City Recognizes Employee of the Quarter
Jessica Fisher, Public Information Assistant, 509.625.6749
Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 2:29 p.m.
This month, hundreds of City of Spokane employees attended the first virtual Employee of the Quarter ceremony! The virtual ceremony recognized employees for their outstanding performance, special efforts and accomplishments.
The first and second quarter of 2020 have been challenging and our employees have been working above and beyond to serve the Spokane community. It was important to recognize them for their hard work throughout the coronavirus pandemic
Employee of the Quarter Nominees
- Rhett McCall & Tisha Heath
Rhett and Tisha volunteered to support emergency operations as part of the Inland COVID-19 Regional Response. They created a streamline processes for collecting, assessing, documenting and disseminating critical information while simultaneously responding to multiple and often competing needs of senior officials on short deadlines.
- Captain Mike Dawson
Captain Dawson accepted the position of Planning Section Chief for the City's Incident Management Team where he worked closely with the Mayor’s Cabinet to support ongoing meetings, develop Incident Action Plans, and facilitate challenging discussions. He did this work while simultaneously continuing his duties as one of the Spokane Fire Department’s two Medical Service Officers.
- Cendy Pfortmiller & Katie Myers
Cendy and Katie were assigned to the Food Continuity Task Force at the Emergency Command Center, their goal was to ensure members of our community were receiving food during the coronavirus pandemic. They did everything from tracking down boxes for the food banks to developing a meal delivery program!
- Dusty Fredrickson
Dusty was asked to support the Finance Section of the Emergency Operations Center. He jumped in without hesitating and organized the team, created a cooperative working virtual environment for the team, managed the meeting schedules, agendas, and notes, and, most importantly, he created the project framework and tracked the progress for each of the different regional response projects.
- City COVID PIO Team –
Josh Buntain, Brandy Cote, Kristin Davis, John Delay, Tessa Delbridge, Amanda Donovan, Marlene Feist, Jessica Fisher, Jeff Humphrey, Julie Humphreys, Mike Lavelle, Brain McClatchey, Jamie McIntyre, Erik Poulsen, Richard Rauschke, Eric Thompson, Thuy Truong, and Paul Warfield.
This multi-departmental team, organized into media/digital media, government, community, and employee relations groups, worked long hours, nights and weekends, to fill the constant demand from media, social media, and individuals. Their efforts provided consistent, clear, and trusted information, calmed an anxious community, and gained widespread acceptance of statewide restrictions that have slowed the spread of infection and prevented a surge on healthcare in Spokane.
- IT Department
The IT Department helped our City employee’s remain productive and operational during this unprecedented time of COVID. From providing the needed cables and quick software installs as employees left City Hall to the multiple software/hardware upgrades, troubleshooting and traditional IT support that is now provided from home.
- Jacob McKenna
When Parking Enforcement operations were impacted and officers were sent home during the coronavirus pandemic, Jacob was happy help the Parks and Recreation Department. He worked for Parks over a month, cleaning up parks and helping out where needed.
- Andrew Hughes
Andrew has been a great help throughout the coronavirus pandemic. He has assisted with a multitude of coronavirus related items ranging from pulling data from websites, creating databases for report building, automating data pulls for departments and creating intuitive dashboards.
- Park Operations Shelter Project Team - Ed Anderson, Mike Dewey Jesse Jones, Robert Lawton, Mike Shearer, and Matthew Taylor.
The Parks Operations team helped design and build new shower and restroom units for two separate homeless/COVID-19 shelter. The first shelter project was completed in less than four days and the second in just three days.
- Sally Stopher
In less than ten days, Sally, along with Tija Danzig and Tim Sigler, were able to stand up additional homeless shelter space at the downtown Spokane Public Library. In addition, Sally continues to take care of the City's supply and service needs related to coronavirus.
- Sean Barley
Sean was a key participant in helping to organize a Street Department maintenance project. He helped put together a crew of people from streets who were not all accustomed to street paving then kicked off the 2020 paving season on Northwest Boulevard.
- Downtown Library Homeless Shelter Team – Laura Aga, Amie Blain, Mike Dewey, Isaac Forsman, Luis Garcia, Kenny Jenness, Jesse Jones, Robert Lawton, Rick Napolitano, Thea Prince, Scott Ramussen, Jason Ruffing, Jason Sandobal, Matt Taylor, Connie Wahl, and Ernest Wickert.
These 16 employees work for seven different departments and seldom work together. During the coronavirus pandemic, they turned the vacant Downtown Spokane Public Library into a homeless shelter in just four day.
The Employee of the Quarter is Josh Oakes! Josh is the Aquatics Supervisor overseeing the City’s six outdoor aquatic facilities. Due to the pandemic, he was unable to hire temp seasonal staff including his aquatics maintenance staff. In their absence, Josh learned about pool maintenance before gathering fulltime parks employees to drain, de-winterize, clean, activate and refill all six aquatics facilities. We cannot thank Josh enough for his leadership, work ethic and solution based attitude.
These employees exemplify our core values of trust, integrity, quality, teamwork, accountability, openness, innovation, diversity, and community. Thank you to all 2,227 City of Spokane employees!
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