will carry into his year as president, built around the word we. Then he turns the questions on us, asking what each of us believes now that we would have argued with a decade ago. The answers move through the weight of the chair, the cost of saying yes to everything, and the boundaries that protect public servants.

There is plenty of Midwestern fun along the way, including Brewers legends, a Friday fish fry confession, and a long-promised trip to a cheese castle.

00:00 Welcome and a stop in Bayside

02:16 From law school to the village hall

05:24 Why a small community

11:31 Twenty-two years in one place

13:37 Why give back to the profession

17:30 Hallway conversations and an open invitation

19:39 Icebreakers for first-timers

28:15 What the ICMA president does

31:19 Reconnecting the membership

33:58 Showing up in every state

38:36 Wisconsin and Illinois, together

47:04 Up north, fish fry, and the cheese castle

53:06 Andy asks the hosts

1:00:54 Making local government cool

1:03:27 Looking two and three years ahead

1:08:35 Sit up front

1:10:16 Andy's final word

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Ron Holifield has spent more than forty years in local government. He started in the city manager's office, then moved into the chair and went on to build the companies and networks that serve the profession, including SGR and Civic Marketplace. He no longer does city management, but he still calls himself a city manager. In this conversation, we talk about what that identity asks of people, and why the profession needs to remember where it came from.

Ron traces his path from an internship in Lubbock to small-town Texas to Garland, where he wore a bulletproof vest for a year and was eventually fired. That experience taught him how isolating a forced exit can be, and how rarely the profession shows up for its own in those moments. It also gave him the belief he has carried ever since. It's not about me, it's not about now.

From there the conversation widens. We talk about servant leadership as a working philosophy, the leadership pipeline the profession hollowed out after 2008, and why the best way to keep emerging leaders may be to prepare them to leave. Ron makes the case that the defining skill of a manager is the ability to engage, inspire, and lead people. We also explore why innovation needs room to fail, how councils elected by district can learn to serve as one body, and what it would take to equip elected officials for greatness.

At the center of it all is a question the profession has been slow to answer. Who are today's Cookinghams? City management began as a reform movement, built by people who believed government could be truer, cleaner, and finer. Ron believes we have stopped telling those stories. He argues that the sewer plant operator keeping a city alive, and the council that protected public harbor access centuries ago, deserve the same telling.

This is a conversation about camaraderie, courage, and the long view of public service.

00:00 Welcome Ron Holifield

01:09 From Lubbock to Sundown

03:03 Leaving the Chair, Keeping the Lens

09:01 Servant Leadership Out Loud

17:20 The Road to SGR

20:40 The Pipeline We Lost

32:30 Who Are Today's Cookinghams?

41:07 Connecting Beyond Communicating

47:31 Innovation and the Freedom to Fail

53:46 Equipping Elected Officials for Greatness

1:03:08 Ron Turns the Questions Around

1:17:53 The Last Word

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We are back. The return came wrapped in a run of eighties movie references, because of course it did, and underneath the fun was something real. After a few weeks of stepping away to enjoy the end of summer, we sat back down to do the thing leaders rarely allow themselves to do, which is stop long enough to notice what the pause was teaching us. This episode is part homecoming and part preview, a conversation about rituals, return, and the quiet renewal that comes from slowing down.

We start with what the last five weeks actually held. A shadow from the past that resurfaced without warning. A week among 1,500 strangers at a conference far outside local government, where being a complete beginner turned out to be its own kind of gift. Two and a half days of full immersion with the newest members of the ICMA board, and the surprising speed with which shared purpose turns strangers into friends. Different experiences, one throughline about belonging and the value of seeing familiar work through unfamiliar eyes.

From there we circle back to the ideas that stayed with us from our end of summer episodes. History rhymes. What feels like unprecedented instability has arrived before in different clothes, and the profession has always found its footing. Judgment, we keep returning to, is a form of civic infrastructure worth protecting.

Then we turn toward what is coming. The ICMA conference in Long Beach and how to make a room of thousands feel human again. The questions we cannot keep deferring about how communities will pay for what they have promised. And a line one of us wrote while working through it all, that nostalgia is not a business plan.

This is a return episode and a road map for the season ahead, made for anyone who has felt the pull to slow down and wondered what waits on the other side of the pause.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Opening

03:13 Why Leaders Rarely Let Themselves Stop

12:05 The Episode That Stuck

15:52 Sometimes We're Our Own Worst Enemy

21:35 From Telling Stories to Building a Living Lab

24:41 Why Conferences Still Feel Like School

33:00 Navigating a 6,500-Person Conference

36:58 Mike's Masterclass in Making Friends

37:40 Change Agents and the Meaty-Topic Challenge

39:40 The Future of How We Pay for Everything

40:56 Reform, Reckoning, and Doing Less

43:37 We Built It Long Ago and Never Rebuilt It

46:03 Nostalgia Is Not a Business Plan

48:12 Not a Hobby Anymore

HOSTS

Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/

Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/

Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic

Website: http://www.aretestrategic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

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Coherence was the note the summer kept building toward, the thread that holds when everything else is pulling apart. This is the conversation about what that thread is actually for.

