Q & A with Livingston's new city manager Grant Gager
In November, the Livingston City Commission hired a new city manager: Grant Gager.
Gager has been on the job for about a month, and he took some time to sit down with PCEC’s Johnathan Hettinger last month to discuss his background, housing, his first few weeks in Livingston and how he views the job of city manager.
In the discussion, Gager explains that he will be hosting listening sessions in the coming months to get to know the community, as well as his initial thoughts on the Livingston Growth Policy. He also discusses housing, his experience with flooding and what attracted him to the area.
Gager also shares some of his experiences in Ketchum, Idaho, where he worked for the city government as Director of Finance and Internal Services, as well as working in the New York and Los Angeles areas for transportation authorities.
For the past year, Gager had been living in Stanley, a small town north of Ketchum, with his wife, Chloe, and their two boys, Cade (9) and Grey (7). The family also has an Australian Shepherd named Dandelion (10).
Gager was hired unanimously by the Livingston City Commission among four finalists. He replaces City Manager Michael Kardoes who passed away earlier this year.
The November 17 interview is below.
City Manager Grant Gager
Gager was unanimously hired by the Livingston City Commission in November.
PCEC: What made you interested in coming to Livingston?
GG: A number of things. First and foremost, where we came from in Idaho – Ketchum – I moved there in 2003, right out of college. The town has really grown and really changed in the last 20 years that I've known it.
And, really over the last three or four years, it went from being kind of a quirky, fun little downtown, with a lot of ordinary folks that you'd go hang out with and grab a burger and beer to something else. Over 20 years, as Seattle and San Francisco got wealthy in the tech boom, those people needed a place to ski and, and Ketchum just really changed and a different demographic moved in.
With that, the housing stock in Ketchum is about 60 percent second homes or short-term rentals, so the community just hollowed out. And so, it didn't seem like it was going to be the best place to raise our kids. We've got 7 and 9 year old boys, and as my wife and I looked around and started to think, what's next? My wife had gone to MSU and graduated from there, so we've come up to the area a bit, and our kids were kind of outgrowing our current school.
So this summer, we started to look around, and, in September, we saw this opening. It seemed like a real community with real people still, and as best I can tell, you know, we're not in the 60% vacation rental realm yet here. It's still owner-occupied, or long-term-renter-occupied, which I think is better for community cohesion. Frankly, it’s a better place to raise your kids in my estimation. Also, it's a beautiful area, let's be honest, right?
PCEC: What is that part of it being beautiful that attracts you here? Like, what is it that you'd like to do outside?
GG: Probably my favorite thing to do outside is ski, whether it's alpine or Nordic. You know, I love them both. The kids often do that. And sledding in the wintertime is a big family activity.
In the summer, we're river people. I don't fly fish as much as I used to, just because I've got young kids that don't find it that fun. We used to live on Salmon River in Idaho. We float the river in our kayaks or inflatable boat, sometimes twice a week.
The Yellowstone is a fantastic-looking river. I can't wait to spend some time on it this summer. Just anything in the mountains is a good time for me.
PCEC: Have you had a chance to look at the Growth Policy?
GG: Absolutely, yeah.
PCEC: What sticks out to you from that?
GG: It is a very cohesive document. I like how it approaches growth from all aspects and all angles. Specifically within the document, the focus on infill and reducing sprawl and compact walkable development is really what is most intriguing to me.
The historic downtown here is fantastic. It's compact. It's walkable. It's a pattern that has stood the test of time. That's obviously very attractive and to the extent that we can preserve that, and expand and replicate that throughout the city, I think that’s fantastic.
PCEC: What lessons did you learn during the changes you experienced in Ketchum?
GG: You know, I've learned a lot of lessons.
First and foremost, the most important thing is to work to preserve community character as much as we can. Whether that's in the built environment, or whether that's more on the human side, both are very critical, and both play off of each other.
Keeping Livingston a place where normal people can live and afford to live is very critical to the community's future. I've seen what happens when a community hollows out.
The first mayor I worked for in Ketchum started a restaurant with her husband. It’s a very successful restaurant – during the holidays, just lines out the door. And when they opened 20 years ago, they were open seven days a week. He's the cook, she was front-of-house, and they had a couple of other people to help manage the business. Now, they're open four days a week, they can't find the employees. And they're not the only restaurant that's only open four days a week.
It's pretty critical for us to focus on both the built environment, through the building process and planning process, and also making sure that it’s the sort of place where families can live. That’s critical to me.
PCEC: And how do you do that – help make sure families can afford to continue to live here?
GG: Housing is an issue everywhere we go. The affordability of housing is an issue everywhere we go. Private property rights are what they are, and they’re relatively immutable. There's some things I think we can do on the planning and zoning side that preserve community integrity.
