Last Friday’s letter to the editor author asked about auditor/recorder candidate Joel Oliva’s education and work experience and why he has settled in Marshalltown. Because I know and like him, let me answer her questions.

Born and reared in Idaho, Joel was a high school athlete, playing soccer and placing 3rd at the Utah state wrestling meet. A Goddard Scholar at Weber State University, he graduated with a B.S. in Management Information Systems, accounting minor, 3.7 GPA, in the top 10%, and as its “Outstanding Graduate” in the program. He was one of only 11% of the applicants to Carnegie Mellon University, ranked #21 out of 436 national universities, accepting only 11% of its highly-qualified applicants, and considered about as prestigious as Ivy League schools. With a Boeing Company Fellowship, he graduated cum laude, with distinction, top 10%, with a 3.8 GPA, with a Master of Science degree in Information Security Policy and Management.

For work, Joel was a teaching assistant in ethical penetration testing while getting his masters degree, served as an information security analyst for the Church of Latter-day Saints in Utah, as a threat intelligence analyst for Kimberly-Clark Corporation of Irving, TX, and a director of incident response for Ankura Consulting Group of WDC, managing other team members in working on multi-million-dollar projects involving cybersecurity threats. He was able to work remotely for five years at the last two positions, before he moved to Marshalltown to be with his family.

Joel’s mother is an assistant librarian at MHS and his stepfather is a manager at the beef plant in Tama, where his two brothers work. His sister is an 8th grader at Miller Middle School. The family attends St. Henry’s Church, where other members encouraged him to put his name on the ballot. Having been around him at Rotary meetings, sporting events and other gatherings, I can attest that Joel is very intelligent, engaging, articulate and nice. I trust him to run both sides of the office well, to manage staff, to listen to the public, to make sure our elections are run 100% safely and correctly, and to handle the duties as the recorder of legal documents that other lawyers and I prepare. And I trust him to get the city council the necessary tax information we need by the deadline each year.

Three main reasons compelled me to vote for him. One, the council and I did not get the required paperwork to our office this last year when we needed it to do our own budget — we were one of the last three counties in Iowa to get it. The incumbent’s explanation is that it was a computer change last year, but that does not explain the other multiple years she was late using the old software, and, if we need someone with better computer skills, Joel is your person. Two, as auditor, she was in a critical position to keep the contractor repairing our courthouse from overbilling us by such a huge amount. The contractor has now sued our county in federal court, so our tax dollars will be going to pay the costs of defending the suit. Three, the former supervisors and she failed to hire a project manager to oversee the huge job of rebuilding our beautiful but badly hurt courthouse. When other volunteers and I were building the new Y, its staff (including new county supervisor Carol Hibbs) and the other volunteers on the board and I made sure we had a project manager, who saved us many millions of dollars and months if not years of the time it took to complete the job.

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Joel Greer is the mayor of Marshalltown.