We close the season with Bob O'Neill, former executive director of ICMA and one of the most respected thinkers this profession has produced, for an hour that keeps returning to a single idea, that the power that matters most in local government is the power to convene.

Bob makes the case that local government is the last fully functioning level of government we have, which means the work of rebuilding civic life is going to bubble up from communities rather than arrive from anywhere else. That puts the manager in an unfamiliar seat. Writing a check used to solve most problems, and it rarely does anymore. What the moment asks for instead is someone who can bring a room together, hold a hard conversation inside a set of shared values, and keep it grounded when the forces nobody controls start to pull.

Along the way we get into the traits that carry a leader through disruptive change, from anchoring an organization around mission and values to becoming what Bob calls the chief meaning officer, the person who keeps reminding everyone why the work matters at all. We talk about working across the lines on the map, the boundaries drawn long ago for taxation that no longer match how communities actually live. We talk about reverse mentorship and the handoff already underway, because the next generation is watching how we carry the work far more closely than they are reading any job description.

There is a night at the White House and a conga line, because Bob tells a story as well as anyone in the business. And underneath all of it runs a steady, hard-won optimism, the belief that this profession has met moments like this before and found its way back toward the middle.

Chapters

00:00 Closing the summer and what coherence is for

01:40 Welcoming Bob O'Neill

07:35 The last fully functioning level of government

09:19 When facts get treated as partisan

18:03 We have been through disruptive change before

20:38 The chief meaning officer

27:22 The social network that keeps you steady

35:50 The biggest power is the power to convene

41:15 The four traits that matter most

45:30 Putting meaning back into the work

47:59 Three reasons for optimism

53:10 Reverse mentorship and blending the generations

56:24 A night at the White House

1:03:14 ICMA, and why the network is the whole point

1:10:18 What better looks like for the profession

1:21:31 Welcoming people in and generational work

1:29:44 Closing thoughts

GUEST

Bob O’Neill

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-o-neill-5206a010/

HOSTS

Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/

Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/

Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic

Website: http://www.aretestrategic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

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Some conversations wander. This one converges. After a summer spent working through truth and trust and the discipline of holding more than one version of what's real, we follow those threads to where they lead, which is coherence, and the clarity and curiosity that keep it alive.

Coherence is the thread that holds when the forces you do not control try to pull everything apart. Clarity is what it brings, the center of gravity that lets you keep moving on ground that will not sit still. Curiosity is what keeps both sharp, because the moment we decide we have all the answers is the moment we stop asking the questions.

None of this stays abstract for long. It lives in the hard conversation a supervisor keeps postponing, in respect offered freely and the harder truth that respect is not infinite, in what the 140-character world has quietly trained out of us. And it lives in the small acts of presence that cut through the noise. Ten days without devices. A cooler of ice cream carried through a public works garage after the storm. The conversations that only arrive when you finally slow down and sit with someone.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

06:16 The road into coherence, and where Phil planted the flag

11:11 Coherence as the thread, and a community becoming capital C Community

13:39 Clarity, the pogo ball, and the center of gravity

18:23 Living it, or seeing it only in hindsight

21:39 Curiosity as the skill you sharpen

31:28 Curiosity, humility, and the joy that keeps you going

34:39 Getting selective about the noise

38:51 Good faith, bad faith, and the lost guideposts

41:16 Respect given, and whether it's infinite

49:10 Analog by choice, and ten days without devices

59:15 The recipient of coherence, and a look ahead

HOSTS

Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/

Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/

Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic

Website: http://www.aretestrategic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

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Some leaders spend an entire career learning to stay out of the way. This conversation is with one who chose the opposite. Booker Hodges, police chief in Bloomington, joins us for an hour that circles back again and again to the thing holding all of it together, which is trust, and how little of the job works without it.

We start where he started, with the mentors who shaped him and a coffee-stained Dartmouth degree that taught him something about wearing accomplishment lightly. From there we get into the values underneath the department. He built the whole thing on a single word, respect, and he means it as something every person is owed rather than something they have to win. It shows up in how his officers talk to the community, in who makes it through hiring, and in why he interviews everyone who meets the bar instead of trusting a test to sort them.

The middle of the conversation turns to the pressures reshaping the work. We talk about hiring for character and training for competence, about building an organization around the generation that will soon be most of it, and about why a century-old civil service model keeps producing good test takers instead of good officers. We get into the technology arriving faster than the guardrails, the privacy we surrender with a single unread click, and the harder question of who is actually overseeing any of it.

