December 2003 · Volume 85 · Number 11
Profile
Here to Stay: City Manager Celebrates 20 Years
That Almost Weren’t
As City Manager Jim Berzina’s two-decade mark with Wichita Falls, Texas,
approaches, it’s not all pomp and circumstance. “You don’t think too much about
where you work until something like a 20-year milestone comes up,” he said.
“Then, you think about how you got there and what you walked into.”
Former Mayor Charles Harper was serving on the city council that hired Berzina
in 1983. “Jim was the youngest of all the [candidates] we’d talked to,” Harper
recalls, which is what the council wanted—someone youthful to stick around for a
while.
“When he came in, he didn’t have any idea what he was getting into,” Harper
said. Although Berzina did have an inkling.
During his first few months on the job, he was a frequent guest speaker for a
variety of local clubs, organizations, and agencies. He liked to warm up the
crowd with a little interactive game. Berzina asked five people in the audience
to name their five favorite cities in Texas. “Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas”
were always mentioned. One city never made the cut.
“I would always say, ‘Isn’t it interesting none of you picked Wichita
Falls?’” Berzina said. But he would champion his own game. It took years, but it
was practically a new city under the old name that made Wichitans’ top-five
lists. “People started to say, ‘Wichita Falls,’” Berzina said. “I really believe
it’s changed that much.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of South Dakota and his
master’s at the University of Kansas, Berzina first went to Missouri as the
assistant city manager of the city of Springfield before moving up to two city
manager positions within the state.
Berzina came to Wichita Falls from Joplin, Missouri, where he had been city
manager for six years. He came there from a similar post of seven years in
Warrensburg, Missouri.
There, he dealt with a city in desperate need of street, sewer, and parks
improvements—all paid for by a sales tax fund, similar to one implemented years
later in Wichita Falls under Berzina’s tenure. “We had a field day,” he said,
recalling all the improvements made throughout the small city.
The Iowa native changed the two Missouri cities for the better and
unknowingly prepared himself to tackle a larger city in Texas. At 39, the
Wichita Falls job was only his third city management position and his fourth
working in municipal government.
Looking back, Berzina said he would have been happy in either of the latter
Missouri cities as manager until retirement. And in 1983, after accepting an
invite from the Wichita Falls City Council, which was considering a handful of
candidates after a brief and unsuccessful stint with its last manager, the idea
of forever in Joplin seemed like a pretty good idea.
“After I interviewed the first, I thought, ‘I’m not coming to this city. There’s
no way, too much to be done,’” Berzina said. “They [the city council] said, ‘You
are our number-one choice.’ I said, ‘Fine, go to number two.’”
Between the poor quality of the streets, the lack of public infrastructure,
the sad state of the parks, the financial disarray, and department-head
vacancies at city hall—plus the low morale of city staff and residents
themselves—he wasn’t sure if he could do it, or how. “This wasn’t a pretty
city,” Berzina said.
As “the new city manager,” he saw Wichita Falls in a new light, albeit a
harsh one, but problems were identified and changes ensued. “You kind of just
throw yourself in that first year,” and Berzina says now that it wasn’t easy
back then. In a Times Record News article from 1984 reflecting on his first
year, Berzina said, “It’s been more difficult than I thought it was going to
be.”
He tackled city hall first. He shuffled employees around departments, filled
vacancies, and added and eliminated positions. Construction followed. In his
first six months on the job, Berzina told the TRN, “I’m basically a
brick-and-mortar type of person. I like to see projects.”
Residents saw them, too. During his 20 years, he saw the Multi-Purpose Events
Center’s (MPEC) three buildings through: the Bridwell Agriculture Center, the
Ray Clymer Exhibit Hall, and the Kay Yeager Coliseum.
Coliseum namesake Yeager said it’s Berzina’s perseverance that saw the trilogy
to completion, as well as other projects the two have worked on since she served
on the council in the early ’90s and today, as the two serve on the MPEC board.
It’s three of these projects—the largest and most expensive in Wichita
Falls—that are taking shape now. The first phase of the $5 million Faith Village
flood project is under way. Nearly 100 streets have been tagged in a $2 million
effort to repair roadways around the city late this [past] summer. The $40+
million Cypress Water Plant project will be broken into phases and is close to
construction.
Berzina jump-started the 4A/4B Sales Tax Fund, which is a collection of
quarter-cent-shaved-off sales taxes to be pooled for citywide development and
improvement. The most recent recipient of the monies is the in-progress Public
Safety Center, at the corner of Rosewood and Flood streets. “We’re moving up,” Berzina said. “It [project progression] is going to raise the plateaus of this
city. . . . I guess that’s why I’m still a project person today.”
“Dinah, won’tcha blow/Dinah, won’tcha blow/Dinah won’tcha blow your hor-r-r-n,”
Berzina sings merrily with a couple dozen Lions’ Club members one afternoon at
Luby’s Cafeteria. He was asked by the club to join them for lunch and speak at
their meeting, but not before a musical appetizer. “Smile! And the world smiles
with you,” he sings to the banging piano ballad, followed by “You’re a Grand Ole
Flag.”
