Why turnover is increasing among Iowa city clerks, the ‘hub of the local government’

In the small red brick building that houses Swisher’s City Hall, Tawnia Kakacek sits at her desk, ready to field citizen inquiries and city council member questions about votes they’ll take later that day.

Red smiley face stickers line the City Hall window facing the entrance. Seeing the smiley faces, “hopefully (visitors) cheer up before they come in,” said Kakacek, the city clerk and financial officer. “I don’t know if it works, but I try.”

Council member Mary Gudenkauf laughed and said, “She’s got another large complaint center.” A tiny orange board at Kakacek’s desk marks the “complaint center,” with a green paper clip holding a piece of paper where visitors can share their concerns.

Public works staff came in the back door, took some pens that Kakacek had picked up from a conference and commented that “she’s the best” before they returned to work outside.

Kakacek smiled, but chalked up their flattery to an attempt to dissuade her from leaving her position. After being in her current role since January 2014 — and stints as a clerk with other area cities dating back to the 1990s — Kakacek will retire March 31, 2024.

That’ll leave her time to help onboard new council members after the Nov. 7 election and get one last city budget passed — handling municipal finances is her favorite part of the job.

Iowa’s 940 cities are all required to have a city clerk. Oftentimes, especially in smaller communities, these individuals are one of only a handful or two of staffers keeping their local governments running. In some cities, they may share financial duties with a city administrator or effectively assume those responsibilities themselves.

“The clerk position is the hub of the local government. They are front-facing to the customers, they are the support for the council. They are the researchers, the financial experts,” said Trish Gleason, president of the Iowa Municipal Financial Officers Association. The statewide organization is made up of city clerks and other municipal officials.

Facing such wide-ranging responsibilities, sometimes with little training, while state law changes strain city budgets has prompted high turnover among Iowa’s city clerks, Gleason said.

In previous years, Gleason said the association might average 10 to 15 new clerks at each of its two annual conferences. Now, she said the group is seeing more than 50 new clerks at each one, “which is an extremely high turnover, whether it be from retirement or the clerk before them was only there for a few months because they didn’t realize what exactly they were getting into.”

Alan Kemp, executive director of the Iowa League of Cities, said from cities as small as Le Roy, which recorded a population of 10 in the 2020 Census, to the capital of Des Moines with a population of less than 214,000, the salary range and the duties of the clerk vary widely.

There is no statewide clerk survey data available, he said, in part because of the difficulty of reaching the 900-plus clerks in Iowa. But he also has seen the trend of increasing turnover among Iowa clerks.

“Part of it is like any other employer, they’re aging out and they’re retiring after several years,” Kemp said. “Also, being a city clerk is not for everyone. … If you love the job, you’re likely to be in it for the long haul, but if you don’t like the job, you get out rather quickly because you don’t like the public face that goes with it.”

With city and school elections coming up, some city clerks say January after an election year can represent times of change in city administrations depending on who voters elect to serve on their city council, sometimes prompting more clerk departures if they don’t see eye to eye.

But those who have persisted in the profession say it’s rewarding to see projects in the works and be part of them, knowing the work of a city is something that will stick around forever.

‘In a small town, this is it’

When you walk into your community’s city hall, city clerks are often one of the first — if not only — people you’ll encounter. They take your phone calls or greet you in person when you need to do business with the city.

“The thing I like most is being able to work with people, the public, and start projects and help make sure that they are facilitated so that they actually go through the whole process and it improves the city and it improves quality of life for people,” said Beverly Conrad, city clerk of Wayland, a southeast Iowa town of about 975 people.

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Gleason said city clerks in small communities do a bit of everything. They may clean toilets, manage city finances, submit an array of annual reports to the state and keep up on Iowa’s constantly changing laws on liquor licenses, zoning, tax policy and more to be good stewards of public funds.

They also are resources for city council members, helping to train new ones, inform them about the functions of the city and ensure the elected officials know the rules governing the city.

In Swisher, which has about 914 residents, Kakacek said she handles payroll and other financial matters, utility billing, permits and complaints, and she creates agenda packets and documents such as resolutions and ordinances needed for city policymaking.

“In a small town, this is it,” Kakacek said. “We don't have other departments. We’ve got public works, of course, and the library, but anything that goes on in this city, I'm the main person that you come to and then I direct it to who needs to (get it) done.”

An Eastern Iowa clerks group meets quarterly to gather informally — offering training and support to fellow clerks or a chance to simply talk and vent.

When the clerks meet, Ely City Clerk Tara Miller said the municipal officials can find humor in how they have to be a jack of all trades to succeed. While some go to graduate school to study finance or law as their careers, she said, clerks have to know a bit of everything.

“Every day is different, and within that day you are going to have at least four or five different things happen,” said Miller, who also is filling in as the interim city administrator until October.

