Letteri settles into new role

After 12 years in a rival college town, new Public Works Director Bill Letteri has settled into Chapel Hill.

“It is what I had hoped it would be,” he said of his first full month. “There are the kinds of challenges and interests I was hoping for.”

Letteri started Dec. 6 after serving as chief of administration and facilities management in Charlottesville, Va., home of the University of Virginia.

Although he said he has been pleasantly surprised by the caliber and skills of the staff, he added that he hopes to improve employee relations with management.

Town Manager Cal Horton said in hiring Letteri that his strong communication skills and ability to work with employees were what set him apart from the rest of the candidates for the position.

“Sometimes, I think we live in these clusters that are closed and no one knows what anyone else is doing,” Letteri said. “I want to open that up.”

Externally, Letteri hopes to strengthen the relationship between public works and the University and Orange County.

“A strong partnership can be built there,” he said.

Public works — the town’s third-largest department — is responsible for things such as trash collection and maintaining traffic signs, signals and streets.

Letteri also wants to strengthen the department’s impact in the community.

“I like to be challenged, and I like to be questioned,” he said. “The residents are all very active in the community. They’re quick to talk about what their needs are.”

Active residents are just one of the many similarities Letteri found between Chapel Hill and Charlottesville. The two towns are “remarkably similar” in that they are both fundamentally college towns, he said. But, he said, that does not mean he finds the towns identical.

“There seems to be less industry here in Chapel Hill than in Charlottesville,” Letteri said. “(Chapel Hill) has a greater balance of retail, residents and businesses.”

He also said Chapel Hill is geographically larger than Charlottesville, meaning that while the operations remain the same, there is a lot more to take care of physically.

“It is unique here in that we run the entire operation,” Letteri said of the department. “We take care of all government facilities.”

Although Letteri has called Chapel Hill home since December, his wife and two children, ages 6 and 11, only joined him last weekend.

“I (can) stop eating pizza every night,” Letteri said, when asked about his family’s arrival.

Letteri graduated from Cornell University with a degree in business and finance and received a master’s degree in finance from James Madison University.

“While I enjoyed (Charlottesville), I really felt like I needed professional advancement,” he said. “There were only a few places, including Chapel Hill, I would want to come to.”

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.