It’s just another day for the city manager. He is often invited to the club
luncheons, meetings, or speaking engagements around town and at Sheppard Air
Force Base. Berzina gives a quick state-of-the-city address of sorts and takes
questions from the audience.
Most days are filled with department meetings. Berzina is often away from city
hall and out and about in the city. He usually spends at least a couple of hours
a day with councilmembers in and out of his office. And hours more plowing
through e-mails, phone messages, and media inquiries. All to run the $115
million-a-year business with more than 1,000 employees and 104,000 residents.
And then there are the bimonthly city council meetings. The first and third
Tuesdays of every month, Berzina takes his end-seat on the bench in council
chambers, the city attorney to his left, followed by the seven city
councilmembers—his seven bosses.
It’s the council that is responsible for hiring and firing the city manager.
He’s survived this ever-changing body of representatives these past two decades,
some easier than others, he readily admits. “I’m sure I’ve had a few close
encounters,” he said. Mayor Bill Altman jokes that Berzina has stayed so long
because “the right four councilmembers haven’t gotten together,” but in all
seriousness, it is because of his skillful handling of the city, its staff, and
its council.
Councillor Arthur Bea Williams said the trick that Berzina has mastered is
quickly adapting to the council. “I think he’s very good at reading his
council.” It’s this relationship with each council that has aided in Berzina’s
endurance at city hall, Williams said. “He’s stayed because he understands what
the councils want. They bring out the best in each other.”
In 1988, just five years after arriving in Wichita Falls and about the time when
most city administrators are itching to move on, Berzina got a phone call.
Austin needed a city manager, and Berzina was one of the top five choices. He
went for an interview and didn’t like what he saw just an hour into the meeting.
“I told the headhunter I was going home,” Berzina said. “I thought, ‘This is not
a workable situation.’”
Turned off by the lack of council-manager government, the financial problems,
and broken promises to the voters at the time, Berzina went back to Wichita
Falls. In 1996, he was offered a shot at the city manager position in Reno,
Nevada. Again, as one of the top five candidates, he went for interviews and
immediately knew the job wasn’t for him. “It was an unbalanced deal,” Berzina
said without elaborating, except to say that he felt “misled.”
There have been other offers—some smaller cities seeking his help, a few larger,
like Kansas City, Missouri. And some pretty tempting ones, too. Little do most
know, but after two years in Wichita Falls, Berzina was contacted by Colorado
Springs, Colorado. The city needed a manager, and he wanted to go. Berzina
wasn’t offered the job.
“It just didn’t work out,” he said. If offered the position today, he says he
wouldn’t go. And looking back, Berzina said he’s glad he didn’t go then. “Bigger
was thought to be better, then the light goes on.” Twenty years ago, he never
would’ve predicted that his home and his life would be in Texas. “I always said
I made it in Texas because I didn’t come directly from Iowa but washed through
Missouri first.”
But it’s more than a slow southern transition. It’s about building something,
creating a staff, and saving a city. “To me, that’s what a city [staff] is
about, to fix the place where people live.” It didn’t feel right to leave,
Berzina said, and staying was getting better and better. “I was a stayer. I
thought that’s what I owed the community.”
It’s the contagion of progression and improvement that’s kept him here for so
long. “Projects get a hold of you,” he said. And the progress is overwhelming.
“I’ve watched the job change,” Berzina said, and with it the city and its
residents’ morale. “There are so many opportunities to feel gratification.”
It’s this gratification that has kept him here beyond the average job tenure,
his wife, Carol, said. “Every little project changed [the city] before our eyes.
He wanted to finish some things.” And start new things, too. It’s this
perseverance and strong work ethic that his wife says wouldn’t allow him to pack
his bags and turn over the city key. He has never minded putting in the time to
see something through, she said.
“As I look back, its been fun,” Berzina said. And there have been some regrets
and surprises along the way, too. It’s the latter that he thinks about more.
“Its just a different place,” he said.
Berzina said he’s had a few hesitations through the years. “I have never
anguished over any decision the council makes,” he said, adding that there is
some regret. “I think I could’ve pushed harder for the improvements. All of
them,” he said, and accomplished the work at a faster pace.
But he’s not done yet. He is thinking of retirement but hasn’t decided on a
date, or even the year. Realistically, Berzina said that in about three or four
years he’ll say goodbye to city hall. “I’ve never had more fun at this job than
I’m having right now. Why would I leave?”
A question much harder for him to answer now than in 1983.
Brye Butler,
City Reporter,
Times Record News,
Wichita Falls, Texas
Reprinted with permission from the June 22, 2003, online edition of the
Times Record News, Wichita Falls, Texas, copyright the E.W. Scripps Company.
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