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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Follow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

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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Follow AuthentiCity FM for more conversations with the people doing the work of local government: https://www.linkedin.com/company/authenticityfm

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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#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