Near the end, he names the threat he thinks too few people are willing to discuss out loud, and what political violence does to the quality of the people willing to serve. And he brings it home to the one relationship a city cannot afford to get wrong. Trust between a manager and a chief is the whole job, and everything good a community gets from its government tends to grow from there.

00:00 Introduction

02:19 The profession chose me

04:12 Mentors and the coffee-stained Dartmouth degree

07:49 Bringing a new generation into the work

11:28 Beards, tattoos, and a changed profession

13:27 The one value that runs the department

16:38 Why young people choose the badge

18:41 Building the organization around the next generation

22:43 Technology, privacy, and who oversees it

26:15 Surveillance and the data we give away

31:15 Proactive or reactive, and why staffing decides it

35:16 Hiring for character, training for competence

38:50 Why he doesn't trust civil service

42:46 Life outside the badge and being hood famous

44:56 Telling the story before Hollywood does

55:36 Clear expectations and backing your people

57:34 The threat nobody's naming, political violence

1:02:00 The question Booker has for city managers

1:12:21 The one relationship a city can't get wrong

1:14:05 Trust is the whole job

GUEST

Booker Hodgers, Police Chief, Bloomington, Minnesota

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BPD_MN

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BloomingtonPD.MN

HOSTS

Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/

Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/

Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic

Website: http://www.aretestrategic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

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This week we welcome Brent Messer, who spent eight years as chief information officer for the city of Chattanooga before moving to Info-Tech Research Group, and we welcome back Jerry Driessen, our first returning guest, whose career runs through some of the largest technology operations in local government. Together we spend an hour asking what the role of technology in a community actually is now that AI has arrived, and what it asks of the people who lead.

Much of the conversation circles the person in the room whose job everyone assumes they understand. The old picture of the technologist keeping the lights on and answering the call when the printer breaks has very little to do with what the work has become. We talk about the vernacular that separates a partner from a vendor, about the seat where strategy actually gets decided, and about why the first call regarding the future so rarely reaches the person who will have to make that future work.

From there we get into failure, and the strange comfort of a system that performs poorly without ever quite breaking. We look at why the public sector learned to move slowly, what shifts when a community starts thinking more like a startup, and where the partnerships hiding in plain sight actually live. There is a running argument about whether to buy technology or build it, and a metaphor about a tiger that nobody in the room can shake.

Underneath all of it sits a question about trust and whether it was ever as solid as we remember. We work through public safety as a living laboratory, from the calls we answer to the systems we have never thought to question, and we sit with how expansive the change ahead might be. What it asks of us is a willingness to let go of how things have always been done, at a moment that may not come around again.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introductions

02:15 Brent's thirty years in and around public sector tech

07:10 What to look for in the next technology leader

09:50 The printer call, the first call, and partners not clients

13:22 Buy before build becomes build before buy

16:18 Risk aversion and the case for failure

22:22 The vanilla ERP problem

25:20 What keeps a CIO up at night, and advice for small communities

31:01 Staying ahead, and being sold a bill of goods

36:36 Thinking like a startup and the fake structures we built

41:47 Data governance without the fear

47:47 Public safety as a living lab

57:00 Skepticism, broken trust, and why trust keeps cycling

1:01:09 When transparency gets weaponized

1:03:54 Collisions and who's doing something worth watching

1:09:06 Talking to the people who hold the purse

1:13:02 Storytelling and leaping before you're left behind

1:18:50 The last word and the systems worth keeping

GUESTS

Brent Messer, Info-Tech Research Group

Website: https://brentmesser.com/

Website: https://www.infotech.com/profiles/brent-messer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbmesser/

Book: Value-Driven: The CIOs Handbook for Digital Transformation and Innovation in the Public Sector (https://a.co/d/0cZpLsgI)

Jerry Driessen, Celonis

Website: https://www.celonis.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-driessen-6997222/

HOSTS

Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/

Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/

Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic

Website: http://www.aretestrategic.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

Book: ordinary: Harnessing the Power of Or in Everyday Moments (https://a.co/d/0cGQsoZV)

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Trust keeps moving. Across the last several generations, it lived first with the people we knew, then with the institutions we built, and now it is settling somewhere new again. In this episode, the three of us are back around the table together to follow that movement and ask what it means for the people who serve communities every day.

We start with the numbers. The institutions Americans once leaned on now sit near the bottom of the confidence rankings, and local government has watched its own standing slide from the high marks it held for decades. That is where the conversation begins. We look at how the information environment fractured from a handful of trusted voices into millions, how credentials and ratings and the letters behind a name carry less weight than they once did, and why transparency so often creates visibility when what we were hoping for was trust.

From there we get practical. We work through the technology that now sits between local government and the public, from license plate readers to facial recognition to the apps parents use to track their teenagers. Each one raises the same quiet question about the line between serving people and watching them. We talk about the pull to use data to prove a point rather than to do the work better, and what it costs a community when we try to build trust the way we did in 1996 and expect it to land in 2026.

