Well, I'm continuing my conversations with the 2025 Chamber of Commerce Award winners, and I'm here with the boss of the year, City of Shelton City Manager, Mark Ziegler. How are you? Doing quite well today. That was a wonderful gala, and when your name was called, you were up against a couple great finalists as well.
Hard to get you up there. You didn't, you were like, ah. Yeah.
Give this to my employees. This isn't, and that's what I've heard when I've talked to folks around the city is that, you know, boss is kind of a title, but it's not what you do. You don't boss people around.
You kind of like bring everybody to the table and listen. You've been with the city for a long time. Long time.
Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I want to be more of a collaborator than, you know, than that dictator director.
That's just, that's my personality. That's my management style, and I think that signaling or, you know, or drawing attention to me over the entire staff is kind of uncomfortable for me, frankly. Sure.
Sure. There's a lot of great people here that do great work, and to take credit for that without having them involved in that is a little uncomfortable. It's flattering, but uncomfortable.
How many people are under your purview here in the city these days? Well, you know, I've essentially eight direct reports, but we have about 96 employees in total. So, you know, I try to consider all of them, you know, employees of mine. Sure.
Because I care deeply about them. Eventually, it can get up to you. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And we work very hard on succession planning and professional development.
So, my goal is that we have a number of employees here that can eventually become department directors and be direct reports. So, working with them and providing them the opportunities to learn everything they need to do to, you know, progress professionally, be involved in some of the decisions we make around here, at least understand the decision-making processes, be able to be advocates for the city, regardless of the department that those decisions are being made in is really important to me. You were at the Capitol just last week or the other day here with some of the council members, kind of just continuing that advocating for the city.
What's it do for you to be able to go in session? We've got a great relationship with our 35th guys. And so, when you're able to go up there and just press upon them, hey, we're still working hard, we're still doing this, but we could use your help in the process of budgets and things like that. We've got a good relationship.
Yeah, we do have a great relationship. We're fortunate that we're the only incorporated city in Mason County, the 35th district. So, we get a lot of attention from them, and rightfully so.
We're the county seat as well. We've got great needs as a community that hasn't seen growth in investment from the private sector. The public sector needs to help encourage that and then relieve some of the impacts on a small community with some aging infrastructure and increasing requirements that come from the state.
We appreciate not just the monetary help that we get from them, but also the policy help. There's legislation that comes out through every session that has an effect on this local constituency. It's important for us to convey that message and how we believe that impacts our residents, but also how they can help us, how they can get our message across to their compatriots there in the legislature and make sure that our voices are heard and we're representing Shelton the best we can.
You have kind of a tougher job too. Some might say it's like herding cats with the council. You've got seven council members that are all very opinionated on what they want to see for the future vision of Shelton.
You've been here a long time, as we've talked about growing up here, and so you kind of have seen it over the decades evolve and take shape. City government, government in general, moves slow. The council members at times, I think, probably want stuff to maybe move a little faster in their direction.
How do you balance listening to them and helping them maybe understand why you can move fast in certain spots, why you don't in others, and the law and things like that to help them make their best decisions? Yeah. That's a majority of my job, frankly. We led into this with managing the employees at the city of Shelton, but a majority of my job is really working with the council to inform them, educate them, provide them the facts and necessary information so they can make an informed decision.
My position, I'm apolitical. I don't get into the politics of these decisions. I need to bring facts to the council.
I'm fortunate that I think I've got a council that really trusts me and the information I bring them. I'm willing to answer any questions at any time. If that means putting me on the spot and questioning the information we bring them, that's part of their job.
The public expects that. There has to be a little bit of skepticism, but at least fact-finding and proofing of the information that comes their way. We try to work with them as much as we can.
When we think an initiative or an issue is going to be seen in different ways, it could be controversial. We might need to take a broader stroke with public outreach. That's done in here, in this office, outside of the public forum a lot.
We can have these conversations. We can provide the information. We can answer some of the questions up front.
