Wayne Reed joined the city of Georgetown’s staff Jan. 25 as assistant city manager to lead development efforts in the city.

In his new role, Reed oversees the city’s planning, housing and economic development departments as well as the Georgetown Public Library, Main Street Program and convention and visitors bureau.

Prior to coming to Georgetown, Reed served in city government for more than 19 years with jobs in Colorado and in Texas. Most recently he served the deputy city manager in Centennial, Colorado, where he oversaw community development and public works.

Reed also spent time working as a planner in Denton, Texas, as well as Arvada, Colorado, and served as the planning director for Berthoud, Colorado.

“Each one of those experiences gave me more exposure to how a municipal government operates,” he said.

Reed graduated from Texas A&M University with a bachelor’s degree in environmental design and a master’s degree in urban planning.

Reed said the city’s parks and recreation opportunities as well as its reputation as a safe place were a big draw for his family to move to the city.

“I picked Georgetown because I believe it’s not just a great place for me professionally, but Georgetown truly is a great place to raise my family,” he said.

Reed and his wife have two children.

What do you love about your job? My favorite part is working with people. I love working with people. I worked my way through college in retail.

Knowing people are better off after I work for them than before is very rewarding. There are good days and there are bad days, but in the end, I really enjoy working with people.

What led you to apply for the Georgetown position? It was a great professional opportunity for me to expand what it is I do as a leader and to challenge me professionally to work in a new organization.

Georgetown has the opportunity of taking all the fast growth it is experiencing to translate that into a better Georgetown in a decade or 20 years from now. That’s a great challenge to be a part of.

[City Manager] David Morgan was another reason I took this job. I felt he was the right city manager that I would want to work for.

What do you hope to accomplish in your new position? My job as a leader in a municipal organization is to focus on people, processes and services. My background demonstrates I can be highly successful in aligning the people around mission and to have values, which we are working on as an organization right now.

Once people understand there is one mission, one team, then we start looking at processes to ensure we are delivering responsive and predictable services to our customers. Then we get to the service component and we start measuring the performance.

I believe the public sector should emulate the private sector when it comes to predictability and the quality of service delivery.

What do you see as the city’s challenges and opportunities? I think the opportunities are right in front of us. We have the path of growth from Austin coming right up I-35, and Georgetown is poised to take that growth and translate it into new jobs, new housing, new medical facilities and commercial development. It’s at our doorstep.

That’s a great opportunity because there are a lot of communities that aren’t in that position. The challenge is to ensure our service areas are ready to take on that growth.

We need to make sure we have the best processes in place to have the best service delivery.

I’m working with those service areas that I’m overseeing to make sure we have those in place.

Georgetown is ready to have its primary employment explode in that we should have some office development of 50,000 square feet and larger in Georgetown. That’s an opportunity we are working very closely with a developer [on Westinghouse Road] on.

Another great opportunity is our downtown. … In the last 10 years there has been a transformation. So another great opportunity we have in Georgetown is to take the next decade and make it that much better by bringing more restaurants, more retailers to downtown along with nightlife so we can make this truly a destination that is active from 8 o’clock in the morning until the evening hours. We’ll see not just more businesses coming to downtown, but I think we’re going to see more housing development in downtown.

Another great opportunity we have is becoming a destination for entertainment. … The city’s investments in Garey Park, San Gabriel Park and in downtown will provide us outdoor venues to make our festivals and events even better.