We'll start to have some community conversations and listening sessions in early January to really find out what the community wants and what the community thinks about what solutions are palatable to them.
I've got a lot of ideas and a lot of things I've seen implemented elsewhere, but you know, I'm no master of the universe here, I'm not coming in to tell the people of Livingston what's best for them. I think it’s really important to listen to the community.
And that process will start in January, with open houses, public hearings, and listening sessions and just kind of testing some policy ideas and seeing how the community reacts to them. Whatever we think seems like it's going to provide a good policy solution and be palatable to the community, we'll start to move some of those forward with the commission.
PCEC: What are the similarities and differences you see between Livingston and Ketchum?
GG: The historic railroad downtown. Ketchum is an old railroad town, like Livingston is.
The built environment is very similar, being surrounded by tremendous natural resources with a major river running through downtown. Ketchum has that, too. In 2017, we were a federally declared disaster area after our floods from the big snowpack year of ‘16-’17. And we just had a quick melt that ran through town. Livingston, obviously, in that regard is very similar.
The differences – I just think Livingston is a little bit earlier in the development cycle and hasn't been overrun. That being said, Bozeman is growing every day. It doesn’t even resemble the city it was 20 years ago. As that city grows, as it gets more expensive, those people are gonna get pushed over the hill here.
While we might not have the same influx of wealthy vacationers, I think we're going to have an influx of wealthy people who have been priced out of Bozeman and that will flow down here. And if we're not careful, and we don't do things right, it's going to start to pry some people out of Livingston and, you know, move farther east down the interstate.
That's what happened to Ketchum. As moneyed outsiders came in, people from Ketchum got pushed down the valley 10 miles to Hailey. And then as that built up, they got pushed 5 more miles down the valley to Bellevue. Now, we've got people that are commuting two hours to and from work each day for a $25/hour job. If you’re waiting tables it’s going to be an hour, hour and a half commute each way. That's not healthy for the environment, that's not healthy for employees. It's not healthy for anything, the economy, businesses.That’s really one area that we need to pay attention to here and make sure that doesn't happen.
PCEC: It’s even changed since I moved here in 2018. Significantly. I mean, I was making $13/hour at the Enterprise and had an apartment that was $600 a month. There’s no way you could find that now. That was four years ago.
GG: There were a lot of demographic shifts over the last two-to-almost-three years now. There's a segment of the population that economically got freed up by being able to work from home. There's a segment of the population that was nearing the end of their career, and maybe for health reasons, or otherwise just said, “You know, what, I'm just going to step back from what I've been doing, and just take that early retirement or move to my second home or move to the place that I vacation.” And that’s if they haven't left the workforce entirely.
So there's been a lot of demographic shifts. And also, let's be honest, baby boomers. My mom just turned 70 this year. Even without the pandemic and the whole public health thing over the last few years, I think we were going to see this shift happen, regardless, but the pandemic probably accelerated and exacerbated it.
The Teton Valley area – Jackson, Driggs, Victor, and all that – they got hit with it a few years before Livingston did, probably just by virtue of Jackson over there growing a bit more quickly than Bozeman did.
There's also just the large demographic shifts of people coming from California and other metropolitan areas. If you sell a small house in San Jose Valley, that can buy you a pretty big house in a place like Livingston. That's appealing to them, just in that regard.
PCEC: What's your approach to short term rentals? Or do you have any thoughts on how they might affect the community or what the city could be doing?
GG: Regulation certainly is part of it. It is really just to improve public health, safety, and welfare, and ensure that those units are acceptable and safe places to live for visitors.
There's a lot to be done on the planning and zoning side of that equation. Let's be honest, hotels and motels are not an allowable use in every zoning district within the city of Livingston, right? We do limit where we allow certain businesses and certain uses. I think having that conversation on short-term rentals is a worthwhile conversation for the community.
Because if you know just take the Ketchum example where, if 60 percent of the houses are second homes, or short term rentals or vacation homes, that means you as a homeowner, if you look left and you look right, you've got an Airbnb on either side of you. That's impactful to the community and to a neighborhood. And it really does change the character of a residential neighborhood pretty dramatically.
I think that's a conversation that would be worthwhile within this community to find out if that's okay with the community. And if it isn’t, hey, so be it, the community has spoken. But I've heard a large number of comments about them so far, so it tells me that it might not be OK with the community to just have an unlimited amount in every zoning district within the city.
That's just one of several ways to approach it.
PCEC: The city itself has had a lot of trouble hiring because of the housing crisis. So that seems like it's a pretty significant challenge that you might have to address with the city.