We're being as efficient as we can with staff time as well as the council's time. The public can hopefully understand the decision that's being made at the time during the council meeting. The old phrase, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, is true.
We'll lose people through the months and months sometimes of process and decision making, but we try to prove that out through our agenda briefings, the presentations to council prior to the council taking that action. That's really important to me. It's really important how we portray that to the community.
I've never really seen you go off on a council member or not when it comes to them maybe pushing their agenda on what's going on or really not understanding. Again, at the end of the day, I think it's whether or not it's legal or not. It's in the bylaws of either the city or the county or the state or federally how they go through things, but if you had to either before or after a meeting or the next day you pull somebody and say, listen, that was what I'm I'm not trying to push anything here.
I'm trying to let you know what the deal is and either I don't appreciate how you spoke to me at this thing, but again, behind the scenes so you're not dressing them down in public. I don't think that specifically. I think there have been instances, absolutely, throughout my career here, not just in the manager role, where we've had to take the opportunity to maybe clarify with a council member, with one of the electeds, why we've presented the information the way we presented it, some of the background.
Maybe we didn't do a good job. We made some assumptions or we just didn't provide the information we needed to. We need to be a little introspective too and make sure that we are presenting the information so it can be easily digested because it isn't always.
If you're talking about legislation, you're talking about some of department health standards or ecology standards and things like that. It is foreign language to the lay person unless you're working in this field for some time. I wouldn't say that I've had to have that conversation with council members.
I think really for the most part over my tenure, they've been respectful conversations. Sometimes it's misunderstanding and it can be seen as a disagreement, but at the end of the day, boy, the council is in lockstep 90% of the time and very rarely are these dissenting opinions coming out. I really appreciate that that's the case.
I think it shows that our staff are doing a good job in informing the council before they make some of these decisions. It's frankly easier on them to make the decision and then if we plan ahead and we know that there's some dissenting opinions on there, we'll do our best to meet each and every council member's needs so they can make that informed decision. I would assume that it's been a lot easier.
You weren't in the role back when it was a three-person commission, but they couldn't even walk in the same building in a public quorum and things like that. Now, you have the opportunity to speak to up to three of them at a time when it comes to these issues. Has that made it easier to get stuff going? It's different.
I don't know if it's easier. Back in the commission form of government as staff, we would meet with the commissioners of finance, public works, and public safety. You'd meet with that commissioner specifically about any initiative or issue coming forward and then the city administrator at that time would disseminate some information out.
It's the same. You're meeting with potentially two or three at a time, but again, you're still having three meetings essentially with small groups to try to disseminate that. It really isn't a whole lot different other than you do get some council members that may hear each other's opinion, hear differing opinions, and be able to convey that with each other outside of that public forum.
I can gauge what direction they may be going in, and we can be a little more nimble. We might need to change direction. We might need to add some more information, do some more research, provide options, whatever that might be.
That's, I think, the benefit that we get because we get some of those differing opinions maybe in these meetings. Then we can come to the public forum and just have a better presentation and package put together for them. I think in the last 20 years I've been at the radio station, I've interviewed all the city administrators, city managers that have been here.
I couldn't tell you how many there have been. Maybe five or six in the time. You've always been near that position.
You've seen a lot of people come in and come and go over the years. What have you learned from some of your predecessors to do and not to do when it comes to, let's go back to just the general rank and file staff here, and treatment or listening, things like that? Man, that's a great question. When I was presented the opportunity to fill in as the interim city manager back in 23, April of 23- Not that you're counting.
Not that I'm counting. I thought about that a lot, and then even more so when I was presented the opportunity to take this full time. Really, one of the biggest factors was I want to do things differently than what some of my predecessors did.
I learned a lot from all of them, whether it was Mike McCarty when I started here in the 90s to Dave O'Leary for many years, Mike McCarty as an interim, Ryan Wheaton, Jeff Knighton, a few other interims in that time, or others that I had worked with in other communities, and take some of the things that worked really well and some of the things that may have worked, but I just thought could be tweaked and done differently. There's some that were very hands-on. There are others that weren't.
