T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Marshalltown City Administrator Carol Webb, pictured outside of her office, started in her new position on Wednesday. Webb, an Ottumwa native, previously served as the city administrator in Muscatine for the last four years.

When Ottumwa native Carol Webb decided that she wanted to move back to Iowa in 2020 after about two decades in Fort Collins, Colo., she hoped to find a city administrator/city manager position in a midsize community in the central part of the state. Such an opportunity failed to present itself at the time, so she instead accepted the city administrator job in Muscatine along the Mississippi River.

Four years later, however, she finds herself much closer to her hometown and leading a city just a few thousand people larger than her old stomping grounds as Marshalltown’s new city administrator. Webb started Wednesday, and she’s already enjoying getting to know the community and the staff she will oversee as the city’s chief executive.

After earning a B.A. from William Penn in biology and chemistry, Webb followed her sister out to Colorado and, once she had worked a few years in the private sector at a Cargill laboratory, she realized that her true passion was local government. She quickly moved up the ranks into a management role, and through a city program, she was able to work toward a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) degree — with a 4.0 grade point average, Mayor Joel Greer interjected, while adding that she was talented enough in science to go to medical school.

“But I really loved government. Public service really spoke to me. I enjoyed it a lot more than private work,” she said.

Webb, who was raised on a farm, had always intended to move back to Iowa someday, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided what she described as a perfect opportunity to make that change. After working her way up to the title of deputy utilities director in Fort Collins, which has a population of around 170,000, she took on the head honcho position in Muscatine (pop. 23,797 as of the 2020 census) and learned “a little bit of everything” in the process — the department she oversaw in Fort Collins had as many employees as the entire city staff in Muscatine.

But when the opportunity to get closer to Ottumwa and move to a similarly sized community in the process presented itself, Webb couldn’t resist it.

“The more I read about what was happening in Marshalltown, the more I thought this would be a good fit for me. Some of the priorities of the community — housing, (the) focus on arts and culture, some of the rebuilding. In Colorado, I had done a lot of work around emergency management and disaster recovery because we dealt with wildfires and flash floods there,” she said. “I knew Marshalltown had been through a couple of natural disasters and that you were working on recovering from those things, and I think that’s a skill set I can bring, too. So that’s intriguing to me… Marshalltown is a good fit because, much like Muscatine, it’s on the smaller side, but it’s close to larger areas. I think that’s a perfect sort of environment.”

Greer has held the interim city administrator title since January, when former City Administrator Joe Gaa, who was recently hired to the same position in Washington, Iowa, resigned after just 4 ½ months on the job and commented that he and Marshalltown were “simply not a good fit for each other.” Greer credited consultant Cindy Kendall for her work in keeping the city running during the interim period, and he even briefly hired Gaa’s predecessor, Jessica Kinser, to assist the city on a contract basis during budget season — Kinser served as Marshalltown’s city administrator from 2016 to 2023 and now holds the same title in Faribault, Minn.

After all of the instability and controversy surrounding the position, Greer is happy to welcome Webb, and he’s optimistic she will succeed in her new role. Referencing the famous Yogi Berra quote “deja vu all over again,” he said Webb reminded him of Kinser, who worked in the similarly sized Mississippi River community of Clinton before coming to Marshalltown.

“It was like, ‘Well, the staff is gonna love her. The city’s gonna love her, so why bother interviewing anybody else?'” Greer asked. “The staff was given the opportunity to interview (Webb), and they didn’t always get that opportunity in years past. It was a unanimous choice — ‘Oh yeah, she’s the one,’ and the weirdest thing is when the council interviewed her, we had the unanimous vote. And that’s rare around here.”

A representative from the hiring firm MGT of America, formerly known as HRGov, said he had witnessed hundreds of interviews in his career, and he’d never seen one better than Webb’s.

“I try to be authentic in interviews because you want to know that you’re a good fit for them and they’re a good fit for you. And so I kind of take that approach,” she said.

Webb sees the aforementioned turmoil in city government over the last year as an opportunity to establish herself as a strong leader while collecting data, information and input from employees, whom she described as “high caliber” and worthy of respect and appreciation. In all, Marshalltown has around 160 city staff members, while the number in Muscatine was closer to 230.

“I have certain standards that I set as a leader and a certain approach of things that I’ve learned over my career in leadership. So I hope to bring all of that to this position, and I do think that it will be a situation where I can do that. There’s an acceptance around it,” she said.

Now that she’s been hired, Webb will have the chance to lead the hiring process for several key city positions herself in the coming months, including the housing and community development director, police chief and fire chief. Outside of work, Webb, her husband Howard and their teenage daughter, a new member of the MHS marching band, are looking forward to immersing themselves in the community and learning more about everything Marshalltown has to offer.

“We enjoy getting out. Right where we purchased a home, there’s a bike trail to get on just right behind us, so I like amenities like that. I’m an outdoor person. I bike, I camp, I fish,” she said. “I love that they have those types of amenities… I think they’re all looking forward to the community, and I think everybody feels pretty good about it.”

As her tenure officially begins, a few of Webb’s main goals include setting up a strategic planning retreat with the city council to establish priorities — nuisance abatement, housing and streets are a few she has already identified. She’ll also seek to maintain services and navigate the changes that have arisen as a result of House File 718 while bringing the staff together to work toward the betterment of Marshalltown.

And although he’s quick to acknowledge that Kendall was a great help over the last seven months, Greer couldn’t be more excited to finally shed the ‘interim’ city administrator title.

“We’ve got some really exciting stuff in the hopper here, no question about it,” he said.