We close on the part that holds through all of it. Trust has become personal, earned in the ordinary work of showing up and following through. The question we leave with you is a working one. What are we actually doing to help people trust us, and what would it take to become the institution our neighbors count on when they need it most?

00:00 — Introduction: What Trust Means Today

03:22 — The State of Institutional Trust

08:12 — Media, Information, and Credibility

14:50 — From Institutions to Networks

18:06 — AI, Public Information, and Old Models

24:44 — Credentials and the Cost of Trust

42:16 — Trust, Transparency, and Progress

48:30 — Public Safety Technology and Surveillance

58:08 — Life 360, Leadership, and Employee Trust

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We are calling this one our midlife crisis episode, and not just because we hit episode forty. Phil is off recharging with his family, so it is just the two of us wrestling with something we have circled for a long time, the role that time itself plays in how we lead. We start with a simple distinction that changes how you see everything else, the difference between an event and a pattern. A pothole, a council comment, an inbox, these are events, and most of them do not deserve the urgency we give them. The harder work lives further out, in the structural horizon of one to seven years, and further still, in the civilizational shifts most organizations never think to name. We use a growing hospital, a fleet of self driving cars, and a piece of rope stretched across a road to ask whether our tools for seeing the future are still built for the world we are actually living in. We talk about the quiet risk of leading competently in the wrong direction, what our interns need from us that is different from what we needed twenty years ago, and why the institutions we trust most are sometimes the last to notice they have become the dinosaur. We get into workforce loyalty, the strategic plan nobody wants to own, the idea of the manager as chief meaning officer, and a line from Corri's writing that captures the whole thing, the noise does not disappear, but you stop being governed by it. By the end we land somewhere honest about what this summer's work on discernment is really trying to build, the capacity to notice what is coming before it becomes an event we are forced to react to. Phil, we missed you. Come back soon.

00:00 Midlife Crisis and Leadership Reflection

03:02 Understanding Temporal Literacy

05:35 Events vs. Patterns in Leadership

08:39 Navigating Technology and Time Horizons

11:42 The Impact of Institutional Growth

14:32 Curiosity and Technological Adaptation

17:17 The Role of GIS in Local Government

20:12 Innovating with AI in Local Government

23:06 The Future of Workforce Education

26:04 Leading in a Technological Revolution

36:31 Navigating Uncertainty in Community Action

37:47 Workforce Evolution and Future Skills

43:07 The Role of Technology in Government

47:50 Rethinking Governance and Strategic Planning

55:20 Engaging the Next Generation of Leaders

01:04:28 Embracing Change and Future Perspectives

There is something that happens when the familiar becomes invisible. You stop seeing it clearly, stop questioning it, stop asking whether it is actually working. For local government practitioners, that invisibility is one of the quieter threats to good judgment, and it sits at the heart of this episode.

The hosts use an unlikely lens to open the conversation: World Cup tourists posting unfiltered reactions to American life. Europeans genuinely delighted by Costco, the cereal aisle, the scale of everything. Watching outsiders encounter the ordinary with wonder is funny and also instructive. Curiosity requires a kind of distance from familiarity. And in the work of city management, that distance is hard to maintain when urgency keeps pulling you back to the immediate.

Urgency is the episode's central antagonist. Not crisis, but urgency. The chronic pressure to respond fast, decide fast, move fast, in an environment where speed became the shorthand for competence. The hosts examine what gets lost when urgency displaces deliberation, how it distorts the relationship between facts and values, and why the skill of sitting with tension rather than resolving it too quickly may be one of the most underdeveloped capacities in the profession.

The long view is where the episode lands. A storm in Springfield, Illinois brought down the last surviving witness tree from Abraham Lincoln's property, a living thing that had stood since before 1865. It becomes an unexpected frame for the question underneath everything else in this episode: what does it mean to make decisions on behalf of people who are not yet born, in communities that will still be there long after you have moved on? With the 250th anniversary of the American founding approaching, the hosts sit with the weight of that question without pretending to resolve it.

Discernment, they keep returning to, is not neutrality. It is not delay. It is the practiced capacity to see clearly when everything around you is moving fast.

00:00 Introduction to Authenticity and Curiosity

00:53 Exploring Multiple Truths and Perspectives

04:14 Cultural Experiences and American Perceptions

09:13 The Importance of Fresh Perspectives

16:58 Understanding Discernment in Decision Making

27:39 Facilitation and Changing Minds

31:07 The Power of Face-to-Face Conversations

33:53 Engagement in the Workplace

37:34 Meeting People Where They Are

39:47 Cultivating Respect and Vulnerability

41:07 Untethering Urgency from Efficiency

45:39 Long-Term Decision Making and Horizons

52:30 The Legacy of Our Decisions

#AuthentiCityFM #LocalGovernment #Leadership #PublicService #Discernment #CityManagementThis episode opens a summer series built around a question that has been sitting with the hosts for weeks. How do we develop discernment in a world where multiple truths are operating simultaneously? Rather than treating this as an abstract puzzle, the conversation grounds it in the everyday experience of local government, where people's lived experiences shape what they believe is true, and where those individual truths increasingly harden into group truths that resist data, resist logic, and resist careful analysis.

