Dublin city manager John Fitzgerald is to step down in June after 10 years in office. His job will be advertised by the Public Appointments Commission later this week, with an indicative salary level in the range of €150,000 to €200,000.
Mr Fitzgerald, who is credited with transforming Dublin City Council into a much more pro-active organisation, said he had decided not to seek a new contract because "10 years is the absolute outside of the term I anticipated when I took over in 1996". He is considering a number of options, but declined to elaborate.
"I feel I can still bring as much energy as I ever did to the job, but I think it's a good time to go now. The capacity of this organisation to get things done is too important for me to distract it."
What Dublin City Council is seeking is a new chief executive who "will consolidate the progress achieved over the past decade, to lead the city forward and deal with the many challenges over the coming years" as well as managing a budget of €2 billion.
Mr Fitzgerald argues that the Government should revive its five-year-old plan to establish a Greater Dublin Authority "with the clout to intervene in the interests of the region". In an interview with The Irish Times, he reaffirmed his view that setting up a Dublin Transport Authority on its own "would be a mistake . . . a recipe for failure" because it would not draw together the strategic issues of transport provision and land use planning.
Reflecting on his 10 years in office and looking to the future, Mr Fitzgerald said the biggest challenge facing Dublin is to consolidate the urban area with higher density housing designed with the needs of families in mind, particularly in the city centre.
In 1996, at the outset of his term of office, one of the priorities he identified was the physical and social renewal of Dublin City Council's housing stock. Since then, "close to €1.5 billion, if you add it all up" has been invested in transforming Ballymun and inner city flat complexes.
"At first, I thought the way to do it was to get money from the Government. But more and more of it is now coming from the private sector and we've got local communities to buy into the idea that there should be a better mix of private and social housing in these areas."
Through local partnership boards and the involvement of property developers, places like Fatima Mansions, St Theresa's Gardens and Ballymun itself are being renewed in this way. "New solutions like that are the answer to social housing in Dublin," Mr Fitzgerald said.
Widespread distrust in deprived areas of "the corpo", as it used to be called, had been resolved by local staff on an "eyeball to eyeball" basis.
This was a by-product of the city manager's drive to decentralise the administration by establishing 13 area offices around the city. Four years ago, under local government reforms, Dublin Corporation became Dublin City Council. Mr Fitzgerald did not regret the loss of its historic name.
What he termed the "old rigidity" of the corporation has been replaced by a more flexible structure suited to modern-day needs, with the emphasis on individual responsibility and a "can do" attitude. Morale among its 6,500 staff has never been better, he said.
Mr Fitzgerald set the tone - for example, by declining to wear his robes of office. He also made it his business to find out what was happening in other cities like Barcelona and Helsinki, travelling to visit them with city architect Jim Barrett and chief planner Dick Gleeson.
The idea for the Liffey Boardwalk originated while a group of them were in a pub in Liverpool late one night and "Jim Barrett drew it on a beer mat". Less successful have been the grey kiosks on Capel Street Bridge. "We're looking at getting craftspeople into them now." He puts any mistakes in perspective by pointing out that, 10 years ago, O'Connell Street was "disappearing down the tubes, Smithfield was a surface car park and people told the light rail project team that they'd believe it when they saw it". Luas is part of Dublin's fabric now.
"By the time I finish here in June, our work on O'Connell Street will be completed and we'll be moving on to Parnell Square". However, he finds it very frustrating and unacceptable that the redevelopment of the Carlton cinema site has been held up in the courts for five years.
When he took over as city manager in 1996, the Dublin Port Tunnel project was in serious doubt and he had to put it up to the councillors to get on with it. When it opens later this year, he believes it will take at least two-thirds of heavy goods vehicles off the city streets. Mr Fitzgerald said he was "prepared to stake my reputation" on the final bill coming in close to the contract price of €752 million. He also believes that it was right to exclude taller trucks, saying they were responsible for "50 crashes into Dart line bridges a year".
On Dublin Port, he agreed that it would "make more sense" if it relocated its cargo operations to Bremore, in north Co Dublin. But he insisted that there was "no problem facing Dublin that can't be resolved in a short time-frame". "I wish we had put in Metro and light rail years ago, but that's being done and we now have a much better idea how to do these things."
