From Afghan war to Memphis City Hall
Former US Navy captain McGowen plays key role in shaping the city as chief operating officer
Once he was a U.S. Navy captain. Today he’s Mayor Jim Strickland’s chief operating officer.
He’s Douglas McGowen, the senior leader in City Hall least known among Memphis residents even though he has played a key role in shaping the city.
“Doug has driven a lot of the things that have happened to make Memphis a great place in the last five years,’’ said Kerry Hayes, a former member of the Innovation Delivery Team, a think tank in City Hall.
What the city has in the Pennsylvania native is a former jet fighter pilot with Afghan war experience, exceptional organizational skills, an unusual insight into the fabric of Memphis and a footnote in naval aviation history.
When the first F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were sent out a decade ago to the forward-deployed squadrons – the guys and gals trained to fight if, say, North Korea fired a missile at America — the first $98 million-per-plane Super Hornets went to VFA-102, the Navy strike fighter squadron stationed at Atsugi, Japan. McGowen commanded VFA-102.
Since 2005 he’s been here, brought in for his final command at the 1,500-acre Millington base that serves as the Navy’s global personnel center. Today, he’s the go-to manager in City Hall for daily operations.
If Memphis manages to look solid and secure in its delivery of urban services in 2018 — when attention worldwide focuses on the city where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 50 years earlier — it’ll reflect on McGowen’s organizational talents.
“I couldn’t sing enough praises about him,” said former Millington Mayor Richard Hodges, who relied on the Navy base to help the city weather Big Creek’s deep 2010 flood. “He’s a down-to-earth guy and he knows how to get things done. I have nothing but respect for him.”
Ever since Strickland entered office in January 2016, McGowen, 53, has been a steady and some say pragmatic and data-driven chief operating officer, insisting the departments that employ 6,800 municipal workers measure up to the new mayor’s guiding principle: Brilliant at the basics.
If the busy crews taking 911 calls, for example, permanently cut the answerthe-phone time it’ll be in no small measure because of McGowen. Near his desk a computer screen tracks 911 call volume. The average call answer time has reached 14 seconds, compared to 59.7 seconds in December 2015.
Innovate Memphis
A graduate of the Navy’s Top Gun jet fighter school might seem an unlikely executive in municipal government, but McGowen isn’t new to city service.
You probably remember Innovate Memphis, the group set up in 2012 by Mayor A C Wharton with $5 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies. McGowen had just left the Navy when he learned the think tank was being formed.
“Tough problems with no clear solutions,” McGowen said. “That’s exactly what I like to do.”
Problems. Solutions. It fell to sailors like McGowen to manage the chaos of moving the peacetime Navy into war following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He was part of an air wing staff responsible for advancing the deployment of seven ships, 70 aircraft, 8,000 sailors and tons of armament and munitions to the Arabian Sea and planning the air war over Afghanistan. The carrier battle group sailed that November and began fighting the Taliban in December.
McGowen would share none of this. Colleagues call him extraordinarly modest. He came out of Meadville, Pennsylvania, a 167-pound wrestler accepted by the Virginia Military Institute, and promptly after graduating with a degree in civil engineering entered Navy flight school. He put his long resume in front of the mayor of Memphis 27 years later.
Wharton hired him, made him head of the think tank and its Innovation Delivery Team. They looked into youth gun violation, blight, revitalization and other critical issues. The retired aviator from a factory town an hour north of Pittsburgh got an unusually vivid insight into big-city social and economic challenges.
“What was cool about him to me was who the hell was this guy who’s not a political guy, hadn’t served in city government, had never been in county government? Here he was, this completely unexpected person to come into our universe, and he was the right guy for the job. He had this intellectual thirst,’’ said Hayes, a fellow team member.
While the team’s missions were prominent within the Wharton administration, McGowen himself was never as widely known in town as a pair of other executives in Strickland’s inner circle.
Brian Collins, a former First Tennessee Bank senior vice president, had taken the point on Wharton’s controversial municipal pension reform. Strickland named him chief financial officer. Alan Crone was more widely known. He had served on the Memphis City Council and headed the Shelby County Republican Party. He became special counsel to Strickland, a lawyer and former councilman.
