Joliet hires Carpentersville development director as city manager
Jim Hock, Carpentersville’s community development director, is leaving the village for a city nearly four times its size.
Hock has been named city manager of Joliet, which has a population of around 148,000 people. Hock starts Nov. 12 and will make $185,000 a year. He was making around $103,000 a year in Carpentersville. The Joliet city council hired Hock earlier this month.
“The opportunity here as community development director has been a good one for me,” Hock said. “It’s been a pleasure to serve the village manager, the board and the residents.”
A search for his successor is under way.
Carpentersville hired Hock — who had been terminated as Park Ridge city manager — last November with the understanding his eventual goal was to again be a village manager, Village President Ed Ritter said.
“It was not a surprise that he was looking elsewhere,” Ritter said. “We kind of expected it. We knew that he was probably wanting to end up in a manager’s position and obviously from the size of the city that selected him, we were right.”
Ritter credits Hock for implementing a system in the community development department that allows inspectors to file reports remotely on laptops, rather than in the office by hand. Hock has agreed to stay on until the final phase of the system is completed.
Hock and his department faced criticism from Tom Roeser, president and chief executive officer of Otto Engineering.
In August, Roeser complained to the board about what he said were miscommunication, misinformation and mismanagement issues in the department that involved several of his village properties.
In response to complaints from Roeser and others, Hock and several members from his department were ordered to attend in-house educational seminars on customer service.
Hock says the issues with Roeser have nothing to do with why he’s leaving Carpentersville. Moving to Joliet was simply a great opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
“It’s a much larger community with different types of problems and concerns and greater responsibility for me that I’m looking forward to,” Hock said.