Charlotte Katzenmoyer is driven by challenge.
Charlotte Katzenmoyer talks to city carpenter Lee Smith about a
project at Reservoir Park last week.
When she resigned as Lancaster's director of public works to accept the position of facilities and operations director at Franklin & Marshall College in June 2005, she realized she needs to solve problems to be happy.
Katzenmoyer agreed to work both jobs until the city could find a replacement for her. But in six months, she opted out of the F&M deal and recommitted to the city.
The college job, she said, was "the same in terms of variedness, but I went from a scale of something ginormous to something that's manageable. ... I did not feel that I would be challenged enough there."
As director of public works since 2001, Katzenmoyer, 46, has led a staff of more than 200 employees who keep the city's infrastructure running in ways most residents never notice until something goes wrong. Water, snow removal, police and fire facilities are just a few of her responsibilities.
Female engineerKatzenmoyer's interests and upbringing made civil engineering a natural career path, though one with hurdles.
By seventh grade, she'd set her sights on becoming an engineer. Odd for a girl in those days, but it was destiny for Katzenmoyer.
With an older brother who worked for a civil engineering firm and sometimes let her tag along to the job, and a father in residential and light commercial construction, she caught was she calls "the family disease."
This gravitation to engineering was mildly contested at Cloverleaf High School in Lodi, Ohio. After a series of moves, her family landed there so her dad could serve as a Church of the Brethren minister.
The teenage Katzenmoyer excelled in math and science, yet "actually had to talk the principal and teachers into letting me take drafting courses," she said. "So I really had to prove myself."
Undaunted, she immersed herself in the courses with delight.
Even today, women earn less than 20 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
The National Society of Professional Engineers hopes to change that with campaigns encouraging girls from elementary through high school to consider an engineering as a future.
"Traditionally, engineering has been seen as a white, male job and it's not," said Stacey Ober, spokeswoman for NSPE.
"It's not fair to [the profession] because we're not getting the incredible talent they have, and it's not fair to them because it's not fair to tell anyone they can't do something," Ober said.
Katzenmoyer's family, on the other hand, never questioned her matter-of-fact interest in the field. "My father really saw that I liked the challenge," she said.
Even now, she can't suppress the mirth that lights her face as she reflects on discovering her calling. "I loved drafting. I could really visualize it," she beamed, punctuating her words with her hands.
On her wayShe had set foot on a path that would include a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering from the University of Akron and, a Master of Science degree in environmental and civil engineering from Lehigh University, with academic honors along the way. Her graduate studies focused on water and wastewater process and design.
She worked for an engineering firm before landing a job with Reading's Department of Public Works, where she would face one of the biggest roadblocks of her career.
Katzenmoyer's husband, Michael Katzenmoyer, was fired from his position as building maintenance supervisor for the City of Reading. He filed a lawsuit in November 2000 claiming he was terminated for advocating a citywide trash collection system opposed by Mayor Joseph D. Eppihimer, the Reading Eagle reported.
With the lawsuit ongoing, Charlotte Katzenmoyer claimed she was rejected for a promotion in retaliation for her husband's pending lawsuit, and also sued, according to court documents.
A year into this legal battle, the couple dropped their lawsuits without public comment, the Reading Eagle reported.
Today, Katzenmoyer says grief over her father's death in 2000, and her job with Lancaster city made her ready to let it go and move on.
"You want to make a point from a philosophical point of view, and I felt I had made my point," she said.
Katzenmoyer has served the city longer than any other executive. At $105,000 a year, she also gets the biggest paycheck, which Mayor Rick Gray and his chief of staff, Pat Brogan, say is a bargain for the job she does and her professional expertise.
Reporting to the mayor, Katzenmoyer oversees a $27.5 million budget, and is in charge of maintenance and capital improvements for city-owned facilities, encompassing city hall; police and fire administration facilities; four fire stations; 28 parks and playgrounds; one wastewater treatment plant; and two water treatment plants.
It's a lot to manage, even in the 60 to 70 hours she puts in weekly, not including time spent on weekends catching up on e-mail from home.
"The number of things she deals with and knows about is really impressive," said Gray. "There's quality there."
Despite such a workload, Katzenmoyer appears surprisingly content.
Brogan said, "She's really very low-key, very self-contained."
She gets satisfaction from public service, said Gray. "It's obviously not the money. If it were the money, she'd be working elsewhere."
Even at home in Brownstown, she finds shop talk with her husband — now Pottsgrove School District director of facilities — therapeutic and helpful for problem-solving, she said.
Not all businessThey do leave work behind for evening bicycle rides of up to 25 miles, tennis, and breakfast together at 5:15 each morning. Their children join in when they are home.
The Katzenmoyers each have children from previous marriages who reside primarily with their other parent or at college.
Charlotte Katzenmoyer has a daughter, Aminah, 23, a biomedical engineering student at the University of Maryland; and two sons, Amin, 21, and Ali, 15.
