I went to the City Council meeting tonight and, at my place, there was a letter. In that letter Larry Hughes announced his retirement tonight.
Larry has been the City Manager for over 12 years and has seen the City through the great times of the early 2000’s where, led by a Council with a vision, the City powered forward and did some great things in our City. Next came an enormous immigration event and then the “Great Recession”. Larry managed through these wrenching changes with relative aplomb although the political pressures were fierce. Indeed, I came on the scene during the great recession and, fortunately for the City, one of Larry’s strengths is budgeting and finance. Came in extremely useful when we had to make some extremely difficult budget decisions..
I’ve worked with Larry for the last 5 years and have found him a capable manager. There are a couple of things that I’ve always admired about Larry. Chief among them were his creativity and flexibility. He was central to some of the early pieces and parts of Manassas Next – he knows every part of the budget and the government and wasn’t afraid to help figure out how to make some of those things happen. That flexibility also served him well when the Council changed almost all of its members in 4 years. I’m always amazed that Larry and his staff can be so patient with the new elected folks. It must be a huge pain in the neck but they never seem to let it get to them.
Larry believed that his job was to “work on the Council” and, while I rarely thought about his job in those terms, I think that he did just that. That’s a rare person that has the determination and discipline to keep that focus.
I’ll be sorry to see Larry go and that’ll happen at the end of the year.