New Tempe leader wants to tackle crime, road repair and low staffing. Here's how
Tempe got a new city manager for the first time in a decade when Rosa Inchausti was tapped for the spot in June, a move lauded by those who say she "gets things done" and criticized by others who have concerns about the rushed appointment process, her record high salary and Inchausti's conduct over her 30 year career.
The city manager spot is similar to a private sector CEO, while the City Council is akin to a board of directors. Elected officials dictate the city's direction, sometimes with input from the manager, who then directs the implementation of those policies while overseeing the day-to-day function of city departments and services.
Inchausti is the first woman to fill that role in Tempe. The 55-year-old was born in Florida to Cuban immigrants and grew up in Bell, California, a small town just south of Los Angeles. She moved to Tempe after receiving her master's degree in counseling from Northern Arizona University in 1992.
City insiders are divided about what it will mean for Tempe now that Inchausti is at the helm.
In her 30 years at City Hall, Inchausti has amassed supporters and opponents. Her fans describe an effective, competent leader who tackles tough problems and gets things done. Her detractors object to what they consider her overbearing management style, and call her effectiveness superficial.
Mayor Corey Woods has championed Inchausti, telling The Arizona Republic that "you don't continue to rise in this organization ... if you're not an exceptional human being and an exceptional city employee."
Inchausti's journey through Tempe's ranks began shortly after she graduated from NAU in the early 1990s, following this path:
1992: Inchausti began working for the city as a marriage counselor shortly after graduating from Northern Arizona University with a degree in psychology.
2002: She was tapped to be Tempe's first Diversity Office director. The office was created in response to a discrimination scandal that rocked Tempe in the late 1990s.
2016: Inchausti became the director of Tempe Strategic Management and Diversity Department when it merged with the Diversity Office.
2021: Inchausti took her first executive-level position as one of former City Manager Andrew Ching's deputies. She oversaw nearly 300 employees across five departments, including those focused on homelessness.
2022: Inchausti became Ching's chief deputy. She said her main focuses included "cultivating relationships" with local non-profits, city leaders and developers to further initiatives such as Hometown for All.
Her ultimate step up the organizational ladder came on June 27 when Tempe's City Council voted 6-1 to make her the new city manager, less than two weeks after Ching stepped down from the role. Inchausti expects that her varied experience will allow her to "hit the ground running."
“There’s a runway that takes place with any new position. Lucky for me, I’ve had decades of experience,” Inchausti told The Arizona Republic. “Now I’m able to do something about the things that need to be accomplished in our community.”
The Republic sat down with Inchausti to talk about her priorities. She's set her sights on improving some negative trends in Tempe’s performance data, including those related to human services issues, an area she helped oversee for years. Her plan will be guided by a framework she's dubbed the “four pillars," which focus on:
Streets and infrastructure: The city has made virtually no progress toward improving its road quality over the past 12 years. Inchausti's goal is to secure nearly $200 million to repave Tempe’s streets. The funding details haven’t been sorted out, but will likely involve bond debt or new taxes.
More staffing: More than an eighth of Tempe's staff positions are empty and only half of its employees report being satisfied. There's an upcoming compensation study to adjust Tempe’s salaries so that they are competitive with private companies and a new recruiter is also coming on board to speed up hiring.
Resident safety: Nearly 40% of residents don’t feel safe — up by 14 percentage points since 2020 — and data suggest homelessness-related issues are a core driver of that trend. The city is in the early stages of creating a “real-time crime data center" and “beefing-up” funding for affordable housing under an existing program.
A new approach to neighborhoods: The Neighborhood Services Office is a core link between Tempe and its residents. Its staffers usually communicate with homeowners' associations, which Inchausti said is outdated because the formal groups are becoming rarer. She wants the office to start engaging with individuals directly.
The success of her initiatives hinges on the City Council making her plans possible through policy, as well as the heads of Tempe's city departments efficiently carrying out the efforts. She'll need buy-in from both.
Inchausti's near unanimous support among elected officials suggests she won't face difficulty there, but coordinating with her skeleton crew of staff leaders might be more challenging. Eleven of the 20 departments that she oversees either lack a permanent director, will lack one in the coming months, or have directors with less than a year on the job.
The Economic Development is without a permanent director. The office is currently being managed by the Community Services Department director.
The heads of the Municipal Budget Office and the Education, Career and Family Services Department are retiring before the end of this year.
Interim directors are overseeing both Fire Medical Rescue and the Engineering and Transportation departments.
Six departments are being led by individuals with less than a year in the position. They include Sustainability and Resiliency, Information Technology, Community Health and Human Services, Strategic Management and Innovation, Diversity, and the Police Department.
The situation could slow the pace of Inchausti's planned initiatives as department staffers adjust and future directors get up to speed on how the city works. But the vacancies also give Inchausti a chance to handpick a trusted team that's fine-tuned to her plans.
