Carmen Young, Whiteland director of administration, and Shaun “Slim” Young, director of operations, stand outside of the Whiteland Town Hall on Thursday. Both are splitting the duties of a town manager in their new roles with the town.
Emily Ketterer | Daily Journal
When disaster struck Whiteland in March, two leaders stepped up.
And last week, the Whiteland Town Council officially named them the new town managers — splitting the previous job into two positions.
Carmen Young is now the town director of administration, and Shaun “Slim” Young is the director of operations. Both are taking on the duties of a “town manager,” just with split roles and titles.
The council voted unanimously on June 13 to amend the town code for the town manager position to allow them to hire two people to fill the role with the two new titles. They then offered the two jobs to the Youngs, who both already worked for the town in different capacities prior to this spring.
Carmen Young was previously the community development and planning director for the town and Shaun Young was the street superintendent. They were both unofficially thrown into these new roles the night of March 31 when Whiteland was hit by an EF-3 tornado, and the town was without a town manager. Former town manager Jim Lowhorn was out at the time dealing with ongoing health issues.
The two stepped in to help the town and its residents from there. Carmen Young took on the administrative side of town duties, and Shaun Young took on operations, working a lot in the field with disaster cleanup initially.
Both of them said they felt the need to come in to lead for the residents, and to ensure everything for the town was getting taken care of properly.
“It was about the residents, especially in the position that they were in and what happened to them. Just being able to help them,” Shaun Young said. “Taking on that role… you know what needs to be done, so why not just do it?”
“I’ve always been one where I don’t want to see balls getting dropped, and that’s not saying I’m trying to overstep my role, but it’s to keep the town in a forward-moving fashion where if those things weren’t getting done, we would be falling behind,” Carmen Young said.
A town manager’s general job description entails managing the day-to-day operations of the town. Shaun and Carmen Young are working as a team in their roles, each making a salary of $85,000.
The exact duties of each position are fluid, and both look at everything as a team effort, Carmen Young said. Shaun Young will mostly handle the utilities and streets side of the role and be more in the field on different projects in town. While Carmen Young will oversee administrative duties for the town, such as working with developers on project plans, going to events, and talking to residents.
“Obviously there’s going to be times when he needs to ultimately make the decision for X, or there’s something that maybe I have to do. But we’re not going to fight over who gets to sign what paper,” Carmen Young said. “We really want to do this as a team and a partnership.”
Their shared last name is also not a coincidence, because the two are married, which is something not everyone catches on to immediately, Carmen Young said.
They keep their work and home lives largely separate, and they don’t bring business from one over to the other. Shaun Young joked, “she lives on one side of the house and I live on the other.”
“We try not to take it (work) home. But there are some times when you have to take it home because that’s the only time we get to discuss that,” Shaun Young said. “It’s like just in the first hour after we get home.”
They’re grateful the town council had confidence in them to give them this opportunity to share the town manager role together, Carmen Young said. She joked, she and Shaun aren’t trying to take over to turn Whiteland into “Youngtown.”
“It was one of those things that the council didn’t have to go to the trouble that they did to create the opportunity for us to both be in this type of position,” Carmen Young said. “I’m thankful, I know Slim’s thankful too, that they didn’t go back to the drawing board.”
Council members over the last few meetings have spoken highly of Carmen and Shaun Young, and commended them for their work leading the town in the last few months.
Shaun Young grew up in Whiteland, and has worked for the town in different capacities for over a decade. He had previously worked at David A. Kelsay’s trucking business in town until it closed. That’s where got his nickname, Slim, which is the name most people call him by now, even at the town hall. He says when people call him Slim, that’s how he knows they know him. Some people don’t even know his real first name, they joked.
Carmen Young started working for the town of Whiteland in 2019, after getting involved in the community by working on a master trail plan project. Young does not have a background in working in government prior to coming to Whiteland, and she worked in the nonprofit world beforehand.
She had applied to be the town manager two years ago when former town manager Norm Gabehart retired, but the council decided to go another direction with a different candidate at the time.
Both of them said their prior experience with working for the town makes it easier to transition to leading it. They already know the community and have relationships with residents.
“It’s helped a lot in we have their trust … knowing quite a few of the residents, what they need, how they feel about things and you know where they’re at,” Shaun Young said.
One of Shaun and Carmen Young’s goals coming in as the new town managers is to work on various infrastructure projects in town, and prioritize that list of projects. Big projects in the future for Whiteland include upgrading the wastewater treatment plant, different road and roundabout projects, and managing the new developments under construction, such as the Patch Development mixed-use project on Whiteland Road. The town also started the process to apply for grants to update its comprehensive plan.
The Youngs’ priority is to see Whiteland grow, but to keep its character. Whiteland’s growth has exploded in the last five years, with construction of new industrial parks, commercial spaces, apartment complexes and single-family subdivisions.
“We don’t want to try to take away the small-town feel,” Shaun Young said.
Growth is still important, and it needs to be managed well, Carmen Young said. Expanding the town does not mean just bringing more people, but finding ways to bring new business or amenities like parks or a small grocery store, for example, she said. Diversifying the tax base to pay for town services is important to keep a community from being stagnant, they said.
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying … we have to expand, and that doesn’t mean population,” Carmen Young said. “That’s not, you know, ‘oh, I want to add 5,000 more people.’ No, I still think that we have an opportunity to be that quaint, smaller community and still grow.”
Another goal of theirs is to engage more with the younger population in the community. They want to work more with students from Whiteland Community High School and Franklin College. Carmen Young has already been working with WCHS students recently on a project to create a town emergency management plan.
“They have a lot of great ideas,” she said.
They don’t have immediate plans to replace the two positions for community development and street superintendent they left open. Their plan is to see what help they may need and decide around budget time this year if they want to hire new staff for the existing positions, modify the jobs, or leave them empty.
Carmen and Shaun Young are excited to lead the town in this new capacity.
“I’m excited to see what we can do,” Carmen Young said. “We’ve both, you know, beat our heads up against the wall. We’ve also put our heads together.”
