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Working Americans Vol. 2: The Middle Class

1997 Family Profile: Department of Transportation Administrator from Iowa

Dan Stevens is the division administrator for the Iowa Division of the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation. This is his eighth move in 21 years. He has promised the family it will be their last.

Annual Income:

$81,734

Annual Budget

The average per capita consumer expenditures in 1997 are not available. The average per capita consumer expenditures in 1995 for all workers nationwide are:

Auto Maintenance $266.00 Auto Usage $2,015.00 Clothing $681.00 Entertainment $644.00 Food $2,803.00 Furniture $130.00 Gas and Oil $402.00 Health Care $692.00 Health Insurance $344.00 Housing $2,371.00 New Auto Purchase $479.00 Personal Business $1,185.00 Personal Care $163.00 Public Transportation $142.00 Telephone $283.00 Tobacco $107.00 Utilities $593.00 Per Capita Consumption $12,905.00

Iowa’s long winters encourage family-oriented projects.

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Life at Home

To move up in the organization, Dan has asked his family to move eight times; he has told the family they will stay in Ames, Iowa, his current assignment.
They are particularly happy with the public schools and the friendly atmosphere of the community.
He designed their new home in Ames himself, and is extremely pleased with the craftsmanship and skills of the workers who built his house.
Generally, he finds that workers in Iowa take great pride in their craftsmanship, whether they are building houses or roads.
The home cost $280,000 to construct. The family has a $1,500 monthly house payment; for the first time he is using a 15-year mortgage to finance his home rather than a 30-year mortgage.
The length of the winters, often seven months long, has surprised Dan; he enjoys being around his wife and three children, but feels confined.
On weekends, he coaches youth soccer, which is in its infancy in the state; few of the parents played soccer as children, and struggle with the rules.
He played soccer in high school and in a college intramural league at the Pennsylvania State University.
His daughter’s team travels throughout Iowa and Nebraska to find competition.
He is also spending time building a deck on his new home and finishing the landscaping; new homes always require lots of touch-ups to get them right, he has learned.
Both he and his wife Maura earned civil engineering degrees from the Pennsylvania State University.
They met in college and married after graduation, when they both got jobs with the Federal Highway Administration.
Once they were married, they were not allowed to work in the same office, but were assigned to areas near one another, particularly during the two-year training program.

On weekends, he coaches youth soccer.

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Maura worked for 10 years before electing to stay home with their two children.
At the time, they were each making approximately $35,000 a year.
The long winters have given her more time to cook; she has carefully designed the kitchen and often orders specialty items from kitchen catalogs.

He is extremely pleased with the craftsmanship of his house.

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Dan designed his new home in Ames himself.

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Dozens of mail order catalogs now arrive each month at the Stevens’ home.

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Life at Work

Dan manages 17 employees in an office which handles approximately $200 million in Federal Highway Aid coming to Iowa.
His role is to help highway projects move through their various stages to completion; from concept to completion nearly always takes several years.
A typical project moves from planning to environmental evaluation, right-of-way acquisition, to design, and then construction.
He sees his principal role as creating an environment in which his engineers can make quality decisions, despite political pressures.
Twenty years of experience has taught him that problems will arise on complex, expensive Interstate projects, and without a good working relationship, problems quickly turn to crises.
He believes that open and honest communication is the best way to forge partnerships.
He encourages the people in his office to socialize with each other and their counterparts with the Iowa DOT.
Getting to know each other will make communication easier, he believes.
He also believes in having fun on the job, because confident people make better decisions, he feels.

They are pleased with the schools in Ames.

