Mike Dorn studied to be an architect. But rather than designing
homes, he spent his life shaping the face of Gilroy’s biggest
institution.
Gilroy – Mike Dorn studied to be an architect. But rather than designing homes, he spent his life shaping the face of Gilroy’s biggest institution.
The 57-year-old, who retires today from his dual post as the city’s administrative services director and treasurer, has been a Gilroy public employee for nearly three decades. Much of his career involved modernizing City Hall’s institutional structure, ensuring that entire departments function smoothly and provide efficient public services.
“I handle all the internal services that the public does not see, but the employees do see,” Dorn said. “Whether it’s doing the budgeting, human resources, fleet and facilities. Everything that had to do with servicing the people or equipment in the background to provide services to the ultimate customer – our residents.”
Dorn stepped into his current role, which also involves managing Gilroy’s $102-million investment portfolio, in 1994. The job required tying together various arms of city government that had worked independently over the years.
Dorn demonstrated his ability to knit together departments in his earlier post as the city’s planning director. He rose to the position a year after being hired as an associate planner in 1977, and eventually succeeded in his push for an overarching department to handle all development-related issues.
“I had been promoting the concept of a community development department, as opposed to planning, engineering and building being all separate and forcing people to go to different places for approvals,” he said.
A career in government was not part of the original life for Dorn, who studied architecture during college. After several years of work in the industry he decided to instead pursue a masters degree in urban planning.
“I was not someone who was really patient, and I realized it was going to take a long time to develop and perfect an architectural style and build a practice,” he said. “I wanted to make a bigger difference than I could have in architecture. I felt urban planning was a better choice, because it would let me help entire communities, rather than individual building owners.”
In the mid-nineties, after 15 years directing the city’s development department, Dorn accepted a new challenge – creating an administrative services department. The numerous departments Dorn managed for more than a decade have reached a stage of maturity that has allowed them to stand alone. With Dorn’s departure, his position will be phased out and the city will promote the finance and human resources directors to department-level heads, and create a new assistant city manager position, all of them reporting to City Administrator Jay Baksa.
He and Dorn have worked together closely for more than 20 years.
“I’ve known Mike for more than 20 years,” Baksa said. “He’s just a nice fella. It was a real honor and privilege to work with him all these years. Of course the organization will miss him from an institutional memory-perspective, but I think we’ll also miss Mike just as a person.”