I have individual meetings with my direct reports. We also have a leadership meeting once a week. I'm very much hands-on with the direct reports.
Our monthly all-hands meetings with all of our staff, and we provide updates to them. I do bi-weekly, or sometimes it's monthly depending on time, these civic snapshot emails to all of our staff about council proceedings. Those are some of the things where we receive feedback from our staff that they didn't know was happening in this office or at the council level necessarily, and they want to know more about that and some of the processes that we were going through, so try to disseminate more of that information down, and just take more of kind of an interest in the hands-on role throughout the hierarchy of our staff.
That's something I wanted a little more when I was either in director or supervisor roles as well, because it's just my personality, my management style, and some people might not enjoy that much hands-on and personal involvement, but I think for the most part, it's something that our city, our employees embrace and really enjoy, that they're getting that opportunity to voice what's happening in their departments, advocate for their departments, express any concerns at the same time, so that's probably the biggest thing I took from some of my predecessors and really instituted that when I first came on board. And you've kind of also flipped that a little bit in the sense that you're now doing council updates on what's happening in these departments, so they have a better sense of what's going on. Yeah, absolutely.
What are the Shelte Awards? Shelte Awards, it started out as, it's essentially an employee recognition program, and it's your typical, who's got a messy desk or who provided terrific customer service that year, and I was trying to think of a name for those, and you have the ESPYs and the ESPN, the Grammys, everything kind of ended with an IE or Y or something, so I don't know how I came up with Shelte, but I came up with Shelte, ran it by some staff, we worked on what that looked like, we came up with 15 to 20 awards annually, they change sometimes, and then we use it in an employee recognition event in December of every year, so it's kind of, and we got rid of the employee of the year award because it seemed to be, it singled out an employee, a couple employees that were nominated, one employee, and I really wanted to recognize the great work and the uniqueness of all of our staff, have some fun with a few of the awards, but also honor the people that are doing the great work here, and we take nominations from their peers, and many of the awards have 20 nominations, and so we recognize everybody that's nominated, and then our wellness committee serves as kind of the judges, and we'll vote on those nominations, and the first year I made the awards myself, and I spent a bunch of time on some unique, frankly crappy looking awards that were kind of fun, we can show you a picture of one or two of them here in the office if you like, and then I decided the last couple years just to go out and purchase some awards that maybe people would be more proud of displaying in their cubicles, and save me some time, probably to be honest, save me some time, so it's fun, our staff enjoy it, we have a breakfast in December, and present these, and do the whole awards ceremony, it's not quite like the Oscars, or we don't have the red carpet, or anything like that, but we get to present them in front of the group, and recognize those individuals, and have some fun with it. I think something like that, you mentioned the wellness committee, lots of things have changed, I was in the lobby, and there's a postcard there, and it's from 1992, so it's about 35 years old, the population at that time was 7,000 or so, so things have really changed in the city, and the way people kind of do business has changed, there's a lot of new things like wellness, and this kind of opportunity to make work, I think, a little more fun, perhaps, things changed a lot over COVID as well, and the way you do business, what are some of the things that have been implemented since you've been at the city, that at first, either you kind of was like, this isn't going to work, or there's, this is not us, this is not what we do, but now you've come to realize maybe it's an integral part of the whole, they talk about whole child, and all that stuff, but the whole employee. Yes, those are a few things we've done that's really important to me, because we spend a lot of time here, and at times it's stressful, and really investing in our employees, retaining good employees, and we can't do that solely through compensation, we can't compete with the Thurston County markets, and the I-5 corridor, and we know that, so how do we compete with that to recruit and retain employees in Mason County, and Shelton, outside of compensation, so those are the other things that we do, the wellness committee works very hard in putting together events and activities that bring people together, lightens up the day a little bit, recognizes employees, have some content, chili cook-off, you know, pie day on 314, right, and things like that.