GG: Absolutely, city employees are no different from any other service workers out there. Our planning director just moved here. She started on the first of the month and I started on the second. She was able to get an eight-month lease, she couldn't get a full 12-month lease because the landlord has designs on using that property differently in the summer. And frankly, I'm in a two-month lease.
So yeah, the housing struggle is real. We've had police officers who have turned down job offers in the last few months because of the housing situation and the cost of housing here. And so it is a real concern for every business owner in the valley. We all need employees to operate our business. You know, the city is no different from anyone else.
PCEC: Someone told me to ask about your experience with FEMA and floods.
GG: When you live on a river that runs right through downtown, you learn pretty quickly that it matters what happens upstream of you and what happens on the river banks.
Ketchum actually was very forward thinking. We have a 25-foot riparian setback, which meant no development, not even mowing of lawn or cutting of grass or trimming trees within 25 feet of the mean high watermark. People took that pretty seriously, and we enforced it. I oversaw code enforcement, and I frequently sent our code enforcement teams out to investigate incursions into the riparian.
That said, Ketchum was three and a quarter square miles, and the area just outside, in the county, did not have the riparian setback requirements. So we would often just have very, very large mansions owned by, you know, Fortune 500 CEOs who wanted that grass in the backyard going all the way down to the river, so they could stand in the nice grass and do some fly fishing or what have you. That has an impact on everyone downstream, and especially if, at the edge of your nice grass, you maybe put in some riprap because you lost some land in the last big rainstorm.
I learned a heck of a lot about the river ecosystem and the importance of understanding what your neighbors upstream are doing. I also learned about working with FEMA. We were lucky not to lose any bridges, which was not the case here in Livingston. But we did lose a lot of decent public infrastructure that was related to water and wastewater. We had a few pipes that crossed under the river bed that just became dislodged.
Thankfully, all of the sewer pipes just naturally got sealed, so we didn't have any actual leakage but we just had the one area of the sewer system disconnected from the rest. We had pumps in neighborhoods.
For a little bit of that summer, the real flood event was in early June. All of the work in the recovery effort, as far as public infrastructure was concerned, was completed by September 30 of that year. We moved very quickly to get our infrastructure back in place. Thankfully, the FEMA Public Assistance program exists to help municipalities like us in that situation. And then, the hazard mitigation grant program on the back end of that, in preparing for the next storm is an equally important federal program.
I know that our team here is working through the public assistance process with FEMA, and I think the next step for the city needs to be, you know, that hazard mitigation process and looking forward to the next storm, and the next flood, because there is going to be another one, let's be honest. Making sure that we've looked at all of our infrastructure and ensure that it's going to be resilient is going to be critical to weathering the storm.
Of course, I've only spoken about the government side of the equation. In that 2017 storm, we literally had houses that washed down the river, and we were fishing out people's decks out of the river, just to protect our infrastructure and protect our bridges because a deck floating down the river might take out our bridge.
That obviously needs to be the next conversation, with the private property owners. Whether it’s looking at different ideas for riparian setbacks or development in the floodplain, those are all critical tools to ensuring our resiliency.
PCEC: You were a code enforcement officer? It sounds like you worked in all different types of roles throughout government and overseeing different areas. How do you feel that's informed you’re being a city manager? What is your approach to being a manager?
GG: My approach to being a city manager is really to empower the department directors and subject matter experts to run their departments in a way that meets the needs of the community. And my job is to make sure that we are meeting the needs of the community.
That's why we have a number of different kinds of listening sessions and community outreach events that we're planning for the early part of the year. So we can really ensure that we understand what the community's needs and wants are. And then we as a team will take the feedback that we received there, and ensure that we're operating in that way.
I am lucky that I have had some pretty diverse experiences in the city of Ketchum. The only reason I was charged with code enforcement is because the city of Ketchum decided to implement pay parking. I was the Director of Finance and Internal Services, so oversight, accounting, budgeting, HR, IT procurement, risk management, asset management, all those kind of nerdy government functions that nobody likes to think about. Paid parking fundamentally is really an IT issue – it was five different computer systems that we'd integrate and get them all talking together. And so, because I was in charge of IT and counting the money, it seemed natural to a lot of people to give me parking enforcement. And with parking enforcement came the whole rest of the code, which included a pretty robust night sky ordinance. So that was one type of code enforcement, making sure that exterior lights were off at 10pm.
I am lucky to have had a diversity of experiences overseeing multifunctional departments that we really have here in Livingston. For my last three years in Ketchum, I was in charge of the oversight of water and wastewater. The only function of the city of Livingston that I have very little management experience in is the solid waste area.
I've been fortunate to functionally touch a lot of the different areas of the city of Livingston.
