After 30 years climbing rungs of city government, Sarah Medary is ready to step down

For six years, as city manager, Sarah Medary has overseen the day-to-day operations of Eugene’s government, directing more than 1,500 employees and a $1.9 billion two-year budget. 

But Medary first began working for Eugene as a part-time irrigation maintenance employee in the parks and open space department in 1996. She moved through engineering and recreation, worked as assistant city manager and ran the planning and development department. Medary then led public works and, finally, the city itself.

Her tenure could be measured in years (30) or job titles (12). But as Medary, 59, prepares to retire on Dec. 12, she sees her career defined by her relationships. Her colleagues — executive staff and elected officials — said she built trust across City Hall.

“Still the conversations that I sometimes value the most are the ones I’m having with the custodian at the end of the day that’s coming in to clean,” Medary told Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

A new job, then the world shut down

The City Council hires the city manager, who carries out council policy direction across six departments. Recruitment for Medary’s successor is underway, a decision that will shape Eugene for years.

“She has been a phenomenal city manager, perhaps our best in the last half a dozen,” said Councilor Mike Clark, who has served on the council for 19 years. “I don’t know anyone who could take as diverse a set of wants, needs and desires as is held by the people who live here, and synthesize them so well into a direction and outcomes that everybody can live with.”

Medary entered the job in 2019, fewer than three months before the COVID-19 pandemic sent workers home, and the entire city staff began to gather virtually for weekly meetings, thanks to a new workplace Zoom subscription.

She described steering the city during the pandemic as an early, emotionally difficult test. City leadership followed incident command plans in place, but there wasn’t an exact playbook for handling the existential feelings that arose during the lockdown, or the protests in downtown Eugene against police brutality that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.

During that time, Medary found guidance in a diagram: A horizontal line, representing the needs of the world, intersects a vertical line, representing one’s talent. The point where the two lines intersect is circled; that’s one’s purpose. 

“People are their happiest when they’re closest to that point,” she said.

Those kinds of exercises went on to become commonplace for those working under Medary, who calls herself a values-based leader and says her driving forces are authenticity, stewardship and making a difference.

“She says this a lot, but what makes sense and what feels right … they both have to work together for something to be successful,” said Assistant City Manager Matt Rodrigues, who will serve as interim city manager and comes from a background in public works, where he first worked with Medary. “That was really meaningful to me.”

That balance is especially visible in heavy conversations, some colleagues said.

“I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with Sarah,” said Mayor Kaarin Knudson, who described Medary as her closest colleague. “There is a smile she has just before she says something really wry and funny to usually assess the enormous challenge of a problem we’re trying to get our arms around.”

Changing the city’s footprint

Beyond building relationships, Medary said Eugene’s redevelopment of the lot on Eighth Avenue and Oak Street into the Lane County Farmers Market Pavilion in 2021 was the tangible accomplishment she is most proud of.

The city had bought the property from Lane County in 2019, planning to build a new City Hall there. But design concepts and costly budget estimates piled up. 

During that process, Medary met with a member of the Lane County Farmers Market board, who gave her Market Days — a book by Stan Bettis that documents the long history of farmers markets on that block — and urged her to create a permanent farmers market on the site instead. 

The project would require countless hours and relationships, including approvals from the city and county, and meant giving up on the city’s vision for City Hall, Medary said. But after reading the book, she said she decided, “We have to do this.” 

“It kind of just wraps up for me a lot of how I feel I’ve been useful since I’ve worked for the city,” she said. “Problem solving, impossible problems, like, ‘Let’s do it.’ We can figure it out.”

In 2023, the city shelved the City Hall plan, buying and moving operations to the former Eugene Water & Electric Board headquarters on the Willamette River. That freed the north butterfly lot — part of the property envisioned for the failed city hall plan, just north of the Farmers Market Pavilion — for an ongoing mixed-use development.

Medary said she’s proud the city protected public land on the river by buying the EWEB headquarters, as the entire community can access it. 

Lessons learned

Though she said she didn’t have many regrets, Medary said she wished she wouldn’t have been as trusting that Capstone Collegiate Companies — the developer of the student apartments now known as The Hayward (formerly called 13th and Olive) — would deliver the project the way they said they would. 

She was leading planning and development at the time and recommended to then-city manager Jon Ruiz that the developer receive a $16 million, 10-year multi-unit property tax exemption, known as MUPTE, which the City Council inked in 2012.

But the completed building didn’t match expectations, sparking concerns of a rushed planning process, and the council voted to freeze the MUPTE program before revising the rules.

“We didn’t have the same sort of guarantees in the MUPTE policy and process that would have forced them to build it exactly the way they said,” she said. “We’ve done that since. But what we ended up with was a project that didn’t look like what they said it was going to look like.”

She noted that the building, whose tax break has expired, is now the city’s fourth-highest taxpayer.

In response to questions about delays surrounding the city’s riverfront mixed-use project due to wage disputes between the developer and state, Medary said: “Because of all the rising costs that we’ve seen, I think [paying a prevailing wage] deserves to be looked at, but I don’t think it’s a city responsibility. It’s a state-level decision.”

She added: “A pause is not the end.”

Challenges persist

Medary’s retirement will mean the loss of a steady hand and a source of institutional knowledge in a difficult moment for Eugene. 

The city faces a structural budget gap that sparked divisions during the last budget cycle, a housing and homelessness crisis, and new fear and distrust in the community trickling down from the Trump administration’s activity.

Medary said working to reduce homelessness is the biggest challenge she faced throughout her tenure, a “heartbreaking” reality that persists in the community and has difficult impacts on business owners and residents.

