Kate Fitzpatrick will wrap up her 35 years of what she has described as “relentless practice in local government” with the relatively light duty of serving as the grand marshal of Needham’s Fourth of July parade.
The honor is one of many that have come Fitzpatrick’s way as she concludes her 20-year tenure as the first town manager in Needham. The town had earlier designated June 26 as Kate Fitzpatrick Day in Needham, which was marked by a private reception at the Needham Golf Club banquet room attended by more than 250 people, including Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll.
“I had a front-row seat seeing Kate’s amazing leadership,” said Driscoll, who served 17 years as mayor of Salem before becoming lieutenant governor in 2022.
“You have been the exemplar that so many of us look to when we’re thinking about how to professionally run and manage a community.”
The day after the reception, Fitzpatrick reflected on her tenure that began with her leaving her job at the state’s Department of Youth Services in 1990 to become Needham’s personnel director.
Shortly after her hiring, the town amended its government structure away from its long-standing, highly decentralized, volunteer-heavy system that had an executive secretary of the Select Board being nominally in charge.
The new structure established a new town administrator position. While it marked a shift toward a more professionally managed executive branch under the elected Select Board, Fitzpatrick said the town administrator was far from omnipotent.
“You had to do everything by cajoling and wheedling,” Fitzpatrick remembered.
In 1998, she was promoted to assistant town administrator. When Town Administrator Carl Valente departed for a new position in Weston in 2001, Fitzpatrick was selected to succeed him.
Shortly afterward, an effort was launched to further professionalize town governance by transitioning from a town administrator system to a town manager system.
“We were reaching a point where our then system of town government was not able to do some of the things that the community felt we needed to get done,” said Dan Matthews, who served on the Select Board from 1995 to 2022.
“The impetus came from both the leadership and the community,” he said. “At that point, under the town administrator system, the individual boards were hiring and supervising their own staff in each department, whether it was the library, park and rec, health and the rest.
“The decentralization made for constant low-grade conflict to the point where Carl (Valente) said, ‘One of the reasons I’m leaving is that I’m spending half of my working day negotiating with people that the public thinks work for me.’”
Getting the change through Town Meeting was a heavy lift and it coincided with Fitzpatrick going through her own personal trauma, a battle with breast cancer.
“I had surgery, chemo and radiation through the whole thing, from August of 2003 till spring of 2004, while we were writing the charter,” she said.
Both the cancer treatments and the charter effort proved successful. In 2005 Fitzpatrick was named the town’s first town manager, although even Fitzpatrick acknowledges the structure is not fully understood by many residents. Asked if she thinks it’s a strange system, Fitzpatrick deflected a bit.
“It’s 300 years old, right? So, I wouldn’t call it strange,” she said. “Some of my colleagues across the country think it’s crazy. The thing about town government is that it’s slow by design.”
That deliberate pace can create frustration when ambitious initiatives are proposed, but Fitzpatrick said she has come to appreciate that slow but steady has its merits.
The sometimes torturous process has inspired perhaps the most well-known of the many “Kate-isms” that have marked her tenure — her knack for using aphorisms to explain and guide the town’s budgeting and policy processes: “Everything takes 18 months,” she has said, probably 1,000 times.
“Things don’t happen quickly, but bad things don’t happen quickly either,” she said of the nature of town government.
