DPW administrators go against type

In some area communities, women run the garage

Karen Galligan (left) of Southborough and Kara Buzanoski of Northborough are among the area’s few female DPW leaders. (Globe Staff Photo / Suzanne Kreiter)

It's one of the last surviving stereotypes: When you see Department of Public Works crews filling potholes or fixing water mains, they tend to be men. If the crew is from Northborough or Southborough, though, the boss will be a woman.

Kara Buzanoski is the director of Northborough's Department of Public Works. Karen Galligan is Southborough's DPW superintendent. They are among the handful of females overseeing snowplowing, sewer maintenance, and the other public-works services delivered by the state's 351 cities and towns.

Their gender doesn't significantly affect their work, they said in a combined interview.

"The crew had no issues whatsoever," said Galligan, referring to the reaction of workers when she was appointed to the Southborough post two years ago.

"If you have a good crew, they will work for you," said Buzanoski, who also started her job two years ago. "It doesn't matter if you are a guy or a girl. Heck, we have a chance of having a female president."

Both share the opinion of officials from across the country as to why female DPW directors are scarce, even as they are slowly becoming more common. Municipal governments are increasingly choosing public works chiefs for their man agerial expertise, rather than their experience with a backhoe. That's resulting in more women being hired for the top positions, they said.

"Public works is largely labor," said Lisa Peterson, commissioner of Cambridge's DPW, likely the largest run by a woman in Massachusetts. "It's largely motor equipment operations and park maintenance. Those fields are typically male fields. When you're looking at departments where people have been promoted and moved up in their fields, your pool is going to be men."

That pattern, however, is changing, Peterson said.

"For me, in Cambridge, it was having the management skills, finance, personnel."

Galligan said she spends most of her time drafting budgets, corresponding with consultants and public boards, often at night hearings, and deciphering complex regulations.

"The biggest block you have is getting funding from Town Meeting," she said. "The guys can handle the day-to-day."

Buzanoski worked in Northborough's DPW office for 16 years before replacing John Schunder, who ran the department for 33 years. Once she was appointed, she reoriented the DPW toward maintaining the town's infrastructure, as opposed to developing new projects. She had been documenting department work for years, so she was one of the few people who had a complete inventory of the town's facilities.

"My predecessor was in the field all the time," Buzanoski said. "My job was the paperwork."

Galligan said she has plowed snow a few times during bad storms when the DPW was short-staffed. Buzanoski said she rarely, if ever, has been behind the wheel of a truck.

Of the 938 members listed on the website of the New England chapter of the American Public Works Association, only 69 are women. Of the association's 10,000 members nationwide, about 3,400 are women, and only 800 of them are in upper-level management jobs, said Jennifer Adams, a deputy DPW manager in Tempe, Ariz., who spearheads the association's efforts to attract women into the profession.

Those numbers are low, but they have increased dramatically from just a few years ago, Adams said.

"When you look at the overall picture, it's definitely improved a lot," she said.

Both Buzanoski and Galligan were raised in families with engineers, and were influenced from an early age to embrace math and science.

"My father was an architect. My mother was an accountant. My grandfather was an engineer," said Galligan, who recalls playing with trucks and Lego building blocks instead of dolls when she was a child. "I never was into the girl stuff."

Partly because they grew up in different generations, the two department chiefs took separate roads to their DPW garages.

Early in her career, Buzanoski, 55, encountered discrimination that Galligan, 38, never experienced.

"I would walk into meetings and they would think I was there to take the notes, not run the meeting," she said.

A former president of the American Public Works Association, Judith Mueller said she overcame similar perceptions. She wasn't "one of the guys," she said, when she took over as director of the DPW in Charlottesville, Va., in 1985. Now, she said, women usually don't have to deal with those headaches.

"We don't allow the racy calendars anymore," she said. "We don't allow people to tell jokes in bad taste. That's not just in public works. It's in local government."

Buzanoski took time out of her career to raise her children, while Galligan struggles today with the demands of being a working parent in an era when families need two wage earners to pay the bills.

"Everybody is trying to balance the job with the home," she said. "Both my boys play hockey. I often feel as though I'm rushing them around, and I don't want them to feel like they're an inconvenience."

Northborough's highway and parks supervisor, David Robillard, who has worked for the town's DPW for 18 years, said he was glad when Buzanoski was appointed director. First, she cleaned up the department's Main Street garage.

"In the old days, it looked nothing like this," he said, pointing to the neat rows of trucks, the garage's swept floor, and the organized stacks of brooms and barrels. "I don't want to say it's because she's a woman."

Then, Robillard said, Buzanoski changed the department's management structure.

"She delegates better," he said. "She's more adaptable. She spread the responsibility out more."

But throughout those changes, everyone knew who was boss.

"Trust me," he said. "Get her mad and see what happens."

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