McDonnell
POUGHKEEPSIE – Deborah McDonnell attended two official functions
during her first two hours on the job as Poughkeepsie City Administrator
Tuesday. One was a swearing in ceremony in the city council chambers.
The other, a briefing on a state grant in the firehouse attached to the
city’s emergency center.
It was during the latter that we caught up with McDonnell and asked her
to define her mission in the City of Poughkeepsie.
“To help revitalize it and stabilize its budget and bring some economic
vitality back to the city,” McDonnell said. “There are so
many assets here that just, are just crying out saying, ‘take me,
make me great’ and I think that if we build a team internally and
work very, very strongly with the mayor and the city council, that there
is a strategy that we can put together on how we can make the city strong
again.”
McDonnell left a similar position she held for 10 years in a Midwest city
that is not all that similar to Poughkeepsie, in terms of cultural and
economic diversity.
“I view the cultural diversity as the strength of the city and I
am excited to learn about the different cultures that are here,”
she said. “I do not think that it’s going to be a challenge
at all because I think that people in and of themselves are basically
the same. They all have a story to tell, they all care about where they
are and they all have families that they care about and a life and there’s
a reason that they have chosen to live here.”
That is an outlook that put her at the top of the list among many applicants
and prompted Mayor Robert Rolison to appoint her a month ago.
