T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Incoming City of Marshalltown Finance Director Cole O’Donnell, left, is pictured with his predecessor Diana Steiner, right, who officially retired on Thursday after 10 ½ years in the role.

After over a decade as the city of Marshalltown’s finance director, Diana Steiner officially retired from her position on Thursday, and Cole O’Donnell, who previously served the city of Ottumwa in the same role, took over after training with her over the last couple of weeks.

“I really enjoyed working with Diana and will miss her dearly. I am looking forward to working with Cole. He brings a great deal of knowledge and experience to the position and is a great addition to the team,” City Administrator Carol Webb said.

Steiner, who plans to relocate to the Iowa Great Lakes area, spent her first four years in Marshalltown working at Mid-Iowa Community Action (MICA) before working in the accounting department at the Iowa Veterans Home (IVH) for the next 16. Although that was also a government job, she said coming over to the city was a learning experience and “a totally different animal” with different terminology and funding sources.

Her first task when she started was to find and implement a new accounting software, and before long, she was navigating the 2018 tornado, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 derecho. Later, she endured a major turnover in city staff after the resignations of then-City Administrator Jessica Kinser and former Housing and Community Development Director Michelle Sponheimer.

“It was definitely challenging at times with all the extra work that FEMA brought on because you have to do over and above what your normal work is,” Steiner said. “But for enjoyment purposes, I really appreciate my finance staff and the other department heads and the city administrator.”

Including the director, the finance department is made up of five employees, and they are responsible for accounts receivable, cashiering, accounts payable, payroll and auditing. One of the biggest challenges are the almost annual changes in city budgeting brought on by actions of the state legislature, which, in recent years, has moved to restrict city spending as part of a property tax reform package.

O’Donnell spent the last two years as the finance director in Ottumwa, a slightly smaller but generally comparable community to Marshalltown, and according to reporting in the Ottumwa Courier, he criticized the city council there for fostering an “unhealthy working environment” in his resignation letter.

“Ottumwa has some different challenges than Marshalltown, but what I’ll tell you is this: the accounting for any size city is similar. It’s just the size of the budget that changes. There might be some different programs that are required of cities of a larger size that smaller cities don’t have, but at the same time, it’s very, very similar,” he said.

O’Donnell, a Slater native,has spent his entire 32-year career in the public sector primarily in Iowa (and brief stints in Minnesota and Illinois), with some of that time spent as a city administrator, including holding that title in Keokuk from 2018 to 2023. He feels that Marshalltown is doing better than people realize and was encouraged by the progress he saw when he visited with his wife.

“You can drive around and you can just see there’s a vibrant community here. The businesses are coming in. You know, you look at the mall project and the things that are going on there. You look at the redevelopment of the downtown, and the Central Business District is vibrant as well. Housing stock is, what I would say, is in pretty good shape,” he said. “Looking at all those different things, it was just, OK, it would be great to come to Marshalltown and help the community move forward.”

Looking forward, his main objectives will be to search for new revenue sources and manage expenses in order to meet the community’s needs.

“The problem you run into when you have legislatures and the current governor (who) have said, with the property tax legislation, they’ve said ‘Communities are gonna have to decide what they are willing to live without.’ So there may be some decisions on what we need to live without,” O’Donnell said.

In Ottumwa, he calculated that the new law amounted to an immediate loss of $450,000 in annual revenue before the changes in valuations and exemptions are factored in, so managing expenditure growth will become even more crucial. Steiner is grateful that O’Donnell is already highly familiar with city finances, but he will have to learn the new system nonetheless.

“I’ve never transitioned to a city where everything is done exactly the same as another city,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just the procedures and different things that change, so I’ve got to learn the procedures and learn what I must do in order to not mess anything up.”

Contact Robert Maharry at (641) 753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.