A recurring thread throughout the episode is the tension between values and information. Using a framework built around liberty, equality, community, and prosperity, the hosts work through how a single issue, like a proposed data center, can pit those values against each other so completely that no amount of fact-finding will move people toward agreement. The lesson that emerges is less about winning arguments and more about learning to say I see it differently, a phrase borrowed from an unexpected umpire encounter that becomes a model for respectful disagreement.

That same tension shows up in how practitioners experience their own professional identities, particularly online. The conversation turns to the difference between influence and influencer, and what it means to share honest perspective without performing for an audience or chasing engagement. Underneath all of it sits intuition, the gut feeling that something is right or wrong long before it can be explained. Both hosts share moments when trusting that instinct mattered more than any spreadsheet could, while also wrestling with how that instinct fits inside a profession built on data and process.

By the end, two working definitions of discernment emerge, one broad and one shaped specifically for local government leadership, both of which will anchor the series ahead. Listeners are left with a question worth carrying into their own work and their own lives. Think of a time you were certain you were right, and later discovered you weren't. What changed?

00:00 Introduction to Discernment and Truth

02:14 Exploring Multiple Truths

05:10 Data Interpretation and Public Perception

08:03 The Role of Social Media in Shaping Truths

10:15 Community Engagement and Individual Perspectives

14:19 The Challenge of Groupthink

15:08 Data Centers and Public Values

18:02 Economic Development and Community Impact

21:40 Navigating Public Hearings and Community Values

24:05 The Importance of Perspective Taking

28:53 Evolving Systems and Structures in Governance

31:30 Communication Challenges in Modern Governance

35:09 Finding Innovative Solutions for Community Engagement

43:26 The Gift of Time and Reflection

45:23 The Power of Saying No

50:16 Influence and Responsibility in Leadership

57:41 Navigating Authenticity in Professional Spaces

01:10:48 The Role of Intuition in Decision Making

A year in, the hosts of AuthentiCity FM do what any self-respecting Gen X podcast should eventually do. They pull a clip show.

Framed around Mike's encyclopedic knowledge of early Simpsons episodes and sprung on Corri and Phil with zero warning, Episode 37 is the one where the curtain comes back a little. What started as a joke that wasn't really a joke — three local government professionals who thought it might be fun to push record and see if anyone cared — has become something none of them fully anticipated when they ordered their equipment and scheduled a demo recording that almost didn't happen.

The episode opens with two pieces of news the hosts hadn't shared together publicly before. Phil is on the ballot for the ICMA Region C board seat, a candidacy that traces directly back to a nudge from two people who saw something in him before he was ready to see it himself. And Corri has written a book called Ordinary, built from the word lesson in its two spellings, and from a season of extraordinary disruption that pushed her back toward the small moments where real life actually happens.

The conversation moves from celebration into something heavier and more honest. Mike reflects on the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a state representative and friend, and what it means to run an emergency response while the human grief waits its turn. Phil traces the toll of a profession that expects its best people to absorb the worst things and still show up the next morning. Corri connects the compound weight of it all to why peer groups, friendships, and the network you build before you need it are not optional infrastructure for this work.

The episode closes with Phil turning the tables on his co-hosts, offering two stories about the specific moments he knew they were the real thing. And Corri closes it out with the simplest possible invitation.

Don't be afraid of the yes.

00:00 Introduction to the Episode's Theme

03:14 The Simpsons Influence and Personal Stories

05:39 Phil's Campaign Journey and Community Engagement

08:45 Corri’s Book and Personal Reflections

11:39 Reflections on the Podcast's First Year

14:58 Technology and Podcasting Insights

17:38 Guest Reflections and Impactful Conversations

20:40 Personal Stories and Community Service

23:44 The Importance of Support Systems

39:17 Building Connections and Vulnerability

40:12 The Weight of Professional Trauma

47:09 Navigating Grief and Community Challenges

49:08 The Importance of Peer Support

50:37 The Value of Safe Spaces

52:14 Behind the Scenes of Podcasting

57:02 Looking Ahead: Future Episodes and Live Shows

01:08:52 The Power of Caring and Compassion

*******

Ordinary: Harnessing the Power of Or in Everyday Moments (https://a.co/d/09XkxRlp), also available on Kindle Unlimited

Explore Seeing Across Time (https://v3xc.substack.com/)

Some careers accumulate experience. A few accumulate wisdom. Scott Neal has been a city manager every day of his professional life since June 1st, 1988, and this conversation is a rare window into what nearly four decades in the chair actually looks like, not the polished version, but the honest one.

