T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Outgoing Marshalltown Housing and Community Development Director Michelle Spohnheimer sits at her desk on her final day of work Friday. After 22 years with the city, she has accepted a remote position with Adaapta, a consulting firm specializing in brownfields redevelopment.

To call Friday bittersweet for outgoing Marshalltown Housing and Community Development Director Michelle Spohnheimer is an understatement, but after 22 years with the city, she’s excited to take on a new remote position with the consulting firm Adaapta and begin a new chapter in life.

“It’s absolutely hard and time (for a change). It’s just really hard to describe how much I’ve been able to do in 22 years (and) the projects I’ve been a part of, just so many of them,” she said. “I love a lot of this community. There are challenges. In government, there are challenges, so I’m excited for that new opportunity of being on the other side of things.”

Spohnheimer, a native of suburban Chicago, attended Iowa State University, met her husband Wayne, obtained a degree in community and regional planning with a housing emphasis, and worked for the city of Ames for a few years before coming over to Marshalltown in 2001. Since then, she has helped the city receive millions of dollars in grants — especially for brownfields, which refer to land that is abandoned or underutilized due to pollution from industrial use, and lead-based paint mitigation — and been involved in more developments and projects than she can count. Since the last downtown plan was completed in 2006, over $90 million in improvements have been completed as a result.

Many of the people she’s worked directly with have been elderly and/or disabled residents as well as low-income families living in subsidized housing.

“It’s neat to have made a difference in all of those families’ lives,” she said. “Every once in a while, I’ll get a little thank you note or somebody will pop in… We have some wonderful clients we’ve been serving for years and years that rely on those programs heavily, so it’s a great opportunity to be able to work with people and help people.”

Alongside overseeing housing within Marshalltown, Spohnheimer’s community development duties took on a variety of forms, including working with developers on projects ranging from residential to infrastructure to commercial to industrial — as she put it, if it’s been built in the past 22 years, she had a hand in it on some level. Most recently, she’s been engaged with Conlin Properties on the new senior living facility being constructed on East Church Street.

“You never quite know what project’s gonna take form. I think one thing people don’t understand about community development is how long it takes. People get like ‘Oh, this should happen tomorrow because I want it to happen,’ but so many projects take years to get off the ground,” she said. “And until the doors are actually opened, at any point you have the potential for something to not come together. So it’s exciting to see projects like that go, and that takes a lot of work and a lot of relationship building and just being open to development and thinking about how we can improve stuff. That’s a fun part of the job that I will miss, but I’ll be excited to see the projects continue to develop that I started working on five years ago.”

In addition to her first full-time job, Michelle and Wayne have also crafted high quality honey-based alcoholic beverages at the Buzzed Bee Meadery near their home outside of Melbourne, and 2023 will be its final season as they seek to “simplify” their lives going forward. With a son in middle school and other changes on the horizon, they decided it was time to free up some of their weekends.

Spohnheimer is the second high-ranking city official to leave her job in the last month following the resignation of former City Administrator Jessica Kinser, and when asked if the departures would create a leadership void, she expressed confidence in her now former coworkers to pick up the slack.

“We have a great department head team. The city is full of, between the employees from the lowest level of workforce up to the top, we have amazing team members here, and they will get through stuff,” she said. “Will there be challenges and bumps in the road? Of course.”

One of those employees is City Planner Hector Hernandez Morales, who has worked under Spohnheimer for the last year and considers her a great mentor.

“I really appreciated just learning from her, (and) 22 years of experience really helped out a lot with all the issues and all the learning I had to do learning this position,” he said. “I’m happy I had the opportunity to work with her, and anytime I had any questions, Michelle seemed to always know what to do or at least have some knowledge of how to proceed with a solution. I’m a little disappointed that she’s leaving, but I’m happy for the new opportunity she gets.”

The city does plan to hire a new housing and community development director with applications accepted until the end of June, but it will be on Hernandez Morales, the four other staff members in the department — Becky Deemer, Geri Larson, Jackie Pippen and Joe Trowbridge — and other department heads to fill in the gaps in the meantime.

“They’re all just amazing staff that are very competent at keeping things and running. I’m working on little cheat sheets and manuals for them,” Spohnheimer said.

Her new job will cover similar territory but involve consulting with communities across the country on brownfields mitigation, and she’ll bring a fresh perspective to the small team as someone with previous experience working in government. It didn’t take Spohnheimer long to decide what she’ll miss most about her job with the city, though: the people she met along the way, especially those who worked with her.

“My department (and) the department heads, I really feel are family. I care about them like family, and sometimes you spend more waking hours at your job than you do with the rest of your family. So that part has meant the most to me in 22 years,” she said. “I love seeing projects. I love to know that ‘Oh, that started as an idea, as a plan.’ As a planner, I love doing plans and seeing them actually implemented… Whether it’s streetscaping or new development or housing or private infrastructure improvements to buildings, the idea that you can plan for something and actually implement it and see those results, that’s the best thing.”

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255

or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.