In a male-dominated career, Brazoria County communities are led by exceptional exceptions

Women city managers prove to be exceptional exceptions

Brazoria County has a higher-than-average ratio of women in its city manager ranks, including women serving as the top administrator in all three of its West of the Brazos communities. From left are Meagan Borth, assistant city manager in Lake Jackson; West Columbia City Manager Debbie Sutherland; Brazoria City Manager Sheila Williams; and Sweeny City Manager Lindsay Koskiniemi.

Brazoria City Manager Brazoria Sheila Williams, left, talks about her job experiences Wednesday with peers Debbie Sutherland, city manager of West Columbia; Lindsay Koskiniemi, city manager of Sweeny; and Meagan Borth, assistant city manager of Lake Jackson.
MIKE FELIX/Special to The Facts

Project Manager David Kocurek, left, Mayor Philip Ray, City Manager Sheila Williams and Wastewater Plant Operator Delane Brown tour the Brazoria treatment plant Oct. 3 after months of work to improve its function.
KEN CONKLE/Special to The Facts


City manager Sheila Williams worked her way up the ranks from collecting utility payments to finally becoming city manager of Brazoria.
MIKE FELIX/Special to The Facts


Meagan Borth, is a former law student who decided to pivot to local government, instead. She is now the assistant city manager for Lake Jackson.
MIKE FELIX/Special to The Facts

City manager Lindsay Koskiniemi is a recent addition to the team in Sweeny, where she was hired earlier this year, but before that, she held many local government jobs, including being an interim city manager for the town of Richwood.
MIKE FELIX/Special to The Facts

City manager Debbie Sutherland also climbed her way through positions in West Columbia, starting on the road though vocational office education training.
MIKE FELIX/Special to The Facts

While the statistics vary, the job of city manager is a position in which women are a minority. Some national figures show the number hovers around 31 percent, while a survey of Texas municipalities put the number closer to home around 15 percent.

West of the Brazos, however, there are three towns who have women serving in the office, plus an assistant city manager in Lake Jackson, making for a mathematical anomaly.

Sheila Williams worked her way up the ranks from collecting utility payments to becoming city manager of Brazoria this year.

“They had asked me to come work over here and it was better benefits and stuff like that, so I came over here. I went from that to utility billing, to court clerk, to accounts payable/payroll, to assistant city secretary, to city secretary to city manager,” Williams said. “I’ve done every job in City Hall there is to do. I’ve learned from previous city managers, because they’ve kept me in the loop.”

Debbie Sutherland in West Columbia also climbed her way through positions, starting on the road though vocational office education training.

“Way back when I was in high school, they had the COE program, which is similar to the VOE program here, and I went to work for the city of Mexico, Missouri,” Sutherland said.

Starting in the finance department, the city clerk snatched Sutherland up to work for her. Sutherland worked on grants for the city and eventually worked with their city manager. After she moved to Texas, she joined West Columbia as a grant writer, then ended up with stints as city treasurer and city secretary.

After a prior city manager exited West Columbia, the mayor came to her with a proposal.

“I wasn’t even looking to be city manager. I was talked into it by our mayor, because I’d seen too many city managers come and go,” Sutherland said. “City secretary takes a little bit of a back seat and the city manager takes the brunt of it. I still got to do a lot and I was more like an assistant city manager.”

The city had difficulty finding someone to step into the role, due at least in part to the size of West Columbia, Sutherland said.

“We went though, I think, two or three city managers who were offered the job and then they backed out, so the mayor said, ‘Why don’t you do it? You basically do it anyway,” she said. “‘You could bump up your retirement.’ That’s been 17 years ago and here I still am.”

‘DESIRE TO SERVE’

Lindsay Koskiniemi is a recent addition to the team in Sweeny, where she was hired earlier this year, but before that, she held many local government jobs, including being an interim city manager for Richwood.

