Page 116 - Cityview_July_Aug_2015

CONSTRAINED
BEAUTY
How Cindy Ogle Manages to Grow the “Gateway to the Smokies”
[ StorybyMarkSpurlock • PhotographybyNathanSparks ]
“The most important thing to remember,” says Cindy Ogle, “is
this is so simple: It all began with the park and Gatlinburg will always be about the park. Without
the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we would not be the premier resort city that we are.”
Ogle has been Gatlinburg’s city manager since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the debut of Seinfeld, and Jack Nicholson’s version of the Joker. Yet after 26 years in office she still describes herself as a Knoxvil- lian—and she says her blood runs deep orange. (Over the course of her long tenure, she has seen nine differ- ent men coach the basketball Vols.) As a self-confessed transplant to the city she manages, she attributes her longevity to that simple understanding of place and Gatlinburg’s relationship to the Smokies.
Ogle recognizes that this picturesque, somewhat Alpine tourist town—that on a day featuring a special event can bloom with as many as 100,000 outsiders— has at its roots fewer than 4,000 close-knit locals, the families of whom often have resided here for genera- tions. To them, Ogle will never be a bona fide Gatlin-
burger—but, ultimately, circumstance of birth has not
mattered. “At least I married into a local family,” she laughs. “You do the work, stay focused, and appreciate the form of government that you’re taking part in.”
Appreciating that form of government—coun- cil-manager, in which Gatlinburg’s five commissioners are elected but then hire a manager as executive to implement their policies—means knowing her own place as much as her city’s. “When I disagree with the commissioners,” says Ogle, “it doesn’t matter. I don’t let ego get in the way and I don’t need to get out in front. I just make sure what they want done gets done.”
Besides the advantage of her cumulative years of experience, she credits a reform of the electoral pro- cess with making her job easier now than it would have been otherwise: “Until 1988, the city commis- sion terms were two years, and there was an election every year. Someone was always running, and there was a real lack of stability. We changed to four-year terms and staggered elections to better stabilize the political situation.”
The major challenge of managing Gatlinburg, however, has always remained the same: The city
is hemmed in by its silk purse of national park and mountains. How, then, does local government foster
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