The Department That Wasn’t There

An observation before the work began

Cities are obsessed with org charts. Boxes, lines, titles—like everything’s always been tidy and sorted. But that’s not how most departments start. Usually, it’s just work that needs doing, and nobody’s really in charge.

When I first began working with the City of Cleveland Heights, I was there as a vendor. Vendors occupy a strange position inside a government building. You are close enough to see how things function, but not yet responsible for fixing them. From that vantage point, one thing was obvious. The city needed a communications department. Not a title. Not a position. An actual department.

Because the work was already there. Press inquiries arrived regularly. Projects needed explanation. Residents had questions about what their city was doing and why. Social media had become part of the public record, whether anyone liked it or not. Council meetings produced decisions that people reasonably expected to understand the next morning. Communication was happening everywhere. What wasn’t happening was structure.

Inside the building, there were frequent conversations about how overwhelmed the communications operation was. Staff was described as stretched thin. The workload was framed as more than the office could reasonably handle. That explanation might have made sense if one detail hadn’t kept surfacing: there were open positions.

In municipal government, that detail matters. Salaries are not invented on the fly. They are proposed, measured, and voted on by council as part of the public budget. When a role appears in that budget, the authority to hire someone for it already exists. The city had the positions. The city had the approved salaries. The city had the authority to hire. Yet the roles remained empty.

Month after month, the same story. Not enough staff. Too much work. Unsustainable, they said. Eventually, you can’t ignore the pattern. If the jobs and the money are there, the real question isn’t can the city hire—it’s why hasn’t anyone bothered?

From the outside, it sounded like a staffing problem. Inside, it was something else. The department had never been designed. No clear roles meant hiring stalled. No hiring meant jobs floated around, landing wherever someone felt like grabbing them. Press calls went one way, resident questions another. Social media turned into a megaphone instead of a system. Communication happened. The department? Still missing.

Eventually, I joined the city as an employee. My title was Communications Specialist, a role that on paper suggested a fairly narrow set of responsibilities. The work looked different in practice. I was managing social media, producing graphic design work, and handling tasks that had never been clearly assigned to anyone. None of that was unusual on its own. Small municipal teams often operate that way. What was unusual was how much work existed without any structure designed to hold it.

When there’s no structure, the work just lands on whoever’s willing. After a while, the story becomes that the staff is drowning, not that the system was never built. Eventually, you can’t miss the difference. The city didn’t need another excuse for why communication was hard. It needed the department everyone kept mentioning.

Eventually, I stepped into a position where that work could finally be done. The first step was not a campaign. It wasn’t a press conference or a social media strategy. The first step was building the department itself.

We had to start from scratch. Communication handled explaining the city’s work to the outside. Community relations took in questions, concerns, and requests from residents. One talks. The other listens. Together, they make a loop.

Once that idea clicked, the rest fell into place. Media relations. Digital communication. Graphic design. Meeting notes. Community intake. Roles built to work together, not just float around. And once the roles were real, hiring finally happened.

Departments do not appear because someone announces them. They appear because the work finally has a place to live. The staff I hired during that stretch still works in the building today, which means something fairly simple. There was a time when the communications department people now assume has always existed did not exist at all. And then, slowly and deliberately, it did.