O'Donnell takes reins of city finance department
Mar. 14—OTTUMWA — Cole O'Donnell has seemingly been everywhere, including three states, remote areas and river towns.
Now, he turns his next focus to the biggest market he's worked in.
O'Donnell, a native of Huxley with a wife and four grown children, was introduced as the finance director for the City of Ottumwa at last week's city council meeting, having most recently served as the city administrator in Keokuk since 2018.
O'Donnell replaces Waseem Nisar, who resigned the position in November.
"I wanted to become more focused on one aspect in city government and not have to be be a jack-of-all-trades," O'Donnell said Tuesday, reflecting on stops in which has served as a city clerk, finance director and administrator. "I've always been intimately involved with the finance part."
O'Donnell has worked in cities the size of East Moline, Illinois (21,000), which is slightly smaller than Ottumwa, and communities like Renville, Minnesota (1,370). Regardless, the role of overseeing finances doesn't really change.
"The same principles always. The only difference is sometimes the complexity. Certainly, Ottumwa's budget is a lot more complex than Keokuk, or all the way back to Denver, Iowa," he said. "There's more departments, more functions.
"But, it's still revenues and it's still expenditures," he said. "It's how you manage both. I'm kind of a problem-solver. so when a budget comes together, it feels like you've completed a jigsaw puzzle. There's a sense of accomplishment."
O'Donnell will have a key role in the city's new financial software, which the council approved to be a part of next fiscal year's budget. Former interim finance director Jessica Kinser, who has since moved into a city administrator role in Minnesota, helped the city send out requests for proposal for a new system.
The software is anticipated to cost approximately $250,000 and take a year of onboarding between transferring current data and training city staff. O'Donnell's ideal vision is to have new software up and running by the start of fiscal 2026, which starts July 1, 2025.
"The system right now is cumbersome, and sometimes getting the information that you want is hard to do," O'Donnell chuckled. "And to get it in a readable format that is both sharable and people can understand also is hard to do."
O'Donnell has prided himself on the presentation aspect wherever he's been. He believes it's important that people — from city officials to the public — understand what they're looking at.
"They like it because I also include the details right behind the summary," he said. "So when they say, 'Well, how come XYZ jumped so much this year?' I say, 'Well, let's go to the line items and you can see something jumped because fuel prices went up, or electric and gas went up.' So once they have a question on the summary, they can go back to the detail and see where it's at.
"I just want to get the information in a usable form so it's easily understood, whether that's by summarizing things, or using pictures and graphs. Some people see things better that way. That's what I'm going to try to work for."
Though finances are generally similar in the states O'Donnell has worked, tax-increment finance laws aren't the same, and neither is the funding that contribute to TIF.
"Each state does it a little different, how you calculate things and get the money off them," he said. "When it comes to budgeting, the differences really come down to your sources. Everybody has property tax, but not everybody has sales tax, not everybody had revenue sharing from the state.
"When I started, Iowa had more revenue sharing. Now you have practically none."
O'Donnell is aware of many of the city's issues, such as street repair, housing and quality of life. He's seen them everywhere he's been.
"Every place tries to improve their quality of life, and every community is struggling with housing," he said. "The success really comes down to the ability to finance it, finding ways to improve a park, etc.
"But we just don't have home rule in Iowa. The legislature, instead of letting local governments fix things, they're trying to fix things up there. It doesn't work."