She said the city has tried to invest in resources on all sides, from structuring staff to focus on unhoused services and hiring more employees for cleanup, to adding more beds at rest stops and partnering with the county on congregate housing.

“It’s a challenge that I wish we could just check the box and be done with, but we’re not there,” Medary said. “The bigger challenge is the hidden challenge behind that, which is all of the folks that are in poverty in our community. They’re so close to being one of those folks.”

It’s hard when residents don’t also recognize progress, she said, like improvement in areas in west Eugene, or understand what role the city plays in the issue. 

That sort of community friction became especially visible during budget conversations in the spring and summer, after Medary and the City Council backed a plan to fill a $11.5 million general fund gap using a new fire service fee. 

The Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce opposed the plan, referring it to the ballot before the council repealed it altogether in July. The city ultimately raised an existing stormwater fee to avoid scaling back popular services.

“I felt like we had gone through all the right steps to get to that recommendation, but folks had a different perspective on it,” Medary said, noting it was one of the most notable differences of opinion between her and the community.

Eugene has long faced a structural imbalance in its general fund, with expenses and demand for services growing faster than the traditional revenue streams. 

The city would need to reduce spending in its general fund by $2.2 million per year beginning in 2027 to keep its savings on target, according to an updated financial forecast presented last week.

In the fall, Medary convened a Technical Advisory Group on Fiscal Stability to make budgetary recommendations, which she hopes will provide a launchpad of strong relationships for the “rough years” ahead. She’ll discuss the panel’s progress on Monday, Dec. 8; a final report will come in February. 

“People want us to do more and more and more. They don’t want to pay more, and I understand that,” Medary said, adding: “You have to be willing to be part of the solution.”

Brittany Quick-Warner, who leads the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce, said Medary demonstrated selfless leadership during budget decisions and was “very graceful” in handling the chamber’s opposition to the fee. She said she hopes the next city manager prioritizes economic development.

“We have sort of allowed the political winds to shift us through decisions that are being made,” Quick-Warner said. 

A turning point for public safety

Some parts of the city organization are bracing for the transition. 

With Medary leaving, the Eugene Police Department is losing a friend, Chief Chris Skinner said. The city manager describes Skinner as one of the best chiefs in the country; he said the pair have grown to have a siblinglike relationship “forged in fire” during the pandemic.

They began giving each other socks every Christmas after Skinner noticed Medary never wears them. 

He said he has some anxiety about how the next city manager will approach public safety and policing, joking that the city’s “security blanket” is moving on.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been supported as much as I’ve been supported in the last several years that she’s been a city manager,” he said.

Despite their strong working relationship, some decisions became flashpoints. One challenge was the police department’s May installation of new automated license-plate reader cameras owned and operated by technology surveillance company Flock Safety. The cameras sparked privacy concerns, including fears of federal agencies using local data, in Eugene and in cities nationwide.

Medary directed staff to shut off the cameras in October at the council’s recommendation, and Eugene police announced it ended its contract with Flock on Friday, citing system vulnerabilities and limitations.

“It was a joint call by me and the chief and ultimately came down to trust,” Medary said. “We need the community to trust we are making decisions and deploying tools and technology that protect with integrity. We’ve been working on policy updates and contract changes to try and ensure that and ultimately could not get there.”

The police chief and next city manager will navigate the decision of whether to pursue a new vendor for the technology, Medary said, adding there is a City Council work session scheduled on Feb. 18 to discuss license-plate reader technology more generally.

Medary said the cameras didn’t stand out as a potential concern or transparency issue during early stages, before fears stemming from the Trump administration surfaced in the community. 

Skinner recommended the cameras to expedite his department’s ability to solve crimes, which Medary said felt in line with current policy direction.

In hindsight, Medary said she wishes Eugene’s police commission, a citizen advisory body, could have “weighed in more” on the department’s license-plate reader policy before the city moved forward with the cameras’ implementation.

“I’ve really listened to folks,” she said. “It’s hard to listen and not be like, ‘Should I have done that different? And what would I do differently?’”

A challenge that predates Medary’s time as city manager will still be unresolved as she leaves. Medary plans to recommend a future structure of governance for Eugene Springfield Fire during a City Council work session on Wednesday — a step toward the department’s much-needed restructuring. She said she wished she could have further advanced those discussions. 

Eugene Springfield Fire Chief Mike Caven said he’s confident in Medary’s interim replacement to keep the discussion moving, though he has some concerns about changes in leadership setting back progress. The department hopes to have some governance benchmarks completed by the time Medary’s permanent successor steps in, Caven said. 

(Councilor Randy Groves, who formerly led Eugene Springfield Fire as its chief, said he hopes the city can keep Medary on as a contractor to “finish it off.”)

Caven first worked with Medary when he was representing the firefighters union as president. He said he only took the chief job in 2022 because she took a risk on him, and he trusted her. 

“That was one of the questions I asked her when she was appointing me to the job: How long was she going to be here?” Caven said.

What comes next

After 30 years working for the city, Medary — who says she feels and perceives her way through significant decisions — felt a “deep sense of knowing” that it was time to move on.

“This work takes an enormous amount of mind, body and spirit and I can feel the toll it’s taken on me and my family and friends,” she said. “There is no one thing that made me know this was the time.”

Medary said she’s excited to spend time outdoors and reconnect with her partner Jen and her friends. She said she will fly fish (a lot), which she said allows her to be present in a new way.

“It’s just time for a new person to step in,” Medary said. “I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life. I never planned on that. I actually never planned on being a public employee at all. I just thought I’d be a landscape architect.”

And as for the next city manager, her message is simple: “Never let anyone let you fall out of love with Eugene.”