| The Observer asked people who know Kate and her work well to comment as she retires. MOLLY FITZPATRICK Daughter, Deputy Town Administrator in Westwood “The number of library trustee meetings and planning board hearings I went to as a kid, sitting in the back with a coloring book, that was my first exposure to this world.” “As I got older, sort of through college and had a better idea of what she was doing, I realized I can use all these skills that I have of organization and consensus building and get to do good work — and be in charge because I’m just as bossy as she is. So, it was just a natural career path for me.” “Having someone like her, a titan in the field who I can call every 5 minutes to her annoyance and say, ‘you’re never gonna believe what just happened!’ And she says, ‘I can in fact believe what just happened.’” MICHAEL FEE Town Moderator since 1998 “We share a desire to deliver competence to the town.” “I think she has always been respectful of the structure of our town government. She’s maintained that respect throughout her entire tenure.” “She and I get together and we laugh because in some of the meetings, we’re the only people in the room who remember stuff, because we lived it.” DAN MATTHEWS Nine-term Select Board member “Public management in our times is extremely demanding work, and Kate is really one of the best in the field. She shows it in so many different ways now, starting with the obvious, which is the day-in and day-out professionalism.” “Kate has had an involvement in the whole evolution of best practices through organizations like the Mass Municipal Association, and other groups. She didn’t necessarily invent these wheels, but she helped them get on the truck in the right way so that they work.” DAN GUTEKANST Needham School Superintendent “Kate, as the town manager, has nurtured the kind of environment where good ideas take root to support the entire community. So when you have those elements, it makes it a lot easier to want to be able to stick around, hang in there and see if what you’ve started can take root and grow and become something that’s sustained.” MATT BORRELLI Four-term Select Board member “When I got on the board, coming from the Finance Committee, I had a different perspective. Clearly, Kate knew I was conservative. I’m a Republican, as you know, which was different for the board. And I just think that she respected or appreciated that different perspective on certain topics.” HEIDI FRAIL Select Board Chair “I’ve learned so much from Kate. Early on, she told me ‘In local government, people will follow you into the bathroom and talk to you while you’re peeing.’ And they do.” ADAM CHAPDELAINE Mass. Municipal Assn. Executive Director and former Arlington Town Manager “You have exhibited that leadership is about everybody else, building other people up and promoting them to move forward.” |
In it for the long haul
Before the switch to the town manager system, Fitzpatrick said her mind was open to a possible change of scenery.
“I never really thought I’d be here that long,” she said. “Before the (2005) change in government, I would look around.”
“When Carl left, I wasn’t really expecting him to leave,” she said. “I thought I had like five more years to figure out where I wanted to go. So that was sort of the pivotal moment for me, taking that job at that time.”
Perhaps she was too busy to look elsewhere because the switch to the new town manager system was followed by two decades that saw Needham complete numerous public construction projects. The flurry featured both brand-new buildings — such as the Sunita Williams school and a new public safety complex with new police and fire stations — and restoration/rehab projects such as Town Hall, the library and the Emery Grover school administration building.
There was also the Rosemary Recreation Complex, the Center at the Heights and the DPW’s Cogswell Building.
Speaking at her final Select Board meeting on June 24, after nearly a dozen speakers had sung her praises, Fitzpatrick said she was proud of both the physical and metaphorical building that took place on her watch.
“Tonight, when I look back, so much of it … really involved building,” she said. “We did a lot of building of things, we did a lot of building of teams, and we did a lot of building of relationships in the community.”
Fitzpatrick acknowledged that not all days were good days and some were exceedingly rough.
“There was 9/11, for sure. Nobody had any idea what was happening then,” she said. “There were all these bomb threats.”
“We had a spate of suicides in the 2000s, which were terrible days. And early COVID was scary. Nobody had any idea what was happening then. People were very frightened, and they wanted more from the town officials than we could give them.”
The good days, she said, “were all the ribbon cuttings.”
At the end, she unintentionally violated one of her Kate-isms, namely “don’t be the story.”
The June 26 reception at the golf course featured nearly a dozen speakers, all of whom praised Fitzpatrick as a role model, a mentor, a friend — in some cases all three.
The event was funded by Fitzpatrick and hosted by her daughter, Molly Fitzpatrick, currently the assistant town administrator in Westwood and about to be named the interim town administrator. Like her mother, Molly majored in history at a Catholic college and chose public service.
“Yeah, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” Molly said.
When it was her time to speak, Fitzpatrick was brief and leaned into the themes she mines on her blog, Very Kate, which she subtitles “Relentless Practice in Local Government.”
“I hope you’ll all practice a little relentless optimism occasionally, because it really works,” she said.
“It’s been the joy of my life to serve as your town manager.”
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