For the better part of a decade now, there has been a familiar face inside Las Vegas’s City Hall.
Betsy Fretwell has been with the city since 2000 and took over as city manager in 2009 -- right as Las Vegas began its struggle to come out of one of the worst financial crises it had ever seen.
But the city must bid farewell to Fretwell in July, as she announced she’s leaving to become the vice president of Switch SMART – the data company’s new smart city division.
“It’s a really exciting opportunity to go work for an incredible company that is changing the landscape in Las Vegas,” Fretwell told KNPR’s State of Nevada.
The smart city effort will focus on integrating technology with city infrastructure. It will also work on intelligent community design. Fretwell said she’ll be able to bring her expertise to the company to help communities be smarter about what they’re doing.
Fretwell’s expertise came from one of the most difficult times in the city’s history.
When she took over, the Great Recession was hitting Las Vegas. Both sales tax and property tax revenue dropped as people stopped spending discretionary money in the city and housing prices plummeted.
Fretwell said because government budgets generally lag commercial business budgets the city had some time to look at its programs and prepare for the downturn.
However, that didn’t make it any easier. On one day, she had to let go 212 employees. A day she still says was one of the most difficult days of her time at the city.
“I’ll never forget standing on the bridge of the former city hall where Zappos is headquartered now and saying bye to people. It was hard,” she said.
But from that difficult time, Fretwell said city government became better.
“I think us becoming much more transparent, much more program evaluation oriented, much more performance management oriented has created a much tighter decision making process on what programs to rebuild, which ones to start and what kind of impact we hope to achieve by doing it,” she said.
Fretwell said the city is on its way to returning to staff levels seen before the recession, but it is being very careful.
“But we’ve been very cautious about adding people back because none of us want to go through what we went through in 2009 and 10 ever again.”
While she was the person “shepherding” as she calls it the city during the time, she credits the work of everyone involved with keeping the city on track.
“Everybody had skin in the game during that recession,” she said.
Fretwell also credits the opening of the new city hall, the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Mob Museum for helping the city recover faster.
As for the future of the city, Fretwell believes the new UNLV Medical School, which will be headquartered in the city’s medical district near University Medical School, will pump millions of dollars into the city’s economy.
She hopes that Cashman Center will become a home to a Major League Soccer franchise someday.
“Our intent is to have this revitalized and used in a different way,” she said.
And despite the setbacks and struggles, she believes downtown Las Vegas is well on its way to revitalization.
“We’re trying to build an environment in downtown where people want to live and where they want to grow and expand their businesses or locate their businesses there. And we believe that that will work,” she said.
Fretwell believes the momentum already seen in the Arts District and Fremont East needs to keep on going and the city can help.
“We’re rolling out some programs where we’re trying to help with tenant improvements, which is kind of new and unique, to try and help people repurpose old buildings”
The overseeing of those projects and the future of the city will soon be in the hands of her successor, Scott Adams. The deputy city manager takes the top spot in July.
Betsy Fretwell, city manager, City of Las Vegas