She also cited the new directors' years of experience working within the city in lower-level roles, saying "we have a well of institutional knowledge and we have new eyes and new energy as well. I don’t see any reason for delays as we move forward with new initiatives to better serve our residents.”
Inchausti acknowledged that, even if she has a team of all-star staffers under her, “nothing changes overnight." Residents can track many of the city's main progress indicators online to see how things shape up.
"I always say once you get (to the top position), it's what you do with it — the impact," Inchausti said when she was appointed in June. "I commit to all of you, whether you are in support of me or are skeptical about whether I should be in the seat, I'm working for everyone."
Power hungry or a 'consummate professional?'
The new city manager will have to inspire employees with starkly differing views about her leadership and performance if she hopes to achieve her priorities.
Don Jongewaard of the firefighters' union called her a "doer" who's willing to take on uncomfortable tasks that others won't.
"She gets things done. She doesn't she doesn't put things off. She's very good at addressing issues as they come up," he said.
"She's not a tyrant by any means" but will "have (difficult) conversations" to get staffers to do "the right things," he said. "Some people avoid difficult conversations, and that doesn't usually help."
But nearly two dozen of Inchausti's former colleagues characterized her as a power-hungry leader whose appointment is a byproduct of pervasive cronyism within the city that employees disparagingly call the "Tempe Way."
"Take care of your friends. That's what (city staffers) referred to as the Tempe Way," said former City Manager Charlie Meyer, who served from 2007 to 2013. Critics say Inchausti built her career on that system by befriending those in power to consolidate her own, and that she has no qualms about using her authority to help her allies.
In 2022, she testified as a city official in a noise-related lawsuit between two Tempe businesses. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge found that she lied to protect the defendant because he was her friend.
In recounting the noise dispute, former Engineering and Transportation Director Marilyn DeRosa said Inchausti "just flat out said, 'these guys are friends of mine and basically we're not going to be enforcing our noise ordinance."
Inchausti contends that the allegations of her creating a toxic work environment are just a result of the "hard decisions" she's had to make as a leader to further city initiatives.
Her dozens of supporters, including Councilmember Arlene Chin, back up her version. She described her as a "consummate professional."
Finding cash for $180M of street repairs
Tempe uses a measure called the Pavement Quality Index to grade the condition of its more than 1,200 lane-miles of city streets on a scale from 0 to 100. The city's goal has long been to reach a 70% score by 2028, which would put it squarely in the "good" quality range, but it has sat stagnant around 60% for the past decade.
The challenge is that it costs roughly $1 million to pave just one mile of roadway, and to reach a 70% score it's expected that the city's total bill will approach $180 million.
Cities typically have three options to come up with that funding: cover the cost with existing revenues, ask voters to approve bond debt or create a new sales tax dedicated specifically to road repairs.
Inchausti said the first option is the least likely. Tempe is getting hit hard by the Arizona Legislature's ban on rental sales taxes, which will cost the city $21 million in annual revenue, nearly a tenth of its overall sales tax income.
Taking on more bond debt might also be problematic because Tempe is already using another tenth of its yearly budget to pay back money that it borrowed. And its secondary property tax rate, which generates cash to pay off that debt, is already the highest in the Valley by a significant margin.
The third option, a new sales tax, might be the most feasible. Most Tempe residents pay about $700 each year on sales taxes, which puts it right in the middle of the pack when compared to nearby communities.
"That's the conversation, so stay tuned," Inchausti told The Republic. "We’ll make that decision by the end of this year."
Boosting low employee morale, filling vacancies
One of Inchausti's biggest challenges will likely be tackling the city's 14% job vacancy rate. Like many other cities across the country, Tempe has struggled to maintain staffing levels since the COVID-19 pandemic and is also facing declines in other staffing-related metrics:
Police and municipal utilities had the highest number of empty spots in the city as of May, with 60 and 46 vacant positions, respectively. Both are critical to Inchausti's resident safety and street improvement goals.
Tempe's turnover rate was about 13% across all city departments last year, which is the highest it has been since at least 2017. The city's target was a 9% turnover rate by 2022.
Employee satisfaction hit a seven-year low in 2022. Only 52% of city staffers said they felt Tempe "adequately supports work-related needs." The goal is 90% by 2030.
Inchausti has firsthand experience with staffing shortages. She oversaw departments with some of the city's highest vacancy rates during her time as a director and a deputy manager. They include the six-person strategic management and diversity office with a 63% vacancy rate, and the Human Services Department with 20 unfilled positions, or 17% of its workforce.
The new city manager believes one of the main drivers of the staffing problem is that "the next generation hasn’t thought about government jobs." Part of her plan is to rethink staffer pay so that Tempe can go beyond competing with other cities for new employees, and also compete with private companies.