The episode opens with Scott's unlikely origin story, a biblical epiphany in an urban politics class that redirected a 20-year-old economics student toward a profession he would never leave. From Norris, Tennessee to Mount Pleasant, Iowa to the Twin Cities metro, his career arc spans the full range of what local government can be, and he brings that breadth to every question the hosts put to him.

The heart of the conversation is mentorship as infrastructure. Scott watched a keynote about gender imbalance in city management and decided that raising awareness was just a polished way of complaining. His response was to build something, a fellowship program that has now placed people in city manager and assistant manager chairs across the Twin Cities. The people who came through his program in their mid-twenties are now in their late thirties and paying it forward themselves. That is what a coaching tree looks like when it actually takes root.

The episode doesn't stay in comfortable territory. Scott shares the story of an ICMA ethics censure, told with a candor that is genuinely rare in any professional context. What emerged from that experience wasn't bitterness. It was a reckoning with what it means to build real relationships in a profession that can be extraordinarily lonely, and a commitment to do it differently. His mother's line lands quietly and stays: if you want a friend, you gotta be a friend.

The hosts add their own failure stories, and the cumulative effect is something the profession doesn't often make room for. The work is hard, people are meaner than they used to be, and the young professionals coming up behind us give us the best reason to keep going anyway.

00:00 Introduction to Authenticity FM and Guest Scott Neal

02:45 Scott Neal's Journey to City Management

07:32 Advice for Aspiring City Managers

11:15 The Importance of Mentorship in City Management

17:30 Creating a Legacy of Mentorship

21:14 The Challenge of Attracting New Talent

26:13 Reflections on 45 Years in Local Government

31:50 Scott Neal's Personal Life and Interests

37:03 Fun Questions and Closing Thoughts

39:39 Navigating Failures in Public Service

43:10 The Importance of Relationships in Leadership

51:10 Ethics and Accountability in Local Government

55:42 Building a Supportive Network

01:00:42 Pride in Mentorship and Legacy

01:03:01 The Role of Peer Groups in Professional Growth

01:11:42 Optimism for the Future of Local Government

A generation that wants to make a difference is coming of age without a clear map for how to do it. Most of them have never heard of city management as a career. Fewer still understand that local government is where the most direct, tangible impact on people's daily lives actually happens. Dr. Shannon Portillo, Director of ASU's School of Public Affairs, NAPA fellow, and recently recognized Local Gov 250 champion, is dedicated to closing that gap.

The episode traces how the pipeline is actually built: fellowship programs, shadowships, and gen ed courses that reach students across disciplines who never planned to think about local government. It explores what's genuinely different about this generation arriving at the profession's doorstep, the eagerness to make change, the instinct to ask why rather than comply, and the friction that surfaces when that energy meets organizations built on institutional knowledge and decades-old rules that mostly still work until suddenly they don't.

Dr. Portillo introduces a reframe worth sitting with, the case for moving from a nonpartisan framework to a partisan-inclusive one, and why that distinction matters for the long-term trust and viability of the profession. It's not a comfortable argument, but it’s absolutely worth thinking about.

The closing challenge is the one that lingers. When professional management is done really well, no one notices it's there. That invisibility has long been a point of professional pride, and it is quietly costing the profession its next generation. Speaking up about what this work actually is, and why it matters, isn't bragging. It's recruiting.

#AuthentiCityFM #LocalGovernment #Leadership #PublicService #ASU

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Shannon Portillo

01:03 Dr. Portillo's Origin Story

04:05 The Transformation of ASU under Dr. Crow

09:04 Bridging Academia and Local Government Practice

11:39 The Evolving Role of Students in Public Service

14:37 Curriculum Changes and Community Partnerships

19:53 Building Strong Connections with Local Governments

23:40 The Importance of Shadowing in Career Development

29:31 Personal Insights and Hobbies of Dr. Portillo

38:13 Celebrating Public Service Champions

39:09 Understanding the National Academy of Public Administration

43:16 The Role of Local Government in Democracy

44:11 Why Choose ASU for Local Government Education

46:36 The Importance of Partisan Inclusivity in Public Service

49:50 Innovation in Local Government Education

51:48 Insights from New Professionals in Local Government

58:29 Navigating Change in Local Government

01:01:32 Preparing Future Public Servants for Diverse Challenges

01:12:00 The Need for Transparency in Local Government Work

What does loyalty actually require of you?

Not the version that sounds good in a performance review. The version that asks you to disagree fiercely, hold your ground, and then execute faithfully on a decision that wasn't yours. That distinction is at the center of this conversation, and it runs through everything.

This episode covers a lot of ground. What resilience looks like when the hard moments don't feel as big as everyone else thinks they should. Why a culture of change is fundamentally different from a culture that reacts to change. How the code of ethics was an easier map in 2002 than it is today, and what it means to navigate the profession when the map has limits. What it means to be nonpartisan without being apolitical, and why those are not the same thing.