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He tries not to get involved in highway projects personally unless his agency is preparing to say “no” or planning to withhold federal funds on a project.
He believes his staff needs to be empowered to make decisions.
Because his agency controls millions of dollars, its decisions can often spark political debate and controversy.
Much of his time is spent improving the relationship between the Federal Highway Administration and the Iowa Department of Transportation.
When he arrived a year ago, an adversarial relationship existed; he was asked to move to Iowa to help breed a sense of partnership.
Cooperation is especially critical now that the national staff of the Highway Administration has been cut from 5,500 employees to 2,800; without trust and a partnership, projects cannot be easily completed.
The local newspapers editorialized against his department shortly after his arrival, saying the Federal employees did little for the community.
Since then, Dan has demonstrated the community spirit of the federal agency, showing its involvement in the local Multiple Sclerosis Society, his role as a soccer coach, and various other community activities by his staff.
Although trained as a civil engineer, he most enjoys his leadership role and working with people, projects, and problems.
Unlike many engineers, he tests as an extrovert on the Myers Briggs Personality profile, while most engineers are more introverted.
Recently, his department began working on widening the Interstate around Des Moines.
His team is assisting with design and traffic analyses for the project, as well as traffic flow and safety during the construction phase.
Managing existing traffic while building highways for future traffic has become increasingly important in recent years.

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The Federal Highway Department is also working on a new, four-lane bypass in Eddyville, Iowa.
When designed several years earlier, planners failed to fully account for the environmental sensitivity of sand dunes in the area.
Dan is now working with the Iowa DOT to review alternate routes for the highway without substantially increasing the cost of the project.
To level the dunes will be environmentally controversial, as will changing the design plans at this stage.
His staff is spending considerable time at public hearings and workshops looking for solutions.
Normally, engineers involved with rights-of-way and property rights plan and attend public hearings to answer the public’s questions.
To gain promotions and positions with greater authority in the Federal Highway Administration often requires multiple moves.
Dan has moved eight times, having lived in Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia twice, Washington, DC, and now Iowa.

In each location, he gained experience in state-federal relations, since each state’s politics are unique.
The Highway Department rarely promotes in place; to go up you must move.
He has held a wide variety of jobs, including pavement design and in safety, and manager of field offices; he has also served as a district engineer.
While assigned to the national headquarters in Washington, DC, he came to appreciate the complexity of national politics surrounding the Federal-Aid Highway system and its funding.
He was ready to leave Washington, its politics, and paperwork behind when he moved to Iowa.
He enjoys the day-to-day management of projects and seeing the results of his department; in Washington, it was more difficult to measure his progress each day.

Life in the Community: Ames, Iowa

Many in the community have deep roots running back generations; they grew up in the town and have never seen a need or had a desire to move.
Located in the center of the state, Ames still retains much of the ethnic flavor introduced by German, Dutch, and Scandinavian immigrants who first began arriving in large numbers in the 1850s.
Small comments and reactions remind him that he will always be considered an outsider no matter how long he lives in the state.
Friday nights in Ames are reserved for high school football; the stands are packed with adults who attended the school years before and whose children have long since graduated.

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Dan enjoys coaching soccer and seeing young people learn the game.

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Drug use within the community is beginning to rise; community leaders don’t like to discuss the problem, but believe they must find more for teenagers to do before drug use gets worse.
A socially conservative state, laws against Sunday dancing, hunting, and horse racing were not repealed until 1955.
The flat, vast plains of Iowa, leveled off thousands of years ago by the glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch, are largely used for farming hogs, corn, and soybeans.
Iowa is one of the few states in which the number of people still living on farms matches the number of city dwellers.
The state raises seven percent of the nation’s food supply, ranking second to California in agricultural output.
Nearly 95 percent of Iowa’s land is under cultivation—almost 34 million acres divided into more than 150,000 farms.

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Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

"1997 Family Profile: Department Of Transportation Administrator From Iowa." Working Americans Vol. 2: The Middle Class, edited by Scott Derks, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA2_0121.

APA 7th

1997 Family Profile: Department of Transportation Administrator from Iowa. Working Americans Vol. 2: The Middle Class, In S. Derks (Ed.), Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA2_0121.

CMOS 17th

"1997 Family Profile: Department Of Transportation Administrator From Iowa." Working Americans Vol. 2: The Middle Class, Edited by Scott Derks. Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=WA2_0121.

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