Saratoga News

New finance director ready to take on city's challenges

By Sarah Lombardo

Mary Jo Walker figures her new job is just about as good as it gets.

"This is probably the pinnacle of my career right here," Walker says, sitting in the finance director's office of Saratoga's City Hall. The city's new top number-cruncher explains that the job allows her to move back to her Felton home on a full-time basis. Now, she says, she has the finance director position she wanted, within decent commuting distance from her and her husband's home.

And that means she'll be moving out of the Oakland home she's been living in during the week while she worked at her previous job of almost four years, as the finance director and treasurer for the city of Danville.

Previous to Danville, Walker was the chief of administrative services for the Santa Cruz County Public Works Department, and the controller for the city of Oakland before that. Walker got her bachelor's degree in accounting from Northern Illinois University and her master's degree in public administration from Golden Gate University. She's also a certified public accountant. Walker's first day on the job was Sept. 8; she replaces interim Finance Director Oliver Wright.

The Illinois native moved out to California when a brother offered to let her stay with him.

"I knew I didn't want to live in Illinois," she says, adding that it was the weather that brought her to California. But what got her working with numbers?

"I've always just had an incredible ease with numbers," she says. "I've just always understood them. Someone once said I have numbers in my veins."

And that could be a great advantage to the city of Saratoga, which, since voters rejected the utility-users tax in 1996, has dealt with little else but budget numbers over the past two years. The lack of funding, the budget trimming and the staff reorganizing would seem to be a daunting task to any incoming finance director.

But Walker doesn't seem concerned.

"I think that the [lack of] funding is something that I will not have to deal with," she says. "It's kind of settled down now." Instead, Walker says, her main immediate tasks will be to form policies and procedures--and provide some leadership in the department.

"For almost a year, there hasn't been any leadership," she says. Of course, being the new leader on the block does have its challenges, which has included, Walker discovered, staffers delighting in delivering boxes of items that need attention to the new finance director's door.

Again, Walker doesn't seem worried. "I'm enthused by this sort of stuff," she says.

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