Meet BC’s new city manager

Even people with a long history in Southern Nevada get sticker shock when they start to consider a home in Boulder City. And Boulder City’s new city manager is no exception.

“My daughter is graduating from Foothill High School this year, so my wife and I will be empty-nesters,” said Ned Thomas in a phone interview last week. “We have been looking for a home in Boulder City and have been surprised at the prices. They are somewhat higher than they are in the valley.”

Thomas and his wife of 27 years, Cherlynn, currently own a home in Henderson and the city council recently extended the amount of time they have to establish residency in Boulder City to a year.

And the prices are a lot more than “somewhat” higher. According to real estate website Redfin, the median price in Las Vegas is just shy of $440,000 while the median price in Boulder City is almost $540,000. But houses in Las Vegas tend to be bigger on average. When you look at prices per square foot, it’s $257 versus $325.

But Thomas’ description of the difference as “somewhat higher” seems on point. Talking to him, one gets the impression of a man who is thoughtful and not given to hyperbole. And that, again, seems very on brand given his background.

Thomas said that he was born and raised in a small town in southern Idaho, the same small town where his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were raised.

“My first taste of Southern Nevada came as a child when we would go on family trips and Las Vegas was where we would stop for the night on our way to see family in California,” he recalled.

After high school, Thomas, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was called to serve a mission for two years in a rural area of Japan, and he fell in love with the country.

“I was in a very rural area, which reminded my of my own hometown and I just loved everything about Japan. I love the language and the culture and the people,” he said.

After returning to the states, he put his experience in the country and his ability to speak the language to use, working for both the Japanese government and a private companies with ties to Japan in New York City, which is where he met his wife. In all, he spent about five years there in several discreet chunks of time.

The last one was when he spent time in the Fukuoka area as a Fulbright scholar working at Kyushu University. This was after he got a bachelor’s degree in geography at Brigham Young University and, after returning to school a few years later, a master’s degree in urban planning from Harvard.

“I joke and tell people that I went to both a very conservative school in BYU and then to perhaps the most liberal school in Harvard,” he said.

Thomas’ career trajectory is less linear than many people in public service. After Harvard and the Fulbright stint in Japan, he spent some time working in California and came to Nevada in the early aughts for a job opportunity as an associate planner for the city of North Las Vegas. And the pull toward public service work appears to have been strong. With just one two-year exception, Thomas has worked for city governments for well over two decades.

The fact that he and his family have called Southern Nevada home for more than 20 years was a recurring theme during Thomas’ public job interview before the city council last year. However, while he has owned a home in the region and his kids all went to Foothill High School and his wife is a teacher there, Thomas has been working for more than a decade in and around the Bay Area in California.

In 2014, he took a job as community development director in Windsor, a town about twice as big as Boulder City in Sonoma County for two years before moving to the much larger city of San Jose as first a planner and then the planning division manager for a little more than two years. For the past nearly seven years, he has been working in Milpitas, a town of 81,000. He worked for five years as the planning director and has been, for the past two years, the city manager there.

This makes for quite the commute.

“I would work during the week in California and then come home to my family on the weekends,” he said.

Being back in Southern Nevada full time and with his family was one of the main reasons he cited as a reason for applying for the city manager position in Boulder City in his initial cover letter.

When asked about the biggest challenges facing Boulder City, Thomas largely demurred, saying he was still getting up to speed. He did mention the challenge of keeping the small-town character and the senior-friendly atmosphere while also maintaining the kind of dynamism that draws young families.

But he had no hesitation when asked about the other side of the coin, the qualities that Boulder City has that make it uniquely suited to facing the challenges of the future.

“The city spirit,” he said. “The spirit of volunteerism. The great organizations like Emergency Aid. And the love the residents have for the town and its history.”