Jennifer Wills: Open, energetic choice for Longview city manager is raring to start

It's a big step for long-time city parks director, but she has the leadership skills and insights to put the city back on track after a year of turmoil

Longview City Manager designee Jennifer Wills relaxes during an interview Friday at her office in the city Parks and Recreation Building.

“I know I talk fast,” Jen Wills said shortly into an hour-long interview in her office in Longview’s Parks and Recreation office Friday.

This is just after she spent the first few minutes giving relaxed but rapid-fire answers to questions about her leadership style and why she believes the Longview City Council on Wednesday picked her to be the city’s next city manager.

“I am a person who is curious. I am open to ideas. I want to get (solutions) right more than I want to be right.”

“Meeting goals and getting things done is important, but how you get there does not matter much.”

“I’ve proven I can communicate well with the community. I am an over-communicator, reaching out to people early and often.”

In other words, within minutes Wills had already proven how quotable, smart, energetic, confident, open and sincere she is. She seems to coin aphorisms as she goes. She never gropes for words. She has a keen understanding of the needs of leadership (in fact, that’s one of her favorite reading subjects). There’s nothing guarded about her.

And she’s clearly raring to go to collaboratively address the city’s challenges and help lead it out of the tumult caused by the firing last March of her predecessor, Kris Swanson.

One of her approaches for uniting the council and community? “If we gang up on problems instead of one another we can move forward a lot faster.”

Even before she negotiates a contract, she is pushing the council to hold a goal-setting retreat in advance of a public “citizen’s summit” already-planned for March.

Wills said she recognizes that, as someone who has worked for the city 18 years— the last 10 as parks and recreation director — she will not have the luxury of a honeymoon period that might be accorded a newcomer.

She seems completely unintimidated by the challenges ahead. During the interview, she curled up crosslegged in a chair, relaxed in white slacks and a knit sweater, surrounded by maps and posters that are reminders of her widespread travels. She talks with her hands, and a smile rarely leaves her face.

Wills, 42, emerged from a nationwide field of about 20 candidates and four finalists identified by the city’s headhunting firm. She is the seventh city manager in city history and the fifth consecutive one chosen from within the city’s own ranks to be its top administrator.

The numerically short field of candidates appears to have been the main reason she was not the council’s unanimous selection.Members Erik Halvorson and Kalei LaFave objected because they wanted more applicants, even though they thought well of Wills. But Wills got a lot of community support for her energy, her openness, her ebullient manner and her record of success running the parks department.

Her’s is partly a bottom-to-top story.

Wills grew up in Florida and Massachusetts and earned a degree in recreation management from a private liberal arts college in Springfield, Mass. She originally planned to major in sports management so she could to represent pro athletes in contract and labor issues.

“I wanted to be Jerry Maguire,” Wills said in reference to the main character in the 1996 film by that name starring Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr.

But she fell in love with the outdoors, especially with backpacking, rock climbing, biking and mountaineering. She was among the first group of Americans to climb Mount Burney, a volcano in the remote South American Patagonia region in Chile.

She’s run the entire 96-mile Wonderland Trail that rings Mount Rainier, completing the circuit in three days in 2023. She’s jogged around Mount St. Helens, completing the circumnavigation of the Loowit Trail in two days. She’s planning to run around Mount Hood in the future.

Wills also has worked as a wilderness ranger and wild land firefighter for both the Chugach National Forest in Alaska and the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington’s north Cascade Range.

Wills poses in her office with a selection of posters from the many U.S. national parks she has visited.

Wills’ love of the outdoors brought her romance as well as a career.

She was working as a ski lift operator in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, when she met a co-worker who became her future husband, Chis Wills. He is a Toutle native, and the couple moved to Cowlitz County 18 years ago.

She got hired in 2007 as a part-time recreation coordinator in Longview’s parks department, where her duties included arranging fitness programs, organizing special events and working with sports leagues to schedule use of fields and gyms.

She rose through the ranks of the department and became its director in 2015. Some of the most satisfying accomplishments of her tenure, she said, were creating community partnerships to build the pickleball courts at John Null Park and the Harley’s Heroes covered basketball court at Lake Sacajawea. She also cited, as a proud achievement, the transfer to city control of all operations at the financially struggling Mint Valley Golf Course.

Even while she was working full time, she and her husband opened the Crosscut Tap Room in Castle Rock, operating it two years before selling it to an employee in 2020.

That experience developing an “entrepreneurial mindset,” she said, helped her as a public official by teaching her the importance of communicating with customers and workers.

“Looking at things from a business lens, how do you deliver good service? Government is a service organization. Communication is key. It is what keeps customers happy and employees informed.”

A major reason the city’s Metropolitan Parks District — proposed in 2023 to finance a $16 million backlog in park maintenance — failed was that voters didn’t understand what it was and what it would accomplish, Wills said.

“People want to know what they’re being taxed for and what they’re getting out of it,” Wills said.

One of Wills’ biggest challenges will be helping guide the council and community through a city budget crunch forecast to continue through this decade. She said economic development has to be the city’s top priority, because Longview needs to increase the flow of outside revenues into the city (The city raised its business and utility taxes last year and still had to cut 10 percent of its expenses to balance the 2025 and 2026 operating budgets).

“We can’t continue to put more (tax) burdens on the residents of Longview. We need to find ways to bring in more businesses and jobs,” Wills said.

In Longview’s form of government, the City Council sets goals and policies and the city manager is in charge of carrying them out. All employees will answer to Wills, and she in turn is answerable only to the seven-member council, which is philosophically divided and temperamentally diverse.

Wills said she’ll need to understand and respond to each council member’s needs, priorities and style. For example, she said, “Councilman (Erik) Halvorson likes lots of data. Councilman (Keith) Young wants to know how things will affect families…”

Wills wants city staff to work together and get departments of out their “silos” to understand each others’ needs and challenges. If a department gets a budget cut or a funding denial, for example, it helps staff to know that the police might need that same money for new radios. Communication and shared information builds teamwork, Wills said. This approach made last year’s round of budget cuts smoother, she said.

Wills knows she will invariably compared with Swanson, whom she admires and whom Swanson admires in return. But their leadership styles are different, Wills said, calling her’s “relational” — the idea that building strong interpersonal connections is key to effective leadership.

“I like to get people talking and connecting. It’s a bit slower way to get things done, but I like to bring people along and get them to buy-in.”

Administratively, becoming city manager is a big leap up for Wills, and that was a concern for some of her supporters. Wills knows this, but she says that she is a quick study and that the city is hiring a new finance director to help ease her burden. (Both Swanson and Kurt Sacha, who preceded Swanson as city manager, served as finance directors in addition to city manager; both came from accounting and auditing backgrounds.) She also noted that she’s the longest-tenured department head in the city.

Her confidence is all in character for Wills, who presents as a quintessential extrovert. Au contrare, she says, there’s strong introverted side to her. To recharge and relax, she likes to read and indulge in pencil drawing. She showed me a couple of intricate, stylized portraits of figures she said were inspired by the legends of Norse gods.

What does she like to read?

“Leadership books. Right now I’m re-reading “The First 90 Days,” Michael Watkins’ popular career advice book for leaders transitioning to a new job.

Jennifer Wills clearly intends to hit the ground running.