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Rick Horst (left) and Benjamin Bitter (center) sit for an interview at City Hall Feb. 12.
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Bitter days Fired once before, new city manager has big support
BY ELIAS WEISS
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to become the next top brass. First slated to succeed outgoing City Manager Rick Horst in July, Bitter’s start date was recently moved up to April 1. Horst and Bitter “mutually agreed they are ready for the changeover and are looking forward to assuming their new roles,” city spokesperson Monica Williams said. It’s a second chance for Bitter. Ashland City Commission fired him in 2016, marking the first time such action was taken in decades. Bitter says it was gutter politics and poor timing. He’s a husband and father of three with deep ties in Pinal County, and he’s ready to open a new chapter of leadership, making Maricopa “a city worthy of our affection.” All about ben After earning his master’s degree in public administration, Bitter’s career started in Casa Grande with a seven-year stint in the city
manager’s office. When things soured in Kentucky, he returned to Pinal County as the assistant to the town manager of Florence until 2021, joining Maricopa staff that year to direct engineering and capital improvement at Horst’s behest. “I recruited Ben several years ago,” Horst remembered in a recent interview. It was Bitter’s forward thinking that piqued Horst’s interest. Since his return to Pinal County, Bitter served on the Arizona City/County Management Association’s board. “I’ve spent years and years in Pinal County,” he said. “I think I have a unique set of skills when working with all of our neighboring communities.” As deputy city manager, Bitter oversaw $128 million of capital projects in a single fiscal year. He played an intimate role in opening the Sonoran Desert Parkway last year, the city’s largest undertaking ever and Bitter’s favorite
N 2015, BEN BITTER DISPATCHED cops to the frontlines of a protest on the steps of a federal courthouse to tangle with Westboro Baptist
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Church extremists. As a landmark ruling on gay marriage made headlines and history inside, the Ashland, Ky., city manager found himself in the eye of a storm of national press and FBI agents, looking on from his office just across the street. “It was a surreal moment,” Bitter said during an interview with InMaricopa last month at Maricopa City Hall. He looked pensively out the sunlit window of the well-appointed office he will soon inherit. “It became very clear that the role of a manager is to lead, often through times of crisis,” he recalled. “I’ve used those leadership lessons every day since then.” Bitter curried Maricopa City Council’s favor over two other internal candidates in December
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InMaricopa.com | March 2024
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