The question of how to describe this profession in three words opens something worth sitting with. The answers from around the table are honest and unresolved in the right way. One answer lands on nonpartisan professional service. Another argues that distilling it at all is an injustice to local democracy. A third pulls the ICMA code of ethics out of a coat pocket at exactly the right moment and lets it speak for itself.

Underneath all of it is a quieter thread about what it means to feel the weight of the work without being crushed by it. About serving faithfully in systems that are imperfect, slow to turn, and still worth turning.

The invitation at the end is for everyone. Not just people in the profession. Anyone paying attention to their community and wondering whether their voice belongs in the conversation.

00:00 Introduction to Authenticity FM and Guest Background

01:52 Christopher Walton's Journey and Early Career

08:28 Navigating Local Government and Community Engagement

12:24 The Dynamics of Town and Gown Relationships

16:45 Resilience and Life Lessons

21:15 The Importance of Perspective and Privilege

30:54 Service to Community and Preserving Democracy

37:06 Personal Interests and Hobbies

41:40 Personal Connections and Hobbies

45:09 The Role of Family in Life

45:30 Interview Techniques and Self-Description

48:41 Describing Ourselves: A Personal Reflection

52:53 The Complexity of the Profession

56:49 Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in Public Service

01:03:32 The Legacy of Service and Community Engagement

01:08:15 The Importance of Nonpartisan Professional Service

What does it take to stay in the same seat for 27 years and never stop asking what comes next?

In this episode, we sit down with Michael Wilkes, the longest-tenured city manager in the history of Olathe, Kansas and the newly appointed President and CEO of the Alliance for Innovation. Michael spent nearly three decades building one of the most recognized local governments in the country, and this conversation covers a lot of the ground that made that possible — and what it actually felt like from the inside.

We start with the origin story. A sixth-grade student council seat, a detour through political science, a master's degree that changed everything, and a rejection letter from a county manager in Oregon that opened the door he didn't know he was looking for. Michael traces the path from budget analyst to city manager of a fast-growing Kansas City suburb, the career goal he wrote on his wall, and the moment at 39 when he checked the box.

From there the conversation moves into the harder and more interesting territory. What it looked like to lead the same community through explosive growth, the Great Recession, and COVID. Why a culture that treats change as part of who you are is fundamentally different from a culture that reacts to it. How building real relationships with your elected officials is not a soft practice but a strategic one. And why the loudest voices in any community are almost never the whole story.

Michael also talks about the transition out of the chair — what he misses, what he had to let go of, and why the Alliance role has been a genuine lifeline. His Bear Bryant story, which carries the whole weight of his leadership philosophy in about ten minutes, is worth the listen on its own.

He closes where it all begins. The work itself, and why it matters.

00:00 Introduction to Michael Wilkes

02:09 Michael Wilkes' Journey in Local Government

09:04 Transition to the Alliance for Innovation

12:16 Experiences in Rapidly Growing Communities

17:58 Strategic Planning and Long-Term Vision

21:55 Leadership Lessons from Bear Bryant

28:50 Reflections on a 27-Year Tenure

30:33 Navigating Challenges in Local Government

33:04 Transforming Local Governance: The Impact of Term Lengths

38:11 Building Trust Through Citizen Engagement

44:15 Navigating Social Media Challenges in Local Government

48:55 The Importance of Relationships in City Management

53:57 Innovating Local Government: The Role of the Alliance for Innovation

01:04:32 Transitioning from City Manager to Executive Director

01:06:47 Navigating Retirement and Relationships

01:10:43 The Transition from Leadership to Personal Life

01:13:01 The Courage to Change and Embrace New Opportunities

01:14:27 The Birth of a Podcast: Finding Purpose

01:17:11 Reflections on Guests and Conversations

01:21:55 The Importance of Authenticity in Local Government

01:25:26 Personal Values and Life Beyond Work

01:27:05 Final Thoughts on Service and Impact

What does it mean to be successful in local government? Not the version the profession has been selling for decades, the linear path from small city to bigger city to biggest chair, but the one that actually fits the life you are building and the work you want to do.

Cori Burbach has been asking that question out loud, which takes more courage than it sounds. As Assistant City Manager in Dubuque, Iowa, a local government management fellow turned sustainability director turned ACM, and a first year ICMA board member, she joins us this episode to talk about what happens when the ladder stops being the point and what you find when you stop climbing long enough to ask what you actually need right now.

The conversation moves through the mentorship relationships that shaped her, what it looks like to mentor others without becoming the person with all the answers, and why the peer who frustrated her most early in her career turned out to be teaching her the most important thing. We get into what Dubuque's size and geography make possible, the cross-border thinking her sustainability work demanded, and what the ICMA board experience looks like from inside the first year when you are still figuring out what you signed up for.

