There’s good old Maggie Dobbs above. She is the current manager of Narberth Borough. I say current manager because they tend to change with the seasons or with fashion trends or something, right?
Her assistant manager is one Emily Pisano formerly of Chadds Ford Township and West Chester Borough with an original background in fashion.
Maybe Emily can give Maggie some fashion tips, right? So Maggie showed up in a post I wrote about manager merry go round in Narberth a while back.
I started wondering about Miss Maggie again because frankly, Narberth is SUCH a mess isn’t it?
I found her in a podcast…led by the current Lower Merion Township Manager who is like 12.
Part of the podcast description caught my eye:
Maggie Dobbs is a trained city planner (Rutgers) who spent a decade writing comprehensive plans across Montgomery County before stepping into her current role as Borough Manager of Narberth, Pennsylvania, a half-square-mile community tucked inside Lower Merion Township just outside of Philadelphia. She arrived after a period of leadership turnover. What she found was not a small job. It was a dense one.
Host Brandon Ford and co-host Nancy Hesshave a wide ranging conversation with Maggie that moves through the real experience of borough management: the math of running a full municipal government — police, public works, library, eleven miles of road — with fifteen people and a fraction of a township’s budget; the intimacy that makes boroughs special and the same intimacy that makes criticism land close to the heart; and the reality that wearing every hat in the building demands more knowledge, not less, than specializing in a larger organization.
Hmmm first question: does Narberth Borough approve these outside activities? Or Lower Merion Township for that matter because Brandon Ford is the assistant township manager there right?
Next question: who is this PR stunt really for? Maggie Dobbs or Narberth? I ask because Maggie doesn’t seem to stay places long term does she?
Here’s a salary tracker:
https://govsalaries.com/search?state=pennsylvania&employee=Margaret%20Dobbs
In this podcast which I encourage everyone to listen to they further remark in the podcast comments:
Maggie is candid about walking into a community that had cycled through five managers in four years, what it took to steady that ship, and why her focus is on building standard operating procedures so the day-to-day can run itself. Along the way, the crew explores Narberth’s housing story
https://www.sabinecoalition.com/
So her waxing poetic about this little hot mess of a borough is amusing since The Sabine Coalition exists to protect a park from residential development yes? And there are even more issues brewing in South Narberth, right?
https://ournarberth.com/about/
So yeah Narberth beyond the fluff and circumstance what is going on? Like who is the police chief?