We've done employee satisfaction surveys, so we actually ask the employees to identify the things that we can do better as management and as staff, and it's really enlightening, and it's great to see, frankly, because I want to know what our employees need to be fulfilled at the City of Shelton. We've instituted some culture and belonging programming, some communication training, some other mindfulness and stress relief training, and we're progressing those throughout, you know, this year too, and providing those as opportunities for our staff. We're developing committees, so everybody has a say in that, it's not driven from the top down, it's driven from, really, I don't want to say bottom up, but from the grassroots of our staff, so we can understand them better, we can fulfill, like I said, their needs here.
We've also, you know, through COVID, we had remote work policies, and we've ratcheted that back a little bit, and really, I got almost no kickback from that. To come back into the office. Yeah, we've had employees that want to work here at the City of Shelton.
We have some flexibility, obviously, because there's unique needs and there's unique positions here that aren't as public-facing, but even the ones that aren't public-facing, they've wanted to be in the office, they've wanted to work as a team, and I go back to my basketball coaching days and playing sports, and I really believe in that team culture and working together and building that camaraderie and that problem-solving, and I just think it's more productive and it's more fulfilling when you do that, you know, as a team and together as a group. So is that where you learned all this stuff, like John Wooden style, like coaching leadership? You know, I never was the big philosophical, you know, coach or read or studied coaches a lot. I learned a lot through Terry Gregg and high school coaching, Dave Neal and Mark Jensen and other coaches.
I was a basketball guy through the years and developed a lot coaching, you know, at all levels that I coach with. You know, you coach the senior in high school much different than you do the freshman in high school, right? And when you're dealing with 50, 60 freshmen that are turning out for the first three days of basketball practice in early November, you have to develop, yeah, some different skills than you might be at the varsity level when it's pretty much already known who's going to be on the team. So yeah, I think I harken back to those days quite a bit, understanding where people's different needs are, you know, how to best meet people's needs individually, much like you do, you know, on the basketball court.
You have people that respond differently to different communication styles. You can't yell at every kid on the court, right? You might need to show them in practice, you know. Sometimes you can draw it up.
Sometimes you have to show it on the court. You have to do that here too. We've gone through the disc assessments, Clifford assessments, the communication styles here.
Better understanding, it's on my right here. The green dot means my green personality. I tend to be more direct.
Okay. Don't necessarily beat around the bush. So what, so somebody's gonna see your ID, and you walk up and you go.
Yeah, understand how I receive information, how I communicate. So if somebody that tends to be more analytical, right, and needs that type of communication, I can see their colored dot and modify my communication to meet their needs a little more. And they might be able to modify their communications, understand me a little more.
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So we don't have a disagreement right off the bat just because our communication styles are different.
So yeah, it's, and it's something we put all of our staff through here, so we can better understand each other and communicate better. Because if it breaks down here, right, it's going to translate out into our community. And so let's talk about the community.
It's grown since that photo I mentioned, 7,000. We've got what, 12,000 people now? Actually, just about 10,500. Oh, 10,500.
Okay. So a good community. That's, you said about 95 staff overall.
So it's a good representation here in a small community like Shelton. Seen a lot of growth. There's a ton of housing growth that's happening over by Olympic College.
There's expansion plans up there. Was that Peacock Ridge or something like that? Yeah, yeah, Olympic Heights. The whole, the Olympic Highway North project that was many years ago, but is still really nice to drive up there.
You're constantly seeing growth and change here. And I think, well, first off, how much of the changes, like you said, it's not necessarily bottom up, but the folks on the ground level, the crews that do public works, the crews that do the parks and rec, things like that, they are the main talkers to the public. How do ideas from the citizenry get filtered in and up to kind of change here? I wish we had more of it, frankly, because it tends to only come out when there's a problem or there's an issue.
And so more active community engagement is something that I believe we need to do a better job of. We have some limitations with public outreach and staffing of that, but there's avenues a number of ways, right? We have council meetings every week. There's public forums on the first and third Tuesdays of each month during those council meetings.