“I separated from the U.S. Coast Guard a little earlier than I would have liked to. I was pregnant with my son and I went from doing what I felt was an important job in a uniform of helping save lives and doing search-and-rescue missions to being at home full-time with a newborn baby,” Koskiniemi said.

She decided to go back to school and get a master’s degree in accounting, turning her education into a career in local government, drawn by the idea of “service above self.”

“I found that at local government, there was a lot of people that are minded that way and oriented toward service and that was something that I really craved and needed,” she said.

After she moved to Texas with her family, she worked in Missouri City with its city manager, Anthony Snipes, who served as a major inspiration for her. She earned a Master of Public Administration through the University of Houston. She said she finds the position allows her to flex her creativity in problem-solving.

‘IT FOUND ME’

Meagan Borth is a former law student who decided to pivot to local government. Hailing from northeastern Kansas, she has become an assistant city manager in Lake Jackson, where she works with their manager, Modesto Mundo — himself an assistant for more than 25 years.

“I’m still relatively early on in my career,” Borth said. “City management actually found me.”

She says she’d been accepted into Baylor University and had just graduated from her undergraduate program when she heard her mother talking about the city manager in her hometown. Her curiosity was piqued and she decided to look into a Masters of Public Administration to go with her studies in law.

“So I applied to do dual at a few schools and kind of last minute, I think it was June, I decided I didn’t want to be an attorney anymore,” she said. “Relatively quickly, I got into the city manager’s office and I love it.”

BLAZING TRAILS

These women have taken different routes to their positions, but all of them have experience or education — or both — on their side.

They are success stories in a field that has slowly opened itself up to more women, Koskiniemi said. As part of her master’s degree, she wrote about the state of the profession.

“When you look at the statistics, the disparity between men and women in the career field — it mostly dates back to a historical difference where men were categorically always considered managers in any profession,” she said. “I would say the statistic is even more astounding for minority females. At the time that I wrote my capstone, it was somewhere around 1.5 percent.”

Koskiniemi related an experience she had while in a job search with a nearby city, when the neutrality of her first name and her experiences in government and the military led to a question of who she would turn out to be by an official.

“He seemed surprised when I walked in. He said, ‘Well, I’ve heard of the name Lindsay being a man’s name, I didn’t know what to think, whether you were going to be a male or a female when you walked in, from looking at your resume.’ I thought, ‘Well, great!’” she said.

It’s a longtime stereotype that’s changing due to the hard work of women like Williams and Sutherland, the managers said.

“I love seeing the progression,” Borth said. “I don’t know that women my age still take the same path that y’all did, but it’s nice for me to hear that I was provided an opportunity that maybe was afforded to me.”

Borth said the experiences of Williams and Sutherland matched many of the other women she has spoken to over the course of her career.

“Every time I talk to a female manager, they really did usually go through every position to get where they are,” she said. “It’s not common for women to take the path that I took, where it’s fresh out of grad school I got into a city manager’s office.”

“I think that’s because you’re younger, too. The mindset is changing,” Sutherland said.

SIZING THINGS UP

Sutherland and Williams work in small towns, where employees can’t be as niche and, as officials, they often have to wear many hats in the course of their duties.

“Larger cities have assistant city managers, so it’s a different concept,” Sutherland said.

In her experience, Koskiniemi has seen that sometimes small towns have to make do with the resources they have, she said. Sutherland noted small cities can often be challenging places to work because of the wide-range of subjects that they must be versed in, compared to their big-city peers.

“It’s not uncommon to find somebody who’s disciplined in more than one department because they’ve had to stand in before,” Koskiniemi said, noting she’d worked in capital projects, engineering and finance as parts of her local government work.

Community development, economic development, social media marketing and communications were also elements of the job the managers said they’ve had to tackle during their tenures.

“If you do not want to have a routine job, city management would be a great fit for anyone, because it’s a challenge every day,” Sutherland said.

Borth appreciates Lake Jackson because it’s a city that has resources but still allows her a flexibility and level of challenges that keep the job fresh and allow her to learn. A role in a larger city may pigeon-hole her, she said.

