About Town: Kurt Triplett Calls Being City Manager His Dream Job

KURT TRIPLETT says he feels like he has found his dream job.

“Being in Kirkland has exceeded my expectations, and they were quite high to begin with,” says the former King County official, who has been city manager now for a little more than a year.

Triplett says he strives to use his deep experience in city, county and state government to manage the city well. His goals are to be consistent and transparent, and to keep city staff focused on what’s important by setting the top 10 priorities at the start of every year.

“Any city or county government tends to sway with the urgent. You can exhaust your staff and elected officials,” if you don’t have a baseline to compare to. He says this doesn’t mean priorities can’t be shifted, but it gives the city an opportunity to clearly see if focus needs to be shifted.

Triplett says he spent a lot of time over his first year on the job talking with people to get a sense of what those priorities should be.

“The first six months, I went to anywhere that anyone would have me, and asked them ‘What do you love about the city?’ and ‘What needs to be fixed?’’

Triplett says he and his wife feel like they’re back in the New England towns they loved while he was in school. But as wonderful as Kirkland is, Triplett says that like all cities these days it faces plenty of challenges.

Some of the major issues residents identified that have been on the city’s priority work program for the year include a lot of those common challenges: jobs and the economy, economic development in areas such as Totem Lake, and angst about budget cuts that cause city services to be affected.

TRIPLETT SAYS he tries to take a practical approach when raising more money is not feasible. For example, with painful budget cuts, the city had to close park rest rooms and remove garbage cans from the parks. Then, Triplett says, city staff noticed the city’s solid waste contractor driving by a park and wondered if a creative solution couldn’t be found. The city renegotiated its solid waste contract, and now the contractor collects garbage from the parks.

“We focused on ‘how do we creatively make this happen?’” he says. The city also joined a coalition that lobbied the state Legislature to allow it to use a small portion of real estate excise dollars for maintenance for the next six years, because cities can’t continue building even with a capital fund if there are no dollars to maintain new projects.

The city is also focused on future issues, such as the potential impacts of the impending tolling on State Route 520 bridge. Kirkland has set aside money to monitor real-time traffic data at hey intersections, to position itself for future funding to address those impacts.

“Kirkland is potentially one of the most impacted -- it’s a big unknown. The state has set aside money for mitigation, so we’ll have the data,” he says.

Now, insomuch as Kirkland is an open book for Triplett, pretty much anyone can get a birds’ eye view of Triplett at his home, which he and his family are leasing from the Kirkland Parks Department in while they navigate a still touchy housing market to move to a permanent residence in town.

State law says the city manager must be a resident of the city, Triplett says, but at the time he accepted the job, it was a very difficult time to sell his home in Seattle. The City Council gave Triplett a temporary waiver of the requirement, then a one-time stipend of up to $28,940 to relocate and rent the Parks Department house.

Triplett says he is now renting out his Seattle home and has terminated the stipend agreement after receiving just less than $14,000 of it.

The home at the park is a little like having the whole neighborhood as backyard neighbors, which he says is an interesting way to connect with the community in itself.

“This Labor Day weekend we had a bunch of teenage boys out there playing football with their shirts off,” he says. Within minutes, through the magic of text messaging, the group had a cheering section of local teenage girls as well.

Triplett says he and his wife Heather love to explore all the local parks with their three children, who started school in Kirkland this fall

“There isn’t anything like the park system here,” Triplett says. Being able to walk downtown from his office is another great luxury, he says, minus the parking hassles of Seattle.

TRIPLETT HAS had a desire to run a city for some time, a goal he formulated while working in a number of different government and political administrative capacities. Originally from Cheney, Wash., a college town about 20 miles from Spokane, Triplett developed an early appreciation for public service and government from his parents, who were educators -- His mom in the Cheney School District, and his dad at Eastern Washington University.

He started his career as an administrative aide in Olympia, then serving as the deputy director of natural resources for King County.

“Fun things kept happening,” Triplett says of his varied experiences.

During this time, however, he also was considering what he’d most like to do long-term. Ultimately, he decided that running an entity where his work could be more legislative than political would suit him, so he went back to school, where he obtained a masters degree in public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard.

Then, just weeks before graduating from Harvard, Triplett’s plans were put on hold when then King County Executive Ron Sims invited him to be his chief of staff.

“That was a tough decision,” Triplett says, but he didn’t regret it. “It was the best six years of my life. I just really learned a lot.”

When Sims was appointed deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and King County had trouble filling his position through the end of its term, Triplett offered to fill the remaining seven months. He knew he didn’t want to run for elected office, however, so he says he saw two possibilities: “When you’re a lame duck on day one, you can be a scapegoat and a punching bag, or you can keep doing things.”

Triplett chose the latter, and kept his ears open for opportunities once the term was up.

“I knew it would be time to move on,” he says. About that time, Triplett heard that Dave Ramsey was retiring from Kirkland, and he says he was flattered to be asked to apply for the position.

“Being a city manager was why I went to school,” he says. He wasn’t sure if he would be offered the job, but Triplett says now that he has it, he hopes to stay for the foreseeable future.

Part of his self-orientation to the city has been meeting with all three of Kirkland’s past city managers to learn from them. He says one of the best pieces of advice he’s received was from former city manager Al Locke.

“Al said, ‘You’ve got a great city here, kid, don’t mess it up.’ That’s my goal.”