Interim City Manager Tom Muehlenbeck has spent 47 years in city management, worked in numerous cities throughout the country and even tried to retire once. However, as McKinney works to hire a new city manager this summer, Muehlenbeck reflects on the path that brought him to his pending retirement.
As a child, Muehlenbeck served his community as a Boy Scout and when he began college, he quickly began searching for a field that would allow him to continue that service.
“I began college in the early ’60s and was looking for something I could really latch onto,” he said. “A professor took me under his wing and said he thought I would be good for public administration. I said, ‘Great, what is public administration?’”
Muehlenbeck said his professor got him an internship. The rest is history.
“I just loved it,” he said. “All I was doing was working. I was researching years of the rise and fall of dollars and expenditures, and I just loved it. I wanted to do away with college right then, but he wrote a glowing letter to the University of Kansas, which was at that time and still is the premier school for public administration, and I was accepted.”
Muehlenbeck, with his master’s degree in public administration, accepted his first job in Hutchinson, Kansas. A few years later, he took a job in College Park, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.
“That was my first real opportunity dealing with inter-governmental operations,” he said. “We were dealing with the city of Atlanta, the regional airport and the county. It was a great job, but I wanted to get to a bigger city, and I wanted to get back to Texas.”
Muehlenbeck’s next job, in a town on the Georgia-Florida state line named Valdosta, inched him closer to his goal when after two years he received a call from the city of Galveston. Muehlenbeck and his wife, Myrtle, made the trip to Galveston for an interim city manager position.
“We stayed in an old hotel that had a window unit over the door, and it was making all kinds of racket,” he said. “Shortly after we had finally got to sleep, at about 3 a.m., we got a call from the front desk. ‘Mr. Muehlenbeck is your wallet there?’ I said no. ‘Well, we have it down at the front desk.’ Sure enough, my money and credit cards were gone. There was an article about it in the paper the next day. My wife was so embarrassed—here was the new man for the job and he only had $13 in his wallet and they put that figure in the paper.”
Muehlenbeck made his way from an interim position in Galveston to a deputy city manager role in Austin before accepting a position in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
“Virginia Beach has the best form of local government I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “They don’t have a city within a county, they have a city or a county. The county provides all the services a city would provide and the city provides all the services a county would provide. Even the school budget comes through the city for approval. We just loved it there, but I wanted to go back to Texas so badly.”
His opportunity soon came in 1987 when he accepted the city manager role in Plano, a position he held for 23 years before retiring in 2011.
“Plano always had a very professional council,” he said. “I think a city manager can either be successful or a failure depending on the public officials. You have to have that trust between the officials and the city manager. If you don’t have that, you need to hang it up. It takes a long time to build that trust and only a short time to tarnish it.”
Muehlenbeck credits his success in Plano to the growth moving north from Dallas, adding that he happened to be “in the right place at the right time.”
Muehlenbeck made such an impact on the city that in November 2007, the Tom Muehlenbeck Center opened. The 83,000-square-foot, $23 million center features an indoor and outdoor pool, a fitness center, an indoor track, a gym, game room, classrooms and a community lobby.
When asked what it feels like to have a municipal fitness center named in his honor, Muehlenbeck said, “It’s surreal.”
“I think a city manager can either be successful or a failure depending on the public officials."
-Tom Muehlenbeck, interim city manager
“I feel a lot of humility,” he said. “I still drive by there every now and then and think of how much money they could have saved on that sign had I had a shorter name—the biggest regret I have is not having a shorter name.”
Although he said Plano was a “very special” place, he retired in 2011.
His retirement was short.
“I wanted to get back into city management,” he said. “I am a structured person; I’ve been doing the same thing for 47 years. The agenda I had, the meetings I had, the interactions with the community—oh, I just missed that so much.”
In 2014 the city of McKinney offered Muehlenbeck the chance to return to a career he said made him “very happy.”
“McKinney had some work to get done; they needed to continue improve on their systems, and there are a number of department heads that I am still trying to get into place before I leave,” he said.
Muehlenbeck said there are several tasks the new city manager will have to undertake, including hiring a new assistant manager, developing procedures and protocols for the city, determining the location for a new municipal complex and continuing to update city facilities.
Although his eyes are fixed on McKinney’s future, he is leaving his own future in limbo.
“I am really not concerned about what I will do after this. Isn’t that brazen?” he said. “If something happens after this, then that’s great, but I am a lot more at rest now than I was the first time I retired.”
His contract with the city expires May 31, though he has offered to remain until a new manager is hired.