 Profile
By extension, the man whose executive duty it is to keep one of these cityships on a smooth course is a kind of social warrior, a captain of a big ship, who, like the captain of “Big John,” must maintain himself and his crew at a high level of alertness and efficiency. The specifics of how that works in an individual case come clear in a review of the work, life, and career of Ricardo (Rick) Menchaca, city manager of Midland, a man who, as the jargon of our time puts it, “has his act together.” Midland’s official web site notes that the city’s manager is “the chief executive officer of the government carries out policy and administers city programs.” That’s the whole story in a sentence. Rick’s days split rather neatly into two areas: one is “routine management” (not always so routine), which includes supervising 865 city employees—98% of everybody who works for the city—and the other is “special projects,” individual undertakings to implement city policy, of which a couple of stand-out examples are the new Scharbauer Sports Complex and the Midland International Airport.
These projects can be of varying difficulty and expense; their common feature is that they add to the quality of life for people who live in or visit Midland. When you talk to Rick about his work for Midland, it is the second category that tends to get emphasized. His eyes light up, for example, when he talks of the new skateboard installation at Beale Park that opened April 2003 and is “the best skateboard park between Dallas and Phoenix.” But one suspects the “routine things” are what take up most of his time. Just imagine having to review, approve, and monitor the budgets and performance of every department in the city’s government to make sure that indeed, the city is not going to pile up on those shoreline rocks labeled “underdone” or “overdrawn.”
Their kids especially like San Antonio for the River Walk and the big entertainment parks—Sea World and Six Flags—and the family has been once to Florida, to Fort Lauderdale. (Disneyworld is being postponed for a few years.) In summer the older children participate in many organized community activities for youngsters. Rick keeps fit by exercising three to four times a week at the YMCA. A favorite sport is racquetball; he also plays golf, goes quail hunting occasionally, and enjoys fishing. Rick has been careful to keep up his Spanish, taking courses in it in high school. In college he said he CLEP-ed some Spanish courses; that is, he took the tests and got the credits without actually taking the courses. He attributes a lot of his interest and fluency in the language to growing up in a border town, where Spanish is an essential. And he notes that his parents would make a point of asking questions in Spanish. “We always answered in English,” he says, “but we were getting a lot of the language that way.” There can be a tendency in families and homes that start out speaking in Spanish to end up with the younger generation speaking only English, perhaps retaining enough Spanish to be able to understand when spoken to, but not able to speak, read, or write Spanish effectively. But Rick has made sure that did not happen to him.
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