Happy anniversary, John Nachbar.
One year away from the fashionable Kansas City suburb of Overland Park and one year into his Culver City contract.
As friendly as the most congenial person in town, Mr. Nachbar, a wily mid-fifties veteran of half-dozen government jobs from Kansas City to Northern California to Arizona, back to Kansas and finally to Southern California, does not give up much.
Making him the most fascinating chief executive study at City Hall since the 1980s.
Despite his collegiality, there is a limit to how deeply you may probe.
Plenty smart, as accessible as your spouse and typically as quotable as an office-seeker, there is, however, a barrier, a fence that is not to be hurtled.
Whether the subject is good news or bad, his expression is unchanging and impenetrable.
And so there are tradeoffs when compared and contrasted with the half-dozen most recent CEOs.
During the past year, Mr. Nachbar says he has developed “a warm and intrinsic feel” for Culver City as a hometown.
Mr. Nachbar and his wife, the parents of two grown sons, have made one dramatic alteration in their lifestyle. They walk many places.
The nationally recognized walkability of Culver City is too strong for the couple to resist.
Not a joiner, he doesn’t belong to community organizations, “but I have spoken to most of them.”
When did the City Manager know he as at home here and settled in?
“I have done this a number of times,” he says. “This has been my adult life, this kind of experience.
“When you are a city manager, at least for me, it doesn’t take long to become immersed in the community.
“The occupation requires you to engage the community in all of its aspects. It is just the way our psyche works. After you have embedded yourself in a different reality, after four, five, six months you have a hard time remembering anything prior.
“I think that is just the way our mind works. As human beings, we are very adaptive.”
(To be continued)
