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Ed Everett on the Move Valerie Harris Special to The Spectrum ‘The definition of community is the feeling of not being alone.’ Redwood City’s city manager, Ed Everett, is eyeing a time in the very near future when the thrills and headaches of managing a city will end. The actual date is Sept. 21. As the photo on this page indicates, Everett will be dancing into retirement. Everett said, “The baby boomers are getting rid of the old definitions of retirement. The definition of retirement that I had in my youth differs from how the baby boomers are defining it.” Everett is a third-generation native Californian, born to Permin and Ellen Everett and raised in Sacramento. His paternal lines trace back to France. The family later immigrated to Denmark. The old French family name, Da Permin, eventually was truncated to Permin, and now every generation carries that name forward in either a first or middle name. Everett’s middle name is Permin, and he has passed that name along to one of his daughters as a middle name. “I had to figure out a plan of attack. It was going to take more than street furniture to revive the downtown area.” Everett grew up in Sacramento along with his older brother, Richard, who lives in Newcastle, near Sacramento. Richard Everett reminisced: “When Ed and I were in school together, I was the older brother, and I would make B’s and C’s. Ed would get mostly A’s with an occasional B. I’d tell him that my classes were harder because I was older. But that was never the case for him. I guess he took after my father. It ran in the family. My father was a college graduate and worked for the state of California as chief of standards and surveys. Even our grandfather, Ralph Waldo Everett, graduated from Stanford in 1901. But Ed was always a leader. Even when we were in high school, Ed was the one who ran the Sunday school.” After graduating from high school, Everett attended the University of California, Davis, for his undergraduate degree in economics. “At that time I was trying to stay out of Vietnam,” Everett said. “I applied to graduate school to get a draft deferment. The draft board drafted me, so I signed up for the Navy.” Everett spent three years in the Navy as an officer. After exiting the Navy, he joined the Vista Volunteers, where he spent a year and a half working with urban youth in Philadelphia. “It was when I was in Philadelphia that I thought about running a city. Philadelphia was such a poorly run city at the time, I thought: Any numbskull could run the city better than this!” Everett enrolled in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, where he received a master’s degree in urban affairs. His first job out of graduate school was in Palo Alto, in program and management analysis. Everett explained: “The city manager at the time was a very innovative thinker, and he wanted me to be a department head, so he made me the fire chief. I wasn’t a fireman!” Everett’s next job was assistant county manager in Washoe County, Nev., around Incline Village and Sparks, where he stayed five years. Prior to taking the job as city manager in Redwood City, Everett served as a city manager for the city of Belmont for eight years. During the transitions from California to Nevada, Everett married and had two daughters: Heather and Nicole. Although Everett eventually divorced, the family retained their local roots. Nicole Everett, now 27, lives in San Francisco with her partner Katie. Nicole is working on an advanced degree in interior design. Daughter Heather Ruiz, 31, is married to Roberto Ruiz and they both work for the county. Heather is a Human Resources manager for the county hospital, and Roberto is in San Mateo Public Works. Heather and Roberto share a home in Mountain View with their five-year-old son, Danny. Taking over the reins of a new city was not that big a leap for Everett, with all the experience he had logged. He wanted to do more. Everett uses a corporate-based analogy, describing his job as that of a chief executive officer (CEO) and likening the elected council members to a board of directors. So what does the CEO of a city do? A city manager’s function is described in detail on Wikipedia: A city manager is an official appointed as the administrative manager of a city, in a council-manager form of city government. Typical roles and responsibilities of a city manager include: • Supervising day-to-day operations of all city departments; • Supervising the department heads; • Preparing a draft city budget each year with options the council votes on; • Researching and making recommendations about topics of interest to the council; • Meeting with citizens and citizen groups to understand their needs better; • Providing executive leadership that encourages good performance by city workers; • Operating the city with a professional understanding of how all city functions operate together to their best effect. Typically, city managers have hire-fire authority over all city employees, though these decisions may be required to be approved by the council, and must comply with locally applicable civil service laws. This authority includes talent searches for “department heads” who are the managers of the city departments. Everett brought a new spin to city management. Once a week, he had his “quiet time” — an hour of solitude, usually in the library, where he forced