After attending 1,500 city council meetings and preparing eight different cities’ budgets over his 46-year career, Sequim City Manager Steve Burkett retires on June 30.

Burkett, who served Sequim since October 2009, plans to stay here and vacation in Mexico in the winter for extended stays but on July 1, he’ll be readying to go crabbing early the next morning for opening day.

He attended one last city council meeting on June 22 and was honored by the Sequim City Council. Earlier in the day he spoke about his career saying he feels fortunate that Sequim was looking for a city manager when he was looking for his last city manager job.

“It worked out great for both of us,” he said. “I was fortunate Sequim needed a city manager with a lot of experience.”

Burkett said prior to his arrival, Sequim grew rapidly but hadn’t established many important policies such as with finances and master plans.

“One of the things I’m most pleased with is the ability to get a lot of that foundation in place for professional management because for a long time Sequim was just a small town and didn’t need or want those standards,” he said.

Burkett said he’s also grateful for stability on the city council.

“It’s one of the best city councils I’ve ever worked for,” he said. “They obviously have differing opinions but don’t criticize each other and work together well. The key is there’s a lot of trust between the city manager and staff and the city council and that’s not always the case in city government.”

He first served as a city manager in Springfield, Ore., in 1980 and Sequim was the smallest city that Burkett served as city manager.

“For me it was a great opportunity to be in a small town like Sequim and make a difference and leave it better than I found it,” he said. “It’s a great ending to my career in public service.”

Here, he shares what led him to become a city manager.

“In the sixth grade, in the mid 1950s, for whatever reason I was really interested in current affairs. I was living near Pasco and my parents subscribed to The Spokesman-Review newspaper. I read that everyday. For whatever reason, I have this vision, being down on my hands and knees reading it. I was real interested in what was going on in the country back then.

There were a lot of things going on like civil rights. My sixth-grade teacher suggested I become a journalist or a newscaster because I was interested in public affairs.

In college in 1965, I took a course in local government. The city manager of Tacoma came to speak to our class. That was the first time I knew there was even such a thing as a city manager. His description of his job sounded pretty exciting.

As a matter of fact he had to leave in the middle of his presentation because they were having some kind of civil disturbance as part of the Daffodil Festival or something. There were a lot of urban riots and unrest in the mid-1960s.

I wasn’t really interested in partisan politics but I was interested in this thing called being a city manager where you could be involved in civic affairs and building community but you didn’t have to run for election. So I took a lot of courses in management and I eventually got my master’s degree in political science with a concentration in public administration. My bachelor’s degree was in education. I originally wanted to be a teacher. I student-taught in high school.

My first job in this business was 46 years ago in 1969 when I was hired in an intern program in Phoenix, Ariz. Every year they hire three interns out of graduate school and teach them to become city managers.

I went to school in Bellingham and packed up a small U-Haul and drove to Phoenix around this time 46 years ago.”

Everyone has a story and now they have a place to tell it. Verbatim is a first-person column that introduces you to your neighbors as they relate in their own words some of the difficult, humorous, moving or just plain fun moments in their lives. It’s all part of the Gazette’s commitment as your community newspaper. If you have a story for Verbatim, contact editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.