Clarkdale’s Town Manager Tracie Hlavinka has put in her resignation with a heavy heart as she prepares to move back to Texas to be near family.
“I honestly thought this was going to be the place where I retired, but you know we don’t always get to see that crystal eight ball, what’s coming up ahead,” she said. “Life took a turn, and family took a turn. … It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in a very long time.”
Hlavinka announced her resignation to the Clarkdale Town Council in a June 8 executive session, and her last day as town manager will be July 8.
Mayor Robyn Prud’homme-Bauer said while the council understands her reasons for leaving, she will be missed.
“We’re sad that she’s leaving us, but we completely understand the situation and the need to be back closer to her family,” she said.
Hlavinka first got started in public service working in finance for the city of DeSoto, Texas in 1997, where she quickly moved into a position managing community initiatives, according to her bio on the town website.
After 14 years in that role, Hlavinka was appointed as the assistant city manager where she worked for four years before being promoted to deputy city manager. Hlavinka was hired as the town manager of Clarkdale in June 2019 after a recruiter found her resume and reached out. She had never been to Arizona but was excited by the opportunity.
“[I thought] ‘it’s just another part of the United States I haven’t seen, so I’m game for whatever happens,’” she said.
Hlavinka said she has two family members in Texas that are experiencing declining health, and with the uncertainties that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused, she decided to move back closer to home.
“I would like to be closer to home, to them, and just the fact that I was out here all alone without family, it’s time to get back to them,” she said.
Hlavinka was offered a position as the city manager of Buena Vista, Texas, and while she looks forward to the next chapter of her life, she will miss the connections she has made with the rest of the town staff in Clarkdale.
“You enter people’s lives for either a season, or a reason or a lifetime, and I may have just been here for a season, but they definitely have left a lifetime of an imprint on my heart and I hope that I’ve done the same for them,” she said.
Hlavinka praised both the citizens of Clarkdale and the town staff as being an unusually engaged community.
“This is an extremely engaged community, and it’s not often that you find that when you’re working in municipal government,” she said. “This organization has some phenomenal employees. They work hard, they think out of the box, they love their jobs, they adore the community and they will bend over backward. … And when you have a really lean staff and you’ve got a very minimal budget, it’s those type of employees that make all the difference.”
Prud’homme-Bauer said that Hlavinka has brought her own engagement to the town, and as someone who was new to the community, she had a unique perspective as a leader.
“What she brought to her position was a key insight as to what Clarkdale’s potential is for building a strong economy, building on its history and yet keeping it a small town that we all want it to be. She saw that,” Prud’homme-Bauer said. “Tracie has been an involved town manager in our community of Clarkdale, and in her short time she was here, she has made her mark on Clarkdale.”
The town will appoint Rob Sweeney, the current interim finance director, as the interim town manager at their June 22 meeting. The town will then begin the process of recruiting a permanent town manager, utilizing an outside firm to help them with the process.
“We are glad that he’s going to do that because he brings, of course, a finance background,” Prud’homme-Bauer said. “He has executive experience of running a town, so he brings all that we need right now.”