"We know we need to be more competitive," she explained. "A lot of cities are now doing compensation studies to see, 'do we need to start comparing ourselves to something in the private sector in order to make sure we're attracting the best and retaining the best?'"
Inchausti has also been involved in departments at both ends of the employee satisfaction spectrum. Her strategic management office received the lowest satisfaction scores between 2016 and 2022, while the IT department that she oversaw as deputy manager consistently scored the highest.
She said "creating stability" is one of the keys to retaining quality employees, which means holding onto department heads and their deputies. Inchausti talked about "rewarding the employees who have been here a long time — that's a morale booster — and thanking them" as a way to maintain consistency in the ranks.
She added that the city has "allocated" a new human resources staffer to "fill those vacancies quicker and to figure out strategically what are better ways to get folks interested in these jobs."
Resident safety in the near-term: park rangers and crime data center
Fixing staffing problems, especially in the Police Department, will be just one aspect of addressing what is perhaps Tempe's most pressing issue: a decline in resident safety and confidence in city services.
Tempe has the region’s highest property crime rate and second highest violent crime rate, according to Valley Benchmark Communities, an initiative under ASU's Center for Urban Innovation that includes the region's 11 largest cities and towns to compare crucial data.
Two-thirds of residents worry about having their cars stolen and a third say they are unsatisfied with Tempe police service, 15 percentage points lower than in 2017.
Meanwhile, homelessness has doubled over the past five years as the share of affordable homes in Tempe’s market dropped from 49% to 26%. City data suggest that might be a major factor driving some of the declining resident safety trends, especially around city parks:
Only 39% of residents reported feeling safe in city parks at nighttime during Tempe's 2022 community survey, the most recent. For the surveys in 2020 and 2021, that figure was 60% and 44%, respectively.
By last September, Tempe had received 104 emergency medical calls to local parks for incidents related to homelessness, drugs and alcohol. That translates to an average monthly call rate for 2022 that is 61% higher than it was in 2021.
By October 2022, there were 69 homeless-related Tempe 311 calls to areas around local parks. That shakes out to an average monthly call rate 123% higher than in 2020 and 40% higher than it was in 2021.
"The unpredictable behavior that sometimes comes with someone who is suffering a mental illness or is actively using drugs — that unpredictable behavior makes people feel unsafe," said Inchausti, who has played a central role in Tempe's homelessness efforts for the past two years.
The new city manager inherited at least one new tool that will help staffers mitigate the problem in the near term. Tempe officials revived the city's park ranger program with 17 new ranger positions as part of the city's budget process, which wrapped up about two weeks before Inchausti became city manager.
Inchausti also said she's working on creating a "real-time crime date center" in Tempe, a more medium-term solution. The system would use existing cameras throughout Tempe, such as traffic cameras or possibly those set up in local schools, to identify crimes as they happen.
It would work by streaming video feeds to screens monitored by staffers who can then dispatch police or other city employees depending on the problem taking place. Mesa and Glendale have similar systems.
"Tempe needs one (and) we're working on that ... It's an intelligence center that helps identify crime as it is happening through cameras," she said.
Resident safety in the long-term: finding cash for housing
In the long term, Inchausti's plan to combat homelessness-related issues centers on fundraising for Tempe's Hometown for All program. The initiative was spearheaded by Mayor Woods in 2021 with the goal of creating 11,000 permanent affordable housing units in Tempe by 2040.
It works by giving developers a way to encourage the city to grant them certain property tax breaks, which are only allowed under Arizona law if companies can prove that their project proposals carry some sort of public benefit. Developers can offer to make a donation to the program in order to check that box.
That cash goes to nonprofit developer Tempe Coalition for Affordable Housing. Then, it goes toward establishing permanent affordable units on empty or otherwise available properties. Tempe also contributes half of any new project's permitting fees to the program.
But the program isn't producing results fast enough. Figures from December indicate that Tempe is creating about 136 new units annually, including its planned units, which means the program will have to increase its output by at least 300% if the city is going to reach its 11,000-unit goal in time.
Cash, according to Inchausti, is the key hurdle. Between city contributions and developer donations, the program has only received about $8 million. Inchausti said she's working with the strategic management and housing departments on figuring out how to "beef-up" that funding.
Inchausti said the idea would be to solicit donations from businesses and developers who want to contribute to community efforts without "getting anything in return." She doesn't plan on offering further material incentives, like tax breaks or zoning abatements.
"Not everything needs to be a rule, policy or a guideline," she said. "It’s also building on relationships that we have and saying, help us figure it out — come to the table and contribute."
Reporter Sam Kmack covers Tempe, Scottsdale and Chandler. Reach him at sam.kmack@arizonarepublic.com and follow him on Twitter @KmackSam.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tempe has big issues. How does its newest leader plan to fix them?