himself to think “outside the box.” It was during one of these occasions that Everett started reading “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert D. Putnam. According to an Amazon.com review: “In the book, Putnam, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argued that civil society was breaking down as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities and the republic itself. The organizations that gave life to democracy were fraying. Bowling became his driving metaphor. Years ago, he wrote, thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, they’re more likely to bowl alone.” That book proved to be a pivotal influence on Everett’s thinking and on the reshaping of Redwood City’s philosophy on community-building. Yogi Berra packaged the idea succinctly: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t come to yours.” The message was powerful in its simplicity: To define yourself as a city, you need to build a community. From that day forward, Everett set the ground rules, along with the city council, to make every resident not just a city dweller, but a cared-for member of Redwood City’s community. Everett and the various city council members throughout the years easily embraced community-building. It’s an easy pitch to make. Redwood City has evolved to the point of truly involving its community members, from Create-A-Smile, which organizes fundraising events for families in financial need, all the way to the Friday concerts downtown. Everett said, “The definition of community is the feeling of not being alone, that if I am in need and reach out, someone will help me, even if I don’t know them. People respond by feeling attached to the community.” When Everett first came to Redwood City, he faced some challenges. Downtown was so dead, it garnered the moniker Deadwood City. “That was 17 years ago,” Everett explained. “I had to figure out a plan of attack. It was going to take more than street furniture to revive the downtown area. That’s why we started spending the money. A community needs family room where people can congregate.” Thus the downtown project was born. “Now on Fridays we have concerts. A man walked up to me and told me that he never misses a concert, even though he doesn’t care for the music some of the bands play. He told me he goes because he meets all his friends there. It’s become part of the fabric of the community.” Another community builder was “Harry Potter night” at the public library. Everett recounted: “The library stayed open from 8 p.m. until midnight, and the event was a framework for kids to socialize and get to know each other. We gave away around 300 books. The youth is our future, yet the youth are the most neglected faction of our society. They are the most ‘left out,’ according to studies.” The public is welcome to attend a community discussion on the city’s youth on Sept. 15 in the Sequoia High School cafeteria. www.TheSpectrumMagazine.net
Other community projects include neighborhood disaster preparedness. Everett envisions having the community selfsufficient for at least 72 hours after a major disaster, to enable local emergency services to tackle the really critical issues. Why is Everett quitting a job he has come to master? “It’s time. The city plan is at a level where someone can come in and take it to the next level. I’ve worked 24 years in a job where I have a target on my back. It’s tough working in such a fishbowl,” Everett explained. For the reader, it takes only a few keystrokes to learn about the contentious battles Everett and his staff have encountered. One incident was so vicious that he had to hire an attorney with his own funds to have some personal attacks cease and desist. The reality may be that Everett wants to spend more time in his cabin in Truckee, more time with his daughters and grandson, and more time on the dance floor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio with his significant interest, Mary Welch. Everett says, “I met Mary working on committees years ago. I was divorced about a year, and I just hated to go to movies alone. One night, I called Mary and asked her if she wanted to go to a movie. She accepted.” The two began taking dance lessons at the popular studio on Broadway. “Mary recently injured her wrist, so she isn’t able to be my dance partner today,” he said as I watched him waltz around the floor with studio owner and instructor Alice Louise. “I take it [dancing] as enjoyable and I don’t always do it well,” Everett said. “But it’s just one of those things that you have to go in and say: You know, it’s going to be fun, and if I screw up, so what? One dance class, we had a substitute, and the dance instructor said, ‘Ed, you lost a step.’ I just stopped, and started looking around. ‘Has anyone seen my step? I lost a step! I know it was around here somewhere.’ Look, when you dance you are going to make mistakes, and it’s sort of like life: You just have to laugh at it,” he added. When Everett closes this chapter of his career as a city manager, he will be far from “retired.” He is eager to share adventures with his family, work on his cabin and spread his goodwill to all he encounters in his newest journey. We wish him well. “Look, when you dance you are going to make mistakes, ” and it’s sort of like life: You just have to laugh at it. 17.TheSpectrum.AUG.07
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