Mike Reynolds, who led the Buffalo Grove Public Works Department for the last seven years, retired Friday, bringing to a close a 37-year career in public service.
Reynolds, 58, began that career as a paid-on-call firefighter in Northfield. Along the way, while working full-time developing his professional skills, he also managed to develop his academic skills, earning associate’s (1989), bachelor’s (1991) and master’s (1997) degrees, according to a village announcement of his retirement.
Following his last day, Reynolds reflected on a long and distinguished career that he said “kind of happened by accident,” after he started out looking at careers in police or firefighting.
But his paid-on-call work in Northfield led to a part-time job with the village, then to a full-time job in Public Works. Following a total of 13 years with Northfield, Reynolds became deputy director of Public Works before moving to Des Plaines to be deputy director of Public Works there. He served briefly as managing director there before moving to a supervisory position in Public Works with Arlington Heights, working from 2001 to 2013. He joined Buffalo Grove as director of Public Works and engineering in 2013, according to the village.
“It’s a great profession,” Reynolds said. “There’s something different almost every day of your career.”
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Reynolds said the career was rewarding, if certainly challenging at times. Workdays were often a mix of inside and outside work.
Reynolds said he kept up his commercial driver’s license, so beyond his management work, on some days he might be found driving a dump truck in town or piloting a snowplow.
Reynolds said he was especially proud of his work on the team helping to develop and implement an infrastructure modernization program for Buffalo Grove. The program, he said, involved convincing both board members and residents of the need for upgrading the village’s water mains, roads and sewer system.
In the village’s November-December newsletter, officials also cited Reynolds for helping create and implement Buffalo Grove’s stormwater utility fee.
For Reynolds, one of the challenges of the job was establishing and maintaining rapport with residents, who sometimes called to complain about the size of their water bills or the way their streets were plowed, he said. Those calls about snowplowing were generally split about evenly, he said, between those who thought the village did a great job plowing and those who told Reynolds “we don’t know how to plow and never did.”
Village Manager Dane Bragg, who hired Reynolds, said his selection was an easy choice.
“He was a real standout from the beginning,” Bragg said. “Mike had such a breadth of experience in Public Works in terms of the utility side, infrastructure side, facility management side. Beyond that, he had incredible leadership abilities.”
Reynolds said his retirement is “the real thing,” although he left open the possibility of some part-time consulting after some time off.
Bragg said Reynolds will be succeeded by another “Mike,” as current Deputy Public Works Director Mike Skibbe is expected to step into the leadership role.
Graydon Megan is a freelancer.