Salvati reflects on career as city manager

Building a capable

city staff gave

him satisfaction

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- With just two days remaining in a 33-year career as New Ulm's City Manager, Richard D. Salvati is certain it will be the people who worked with him in city government that he will miss the most.

"If I point to one thing (giving him the most satisfaction), I would say the building of a very professional, very capable staff. That would be something I will look back at with some fondness, and that's the part of the job I'm going to miss, namely working with the people."

Even though Salvati has held the reins of city government for more than three decades, there still are three employees out of a total workforce of 160 whose tenures predate Salvati's, that he didn't have a hand in hiring.

"When I came to New Ulm, we certainly had good people working for the city, but we also had a lot of weak spots. Slowly, through the years, we were able to get better staffed, to get people that had a lot of expertise. That's built the reputation of the city as a good place to be employed. That reputation as good employer has fostered then more and more good people applying for municipal jobs.

"In the process, I think we became more competitive in terms of compensation. We started to develop positive work rules and positive relationships with the municipal unions," he continued.

"We have had really just a very few grievances through the years from the union and have been able to resolve problems. Also, I've had a lot of support from the council in that process."

As is often the case, Salvati, a native of Dearborn, Mich., winding up in Minnesota running New Ulm's city administration could as easily have never happened.

Salvati was administrative assistant to Kalamazoo's city manager when he decided after three and a half years to start looking for a city manager job. He had started checking the job postings in a professional newsletter when he noticed New Ulm being listed for sometime.

He talked to Bob Carroll, traffic engineer and Salvati's best friend in city government, who had family ties in southwestern Minnesota.

"He said he drives through there frequently to visit his in-laws, and it's a great town," Salvati recalled. "That was really the only reason I applied."

His application had barely made it to New Ulm when he got a call from then-council president, Tony Eckstein. "He wanted me to come to New Ulm immediately because the South St. Paul city manager the council had hired accepted the position but because his family apparently balked at coming to New Ulm, he declined. So the council had a city manager, and then it didn't have a manager."

So Salvati came to New Ulm, looked the place over and decided it would be "a good place to start." He began work on Jan. 15, 1968.

"If I had been more discerning, I probably would not have taken the job in New Ulm because I'd come from a larger city, in a very, very professional organization and just assumed somewhat naively that all cities operated that way."

But he found out differently the first time he walked into the street department garage.

"I couldn't believe the junk the street department was trying to use to do their job," Salvati recalled. "The street commissioner was trying to use baling wire to keep everything together and keep trying to invent something to do a job. So, it was a real test to convince the city council to spend money to upgrade the equipment so we had many, many debates."

Salvati doesn't remember what the city's budget was then, but he clearly remembers what he was paid. "I started at the princely sum of $12,000 a year." For his last year, he was paid $88,000.

Another surprise was the condition of the city's wastewater treatment plant, which had been built in the 1930s.

"When I walked into that plant, I was flabbergasted. There were sections of ventilation tubes that were rusted through. It was amazing that none of our people working down there didn't get killed from methane gas. We brought in the right consultants for the job and were able to build a new facility that, to this day, has done just a great job. Again, that was a real accomplishment in terms of doing something for the community and for the environment."

Another project that Salvati recalls vividly was the replacing and upgrading of the combined sewer system in the old town area that was a part of New Ulm's river town legacy.

"If you lived in the old part of town and you flushed the toilet or when the rains came, it all went into the same pipe which was fine if it didn't rain very much," Salvati explained. "When it rained very extensively, a fair amount of what was in that sewer ended up in the river, not at the treatment plant, so it was a real ordeal for people that lived in the center of town because those systems would back up. People would have all sorts of shut-off systems ranging from tennis balls to valves in their homes to try to keep what, in effect, was diluted raw sewage from backing up.

"We were able to finally put together a project which was very difficult because it entailed tearing up paved streets throughout the center of town to separate that system," he said. "It was a mammoth project, but we were able to do it in a way that was affordable for the community and for the people that were directly impacted by special assessments."

While the city has always had a full range of municipal utility systems, Salvati recalled a higher percentage of power used in the community was fueled with coal.

"Our air emissions at times were atrocious, and there were times when we had a swimming pool next to the plant that we literally had to close the pool, drain the water and clean the whole pool because of our emissions. In addition, we had a whole host of other problems."

One of those problems came to light in an unexpected way for Salvati.

"I was out in California on vacation with my in-laws when I got a call about this 'demurrage' problem," Salvati recalled. "I didn't even know what demurrage was."

He soon learned what the word meant.

"It meant we had coal cars stacked up that we weren't getting unloaded on a timely basis. There were penalties accruing, many thousands of dollars, even though we had a railroad siding next to the plant. Staff hadn't forewarned me, and here I was out in sunny California having to explain why we weren't getting our coal cars unloaded on time. I got beaten up pretty severely on that issue."

While the city manager's job carries a lot of responsibility, Salvati said a person holding the job must maintain a perspective.

"The nature of this position is that you have to work with people that are elected officers," Salvati said. "Sure, I can administer programs and implement policy, but it's the role of the city council to set the guidelines and appropriate the money necessary to do the job."

So, what's ahead for Dick and Sylvia, his wife of 39 years?

"We love to travel so we'll be doing a lot of that," Salvati said. And there are grandkids in the area to check on, plus Salvati does a lot of photography so he plans to stay busy.