Page 175 - SAC - DPW - AMB 09 05 19

Fritz Buchman

Thursday, August 29, 2019 1:31 PM

Why are you interested in the Director of Public Works position with the City of Sacramento?
Tell me a bit about what you know about the City.

One of the reasons it is where I started my career in public works, about 28 years ago. I started there as
a surveyor - I went back and got my degree, I ended up as a supervising engineer. I ended up with the
City of Elk Grove. I grew up in the City, have always loved the area. I have grown up here and am very
passionate about the City and public works for that matter. I spent the first 20+ years of my career with
cities. The County environment is a little different. Here the issues have been mainly water resources.
While that has been an interesting experience, I would like to get back to my roots. I hope I don't sound
too crass - but I had a break in public service - so it makes sense for me to back to PERS before I retire.

Please describe your most recent position and day-to-day responsibilities.

Currently Deputy Director with King County Department of Public Works. I have a number of areas that I
cover - water resources - covers regional water supply planning, community infrastructure engineering,
private development and the county surveyors office, just about 30 FTE operating budget,

Please describe a project in which you played a major role in creating pathways for
improvement for those in your community.

There are a number - most recently, I would say that - our work over the past couple of years on the
sustainable ground water act compliance have really improved the ground water sustainability picture for
our community, avoiding existing groundwater pumping - we are heavily agg based. The law required
high and medium ground water systems to develop ground water sustainability plans. We convened a
stakeholder group of nearly two dozen agencies to come to consensus on an approach on how to
govern ourselves. We ultimately decided on a 16 member JPA to do that. We engaged a consultant and
worked with a larger working group. We are poised to adopt it by the January 2020 deadline - without
that plan - without pulling the community together like that, the State comes in and imposes restrictions,
which would have been devastating.
Please describe your experience in evaluating innovation and operational procedure utilized
in a City department and your approach to staying at the forefront of industry.

It's a two-part questions - so let me start here. We have done a couple of things recently with our utilties.
We have done a couple of things in that area to improve our interactions and communications with our
customers - we developed an enhanced website, in which we do outreach and require property owners
to agree to a rate increase. One of the messages we heard loud and clear is they wanted to be able to
stay up to date more real time with the information both financial and otherwise. We developed a website
that went live just a few years ago, projections for the next five years - and it actually - whether there are
rate increases - it also allows them to subscribe to the website - whenever there are changes posted to
the site, they automatically get notified. We implemented a process for virtual public meetings through
YouTube - we hosted the meetings through YouTube channels - they could tune in and ask questions
about proposed rate changes for their district. I think our general approach to staying on the forefront -
was innovate and how people were doing things - were to participate in professional association -
APWA - California Street Light Association - that's really how we stay plugged into what is going in and
the cutting edge of public works.

Please describe your experience in the areas of public transportation and traffic reduction.