New Ventura City Manager meets the Breeze for an interview.
by Richard Lieberman
City manager Alex Macintyre has taken over the reins at city hall. He came aboard in November 2018 and is settling into the position. Macintyre’s background and experience in city management are broad and extensive.
Macintyre has served as city manager for Menlo Park, an affluent city of 36,000 with a median income of $126,000. Menlo Park is also the home and headquarters of Facebook. He had been with the city since 2012. He also served as city manager at Lake Oswego in Oregon between 2008 and 2012. He also served as chief assistant county administrator with Marin County from 2006 to 2008. Before that, he was town manager for Tiburon and Portola Valley, both in Northern California.
Macintyre has a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of California at Irvine.
In addition to the Thomas Fire rebuilding effort, Macintyre is overseeing an ambitious water agenda that includes connecting to state water and working with a new council.
“I am absolutely enthusiastic and looking forward to what we can do together,” he said. “I know there is so much coming up and there is so much to do I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and get going” he added.
Asked how it would be different working with a behemoth like Facebook and now working for Ventura. “When I came to Menlo Park, Facebook had just announced it plans to move onto an old Sun Microsystems campus that had been abandoned and it was a small ten-acre campus and I thought to myself it will be interesting to see how a very well branded company like Facebook does here. When they got there in 2012, they had something like 2500 employees and when I left they were up to about 15,000 employees.
When asked about how it will be working with a new council he said “I think it is going to be interesting given that we are now in the districts, how does the decision making or how might decision making be different on January 1 as compared with December 31st? How will things be different, I don’t know but I know it will be different, I just don’t know how?”
City workers have mentioned to the Breeze that previous city managers never came in to say hi and seemed to not be connected to the city workforce, do you plan to be different? He answered “I actually have been going out to the departments. Among all the other things I have in mind is to get back to the workforce and introduce myself to them. We have 609 employees and another 400 seasonal temporary employees, that is a thousand people. There is no reason I shouldn’t be saying hello and interacting with them. I want to be able to knock on an employee’s doors and speak with them face to face,” he said. Having a workforce management system like the one that Alex Macintyre is introducing to this community will only improve employee productivity in the long run.
Here at the Breeze we welcome Alex to our community and wish him the best of luck in his new position and we look forward to his ability, knowledge, and experience in helping Ventura into the future. We know his management style fits well with the city’s goals and general plan.
