CityView Magazine

FEATURE Meet the City Manager Ted Voorhees brings years of experience to Fayetteville M By Miriam Landru ore than 100 applicants from across the United States applied for the influential job of Fayetteville's city manager. A man who was serving as Durham's deputy city manager was the best fit. His name is Ted Voorhees. Voorhees was appointed by the City Council to be our new city manager one year ago. He has 25 years experience working for cities in Virginia and North Carolina. Our city is much like those across North Carolina as the norm is to have a "council/manager" form of government. The city council is a policymaking body and the city manager is expected and required to carry out all council business. Our new city manager has always been interested in government, politics and making things work well. "My father was a career Army officer and he had a ready tongue about Congress, which sparked an interested for me to learn how things can be better," confided Voorhees. In fact, his father was stationed here at Fort Bragg as a platoon leader, before he was born. After a carefree beginning to high school in Hawaii, Voorhees' family moved to Fairfax County, Virginia. There he was selected to be a "student ambassador" for the county school board with "advisory voting" status. It was and still is among the largest school districts in the country. He learned how a board operates and that set the foundation for his coming successes. His higher education was gained at American University in Washington D.C. graduating with a Bachelor's in Political Science accompanied by a minor in Public Administration. From there, he attended graduate school at Virginia's George Mason University earning a Master's in Public Administration. Voorhees' first job after his collegiate education was with the Department of the Army in a research position. "I felt after that experience I was more interested in local government," he explained. Going in a different direction, he worked for the Fairfax County Board and takes pride in helping build a few metro stations and overseeing several neighborhood redevelopment projects among other achievements. After gaining more city management experience, Voorhees was the Town Manager for the small northern Virginia town of Bowling Green. In 1995, he made his way to the Tar Heel state becoming the city manager for King, North Carolina till 2000. While in the Piedmont-Triad area, he oversaw a downtown revitalization project, built the public works center and added new services. Voorhees found himself in our popular coastal beach town of Wilmington from 2000 to 2002 as the assistant city manager. "I was CityViewNC.com | 37

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