Richard Brown has nearly 40 years of experience in local government management. He is currently the town administrator of Freetown, Massachusetts, and has served as the city manager of East Providence, Rhode Island; New London, Connecticut; and Petersburg, Virginia, over the course of his career. Brown also served as a disaster assistance employee (reservist) for FEMA working in Long-Term Community Recovery, and was deployed in Alabama.

As city manager of East Providence, Rhode Island, he served as the director of public safety and the emergency management director. While city manager in New London, Connecticut, Brown took on the role of acting police chief until that position could be filled on a full-time basis.

In 2005, Brown helped plan and participate in TopOff 3, a national level homeland security exercise, and he completed the Naval Post-Graduate School’s Executive Leaders Program in Homeland Security in 2010. Additionally, Brown is past president of the Rhode Island InfraGard chapter and a former member of the State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Government Coordinating Council.

He is an ICMA Credentialed Manager and Legacy Leader, and chairs ICMA’s Governmental Affairs Policy Committee. In fact, his history of ICMA committee and state association participation and leadership dates back to 1987. When asked about issues facing the profession, he says that “the city management profession was created as a result of a revolution that started more than 100 years ago to bring professionalism and technical competence—rather than political considerations—to local government decision making. City, county, and town managers have mastered the technical and managerial aspects of the jobs quite well and what started as a revolution has become largely routine.”

“We are now seeing a second revolution in local government management, however, as the access to and distribution of information has become more democratized,” he adds. “Technical and managerial expertise is not enough. Today’s managers have had to incorporate the management of open public processes, the equality of access to government, immediate reporting (both formal and informal) of local governmental activities, and increased levels of public expectations. The requirement of increased transparency and openness is coming at a time of diminished resources and overall cynicism about the effectiveness of government in general. Other issues such as sustainability and social justice play out within that larger context.”

He notes that “ICMA, with its emphasis on ethical behavior, has provided me an effective framework for exercising technical and managerial competence and has provided a structure in moving forward to meet the new challenges of the profession.”

He adds that “we as managers have a responsibility to ensure that we leave a community in better shape than when we started there. We also have a similar responsibility to the profession. In order to make our profession sustainable, we need to encourage, educate, and develop the next generation of leaders. Moreover, we need to create within our cities, towns, and organizations a culture of continuous learning that fosters and institutionalizes the development of employees and citizens to assume leadership roles.”