New city admin begins work in Washington

WASHINGTON — Joe Gaa’s path to Washington was a long and circuitous one.

The Washington City Administrator — who started at the job last week — has managed several municipalities since 2010, starting in Woodbine, a Western Iowa town of under 1,500, at the time. He then moved to Chariton, before jumping ship to Dickinson North Dakota, but said he didn’t feel he was a good fit there, eventually transitioning to Aberdeen, South Dakota.

While he enjoyed that position, calling it “the best job I’ve ever had,” Gaa said he had always hoped to return to Iowa. He eventually did so, coming to Marshalltown last year, but said he was frustrated with leadership there and eventually resigned, parting ways with the city before the end of a six-month contract.

While it’s far from a traditional career path, Gaa said he’d be happy to settle down in small-town Iowa, and said the atmosphere in Washington “just felt right” when he first visited the city in July.

“I arrived on a Thursday afternoon, so they were setting up for the farmers market,” he said. “But during the process, meeting with the staff, the community members, the council, everybody just had a real strong community pride here, and I felt like that was probably the most important thing I was looking for.”

The city administrator’s career didn’t start with municipal work, however. He graduated with a master’s degree in parks and recreation management, initially planning to shoot for a Ph.D. and pursue teaching, before realizing that wasn’t his forte, either.

“You think parks and rec, and you think about recreational activities,” he said. “Once you get to the Ph.D. level, it’s all the boring stuff, it’s about research … that’s probably why I didn’t finish my doctorate, because I hated that stuff. I didn’t want to know that stuff, I wanted to do the fun stuff.”

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Gaa was parks director for Sebastian County in Arkansas, with a population of 125,000, for a few years, before his start in Woodbine. He found the administrative work was a better fit, tapping into his own motivations for broader community improvement.

“What we do here affects people’s lives,” he said. “For water and wastewater, people use those services every day, they expect the water to turn on when they turn the tap … knowing that people expect us to do our jobs right, that’s I think what drives me.”

On that topic, a water issue is at the heart of Gaa’s greatest personal accomplishment, in his opinion.

In Aberdeen, he helped coordinate development of a massive water pipeline from the Missouri River, shared by the city and two rural water districts, who now share responsibility for it and a treatment plant that supplies the communities. Gaa said the entities had tried and failed to work together before, but were forced to collaborate to qualify for state funding.

“We all had our priorities, but sometimes you had to check some of those at the door,” he said. “At different times, all three of us traded off on who was keeping us on the rails today.”

While it’s easy to focus on the big wins, Gaa said he was attracted to municipal work by the variety from one moment to the next, and the challenge of balancing such a wide range of priorities. He said the position required agile thinking, and a willingness to change gears at the drop of a hat.

“Someone’s going to walk in the door and say, on the day that I’m balancing a $15 million budget, and they may have a problem as simple as … a property next to theirs not being well-maintained,” Gaa said. “This is really important to them, so you need to make it really important to you … that is tough, sometimes, because you switch from working on something really difficult to something that is more mundane to me, because I’ve done it 100 times in my career, but these people are dealing with it for the first time.”

When not in the office, Gaa has a handful of hobbies. He’s a devout fan of the Kansas City Chiefs, and has a small garden gnome in his office sporting the team’s logo, accompanied by another from Northwest Missouri State, his alma mater.

He also describes himself as an amateur DIY enthusiast, and an avid outdoorsman, and an enthusiast of wood pellet smokers. But he said he seldom stopped thinking about his day job, even when off the clock.

“I don’t think I ever turn off,” he said. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night, just thinking about this, and we’re going to do it … I don’t think it’s in a bad way. This is a really important job, and it’s something that, for me, it’s just who I am and what I do.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com