By Athena Cao
Lexington City Manager T. Jon Ellestad plans to retire in July, ending his almost-24-year tenure.
During Ellestad’s career, the city consolidated fire and emergency medical services, hired its first paid fire chief, improved the water system, and created a regional tourism program, emergency dispatch center and senior center in cooperation with Rockbridge County and Buena Vista.
“This is not intended to be a list of the things I’ve accomplished, because all of them involve so many other people—not just local government—private sectors, [and] other governments,” he said. “Each responded to a specific need at a given time in the history of the city.”
Those are just three out of the 35 items on Ellestad’s list of the cities’ accomplishments in the past 20 years. He said he could not rank them in terms of importance.
As city manager, Ellestad’s role is to advise, make recommendations and then carry out the policy decisions that the elected city council members make.
“A broker of all sides”
Mayor Mimi Elrod said Ellestad’s opinion is so respected it often prevails.
“Jon determines the outcome of a lot of decisions that we make,” Elrod said. “Because we are all itinerants — we move in and out — he has been here for 24 years, so he has a background that the rest of us don’t have.
Even so, Ellestad, 65, hardly ever shows strong support for or objection to any policy. Former Mayor Buddy Derrick attributes this to Ellestad’s personality.
“He is unflappable,” Derrick said. “You will never see Jon get excited or rattled. He is a very steady, even-paced person. I’m sure he has strongly felt emotions, but he is very good at keeping it [them] to himself.”
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“You will never see Jon get excited or rattled. He is a very steady, even-paced person. I’m sure he has strongly felt emotions, but he is very good at keeping it [them] to himself.”
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That characteristic helps Ellestad when he negotiates regional cooperation.
In 1995, Ellestad realized the city could not afford to grow its tourism program, and there was no similar program in the county or Buena Vista. Ellestad said he convinced the city council to give up some control in exchange for financial support from the other two jurisdictions.
The regional Director of Tourism Jean Clark said the whole area benefits from a regional tourism program.
“A visitor doesn’t know where the city line is. They don’t care—they shouldn’t have to,” Clark said. “They are interested in things that are in the area, the entertaining, the educational, a great place to eat, a wonderful place to spend the night.”
Ellestad persuaded the three jurisdictions to give 0.8 percent of their meals and lodging tax to the regional tourism program each year. Lexington’s $200,709 share this year is about one-third of the total.
The question is always who controls and who pays, former Lexington Mayor John Knapp said, and Ellestad is good at solving that.
“He is a broker of all sides,” Knapp said. “He knows these guys, he got them all together, [and] he has no personal ambition in it.”
Ellestad has built trusting relationships with each city council he has worked with, but there were times when he and council members did not agree.
In April 2011, then-Lexington Director of Planning and Zoning Bill Blatter, a close friend of Ellestad, approved a construction permit for duplex homes on Borden Road. But the neighbors soon suspected that the two buildings were intended to be apartments. One neighbor, Ross Waller, said there were six kitchens and six washer and dryer hookups in each building.
The neighbors sued the city for letting that happen. The lawsuit was later settled.
The incident tarnished Blatter’s reputation and some people wanted him removed from office. But Ellestad said it was not Blatter’s fault.
“He gave his heart and soul to the city,” Ellestad said. “All of a sudden, something slipped through the cracks and some people wanted to throw him out. I think that’s bull.”
Not only did Ellestad keep Blatter until he retired in 2012, but he also recommended rehiring Blatter as a part-time supervisor on the construction of Thompson’s Knoll, a low- to moderate-income neighborhood that Blatter initiated. The council voted against the recommendation.
Learning to juggle
In almost any community, taxes are another sore spot for elected officials, as well as the city manager. In Lexington, largely because of its universities, more than half of the real estate is exempt from property tax, the highest percentage in Virginia. Current and former council members said Ellestad is even more cautious about raising taxes than they are.
“He constantly makes sure people understand what you want to do costs money,” former Lexington City Councilman Jim Gianniny said.
In January, the city council sat down at a work session to go over Ellestad’s proposed Capital Improvements Plan. The city had already all but committed to spending at least $11 million to rebuild Waddell Elementary School. But after hearing how urgent it was to replace or rehabilitate some of the city’s sewer lines, Council Member Camille Miller suggested increasing the money appropriated for that project. This worried Ellestad.