Our doors are open. We're accessible through email calls. We've got a public forum coming up next month on Olympic Highway North and the reconfiguration up there because the grant funding, it's a $4 million project that is 100% grant funded.
The grant funds require bicycle lanes to be put in. So being able to convey what that means to the configuration, it might be, we might have to remove parking to configure that road and what that looks like to the community and getting the community to engage in that is really important to us because it's much easier to do that up front than come back around. And we've learned some lessons.
We made some mistakes. Coda Street was an example, the redesign of that. And I think there was great intentions in that, but we didn't do a good enough job of outreach to our community.
So they understood the intent there. So we're learning. We'll make mistakes.
We're not necessarily afraid to make mistakes. And that's not keeping us from progressing and moving forward because we need to do that or we're going to be stuck with substandard services for a growing community and we can't do that. We're working hard on our water systems and getting a new water reservoir in our community.
We're working hard on upgrading our satellite plant out by Sanderson Field. So that can be a catalyst towards economic growth. It can provide reclaimed water to an industrial in use out there that would be a major employer.
We're continuing to make investments in our main plant out on Fairmont Street. So that is as environmentally compliant as it can be. We don't affect the shellfish industry in Oakland Bay and Hammersley Inlet.
We're trying to be as progressive as we can be with our street and transportation infrastructure, both pedestrian and vehicle traffic. So we make sure we can meet the needs as this growth occurs. I think it's really important that as this demographic changes, we may get new people that move into our community, particularly if they're shopping houses in Thurston County and Mason County and the city of Shelton.
And it's a like for like house, but it's 50, 60, $70,000 cheaper. That demographic will change here a little bit and there'll be different needs for our community to meet. So we have to be progressive in how we kind of look to that future and how that's going to meet our needs and work with our partners, work with the county, the school district, the port, our partners at Central Mason Fire as well, because they all play a role in providing some of the public services that we all touch.
So if you're looking to do that and make changes that are kind of almost generational in the sense that younger families may want to move in here, things like that. So what I've come to know over the years is that for a lot of time here, the folks that are engaged and the ones that speak out the most are the, we'll say, elderly population that have the time to come to the meetings and speak out about these things. Those aren't necessarily the, you want to hear all the voices, but the ones that are making these new inroads, they don't have a lot of time to come and advocate for themselves when it comes to that.
So how do you balance knowing you need to make this shift demographically, but all your comments are coming from folks who may not want the change. How do you do that? It's dynamic, right? And you have to be dynamic. So we have to be creative on how we reach our community.
We have to use different methods, whether it's the public forum, the council meeting, a social media account, going to where people are. Potentially it's at the chamber expo in the Bight downtown. It's a farmer's market and meet people where they are.
It's also packaging that information appropriately. I talked about disseminating that information to our staff. It's also letting the parks maintenance worker know about a street project.
So when they're in the grocery store, they're talking to their neighbor or their friend, they can talk about that project a little bit and inform people a little more organically. I think that builds trust in our community too. If it's somebody that you know, if you are coming to me and asking me a question about a road project and we have a relationship or neighbors or friends or whatever, that information is going to be trusted, I think, because there's already a trust built between us.
So if our employees have this social circle and there's trust already built, that information disseminated out will be, I think it will be accepted a little more than maybe skeptical of, you know, it's just government trying to do something that we don't agree with or instituting a policy that might be overbearing or something like that. So there's different avenues we want to take at all times. And I don't know if there's a magic wand to wave over that.
You work in the media, obviously. No, I try to get out as much information as possible. You guys have been doing a good job of getting it out there and letting people know of the changes.
I watch the council meetings. You know, it would be nice. But again, people don't have the time.
Of course, they can go back watch it on Mason Web and things like that. So that service is great, or on your YouTube channel. It's hard.
And you know, again, like everybody has said over the many years, local government, local politics is so, it impacts you so much more than national politics. But national politics gets all the attention. It's a tough one.
It is. And we have to wade through that every day. Because it does build some mistrust, and it trickles down.
