Council, stakeholders quiz finalists for city manager post

On April 15-16, three candidates for Springfield city manager were vetted in interviews, virtual public interviews and stakeholder meetings.

The deadline for applications was Feb. 2, and 75 were received, according to city officials. On April 9, the finalists were revealed in a news release from the city.

Two names were familiar to Queen City residents, including an inside candidate, Brian Weiler, who is employed by the city as its director of aviation, heading up the Springfield-Branson National Airport.

David Cameron, city administrator of Republic, was also a finalist.

The third candidate is Bob Cowell, a Missouri native who most recently served as city manager of Roanoke, Virginia.

A target date for the hire has not been announced, but a special City Council meeting was happening just as this publication went to press on April 17 to discuss personnel matters, possibly including the city manager hire.

The timeline is complicated by the fact that a new mayor and City Council member are scheduled to be sworn in at the council meeting on April 21. The agenda for that meeting has already been posted, and it does not include a hiring measure.

If one of the current finalists is selected, council will hold a public hearing and a subsequent vote in a series of two meetings following their deliberations, according to city spokesperson Cora Scott. The timing of that process suggests a hire would not be finalized before its May 19 meeting.

Business partnerships
In a news conference alongside members of area media outlets on April 16, Springfield Business Journal asked each of the candidates to characterize the local business community and to explain how they would leverage public-private partnerships.

Cameron said the city is very collaborative.

“There is a lot of vision; there are a lot of ideas,” he said.

Cameron noted he has attended some of Springfield’s community leadership visits, which take area leaders to other cities to see the innovation underway there. After each visit, the leaders brainstorm about what they saw, he said.

“The frustrating part is, that doesn’t always translate into action,” he said. “I think it’s very important for us to have the collaboration, but it has to have an action plan that goes with it.”

Cameron said there is momentum and a shift, and Springfield needs to capitalize on it.

“We’ve got to use new tools to address the problem,” he said. “We can’t keep using what we used in 1988 and talk about, well, this is how we handled it. What are other people doing being creative and challenging the status quo?”

He added that Springfield has to support the members of the business community that are investing in the city.

“We’ve got to get some of the control and responsibility back to those people that are making the investment,” Cameron said.

Cowell said Springfield has world-class businesses with O’Reilly Automotive (Nasdaq: ORLY) and Bass Pro Shops – businesses that outsiders connect with Springfield – and there are others as well.

He said in his previous positions in both Roanoke and Amarillo, Texas, where he was assistant city manager, projects involving business and institutional partners transformed the landscape and were key to what the cities could accomplish.

“I don’t believe that we could accomplish anything that we did in Roanoke – the downtown development that we had, any of the economic success that we had, being able to market to the community – all of those required those kinds of partnerships,” he said.

Cowell cited the establishment of a biomedical and bioresearch corridor in Roanoke during his time as city manager, as well as the use of historic tax credits to transform former mills and other commercial buildings into mixed-use housing.

Weiler said the airport is essentially a small city.

“I work with 40 tenant businesses that are based at the airport – everybody from airlines to restaurants to car rental agencies, FedEx, UPS, the military, Expedia – so I’m used to trying to work with them,” he said.

The public hears about runway and taxiway improvements funded by the federal government – about $35 million this year alone in and around the terminal, Weiler said.

“What you probably don’t hear as much of is the private investment that’s also occurring – it’s actually probably more,” Weiler said.

UPS is about to spend more than $10 million, while Expedia just finished a refresh of the former airline terminal it occupies. The military, too, is preparing to invest funds at the airport.

“I’m very comfortable working in that environment; in many ways I view that I’m basically running a business, but yet I’ve got a little bit of the knowledge of also being a governmental entity and working in that – but I hate bureaucracy,” he said.

Rules are necessary, and unfettered development can’t be permitted, he said, but the city’s comprehensive plan offers opportunities for measured growth.

Problem-solving
Springfield’s efficiency in working with developers and neighborhoods was also a focus for the candidates.

Cameron noted he gets a lot of credit for helping to bring an Amazon fulfillment center to Republic.

“They called and said we want to build here; we want to be able to turn dirt by September – can you do that?” he said.

Republic officials were already positioned with the fundamentals of a permitting process and were prepared when the calls came in, he said. In a previous interview, he spoke of the one-stop shop of the Republic Builds office, which removes barriers for developers.

