Longest-tenured city manager says goodbye after 23 years

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Longest-tenured city manager says goodbye after 23 years

Around Osceola

Wednesday, 01 September 2010 00:00

By Juliana A. Torres
For the News-Gazette
After 23 years of steering Kissimmee through explosive tourist development, growing pains and hard economic times, Mark Durbin will step down from the role of city manager.
It will mark a new era for the city. Durbin is more than the longest-tenured city manager Kissimmee has ever had. His years leading the city have been characterized by his integrity, his open-door policy for employees and residents alike and his love for helping people.
“I don’t know how other cities function,” said Dave Drake, a 21-year employee in the Information Technology department. “We were very, very lucky to have him.”
The job he always wanted
Durbin decided he wanted to be a city manager after watching his father, then-Police Chief Alex Durbin, take on the responsibilities as the first administrator of Kirkwood, Mo. The younger Durbin was 15 at the time and saw how his father’s new job as city manager had him doing something different each day. The variety and the leadership role appealed to him.
At his father’s recommendation, he earned an undergraduate degree in business and a master’s degree in public administration. By the time he graduated, he had already interned at four different cities in Missouri.
The first two cities Durbin managed were towns dealing with funding problems. Because he wanted to move to a high-growth area, he started looking for jobs in Florida. In many ways, the job he found managing Kissimmee was perfect for him, he said.
“Kissimmee has grown with me, so I never had the opportunity to feel like I’d done it all, or there was nothing for me to do,” Durbin said. “Every year was different … like I was in a different city. I doubt I could have stayed 23 years in very many other cities.”
He was 32 when he became manager of Kissimmee. Though it was another 10 years before Durbin committed to living in the city as long as the city commissioners would have him, he has never looked for another job.
A ‘lanky kid’ as manager
During his beginning months in Kissimmee, Durbin made a point to visit the various aspects of the city, not only to observe his new employees, but to work with them. He worked a day with every crew, doing everything from picking up trash and weeding to street and drainage maintenance.
Budd Smith, now street superintendent for the public works department, remembers the day he first met Durbin. The city had gone through a series of short-lived managers who hadn’t paid much attention to the lower-ranked employees.
“We waited for suit to show up. This young, tall, lanky kid showed up,” he said. “The first thing we thought to do was take him and put him inside a storm pipe.”
To his credit, city employees have never thought of Durbin as “a suit.” On that day out with the public works employees, John Tulak, then an equipment operator, pulled a ladder out of a hole and accidentally let it fall over. It hit Durbin, standing about 10 feet away, square in the head. But Durbin kept working, and instead of expecting negative repercussions, Tulak was promoted to foreman about a month later.
“He worked down with us in the water, the sand and the dirt, the snakes and everything else. (He) never complained, did a full day’s work with us, even with the lump on his head,” Budd said.
Charles Barboza, now stormwater supervisor, also remembers the day Durbin came to work with his crew, not long after Barboza started with the city.
“The thing that really stood out was from then on, he always knew me. Whenever he saw me, he shook my hand and called me by my name,” Barboza said. “That went on with pretty much everybody that I seen that he came into contact with him.”
Employee loyalty
In the city of Kissimmee, employees have a tendency to stay on for decades rather than years, partially because Durbin supports and looks out for them. He keeps an open door and listens to employees, fielding their concerns and suggestions, even if he doesn’t agree with them.
“I always felt like he had our back,” Drake said. “No matter which direction (commissioners) wanted to tear off and go in ... he always tried to bring them back on keel.”
Kissimmee Police Chief Fran Iwanski, whom Durbin made the first female police chief in Central Florida, said she saw firsthand how he worked to make tough decisions about city employees, especially as finances got tight.
“I watched him struggle with those decisions,” she said. “It’s a sign of great city manager. He really does have his heart with the employees.”
Durbin also was never afraid to act goofy around his employees. He made several appearances as one half of a Blues Brothers act during employee functions, kept jokes in his monthly letters to employees and never hesitates in laughing.
“I don’t think all of us had ever agreed with everything Mark has done,” Smith said, adding: “We couldn’t have had a finer city manager than Mark. I think he’s had the foresight to see us through some tough times.”
A leader for a manager
Shortly after moving to Kissimmee, Durbin divorced his wife. Though he was glad his ex-wife wanted to stay close by with their children, Brian and Jessica, the divorce made him re-think his priorities, he said. He started to invest more time into his church, which in turn changed everything he did and helped him develop more compassion for the residents he served.
Those who come in contact with him always note his quiet faith, as well as his values, morals and ethics that permeate everything he does.
“I mean, those are things people dream about in their bosses, to have a boss that has all those talents, all those traits,” Dan Loubier said. “It’s nice to know there are still people like Mark out there that believe in that as their core.”
Loubier, who heads the Parks and Recreation Department, was one of the first directors Durbin hired. At the time, Loubier realized that Durbin meant to hire for the long-term, especially when Durbin came and visited the community where Loubier was working. Twenty-two years later, the senior management team still shares the common vision of Durbin’s leadership.
“So many people that have made this their career, I don’t think they would have if Mark hadn’t been managing it,” Loubier said.
While Durbin unabashedly admits to knowing Kissimmee inside and out, he’s never tried to understand the intricate details of each department, claiming to be a “decentralized” manager.
“A lot of what I do is just making sure that I know what’s going on,” he said. “I hire good people, put them in place and let them do their job. I expect them to do their job to the best of their ability, without running to me for direction on everything.”