You can be associated with some of those things that are happening. And trying to be approachable, trying to be accessible, being truthful and honest are paramount to building that trust. Part of what we're doing with the council, I wanted to mention, we're going through a strategic planning process.
We're in the middle of it now. And so we'll be having a couple retreats coming up. And so getting that seven-member council to really set those strategic goals.
So we as staff have that roadmap moving forward. And so what we'll do is every initiative, every council briefing, every budget request will have a strategic goal attached to it. And that will be transparent to the community, and they'll see that.
We'll be able to speak to that strategic goal along the way as we're moving through this. And we'll have some performance measures attached to those. And so we'll be able to demonstrate that to the community as we're moving forward.
We haven't formulated this yet, but most likely on the website, we'll kind of have a tracking system, if you will. So we'll be able to communicate how we're moving towards those goals, and what progress we're moving towards, and what kind of programs and projects will be attached to those strategic goals. All right.
You got any breaking news for me? Anything to share? Any contracts signed or anybody coming into town? Not really. It's early in the year. It tends to be a little bit slower, believe it or not.
We're getting ramped up. We're really looking forward to the reclaim project, the reclaim tank. Olympic Heights is moving.
They're putting infrastructure in the ground, 199 lots right behind the college. The next phase of 350 or so lots, we're talking with them as well right now. And then there's a few more subdivisions on the south side of town that are kicking.
It's going to change our community. We're looking forward to that. We should be adopting our comp plan here really soon, our PROST, our Parks, Recreation, Open Space, and Trails plan.
A survey is going out for updating that. So we're looking for public feedback on those measures. We're really excited about a opportunity to partner with the Humane Society of Mason County for animal shelter and animal control services.
So we're targeting a June date to partner with them. I think it'll be a great opportunity to expand those services in the city of Shelton. It'd be nice too to have them get a ... I'm assuming they'll have like a satellite office here.
I mean, they're up in Belfair now. Exactly. And sort of have another presence.
Yeah, down at our existing shelter. They have such a great network, a fostering program. And as municipalities have more and more demands on providing services in the community, we have to look at how to be creative and provide some of these services.
And animal control and animal shelter services are one that there's somebody out there that frankly has a better network than we do. There's models all over the state for this type of partnership, particularly Kitsap County, who the Humane Society up there offers that program throughout municipalities. So yeah, we just have to be creative and look beyond these walls if we have to.
I feel like when you were the Parks and Rec Director here, we talked one time, and this had to have been years and years and years ago, but it was an idea that everybody could be within walking distance of a park. Is that still a thing? It's still a goal. Yeah, it's still a goal.
We have neighborhood park standards that are imposed on these subdivisions. So the Olympic Heights subdivision will be building a neighborhood park with a play structure on it. That'll serve that neighborhood.
But that still is absolutely a goal. So the underserved areas that are currently built out will be priorities. We're going to continue working on trails because that's been a top priority for 20-some years.
We've got some design work going on the old Simpson Railway right now. We have 30% design to convert that into a multimodal trail with eventual connection out to the marina, the Yacht Club as well, and then out to the western boundary of the city limits, which will be, I think, a great piece of not only recreational infrastructure, but also transportation infrastructure. We want to integrate some of the rail elements to that, so we're saving some of the switches and arms and things like that.
We can incorporate signage and art into when it's appropriate. So yeah, it's still near and dear to my heart is parks and recreation. Maybe Jordan, I bugger a little too much about that, but it's something that probably won't ever leave me.
That's great. That's awesome. Boss of the year, Shelton Mason County Chamber of Commerce, nominated and voted on by the members in the chamber.
Mark Ziegler here, city manager, and again, the doors are open to the city if you want to pay attention more to what's going on in the council meetings. They happen on Tuesdays, either the study session or the council meetings. You can find them on the YouTube channel.
You can reach out. I guess the council members don't have districts yet, but so you can reach out to any of them and share your concerns. They're always available and willing to talk to their constituents there.
Always good stuff. Or myself. I'm here in the office.
Come on up here. I walked right in. They let you right in.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.