“I do believe there’s a secret sauce,” he said. “The investment community and the development community will follow because they know that how we changed it there and how we made it a little bit easier to get through the permitting process.”

Cameron believes the enthusiasm for development that he experienced in Republic will carry through to its larger neighbor to the north.

“There will definitely be an infusion of excitement from that that will carry over, that will benefit Springfield, yes,” he said.

Cowell said he believes cities should be problem-solvers.

“I actually don’t believe in any way that there’s two opposing interests; I think there really are folks that genuinely are interested both on the business side and on the neighborhood side,” he said. “They want the best for the community.”

The key is to identify how to broker consensus agreements, he said.

“Probably during a rezoning or a specific site development, that’s not the time to do it,” he said. “That’s when you look at tools like neighborhood planning and district planning and corridor planning, so you can have those conversations a little bit more in the abstract.”

The city also needs to make sure its processes are as efficient and streamlined as possible, he said.

Weiler said success begets additional success in a city, and he anticipates the combination of the Forward SGF comprehensive plan and the development of neighborhood plans will reap benefits.

He added that he has experience applying for the same permits developers do in the work he has done at the airport.

“You do have to follow certain rules, and they’re there for a reason,” he said. “If we’ve been given the basic information as an entity that will allow us to do the reviews necessary, there ought to be a timeline on the process to do that.”

City planners and building development professionals have an important role, he said.

“Are there things that we can do to improve? Sure there is,” he said. “I would just try to look at that and try to streamline the processes.”

Separation explained
Cowell left his employment with the city of Roanoke in June 2024 through a mutual-agreement separation pact with that city’s council.

Cowell explained the incidents leading to the separation, noting an incident occurred where a senior employee – one of his assistant city managers – yelled at a subordinate who was a budget analyst with the city. Cowell said he began an investigation and concluded some action needed to be taken, so he secured a retirement date, demoted and reduced pay of the employee and physically relocated the person in concert with the city attorney and its human resources department.

A few days later, council members informed Cowell that they wanted the employee fired, but he did not feel that doing so was appropriate; there had only been a single incident, and an agreement had already been reached for the punishment.

Afterwards, the same council members returned to Cowell and told him they wanted to negotiate his separation from the city.

“I was devastated,” Cowell said. “I really, again, had no intention of leaving that community. I was really proud of what we were doing, and extremely proud of the organization that I had helped build there. But in this industry, you make decisions all the time, and most of the time you’re going to get those right, and some of the times you’re not going to get them right.”

He added that two of his references for the Springfield job are the current and former mayors of Roanoke.

“Though it ended in a way I certainly would not have wanted it to end, I still have maintained very strong relationships with them,” he said.

Cowell is the defendant in two lawsuits filed by former city of Roanoke employees. At a media event for finalists April 16, Cowell said he expects to prevail in both cases.

“I don’t believe there’s any basis to the claims associated with either of those,” he said.

One-on-one interviews
In advance of finalists’ on-site visits, SBJ sat down with each of them on April 14 to learn about their qualifications, values and leadership styles. A resulting story was published online on April 15 to prepare readers for public engagement sessions.

Questions probed their ideas for speeding up development processes while including residents in the discussion, their strategies for dealing with workplace conflict, their experience with comparable budgets and the strengths and weaknesses they would bring to the role.

Cameron: Regionalism champion
Cameron calls himself a 417 kid, having grown up in Miller. These days, he says, he feels energized by what southwest Missouri is doing as a region.

It’s something he witnessed in his previous role as city administrator of Siloam Springs, Arkansas – part of the northwest Arkansas region that serves as a model of collaboration many in Springfield would like to emulate.

During Cameron’s time in Republic, he has overseen the establishment of the city’s Builds office, a one-stop shop for development that he sees as a center for city staffers’ innovation.

Staff had a pretty good idea of how they would improve processes, Cameron said – they just needed to know someone would back them as they made adjustments to improve efficiency of development processes.

The one-stop shop approach allows developers to walk in, pay for permits and talk with everyone they need to talk to, he said.

It’s a change from when Cameron arrived in Republic in July 2016, he said, noting the city faced many of the same complaints Springfield sometimes hears.

“Republic had the exact same problem,” he said. “I was told when I first got here people said, ‘I’ll never develop in Republic again.’”

