Eckert: City Employees 'Best Possible Team'

Editor's Note: City Manager Rick Eckert, , , and each spoke at the Powder Springs Business Association's monthly luncheon on Tuesday. Click on each person's name for highlights from their speeches.

City Manager Rick Eckert praised Powder Springs’ city employees at Tuesday’s business association luncheon, calling them the “best possible team I could ever hope to manage.”

“Like I say: ‘They don’t work for me. I work with them,’” he said.

Eckert noted that balancing the budget has been rough the past two years because of continued economic woes, and the city has laid off “very few people.”

“And we’re hoping and praying that we’ve stabilized. I’m not going to hold my breath on that, but we do what we have to do, and we have hardworking people, good people, competent people, people who are staying when they could go find better jobs if the economy was better,” the city manager said. “But they’re staying because of the love of what they do, not necessarily what they’re making because they’re sure not making enough.”

Powder Springs has some “very, very good people” working for the city, he said.

“In city management, everybody says, ‘What do you do?’ To quote Herman Cain … ‘You surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing, and you manage those people.’ And that’s what I do,” Eckert said.

Eckert, a 33-year veteran of city management, also gave a little bit of background about himself.

A few years into his career, he ended up working in Alaska. He’d stay there for seven years before coming to the Atlanta area to work for CH2M Hill, a company that outsources municipal services.

“City manager jobs are like prison terms: three to five year out,” he joked, noting his seven years in Alaska.

Under CH2M Hill, he helped start a city called Masdar in the United Arab Emirates for a year.

“It’s supposedly the highest high-tech city in the world,” he said. “We literally brought that thing out of the sand.”

Eckert joined the city in March 2010.