More recently, Durbin has left more and more responsibilities to his management team and concentrated on coaching city commissioners. He always makes time for their questions and tries to get them to think about the overall impact of their eventual decision, he said.
“I’ve really enjoyed that,” he said. “It’s good for the city.”
Even when he doesn’t agree with the commissioners’ decisions, Durbin considers it his job to make their direction turn out well for the city. Over the years, commissioners have had more confidence in staff members and their recommendations.
“I think most of the commissioners will tell you, even the ones that didn’t like me will tell you, that they felt like they were treated fairly,” Durbin said.
Growing too fast
If Durbin has one regret, it’s allowing Kissimmee’s tourist-driven development to get away from him. As the city began to explode in growth responding to the tourism potential to the north and west of its limits, it was hard to plan for the long-term future of the city.
“We were growing so fast, that we probably weren’t doing a good job of determining what direction the city needed to take,” Durbin said.
Developers wanted to build, and for the most part, the city let them. The end result was an overabundant concentration of multifamily developments in areas like Columbia Avenue, where the sprawling apartment complexes turned to condos during the Florida housing boom and then went into foreclosure when the economy dropped into recession.
“One of the things that’s disappointing to me is how we’ve allowed the mix of residences to be probably a little over 50 percent rentals. That’s not real good for any community. You don’t develop buy-in from residents if they’re renters,” Durbin said. “We’ve tried hard over the last five or six years to try to turn it around, get more single-family, homeowner-occupied projects built.”
With the downtown well on its way to redevelopment, the city has turned its attention to revamping the area around Vine Street. Though he said he’s disappointed he won’t be able to see the project through, Durbin has confidence in the plans.
“At some point, it’ll just all fall together,” he said. “The commission needs to stay with it. They can’t get frustrated.”
The new era
One of Durbin’s major goals in leaving was to ensure that residents and city employees won’t notice any hitch in the transition to new management.
“I want so bad for them to not even know that I’m gone,” he said.
The city employees trust Durbin even in his departure as their leader. When he announced his retirement during the general employee organization meeting, he told them not to worry.
“When he tells you something, you pretty much know it. He says, ‘You won’t even feel it, because I’ve got people ready,’” Barboza explained. “When we walked out of the meeting, mostly everybody I spoke with was confident in what he said.”
About three and a half years ago, Durbin promoted Mike Steigerwald to deputy city manager, moved him up to the fifth floor of city hall and started grooming him as Kissimmee’s future city manager. Steigerwald had been city planning director and said he thought he would eventually become a director in a bigger city.
He was surprised when Durbin told him he thought Steigerwald had the potential for city management and even more surprised when Durbin started giving him charge of critical areas in the city: redevelopment projects in downtown and on the lakefront, the parks and recreation department and the charter school.
Durbin said he was impressed with Steigerwald’s management potential, his fairness and capability to work through problems.
“One of the reasons I’m leaving now, as opposed to waiting, is because I’m afraid if I wait a few years, somebody else is going to grab him, and it’ll be the city’s loss,” he said.
So Durbin moved up his retirement to give Steigerwald the opportunity to lead. Even before he announced his retirement, Durbin was turning more and more responsibilities over to his eventual replacement and encouraging the commissioners to speak with Steigerwald when they had a question or concern so they would be confident in his ability to take the reins in the city when it came time.
For the last year, Durbin has been confident in Steigerwald’s ability to lead, he said.
“Kissimmee will be better off with me moving on and him moving into the top position,” Durbin said. “He’s the right person for the right time, right now.”
Saying goodbye
The most rewarding part of managing the city is helping people who can’t otherwise help themselves, Durbin said.
“There has not been a day when I haven’t had the opportunity to help somebody,” he said. “I can go out and see the success of helping somebody that really needs our help and had nowhere else to turn.”
Along with Kissimmee’s neighborhood watchdogs who have become his friends, Durbin said he will miss the responsibility of being a city manager.
“I like to be in charge,” he said. “I feel like God’s given me the ability to be a leader. It’s what I’ve tried to work hard on.”
One thing Durbin won’t miss is the careful distance he’s maintained with some residents and influential people in Kissimmee. He said he learned the hard way how some friendships can affect the objectivity he wanted to maintain as city manager.
“I’ve not got real close to a whole bunch of people here,” he said. “It makes the job easier, but I think I’m going to enjoy not having to worry about how friendships will affect my ability to be a city manager.”
He said he feels God leading him into the ministry. The city’s pension will be enough for him to live comfortably and serve without having to ask for support.
“You don’t get very many opportunities to just quit your job and go do something that you want to do,” he said.
He’s unsure if he’ll stay in Kissimmee. Where he lives matters less to him than what he’s doing, he said.
“This has been a great area. If I end up staying in Kissimmee, I’ll be thrilled, but if the right job comes along and it requires me to move, I will not find it difficult to move,” he said. “I’ll miss the familiarity. I know everything about Kissimmee.”
The legacy left behind
If Durbin can help it, there won’t be any buildings named after him or memorials in his honor. He gets worked up just at the thought of having to argue down any such extravagant measure.
“I don’t want it,” he said, adamantly. “As long as people look at Kissimmee and say, ‘Boy, it was a well-run city,’ that’s enough for me.”
Those who work with him closely say the city is embedded with Durbin’s integrity and management philosophy: an ethic of treating people fairly and with respect and of responding and serving the residents above all.
“It’s really hard for us to be unsuccessful here when he’s created that mentality in an organization,” Steigerwald said. “(We’re) going to be successful because of what he’s built and the people he’s put in place here. And that’s the biggest legacy he can leave the city with.”