Asked what drives him to find process solutions, Cameron recalled interviewing in Republic for his current job.

“I saw the potential of all the land,” he said, noting Interstate 44, James River Highway, the airport and rail service. “It was a smaller community, smaller organization, but it had this tremendous potential.”

Cameron’s experience with overseeing an operational budget ranges up to about $60 million, and his largest staff ranges up to 375 people. In northwest Arkansas, he said, he oversaw 21 departments. He is in the middle of a $165 million capital project in Republic.

Cowell: A planner’s perspective
Cowell said Roanoke has a population of 100,000 and is the largest city on the western side of Virginia, making it the center of all activities in that area. Before that, he was deputy city manager of Amarillo, Texas, a city of 200,000.

He got his start as a city planner.

“I actually went into management out of frustration as a city planner of not seeing things actually moved into action,” he said. “I’ve focused a lot of my energy on making sure we generate strategic ideas and actually put those into action.”

One thing that makes the Springfield job appealing to Cowell is the city’s Forward SGF comprehensive plan and the depth of involvement in the community to bring it to fruition.

“It’s not just that it’s a really good plan, but council and the community seem really focused on the implementing of it,” he said. “It’s a plan that’s really going to see action, which is attractive. This is a living document.”

Cowell has some ideas for speeding processes in the city, having worked in cities where infill development is the norm.

When he was in College Station, Texas, where he was executive director of development services, he found he could speed up processes by empowering staff.

“We set up the process by which permits could be issued by technicians right there at the counter – they were basic kinds of things where somebody was adding a carport to a house or that kind of thing,” he said. “It removed a lot of headaches.”

As for weighing development and neighborhood interests, Cowell thinks the parties may well have a lot in common.

“It really is a balance,” he said. “That’s where the comprehensive plan becomes so important, because that’s your first level as a community coming together and trying to figure out what it is that you’re trying to do.”

Moving Forward SGF into neighborhood plans is going to be the next challenge, he said.

“When you’re looking at specific plots, that’s when it really becomes pretty critical, but if you can do that well, then you can have those conversations when they’re still ideas rather than projects,” he said. “If you get agreement on those, then you can move the projects through much faster when they comply with them.”

In Roanoke, Cowell managed a $379 million budget and 1,800 employees. Cowell said Virginia cities have some added complexity, overseeing school funding as well.

Weiler: Everyone at the table
Asked how he would improve the pace of development in Springfield, Weiler noted he has been on the receiving end of some of the city’s processes with involvement in both public and private projects at the airport.

Weiler said rules are necessary, but there is an opportunity to refine them.

“If there is a way to streamline, make it more user-friendly, some of the processes that are in review – you’ve got the new development codes – I think they’re heading in the right direction,” he said.

Weiler said one of his mottos is to look for ways to say yes.

“I think it’s the idea of sitting down at the table as early as you can and working together,” he said.

Weiler said he is excited about the idea of neighborhoods developing their own plans, identifying places where development would be welcomed. He noted resident voices need to be included in decision-making, particularly as the city deals with a housing shortage.

“We have thousands of additional homes and units that need to be built to meet the demand of a growing community, and that will not be an easy issue, no matter what,” he said. “I do think the foundation of the comprehensive plan and the involvement that’s been put into that – and again, the new neighborhood plans that will hopefully bring people to the table earlier so you can make decisions that are a little less controversial.”

Residents must be part of the process, according to Weiler.

He added that his role as city manager would be to ensure staff has done due diligence in bringing all parties to the table and made the best recommendation possible to City Council, which has the final decision in development matters.

When Weiler arrived at the airport in 2011, its operating budget was $11 million, and the next fiscal year’s proposed budget is $25 million. Debt load has gone from $120 million at his arrival to under $40 million now. As former multimodal director for the Missouri Department of Transportation, he had a budget ranging from $50 million to $100 million annually. The city’s budget, which tops half a billion dollars, is larger than any Weiler has managed before, but he said he feels he is up to the challenge.

He added that he would strive to build on the good financial position that the city has achieved and the trust its residents have put in it, as evidenced by their support of tax measures, including the recently passed three-quarter-cent tax for public safety and transformative projects.

“Key to that is when you have a project, you say what you’re going to do with the funds and then you fulfill those promises. They’ve been very successful with that,” he said. “While we certainly have our challenges, I honestly think we have more opportunities now than we’ve ever had.”