I had the opportunity to interview
Mr. John Pombier who is the deputy city manager of the City of Mesa. As a
public policy and public affairs major, one aspires to city management and
public administration within the city level and jurisdiction. Although I didn’t
intern for this city, however I have always hoped to learn from city governance
and its contribution to not only the citizens living in that city but also to
the state. The most important thing that I want to learn from a city especially
Mesa is the economic development that contributes to employment, healthcare,
diversity, religions, improvements to social issues, amongst other things.
Mr. Pombier currently overlooks
facilities maintenance, human resources, solid waste, police, fire, fleet
services and the public information for the City of Mesa. According to him
these services made up 67% of the City of Mesa’s services. The city manager for
Mesa is Chris Brady. Mesa is the 38th largest city in America with a
fast growing population. I have lived in Mesa for almost three years now, and
before I am going to move to Phoenix would like to know information pertaining
to the city’s public officials, citizen participation, economic resources that
finances this city, city’s innovations and the city’s emergency preparedness in
terms of natural disasters and terrorist threats.
John Pombier received his Bachelor
of Business Administration from the University of Michigan, and his Juris
Doctor from the Arizona State University. Previously he was a city prosecutor
for the City of Phoenix, deputy general counsel for the State of Arizona’s
Governor’s office and former city prosecutor for the City of Mesa from 2003 –
2011 until he was promoted to deputy city manager in 2011, a position he holds
to date.
He informed me that his resume is
not the typical one for a management position in the city. He doesn’t have a
master of public administration degree as most of the city managers have. This
was not his career anticipated when he started his career long time ago. His
advised was that people with passion to work for public services and to help
make a change are the true pioneers of public administration. There were many
challenges that he was faced with as a city manager such as lack of quality
control by public officials and in adequate economic resources. He had overcame
these challenges by hiring the best employees for the city, empowered the staff
to step up and make decisions with due diligence, there are more citizen
involvements now, there is reserve provisions and the great innovations for the
city.
His contributions to the city
included but not limited to team up resources and innovation to modify the best
possible choices in favor of sustainability, quality of life versus quality of
money, improved productivity, improved services and improved crisis response. He
was very optimistic about the future, sustainable methods for improvement on
core services, higher level of service for the city, better reserves and
overhead and a robust future decisions. In terms of future trends, he is
extremely concerns with online reliance of this generation. Everyone seemed to
be attached to their handheld devices and that is not so much a good thing. He
mentioned that his son is taking online classes from home towards his degree.
The negative downfall of this is that his son wouldn’t be able to interact with
others outside. He would prefer that the next generation doesn’t rely too much
with technology and get out more to interact with other people outside the
realms of doing everything online.
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