PCEC: You’ve talked about working for a railroad? Could you tell me more about that?
GG: That's actually where my government career started – in New York City, with the MTA’s Metro North railroad. It's a commuter railroad, similar to Metro in Chicago. I worked in the capital construction area. Subsequently, after business school, I ended up with the Southern California Regional Rail Authority in LA, which, again, is a commuter rail operator that operated in the LA basin, six counties there, and again, I was in capital construction.
A big focus there was grade separations and quiet zones. I actually lived near and worked on one crossing that was part of the first quiet zone that was approved by the Federal Railroad Administration in Orange County, California. I was an integral part of that project team, the contract administrator, and, and we actually quieted train horns in a three-mile stretch through the historic downtown Orange and historic downtown Santa Ana. That's a pretty good quality of life improvement for residents and businesses.
That's another one of those community conversations that I think will be fun to have over the coming months here. I want to really drill down on: What are the community's needs and wants? What's the available solution set for us as a city? Because a quiet zone accomplishes certain goals. But a separated crossing, whether that’s an underpass or an overpass, answers a totally different sets of community wants and needs.
I’m familiar with both paths, but it really is about finding out what's best for the community and what the community wants. And we'll go from there.
PCEC: I lived on Front Street first, and the train would shake my entire house. I lived at Fifth and Park for a while. That one was the loudest because the train would blast its horn right there. Now, I live on C Street, a block from the tracks, and the train doesn’t bother me at all.
GG: Yeah, yeah, train crossings are a noticeable part of a community, which is why the organization I worked for out there was so focused on just separating the railroad from the surface streets. It's a good solution from a railroad standpoint. It's a good solution from a community standpoint. It's just a little bit costly and takes a little time to get there.
PCEC: What else are you thinking about? What else are you working on right now? What are your priorities?
GG: Well, I’ve heard very clearly from the community and the commission that housing and affordable housing are two very top priorities.
Probably by virtue of my background, which is more infrastructure and capital construction based, I look at our infrastructure around the city, and I see areas where we probably have some deferred investment.
The built environment really is important to how the community functions and is one area where the government actually has a tremendous amount of responsibility in ensuring that all of our utility infrastructure is in good working order, and the public works department has a lot of initiatives there.
I’m also a quality of life guy, and things like code enforcement and leash laws and animal control and all of that. I recognize the impact that has on people, and at the most basic human day-to-day level, if your neighbor is doing something that violates the code, and whether it’s playing loud music if there’s a noise ordinance – which I know there’s not here.
PCEC: I didn’t know that.
GG: And also, in case of the dark sky ordinance, if someone is really egregiously violating that. Or if there is a pack of wild dogs that runs through the neighborhood or owned dogs that someone has just let loose, that really impacts people at a base level.
Things like plowing snow and having clear streets, that matters to me. It’s a quality of life issue. It’s also a safety issue. While I am focused and the city will be focused on those larger issues, like housing and infrastructure, I’m not going to lose sight of the day-to-day things that impact our residents like code enforcement and plowed streets. Those are critical to how citizens interact with government and experience government. That’s very important to me.
PCEC: Have you had an opportunity to get out much?
GG: Oh yeah, I’ll be honest. I don’t cook very well, and with my family still in Idaho, I’ve gone out for dinner almost every night in the past two weeks, and quite a few lunches also. I’ve had a good opportunity to experience downtown. And it’s been fantastic. I have not had a bad meal in the two weeks I’ve been here. And nor have I had a bad time or a bad conversation.
The community has been very welcoming, and it’s been very clear to me that the people who live in Livingston love it, and I’m happy to be welcomed into this community. It’s been great.
When we came for the interview, I brought my wife, kids and our dog. We went out and played along the river, went down to Chico Hot Springs, did all that.
PCEC: Is there anything else that is important for people to know about you?
GG: I really value transparency and public engagement in government. I am a capital “G” Good Government Guy. I really do take that aspect of government very seriously. It starts with making sure that we’re using our resources efficiently and approaching community problems from a standpoint that is respectful of the community and considers all of the community’s wants and needs, but also having public engagement and public meetings.
The commission has been meeting in the conference room here for the last year or so, and it is my strong desire to get us back into the county building in that bigger room where we used to hold public meetings because I think it’s a better space and a more welcoming space for the public. Especially as we start to take on some of these large initiatives, it’s going to be integral to get as much public comment and public participation as we can, opening up government.
At the end of the day, all of us here at city hall and down at the rec center and over at the public works facility and the fire and police, we’re all here to serve the residents of Livingston and the community.
It’s important that we’re open and accessible, and the community has the opportunity to shape the government that they want.
That really is above all, my guiding principle.