Just as Wharton brought in Jack Sammons, a business executive and political insider, to help steer the city so the mayor could focus where he was needed, McGowen provides a similar competence.
‘Lucky to have him’
From his big corner office in City Hall, McGowen can see the innovation team’s work rippling out today.
For example, Strickland soon will double the 901 BLOC gang intervention squad to 20 members. It springs from an innovation team idea to approach shooting victims at their hospital bed and urge them not to retaliate. Wharton’s decision to bar more annexations came out of the team. Broad Avenue’s flowering as an art district stems partly from an attempt to spur new interest in old neighborhoods, an effort the team calls MemFix, which inspired renovations such as the Sears Crosstown and Tennessee Brewery revivals.
The University of Tennessee’s recent decision to attract apartments to 10 acres near its health sciences campus is like a massive MemFix. The housing proposal traces to the Medical District Collaborative, a new venture by a group of major hospitals and colleges to redevelop a 2mile stretch between Downtown and Midtown. Tommy Pacello, a former innovation team member, heads the collaborative. Abby Miller, another innovation team alum, works there too.
“Learning from Doug McGowen made us all better,” said Pacello, a lawyer and land use expert. “Memphis is lucky to have him here.”
Cities are messy places without easy solutions. Pacello found McGowen ideal for the innovation team. He stayed calm and had a way to keep the team focused.
“You can certainly see his military management style,” Pacello said. “He takes complicated things and really distills them down to their essence. He’d say, ‘Let’s just see what the data says, make a decision and do it.’ Then he’d stand behind you 100 percent.”
His style isn’t to issue an order first. It’s to talk to employees, gather information, turn it into statistics that can measure progress or regression.
“Let’s understand where we are today,” he recalled telling city employees. “What do you think you can do better?”
Outside the box
City Councilwoman Janet Fullilove chided City Hall’s data-driven mindset in December.
After city officials outlined Memphis 3.0, the name of a detailed way to identify neighborhood needs and solutions by 2019, Fullilove slammed the idea as mayoral showboating, saying, “We know what the problems are in our city; we don’t need a database to tell us.”
That day McGowen defended Memphis 3.0. The document would be the city’s first comprehensive plan since 1981. The idea for it flows in part back to the innovation team bringing in thinkers such as land use scholar Charles Marohn of Brainerd, Minnesota, author of “Thoughts on Building Strong Towns.”
Stepping up in favor of the document wasn’t odd for the retired sailor. In Millington, he’d launched the first comprehensive land use plan for the 8,000-personnel base and its 174 buildings since the 1950s. He’d also done something else unusual for a branch of the service steeped in tradition.
Sensing the Navy and Memphis had drifted apart culturally, he founded the Mid-South STEM Alliance to boost education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics among public school students. And he did something else. As officers realized the Navy needed to boost recruitment, he led the effort that resulted in an ad agency coining this brand message: “America’s Navy: A Global Force for Good.”
As the innovation team took on projects, it attracted $1.9 million in grants and donations in addition to the Bloomberg money.
When the city revealed evidence provided by victims of 12,000 sexual assaults never had been examined, McGowen volunteered to organize and lead the Memphis Sexual Assault Task Force. Within three years, 8,500 evidence kits had been analyzed, leading to 866 new investigations and 142 requests for indictment.
After Strickland was elected mayor in 2015, he invited McGowen to stay on as chief operating officer. “This is an opportunity to serve I couldn’t pass up,” he remembered thinking.
Eyes of the nation
Now the city’s COO is well aware of what comes next year.
Memphis will commemorate a key anniversary in the municipal sanitation worker’s strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., followed in 2019 by the city’s 200th anniversary celebration.
“All eyes in the nation will be on Memphis,” McGowen said, noting the burst of new development such as Sears Crosstown, St. Jude’s expansion, the revitalization of Overton Square and South Main will set off “the new conversation about Memphis” by visitors.
It’s unlikely they’ll talk about McGowen. He prefers the background, making sure 911 calls are answered promptly.
Ted Evanoff is business editor of The Commercial Appeal.