J. Scott Miller, the city’s new City Manager, works at his desk in his City Hall office earlier this week.

J. Scott Miller, the city’s new City Manager, will be at his first City Council meeting tonight.

Miller sat down with East Ridge News Online earlier this week to talk about his long career in government and some of his major accomplishments.

The 66-year-old former power lifter and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania product, came out of a brief retirement to accept the post here. He candidly admitted to missing the daily challenges of running a city. How he began a 40-plus year career in public administration is interesting.

“When I was in college I was pre-med,” said Miller, who holds a BA in Business Administration from Ohio Northern University.  “A career in government never touched my interests.”

Miller said he was the last to wash out of his studies preparing him for medicine. He said the memorization of diseases and maladies and mastering the spelling of words “longer than the pen you’re holding in your hand” didn’t agree with him. So he switched to business.

Miller said he “flipped a coin” in his senior year. That’s how he got into public administration.

He furthered his higher education at the University of Pittsburgh, were he obtained a Masters of Public Administration in 1974.

That was the year he saw freshman football sensation Tony Dorsett, coached by Tennessee’s favorite son, Johnny Majors, rush for 202 yards against Notre Dame. 

While attending Pitt he worked full-time for a town called Upper St. Clair. After completing a graduate school project in financial management, he went to work for the town of 18,000 people as an administrative assistant.

He followed his mentor there to Monroeville, and became assistant to the manager and finance director.

Prior to taking the job, Miller said he told his former boss that he wanted someday to be a city manager. “He said, well, how about you be the Finance Director/Assistant to the City Manager,” Miller quipped. “I said, ‘OK,’ and took the job.”

Two years later, he became the Township Manager in Lower Providence Township, a city of 18,000 folks. 

“This city was booming,” Miller said, going back decades in his memory. “It was 15 square miles and there were 50 subdivisions being developed.”

While there, he established the first Parks & Recreation Department and coordinated the design and construction of community park on 30 acres. He initiated the planning, design, financing and construction of a new Town Hall.

Miller’s career trajectory took off when he took the position of City Manager in Eastpoint, Michigan, formerly called East Detroit. The city had 38,200 residents. It was there that he introduced a “Master Plan” and implemented a downtown redevelopment plan for the business district. He also headed up a program that allowed for commercial and industrial business’s to receive tax incentives helping them stay inside the city limits.

After four years there, he headed south to Florida and became CM in Wilton Manors for three years. From there it was on to Oakland Park, a city between Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach. It was in Oakland Park where Miller helped formulate a five-year Capital Improvement Program that addressed drainage, sewer and road problems.

He moved on to Boynton Beach, Fla., a city of 48,000 people with an All Funds Budget of $62 million. Miller headed north in October of 2001 to become the City Manager of Des Plaines, Illinois. After a brief stint there, he took the job of CM in College Park, Georgia, a city of 20,000 with a budget of $83.5 million. 

Miller explained that the majority of Hartsfield International Airport is within the city limits of College Park. When he was there (two different stints totaling nine years) he helped guide the city through a deal in which the airport built a fifth runway encroaching further into College Park and potentially having an adverse impact on the city’s bottom line.

“It was me and our City Attorney, George Glaze, on one side of the negotiating table and on the other side were people from the airport, Coke, Georgia Power and Delta Airlines,” Miller said.

Waiting in the wings was the legislative delegation of Clayton County who warned Miller, “Don’t hold this up.”

Four years and three different airport managers later, the parties had a deal, Miller said. The bottom line is that College Park ended up getting a check for $82 million, which it used to build the largest convention center in Georgia and an above-ground tram that moved people from the airport to the facilities within the city.

“It was interesting,” Miller said smiling. “Talk about a lot of sleepless nights.

He left College Park for a three-year stint at CM in New Port Richey, Florida. Then it was on to Leavenworth, Kansas for eight years. It was there that he used his vast experience to help that city move forward.

Miller talked about an 18-acre section of town that was blighted. A Ramada Inn was located there and it was fading fast. It was bought out by Knights Inn, then changed hands again and the new owners dropped the “K” and it became “Nights Inn.” That name change, did little to help promote a positive image of the city, Miller noted.

Ultimately, the city closed down the “Nights Inn,” due to all the problems one might imagine _ crime, drugs, bedbugs.

“I went to the commission and said that we needed to buy it,” Miller said. “If we don’t buy it somebody will come in and slap a coat of paint on it, reopen and the public will be outraged.”

Miller helped the city acquire the property for a bargain basement price. Because the city owned the property, it could control the development, he said. The once blighted site became the new home of a Hilton extended stay hotel, he said. That was accomplished through some development incentives, he said.

Now, Leavenworth’s front door, the north side of the city that was once an eyesore, is home to a “three-star” hotel and three more that are either being built or are in the planning stages.

In Leavenworth, Miller said, he initially did a lot of “sitting and listening.” He wanted to find out from the public and from the governing body “what they wanted me to key in on.”

Miller said Tuesday that is essentially where he is right now in East Ridge.

“We want to work on quality of life issues,” he said. “We need to get the temperature of the community to get an idea.”

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