By AVIVA LUTTRELL
Recorder Staff
GREENFIELD — The town’s Department of Public Works field superintendent, who’s leaving to take a job in Hadley, got a strong send-off from Mother Nature Thursday as heavy overnight rains flooded parts of town, damaging some roads.
Marlo Warner, a Greenfield native, has worked for the town for 16½ years, and today is his last day with the Greenfield DPW.
“It’s a great career opportunity,” he said. “All the skills that I’ve developed over the years in construction and DPW work has put me in a position where I feel that this would be a great opportunity.”
In Greenfield, Warner is responsible for overseeing seven divisions, with 43 unionized workers and three assistant field superintendents working under him. He explained his job as being the middleman between the DPW director and all operations.
“My job is to prioritize the work and make sure all the divisions are set for equipment, the schedule is set, and I work with many other department heads when they need things from the DPW,” he said.
Warner graduated from Greenfield High School in 1984 and after spending several years in the Air Force and National Guard on Cape Cod, returned to town and worked his way up the ranks to a management position in Greenfield.
“I’ve always been the type of person who focuses on goals, and you take them one at a time,” he said.
Upon returning to town, Warner took a job at Greenfield Tap and Die, but said he quickly realized factory work wasn’t for him.
“At the time I was working for a private contractor during the days and I said, ‘hey, I kind of like this contracting stuff,’” he said.
So he decided to join a local, private excavating company in 1989 and stayed with them for about seven years.
“At that point I was getting married and wanted to start a family, so being laid off from construction every winter wasn’t a great feeling,” he said.
Warner then took a job at the Shelburne Highway Department, and came aboard in Greenfield in September 1999, starting on a trash truck. He worked his way up from there, becoming a master mechanic and working in the sewer and drainage department. When an assistant field superintendent job opened up, he decided to apply.
“I figured with all my background in mechanics and all the different divisions and the construction background, I’d give the management thing a whirl, and I was selected by the town of Greenfield to become a supervisor as an assistant field superintendent,” he said.
Warner rose to the position of field superintendent in July 2012.
During his time with the DPW, he said he’s faced a lot of challenges, but none compare to Hurricane Irene in 2011, when water levels rose higher than he’d ever seen.
“I was up for three straight days with the flooding and losing roads, and we lost the treatment plant,” he said. “We lost major amounts of infrastructure.”
It was a situation that still stands out in his mind, he said, because there was nothing he could do until the water receded.
“You want to go repair everything, but you really have to just sit back and wait for everything to recede and then evaluate,” he said, “so it’s a long three days watching everything unfold, but you can’t do anything about it until after the fact.”
Although he said he’s looking forward to the new challenges that will come with the Hadley job, Warner will miss meeting with residents and working with the DPW employees, who he said are professional and always rise to the occasion.
“A supervisor, whether it be a director or a field superintendent, they’re only as good as the people that work for them, and they’re a great bunch,” he said. “It’s bittersweet.”
Warner doesn’t know who will replace him, but said his hope is that one of the assistant field supervisors will be hired to fill the position.
“The thing that I’ve taken out of public service all these years is I truly enjoy serving, listening to the taxpayer, troubleshooting problems and resolving them. Good customer service, I enjoy that aspect of the job,” he said. “Every municipality has the same issues today — infrastructure underground that everybody forgets about and it’s starting to fail. Hadley has challenges just like every municipality has challenges, and I think I’m ready for those.”
You can reach Aviva Luttrell at: aluttrell@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 268 On Twitter follow: @AvivaLuttrell