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

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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

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

Endless Motion

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Wonderment

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