KNOW-IT-ALLS BY NECESSITY

They spoke about getting hands-on experience with city employees to stay grounded with the requirements of their work.

“When I got promoted in April, we were short-handed. We didn’t have a utility billing clerk and we didn’t have an AP clerk. I was city secretary and I was doing all of that,” Williams said. “So when I got promoted to this, the first thing I said was, ‘I’ve got to have help. I cannot do all of it and be a city manager.’ So I started doing interviews and I’ve got a really good staff up there, but they feel like if they have a problem, they can come to me because I’ve done it. I can explain it to them.”

The experience helps them defend their positions to city councils regarding what they need and why they need it, Sutherland said, which in turn helps streamline the process. It also gives council confidence in their decisions.

“We know the complete ramifications from the bottom level all the way to the top level,” she said. “From the nut over here to the software up here — we know how they all intertwine and react with each other. I think that’s valuable in discussing it with council.”

The managers agreed it was likely easier for someone in their position to step into the job at a larger city than for someone from a larger city to do what they do every day.

Their ability to handle the variety of challenges has been met with respect from both their city councils and peers from neighboring cities like Angleton, Freeport, Manvel and Clute.

“I don’t know if that’s how it’s always been, but I think our cohort right now is top-notch, which is wonderful,” Borth said.

They also say they’ve been able to help — and be helped by — other city managers, forming a community for advice and to give a hand to those who might need it. They communicate on subjects from hiring to taxes and try to meet when possible.

“As Lindsay pointed out, if we have a need, we’ll just shoot it out, mass email, to all our city managers and say, ‘Have you all dealt with this issue?’ or ‘Have you seen this happen? or ‘What’s your experience?’ or ‘What’s your recommendation?’” Sutherland said. “I think that’s what’s great about Brazoria County. We’re very close-knit.”

FUNDING CHALLENGES

It’s that ability to bounce off each other that has helped them face the challenges of the job, which are plentiful. The biggest one is finding funding for infrastructure, which is becoming more difficult all the time, they said.

“Having the infrastructure to not just grow, but to also sustain — I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges. I know an immediate challenge is finding qualified people,” Koskiniemi said.

“And retaining them,” Borth added as Williams and Sutherland nodded.

It can be frustrating seeing larger cities have money earmarked for them, said Sutherland, while she described smaller cities as having to fight for every dollar they receive through ever-widening layers of bureaucracy at all levels, as well as the requirement of matching funds.

“It’s often a deterrent from even applying, because of the commitment level that’s required to follow through with the grant, if you’re even awarded it after going through the hoops of applying for it,” Koskiniemi said.

Unfunded mandates imposed by the state legislature are also an increasing issue. Those often are intertwined with attempts to secure those grants, such as the state’s new laws regarding police training and requirements for backup generators on critical infrastructure.

“They’re not cheap. They’re not easy to obtain, even,” Sutherland said.

“We’re trying to get a grant on generators now,” Williams said.

They say the challenges are worth it, because there are rewards for doing their jobs well.

“The biggest thing I think, for me, is that in government we don’t want people to think about us. We say that we’re doing our job if, in a day, your citizen never has to think about the government,” Borth said. “The thank-yous are nice, but I have learned that it is better when it is quiet.”

Being a person who can help a resident find solutions to their problems within the city’s ordinances and serve as a buffer can be very satisfying, calling it the role of a “discretionary liaison,” Borth said.

Sutherland added that being able to use their experience to give someone solutions and options is important.

“Getting that one ‘Thank you’ is really worth it,” she said, especially when most incoming calls are from people facing an issue.

All four hope they can help anyone from any walk of life enter into local government service, whether it’s answering questions or mentoring a young person who is interested in civics.

“I think we all have a passion about serving our community, our county and our state, and if you don’t have that, then this isn’t the position for you,” Sutherland said.