[Editors Note: This story originally appeared when John Nachbar was hired as city manager out of Kansas six summers ago.]
Since he just returned to work this morning in Overland Park, KS, from a long-planned vacation to Scotland for the British Open, one of his signature sporting events, you might have expected John Nachbar to reply “golf” when asked what, in the whole universe of life, he is passionate about.
In the wake of his answer, there is no question that the new City Manager of Culver City is most comfortable as a bolts-and-nuts guy, and his answer proved it.
“I am very passionate about city management,” said the 54-year-old Mr. Nachbar.
“From a very young age,” said the Kansas native, “I was interested in the political arena. But I decided I was better suited for management.”
Politics is noisy, heavily based in show business where bell-ringing is a daily routine. That did not seem a fit for Mr. Nachbar’s more reserved personality.
As for his own golf game, the City Manager described it as “okay,” and went on to another subject.
A month or so before he sits down for the first time in his new third-floor office at City Hall, in his first Culver City interview, Mr. Nachbar came across the telephone wires from Kansas City this morning as a man of the people. He eschews flashiness and striding across the stage, preferring instead to work industriously, unglamourously, off-stage, letting others take the neon bows.
“I prefer to focus on the long term and less on accolades,” he said. “I am more interested in what gets accomplished.
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His no-nonsense work ethic has impressed bosses and colleagues, which help explain the geography of his career.
Mr. Nachbar was not long out of school in the early 1980s when he arrived in the upscale Kansas City suburb of Overland Park as deputy city manager. Later he heard the call of the West Coast, spending the next nine years in two small Northern California communities, Patterson, then Albany, and therein lies a story. “I meant to stay in California,” Mr. Nachbar said.
Albany is near Berkeley, and when one of his executive friends in Berkeley became city manager of Tucson, he recruited Mr. Nachbar as his deputy in the larger, more challenging metropolitan setting. He loved the Arizona environment and the notion of helping to command a region of 500,000. Five years in the desert took him to the turn of the century. Ten years ago, he was recruited once again, to come home to Overland Park as No. 1 this time.
Mr. Nachbar and his wife Patti have two sons, both in their mid-20s, one in Boston and the other interning this summer in downtown Los Angeles.
From his reading choices, a little summer fiction, he sounds like a man of the people who won’t have to be shoehorned into Culver City — he just finished “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”