“Corn Fest is ready to support a slate of community nonprofits on Saturday, July 20, in downtown Camp Verde,” outgoing Camp Verde Parks and Recreation Manager Michael Marshall wrote in a press release. “This free one-day street fair event celebrates agriculture in the area with a focus on Hauser & Hauser sweet corn. The event is full with 79 vendors of all types.”
The 30th annual Corn Fest will also mark the end of Marshall’s career in public service. For 37 years, he was a first responder with the fire department of South Portland, Maine. He also worked per diem with Verde Valley Ambulance for several years and spent nearly the last 12 years with the town of Camp Verde.
Marshall said that an ability to triage problems and being mission-oriented were the main things he learned during his EMS career.
“Most of my other anecdotes from the fire service aren’t suitable for public consumption,” he added.
“Corn Fest will be my last day,” said Marshall, a Clarkdale resident. “I figured that it will be a 14-hour work day in the hot Arizona sun that will remind me that, yes, it’s time to go, in case I had any misgivings.”
Initially the sole full-time employee in Camp Verde’s Parks and Recreation Department, he served as the department’s coordinator for three and a half years before becoming the division manager in May 2016 as the department grew to a full-time staff of five.
“One of the reasons I was hired was to rebuild the department after the cutbacks of the Great Recession,” Marshall said. “One of the big things that we did was, we resumed operation of the town special events in 2019. The town has several special events that had been done by a volunteer nonprofit group for about 10 years …In 2019, we resumed operation of the three main events Fort Verde Days,Pecan and Wine and Corn Fest. That necessitated a lot more workload for us, that’s where we got one of the additional staff … We also have other events that were ongoing that we are already doing. Halloween Trunk or Treat, a Christmas Craft Bazaar and Parade of Lights that were already happening. We took those on. We have since added a new kids’ event, Touch a Truck, which is the second Saturday in February, that we added two years ago.”
Marshall also pointed out that the town’s summer camp program is now in its seventh year of operation after being cut after the Great Recession.
The camp is the only municipal camp in the state of Arizona accredited by the American Camp Association. Marshall plans to spend his retirement catching up on his reading and woodworking hobbies, exploring with his wife, Pam Marshall, in the couple’s RV and occasionally dropping in on future Parks and Recreation events.
“[Pam’s] retired as a nonprofit administrator,” Marshall explained. “She worked in a couple of different nonprofits. Most recently, she was the executive director for Arizona Natural History Association. They [run] the gift shops and [do] interpretive work for the various national forests in Arizona.”
The couple plans to kick off their second retirement as they did their first, by packing up the RV and hitting the road.
“I’ve got a daughter who lives in this area … so we’ll be spending some time with them,” Marshall said. “And I have a son and daughter-inlaw and grandkids in Colorado that we’ll be seeing on that trip. We’re going to start off by a leisurely 12- day trip to the northeast. When I retired from the fire department 15 years ago, we took a three-month trip and came out here to Arizona where we had vacationed several times. And that’s what we did after the first time I retired, before I started what turned out to be my encore career.”
The town is in the process of hiring Marshall’s successor, and Marshall said he is optimistic that his replacement will be named by Corn Fest.
“We’re making transition plans so that whoever it is, whether it’s internal or external, we’ve got everything in place for them to know what they need,” Marshall said.
One of his projects was to create a succession plan because there was little institutional knowledge available when he was the sole employee.
“The key is to stay focused on the mission,” Marshall offered as advice to his successor. “We’re here to provide recreation opportunities to the public … And whoever succeeds me needs to continue that attitude, that positive approach of serving the public, because that’s what government exists for, No. 1, and specifically for us in Parks and Rec. We exist to provide people with recreational opportunities.”