“At the time the budget is presented, how much appetite are you going to have to hit taxpayers with a double-digit tax increase and a double-digit utility [fees] increase in the same year?” Ellestad said.
Balancing the budget is just one of the few tasks in what Ellestad describes as his juggling act. Now he is busy weighing the Virginia Horse Center’s request for additional funding, keeping an eye on the Waddell construction and trying to help implement a regional emergency radio system.
Ellestad said his 24 years of experience have made him a more efficient juggler.
“If you are going to juggle — you got five balls in the air — your goal is not to keep them in the air at the same time, your goal is to not let them hit the ground,” Ellestad said. “In order to juggle, you have to look at the balls at the top; you can’t look at your hands. And that’s management.”
[pullquote]“In order to juggle, you have to look at the balls at the top; you can’t look at your hands. And that’s management.”[/pullquote]
But when a citizen comes into his office, Ellestad said, it’s time to shift your focus to the individual.
“Whether you are responding positively or negatively, more often than not they are just pleased that they got a response,” he said.
Less than three weeks ago, and two years after he and his neighbors sued the city, Waller approached Ellestad asking the city to develop more fields for children to practice soccer and lacrosse. Waller said he’s met with Ellestad more than three times since then.
“He’s receptive to ideas that we’ve tried to bring to him,” Waller said. ”I feel like he wants the field to get developed.”
Elrod cited an incident in which a citizen was upset at the city for paying defined-benefits to government retirees.
“This man came to complain about that, he really read Jon the riot act [and said,] ‘You are not doing a good job, you are….’ Just on and on and on,” Elrod said. “Jon just sat there.”
Ellestad is a good listener, but Elrod said that does not mean he is a people-person.
“He is not the kind of city manager you that will run into at a grocery store downtown,” she said. “I have only seen him outside of his office—besides the Rotary Club—in one event.”
Ellestad acknowledges that he is an introvert in his private life. But as city manager, he said, he ”has a role to play.” Knapp said Ellestad has a reputation for being open.
“His reputation is for dealing directly, openly and honestly — they are attributes of a successful public servant,” Knapp said.
Last year, the school board was asking each nonresident family that sends children to city schools to pay $200 more in tuition for the new Waddell construction. At a city council meeting, Lexington School Board Chair Leslie Straughan and Lexington School Superintendent Dan Lyons advocated for the fairness of the amount because they said city residents would pay the same in taxes, even though it was unclear how much taxes would go up for city residents. Ellestad saw it differently.
“I don’t know what’s fair. I don’t really care what’s fair,” Ellestad said after the meeting. “What I care about is that we don’t set the rate too high that we are going to discourage the county people from coming to our school system because there is an advantage to us.”
Making Lexington home
Unlike many of his colleagues and constituents, Ellestad did not grow up in Lexington. But he was raised in a town about Lexington’s size: Fort Atkinson, Wis.
After he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, with a bachelor’s degree in history, he studied public administration at the University of Delaware.
Ellestad’s internship in the city manager’s office in Newark, Del., turned into his first full-time job after he got his graduate degree. He then worked as assistant city manager in Newark for three years. Then he spent five years in Blacksburg and eight years in Fairfax, in the same position.
When Lexington was looking for a city manager in 1990, Ellestad was competing with many other “perfectly qualified” candidates, then-Mayor Derrick said. As one of three finalists, Ellestad had to impress not only the city council, but also citizens who were on the search committee. Derrick recalls another candidate who had more experience as a city manager, but the council picked Ellestad instead.
“I kind of suspected the vote would go another way,” Derrick said. “But it didn’t and I have been forever glad that it didn’t. They just made a darn good decision.”
Most city managers stay in one jurisdiction for a few years and then move to a bigger place. Ellestad said he has looked at other jobs from time to time, but at the end of the day he decided to stay.
“I don’t know if I am just not that aggressive or what. I thought, ‘I got a great place to live, it’s a great place to raise a family’—I have five kids—‘I got a good working situation, why leave? Why move just for the sake of moving?’”
Ellestad said he has no plan to leave Lexington after retirement either.
“It’s home.”