New county manager Michael Scholes begins work (+video)

For the first time since 1991, Sedgwick County has a new manager.

Michael Scholes, a brigadier general who just finished work in Kosovo as the chief of staff for NATO peacekeeping forces there, started his job at the county this week.

He says he chose to retire from the military so his family could settle into a community after years of moves and deployments.

Scholes and his wife, Jessica, moved into a new house in Bel Aire. His two younger children will attend Sunrise Christian Academy.

He was hired in September over three other candidates. Longtime manager William Buchanan retired in June.

Scholes talked to The Eagle on Tuesday about his time in the military, his new job, what brought him here and how he’ll manage Sedgwick County government.

Why he left the military

“I think in Kosovo, being away from the family for a year. I have young kids at home, a 9- and a 13-year-old. My older kids, when they were the same age as my younger kids are now, I deployed a lot. I was gone. It took a toll on them.

“I have more options than I had then. I wasn’t striving to get to retirement. I could retire. So it was an opportunity for me to look at that potential. My 9- and 13-year-old would benefit from being in a community like Sedgwick County, where they could thrive and establish some roots and get to have friends that they could keep longer than a few years. So I started to entertain it in the back of my mind.”

Learning Sedgwick County

“It’s just a process sitting down face to face. You can only get so much from a paper that’s one-dimensional. Being able to actually talk and build up a relationship and rapport with people is what’s about. For me, it’s about people.

“One of the reasons the commissioners chose me is I’ve been a leader. I know how to be a leader. For me, it’s about people and building those relationships, not only internally but externally with stakeholders. So I’m going to spend a lot of time in the next 90 days getting to know people, talking to them (and) finding out what their concerns and issues are.”

Approach to the job

“Politics are not a part of that for me. It’s about conducting the business, it’s about managing core and essential functions and executing the policy that has been given to me. I really see my political affiliation as being ‘county manager.’ It’s not so much Republican or Democrat. That’s really how military officers operate. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was attractable to all the commissioners. It’s because of that … I was an unbiased lens.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 6:18 PM with the headline "New county manager Michael Scholes begins work (+video)."