Brian Stott, hired in September to replace Melissa Dial as
assistant to the city manager, wears many hats
Morgan Hill – The city has hired a replacement for Melissa Dial who worked as an assistant to City Manager Ed Tewes.
He’s Brian Stott, 32, and he’s already enjoying wearing several hats on the job, including being the city’s public information officer and the eyes and ears of the city’s top officials.
“It’s a catch-all position,” Stott said, explaining his many responsibilities. “I’m here to assist all the departments as needed.”
For the most part, it’s the same job Dial held before she left in June to work for the city of Fremont. Stott started in September with a salary of $100,800.
His official duties are communications and marketing, studying departmental efficiencies and managing the city’s contract with the Santa Clara County Fire Department.
“Essentially, if you look around at a lot of the cities in the Bay Area, or even California, they usually have an assistant to the city manager which the PIO functions fall under,” Stott said. “But they do many other things as well.”
Monitoring the city’s Web site and working on the second round of the Community Conversations – a special effort to engage citizens about city services and how to pay for them – are two of his biggest jobs. Next fiscal year, the city plans to redesign its Web site to make it more user-friendly.
“We’ll be getting a committee together,” Stott said. “It just needs a little bit of freshening up. There will be new content and navigational abilities.”
Stott said he looks forward to providing openness and transparency at City Hall.
“That’s an effort the city wants to undergo, making sure people in the community are informed about what’s going on in the city.”
This year, the Morgan Hill City Council approved the second phase of the Community Conversations and increased the frequency of the city’s magazine, City Connection, to six times annually.
Stott’s last job was assistant to the city manager in Tiburon, Marin County, where he did tasks related to finance, personnel and human resources.
“It was a much smaller city than Morgan Hill,” he said. “There were about 45 (public) employees, half of which were police officers,” he said.
Prior to that, Stott worked for the city of Austin, Texas, also assisting the city manager.
After graduating from Chico State in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in history, Stott’s first job was doing inter-governmental relations for the city of Sunnyvale.
He earned a master’s degree in public affairs from the University of Texas in 2001.
Tony Burchyns covers Morgan Hill for The Times. Reach him at (408) 779-4106 ext. 201 or tb*******@*************es.com.
