The city of Lake Elmo, struggling with controversy over growth and leadership, has named as its interim administrator a man with government experience in Wisconsin who is vowing to try to keep the city "off the front page."
On his first morning on the job last week, Clark Schroeder spoke about taking the helm of a city that has run through several administrators in recent years, and about whether he'd like to keep the job for good. He is filling the job recently vacated by Dean Zuleger, who left after a bitter City Council dispute.
Q: I'm told that you mentioned to the City Council a desire to tone things down a bit and not make quite as much news.
A: I would hope that our meetings would become so routine that there would be five people in the audience. I aspire to good governance, transparent and ethical government, developing relationships among citizens and council members themselves. My goal is to have people say, 'Hey, I want to move to Lake Elmo or expand my business there.' I'll strive to develop better rapport.
A: Would you like to keep the job as a permanent thing?
Q: I'm open to that. I told the council, if they like me and I like them and we want to work out a relationship, that would be to my liking.
You know, a lot of times when you have an interim position, it's sometimes assigning a bad guy to clean house or deal with disciplinary issues, and that's really not the case here. We really don't have a group of employees who have problems. The employees are great. The issue is more just all the press, and the relationships among themselves [on a divided City Council] have been so tumultuous, that they maybe wanted breathing room to quiet things down so that people wouldn't be as gun-shy about applying.
Q: It sounds like this job came at a convenient moment when circumstances in your Wisconsin job suddenly changed.
