Hitting a home run to Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake’s new Assistant City Manager Rich Huebner didn’t start out wanting to run city government.

“I went to Selah High School and I went to WSU for undergrad thinking I was going to be a sports broadcaster, that I was going to be the next Dave Niehaus,” Huebner said during an early Tuesday morning interview in his office at the Moses Lake Civic Center.

Huebner said he’s always been a sports fan.

“My dad introduced me to baseball when I was 9 years old during the ’95 season for the Mariners, the refuse-to-lose year. And my stepfather and I kind of bonded over Monday Night Football,” said Huebner, now 36.

He does have a voice that sounds like he ought to be relating the action on the field to radio listeners when the Mariners have runners on first and second and Eugenio Suarez is coming up to bat — a fact he readily acknowledged and one he said meshes well with his natural talkativeness.

“That kind of set the spark in mind,” he said.

Huebner said that during his time at WSU, instructor and “Voice of the Cougars” Glenn Johnson didn’t so much set him straight, but rather told him what pursuing a career in sportscasting would require.

“He didn’t give you a rosy-colored view of the world. He said ‘Hey, if you want to get into the industry, it’s a difficult one right now. There are cutbacks. Jobs are going unfilled through attrition, and you’re going to have to probably move all across the country,” he said.

Huebner said he didn’t really like the idea of having to move around constantly in pursuit of a career.

“I didn’t want to wander the country,” he said.

So Huebner took his interest in sports and his desire to stay relatively close to his home and family on the West Side and went to work for the Yakima Valley Sports Commission. It was a job, he said, that taught him the ins and out of hosting amateur sporting events. It was also his foray into government encouragement and promotion of tourism.

After earning a Master of Business Administration and then a law degree from Seattle University, Huebner said he realized he liked analyzing the law far more than he liked arguing about it, and went to work for Snohomish County helping that county promote tourism and expand the county’s Tourism Promotion Area – something not covered in current state law.

“I found wow, this is a great combination of all my backgrounds,” he said. “I had to work with the county to analyze the state law, figure out how to do that, because there’s a lot of things unsaid in state law about TPAs.”

From there, Huebner said he quickly decided that he wanted to go into city administration, and started a new job working for the Monroe city manager just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and helped that city put together its COVID relief program for businesses and nonprofits.

“My first day was two weeks into the COVID shutdown. ‘Here’s your computer, here’s your phone, now go home,’” he said.

When the job came open for the assistant city manager position in Moses Lake, Huebner said he didn’t think twice about applying.

“I’ve never lived in Moses Lake, but my grandfather came here. He grew up in Maine and was assigned to Larson Air Force Base when enlisted in the Air Force. He came here, never having been farther west than the Mississippi, and met my grandmother, who worked on the base as a civilian,” he said. “They had five kids, four of them born in Moses Lake.”

“I want to contribute, I want to give back to this community that cultivated my family. I wouldn’t be here without it,” Huebner said.

One thing Huebner hopes to accomplish in Moses Lake is get the city on a more secure footing in regard to its water supply. Several deep wells are already having issues in the summer and the city is beginning to work with the Moses Lake Irrigation and Rehabilitation District to find alternatives to drinking water from wells as a source of irrigation water for lawns and city parks.

“If we do that right, then that will be something that will benefit this community for generations to come,” he said.

Having taken up his job on Nov. 7, Huebner said he’s still learning his way around Moses Lake but finds the people friendly, welcoming and very helpful to newly arrived strangers. He also said that in his new role, he wants to help continue to make the city a place where people can accomplish their goals and provide opportunities for their children to do the same.

“It’s a very proud community, the people who grew up here or have lived here for an extended period,” he said. “They’re very proud to live in Moses Lake, they’re proud of the community that they’ve built, and they want to continue to see it prosper.”

“I think there’s a lot of potential for the government and residents to work together to accomplish that,” Huebner added.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.