Michael Katzenmoyer has a son, Andrew, 17, and a daughter, Lindsey, 13.
"A bad day for me is when I've been serious all day long," she said. "Lighthearted ... things, off-the-wall things," tickle her most, she said. "Seinfeld" is her favorite sitcom.
"She really enjoys bantering," particularly with the mayor, Brogan said. "They have a mutual respect that's very obvious."
Football is one of those things they chide each other about. Gray has held Philadelphia Eagles season tickets for 20 years.
Katzenmoyer, however, displays Dallas Cowboys memorabilia prominently on her office bookshelf. Quarterback Roger Staubach was once her idol and her loyalty to the team continues, even here in Eagles-Steelers country. She's also a fan of NASCAR driver Matt Kenseth.
"Charlotte, as good as she is, there is nobody that's perfect. Obviously in her choice of football team to root for she's indicated that she's just a mere mortal," Gray joked.
All kidding aside, Katzenmoyer names navigating capital projects as the biggest, most stimulating challenge of managing public works. Aging facilities and systems must be kept running and ultimately revamped on a tight budget.
"She'll get a dime's worth of service out of every nickel," Brogan said. "She's the kind of person that she'd walk by a pay phone and look in the coin return to see if there's a dime in there."
"The biggest challenge always is the funding, how to make a project 'go' when the city has such limited resources," Katzenmoyer said. "So it is a challenge of cobbling together pockets of monies from as many sources as I can think of: federal grants, state grants, local grants, [Community Development Block Grants], state gas monies, capital funds, private donations, nonprofit groups, park associations, in-kind services ... whatever it possibly takes to make the project work."
Though Katzenmoyer thrives on problem-solving, she could do without problems that seem avoidable.
For example, the state requires that for a city the size of Lancaster, capital projects must employ several contractors for various aspects of a job, instead of one general contractor.
"The problem is that it's very difficult to put plans together in specs because it's hard sometimes for each of them to visualize how it all works together. You end up having to resolve disputes between contractors," she said.
What really pushes her buttons is hand-holding. "I'm not a baby sitter," she said. "I like it when employees identify a problem and come up with a solution. I want you to be proactive, and not have to have me identify something that you should have known about."
She's a tough boss, but respected and well-liked. "Although she demands a lot out of [public works employees] she's very protective of them," Brogan said.
When an employee was injured this year, Gray said, "I know it affected her personally. ... She really does care about the people who work for her. They're not just employees."
"I think she has a real commitment to developing the people that work in public works," Brogan said. "She's fair. She's not afraid of conflict."
Like the public conflict that ensued earlier this year when F&M announced plans to install a median to block pedestrians from crossing traffic on Harrisburg Avenue.
Katzenmoyer worked with the college to design a solution that would meet the city's needs and PennDOT requirements.
"There was lots of give-and-take on both sides to make that work," she said. "And the complaints were icing on the cake."
She's not complaining. "I could let those things bother me, but you can't. It's part of being in public service," she said.
She also serves on the steering committee charged by the county Planning Commission with evaluating improvements to Harrisburg Pike.
"Charlotte always seems to have in balance the big picture coupled with the city's interests," said Tom Baldrige, fellow committee member and president of the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
"It's an expansive, multi-township project that she's able to deal with and keep the city's interests in mind," Baldrige said. "But she doesn't just check out when we're talking about something outside the city."
To Tehran and backKatzenmoyer's most clearly demonstrated her eagerness to broaden her perspective when she moved to Tehran, Iran, to marry her first husband, whom she met in college, and settle down in his homeland for a few years.
Katzenmoyer became fluent in Farsi by immersion and learned to understand a culture not her own.
Her move and marriage took place in 1982, during the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. It was two years into the Iran-Iraq War and just one year after the release of 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
"It was not only turbulent but terrifying," she said, "because there were many buildings that got bombed right around us.
"Walking to work past bombed-out buildings, daily black-outs for electricity [due to power plants being bombed], and many air raids with fighter jets flying overhead with visible battles in the air was a normal occurrence while I was there."
Yet, in spite of all this, she was warmly welcomed. "The people loved Americans, so I was treated like royalty," she said. "And they can distinguish between the government and its policies and our people. Something we can't seem to do in this country!"
Perhaps the greatest conflict Katzenmoyer has faced was within herself.
When she took the leap to F&M, Katzenmoyer tendered her resignation to the city, but her heart stayed downtown. And the road ahead at F&M looked too level for her kind of bike ride.
And, so, the return to the city. "I felt a huge sense of loyalty to what I had started here," she said. "There was more of a sense of reward from what I view as public service."
For now, there are enough mountains to climb as director of public works. Should they run out, she'll set her sights on bigger ones.
"I often thought that I'd love to manage a city," she said. "But I think I'm over that. I think if I ever ran out of things I'd like to accomplish here, I might."
"Challenge?" she chuckled. "I guess that's my drug of choice."
Jeannette Scott is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact her at jscott@lnpnews.com or at 291-8689.
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