In Fairfax, a city of more than 2,800 residents, City Clerk Cynthia Stimson said she enjoys working with the community to make progress and secure funding for new projects, such as with the new Fairfax area veterans memorial that was dedicated in July or advocating for a parks and recreation director.

“It's the council that ultimately makes those decisions, but they look to staff for information and recommendations, and it's good when you have the elected officials’ confidence and they rely on the professional staff to give them the information that they need to make the decision,” Stimson said.

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State changes challenge clerks

Heading into city budget season, the time when local governments typically begin work to draft their spending plan for the next fiscal year in time for March adoption, Lisbon City Clerk Christina Eicher said this budget cycle will be different from what any clerk has seen before.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in May signed into law House File 718, which caps the amount of new property tax revenue growth that local governments can use in their budgets. It contains two main provisions that have concerned some city leaders:

“Every year there's something new that's thrown at us, so we’re always having to continue to learn our job each year,” said Eicher, who took on the clerk role in 2020 in the city of about 2,200.

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Outside City Hall, there’s work on a sidewalk. The city also is mostly complete with a water main project. New commercial space is going up along old Highway 30. A new sports complex is nearing the end of its first phase of construction.

“We have a lot of projects already in the works with funds that we hadn't anticipated receiving, and now we might have to get a little more creative with our financial planning in the future,” Eicher said.

In Swisher, Kakacek said the city doesn’t receive as much road use tax funds, which are allocated by the state based on population, as larger cities, meaning it can do fewer street projects. The state law changes only further concern small cities that are already grappling with how to keep growing.

“If they stop cities to grow, they're not going to have the income to provide the services of our police protection, fire protection, parks, so then we're going to have to cut things because the state decided to limit our growth,” Kakacek said.

Facing hurdles to fund projects, Conrad said there can be many available grants to help push initiatives forward if communities apply, work with regional partners and rally community buy-in.

“There are a lot of opportunities out there,” Conrad said. “You just have to keep working toward getting that done.”

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Don’t ‘reinvent the wheel’

Fundamentally, the greatest challenge facing Iowa’s city clerks “all comes down to the funding,” Gleason said.

Financial woes can throw a wrench in city projects, but they also pose a barrier for cities looking to scrape funds together to send their clerks to training — opportunities that are already difficult enough for some clerks to access because of lack of staff or room in the budget.

“The state has cut cities’ funding so deep across the board, whether it be for street repairs, for purchasing of an ambulance … that councils are making very difficult decisions,” Gleason said. “Some of them are choosing to forgo education over patching a pothole. A pothole is very important, but having an educated clerk who can manage the funds to be able to pay for that pothole, it’s which came first — the chicken or the egg?”

Through Iowa State University Extension, the Iowa League of Cities and the Iowa Municipal Finance Officers Association, there are many educational opportunities open to clerks. Those trainings cover topics such as:

Through the league’s mentorship programming, Stimson said she’s working with six other cities. Some may consult her occasionally for annual reports. In one case, a town of just under 200 people employed a part-time clerk who was still responsible for the same annual reports and billing as other city clerks. When the clerk started, Stimson said the city’s budget was off by $1 million because the previous clerk wasn’t using proper procedures and software.

“You can't go into a new job and just know how to do it, you have to have training,” Stimson said. “ … What I find is a lot of the clerks that reach out, they want to learn how to do it right, and so sometimes it takes a lot of sorting out of, ‘That may have been how (their predecessor) did it, but this is how we do it right.’”

In another small city, Gleason said, when a clerk quit around the time a budget would normally be adopted, a new clerk came on. The city did not file a budget in time, and the community was not able to levy for property taxes.

“When I go to mentor, I don't hold the mouse,” Stimson said. “They're doing the work and the clicking and I'm guiding them and trying to show them how to do it, so that's a great feeling.”

Having come into a city clerk role without prior local government experience, Miller, who was a deputy clerk for more than two years before becoming the clerk about nine months ago, said the steepest learning curve is understanding all relevant city codes and ordinances as well as state and federal regulations.

Some entering the profession initially think the role is more like a store greeter, Gleason said, and they’re quickly overwhelmed by all the responsibilities the role entails. Plus, she’s heard from some council members who think the clerk is merely a secretary.

“We’re trying to educate the council on exactly what a clerk does so they see the value in the education and continuing education so that clerks don’t feel overwhelmed or confused or lost and quit before they’ve got their feet dug in and find out the true heart and soul of the job,” Gleason said.

The association is exploring different ways to reach out to new clerks and help them learn the systems they need to run their cities. But those without money in the budget for training can find support from area clerks, Eicher said.

Kakacek said clerks may send each other examples of resolutions or other city procedures. She keeps an electronic file of samples from other towns to reference from time to time.

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It’s important to take such steps not to reinvent the wheel, Eicher said.

“Somebody out there has already figured out that report or already knows how to do it,” Eicher said. “You’ve just got to ask, and if the first person doesn't know, they will find the person that can get to you.”

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