THE area now known as the Shellharbour City Centre was a childhood playground for Shellharbour City Council’s incoming general manager Carey McIntyre.
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Growing up in Oak Flats, Mr McIntyre witnessed firsthand the rapid development and population growth the Shellharbour area experienced in the 1960s and 1970s.
The spot where the council’s current headquarters Lamerton House stands was little more than paddocks and bush when Mr McIntyre was a child.
He and his friends from Oak Flats Public School used to head across the range to explore and play army games on a site now covered by a $580 million shopping centre. Mr McIntyre will start his four-year contract as general manager at the start of November, replacing current general manager Michael Willis who leaves at the end of October.
Five years ago Shellharbour Council embarked on a global search for a general manager, eventually attracting Mr Willis, a New Zealander who was in charge of an English borough council at the time.
This time around Shellharbour councillors didn’t have look quite as far when they selected the council’s current director of city outcomes Mr McIntyre, who has sat in the chair to the left of Mr Willis for the past four years.
In Mr McIntyre they get a general manger who knows the current organisation well, but also its history.
His father worked at Shellharbour Council for 35 years.
Mr McIntyre said he put his hand up for the top job because he believes a lot of the successes he has had at a directorate level would work well at a corporate level also.
“It’s always been my ambition to be successful in my career and with that has come movement through the various levels of local government organisations - from manager to director - so to me general manager is the next natural step,” Mr McIntyre said.
“The Shellharbour City area has an amazing amount of potential and promise.
“I believe our communities are our strength, overall Shellharbour City has a diverse community which I think is an asset.”
After “a very short stint” with the public works department, Mr McIntyre’s local government career began as a civil engineer at Campbelltown Council, before he spent 12 years at Wollongong Council.
He arrived at the Shellharbour Council in 2011 from Camden Council.
Mr McIntyre said had identified goals for the next four years. “I would like to have seen we have engaged more with the community and we have grown our relevance with community,” he said, adding he hoped to make inroads into council’s infrastructure backlog.
