The Register has a great excerpt from an interview with outgoing Des Moines city manager Eric Anderson. It’s a must-read for residents of the city. (Couldn’t the Register have posted the full transcript of the interview online? They’ll never learn that bandwidth is cheaper than paper.)
Since the Register was an avid supporter of the city-county merger (writing numerous editorials and giving front page coverage to the issue), they asked three times, out of 14 total published questions, about merging governments. Finally, Anderson gives this great answer:
If I had a dollar that I had to distribute to the things that I thought I could get done, I’d probably put very little into that which has been resoundingly rejected by the voters on two occasions in two very different forms.
When asked about the challenges facing the city he gives this very insightful answer:
Accepting and integrating the immigrant community. That is going to get much larger, and it is both potentially a very large problem but the biggest opportunity that we have. If you look at the history of central cities, the rebirth of a city is closely associated with keeping it diverse and becoming more diverse and integrating those populations. They bring in the new talent, they bring in the new skills, they bring in the new generation.
Eric, thanks for all you’ve done for the city.
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