City’s top administrator calls it a career after 30 years

Shelley Chemnitz set to leave after helping guide city through COVID-19

Shelley Chemnitz hesitated to apply to work for St. Catharines City Hall when someone handed her a want ad back in 1991.

She thought it would be boring. Her mom said she should give it a shot and so she did, but she still wasn’t sure she was making the right decision when she left for work on her first day.

It was on the drive in that her perspective started to change.

“I remember very much driving in to city hall for my first day at work and driving by Montebello Park. The sprinklers were going and it looked like it was going to rain. So I thought, huh. And then I slowed down behind a city bus,” she said, adding she started to notice other things, too.

“I thought, you know what? The city does so many different things, so much variety, it could be interesting. And as soon as I got there, it really was.”

Thirty years later, Chemnitz is retiring from city hall’s top administrative position, having worked her way up from that first city job as accounting supervisor to St. Catharines chief administrative officer overseeing the senior management team.

In the past year, she’s capped her career by steering the city through a pandemic the likes of which hasn’t been seen in our lifetimes. Challenges were something Chemnitz craved, and it turned out life in municipal government was filled with them. She took on a number of new roles before becoming treasurer, commissioner of corporate support services and then CAO in 2017. She said she enjoyed working for and with the people at city hall.

The largest challenge for a municipality, she said, is achieving balance. The city is there to provide a service to the community, but the community is made up of many stakeholders who have different needs and opinions.

COVID-19 presented a big challenge in that balance.

City staff had to look at all the services St. Catharines provides and pare it down to the most essential. Chemnitz said that was done in a pressurized environment of quick decisions, with information that wasn’t complete or changing.

“What if you have to do the most minimal thing and conserve the most dollars? What will that be? What’s the most important or crucial? And then how do you cycle it back up?” she said. “I’m very thankful that in all of the different parts of our organization, community service is what they’re there to do and they’re very good at it. So they were able to bring things down to what’s the most essential, and then start to bring it up again. “But it is a challenge. I think we met it well.”

She is officially CAO until the end of July, though she’s in a transition phase now, finishing up some projects to ease the changeover and using up some vacation. David Oakes, the former deputy CAO, was appointed by city council to be her successor and is acting CAO until Aug. 1. A lifelong St. Catharines resident, graduate of Grantham High School and Brock University for public accounting, Chemnitz said she’s looking forward to spending time with her husband, who retired three years ago, getting some rest and travelling once it is safe to do so again.

She said she feels good about the future of the city. “There will be challenges there, but I have all the confidence that they’ll be able to deal with it and I’ll be able to watch from the sidelines and cheer them on.”