The conversation also goes broader. Who isn't at the table in this profession yet, and what would it actually take to change that? What the pipeline conversation looks like when you strip away the campaigns with nifty names and say the obvious thing out loud. And what it means to build a support network of people who understand the work in a moment when the work is harder than it has been in a long time.

Cori closes with something quiet and generous. She hopes something in the conversation helps someone find the next right thing.

03:08 The Fellowship Experience and Career Development

05:55 Navigating Gender Dynamics in Leadership

08:53 The Importance of Mentorship in Local Government

11:46 Community Dynamics and the Role of Local Government

14:54 ICMA Board Experience and Professional Growth

17:47 International Perspectives on Local Governance

20:38 The Value of Smaller Communities in Public Service

23:35 Reflections on Career Paths and Success in City Management

46:04 The Value of the Second Chair

49:59 Finding Fulfillment in Career Choices

51:50 The Joy of Food and Community

56:47 Travel Tales: The Journey to DC

01:11:11 Diverse Perspectives in Public Service

What does it actually take to build a high-performing organization? Not the version that sounds good in a strategic plan, but the one that holds when things get hard, when timelines compress, and when the instinct to just answer the question is faster than slowing down to ask a better one.

Angela Nicholson has spent 23 years inside that question. As a labor negotiator, COVID EOC director for the County of Marin, and now executive director of HPO in Local Government, she brings the kind of clarity that only comes from having been both the person in the room with all the answers and the person who had to unlearn that habit. She joins us this episode to talk about what high performance actually requires, and why the organizations that get it right are almost always the ones that decided to invest in trust before they needed it.

The conversation moves through the HPO model itself, what alignment looks like when it's real versus when it's just everyone nodding in the same direction, and why the instinct to answer instead of ask is one of the most expensive habits in local government. Angela talks about becoming a prober rather than an answer person, about the culture shift that happens when people start believing their own judgment matters, and about why she refused to cut the small group experience when she took over the program. That piece, she argues, is where the trust actually gets built.

The conversation also goes broader. The structural fragmentation that makes cross-jurisdictional collaboration so hard and so necessary, what the generational shift might unlock for government that's been organized around fiefdoms for decades, and what it looks like to genuinely celebrate the work rather than just moving past it to the next agenda item.

https://www.highperformanceorg.com/

00:00 Introduction to Angela Nicholson

02:17 Angela's Journey in Local Government

05:20 The HPO Model and Its Impact

08:02 Empowering Local Governments

11:01 Shifting Perspectives on Leadership

15:54 Adapting to Change in Local Government

19:42 County and City Relationships

21:20 Angela's Career Highlights

23:31 Evolving Community Expectations

29:27 The Future of Local Government

36:46 Innovative Approaches to Government Organization

37:27 Building Trust and Respect in Government

39:04 The Importance of Relationships in Leadership

40:21 Creating Authentic Connections in Teams

42:49 The Power of Vulnerability in Leadership

47:17 The Value of Community in Local Government

49:03 Celebrating Team Achievements

53:27 Intentionality in Celebrating Wins

01:02:15 Final Thoughts and Wisdom for Leaders

#AuthentiCityFM #LocalGovernment #Leadership #PublicService #CityManagement

Something keeps coming up in the conversations people are having with us outside of this podcast. Not what's broken, but what they're starving for. And episode 30 is the answer we keep circling back to.

Real connection. The kind that doesn't scale, can't be automated, and refuses to move at the speed the rest of the world is demanding. A fish fry in a church basement. Six hours in a room with strangers who become something more. A hundred people crammed into a roundtable that wasn't supposed to be standing room only. Three very different stories that point to the same thing.

We get into what it actually takes to build connection in a profession that keeps confusing dispersion with community. The difference between a network you accumulate and one you curate. Why vulnerability is the price of entry and why sharing your trusted relationships freely is not a liability but the whole point. And what it means for professional associations when the people they serve start building it themselves because they got tired of waiting.

It also gets practical. What does government's role actually look like when community is fracturing and rebuilding at the same time? Not ownership, not a new department, but creating the conditions where connection can happen and then getting out of the way. Because the Facebook community group is not going to rebuild your neighborhood. But knowing you can call a neighbor when your garage door spring breaks just might.

00:00 The Power of Connection

02:52 Community Experiences and Authenticity

06:05 Building Relationships in Professional Spaces

08:38 The Importance of Intentionality in Connection

11:41 Navigating Isolation and Finding Belonging

14:45 Quality Over Quantity in Relationships

17:42 Creating Spaces for Meaningful Conversations

20:20 The Role of Storytelling in Connection

23:30 Redefining Community Engagement

25:50 Lessons from the Georgia Conference

30:40 The Role of Professional Associations in Community Building

37:38 Evolving Membership Organizations and Their Impact

43:34 Trust and Vulnerability in Community Connections

49:33 Looking Ahead: Future Episodes and Themes