Tracey Dunlap likes figuring out how to make things work.

Her recent promotion at the city of Kirkland from finance director to deputy city manager will give her plenty of opportunities to do just that with the city’s Work Program, which includes the redevelopments of Parkplace and Totem Lake Mall, as well as renovating City Hall. The promotion comes as part of an internal restructuring within the city.

Other projects include completing the city’s Comprehensive Plan update, the Transportation Master Plan, as well as on the Fire Strategic Plan and the Development Services Plan.

For Dunlap, who will be joining fellow Deputy City Manager Marilynne Beard, challenges have been part of her job since she first took over as finance director in 2006, where she soon had to find a way to tailor the biennium budget in the face of decreasing sales tax revenue while preparing for the 2011 annexation of 33,000 people.

Though she’s been with the city nearly a decade, Dunlap’s experience with its development goes back even further while working at the Redmond-based Financial Consulting Solutions Group.

Growing up in Connecticut, Dunlap earned an industrial engineering degree, later working at Chemical Bank in New York before going into labor forecasting for Grumman Aerospace Corporation on Long Island during the defense build in the mid 1980s. Grumman was the leading 20th century U.S. producer of military and civilian aircraft, including the famous F-14 Tomcat. By the late 1980s, however, Dunlap predicted that the labor demand had reached its peak and would soon be on the decline. In 1990 she and her husband came to the Seattle area where her parents had retired, but eventually went back to work at Grumman temporarily before going to work at FCS Group, which consults municipalities on economic issues and public finance, among other things. Working with a variety of cities from across the state, she said, showed her how diverse they can be, not only in their outlook but how well City Hall is, or isn’t, managed. One of the cities she worked with at the time included Kirkland, which she said impressed her enough to the point where she applied for the job of finance director in 2006.

“I always thought Kirkland would be a great city to work at,” she said. “I really like the openness of it. I find Kirkland to be very open as far as city halls go.”

Though her first year handling the biannual budget from 2007-2008 went well, she said at the beginning of 2008 sales tax began to drop and by the end of the year the economy had taken a massive hit, including auto sales and construction.

On top of the recession, the city was in the stages of planning the annexation of the Finn Hill, Juanita, and Kingsgate neighborhoods after the City Council voted to approve it in 2009. As part of the annexation, the city would be taking over services in the neighborhoods, but the city’s lagging tax revenue created a situation where the budget was not growing as fast as service demands.

“It was just really big (annexation),” she said. “We had to be clever in trying to absorb it.”

Dunlap said they were able to avoid laying off city staff because they had anticipated hiring people for the annexation. Instead, they simply moved staff around.

Although the local economy seems to be improving, it was only last year that the city returned to its sales tax revenue peak from 2007, but only after adding nearly 40,000 more people.

Part of her job as finance director, Dunlap said, was anticipating revenue from possible development while examining the forecast for the global economy, which ultimately impacts the city locally.

“We can’t control a lot of things,” she said. “A lot of what it is, is predicting reality when it comes.”

At the same time, it can be hard to predict local projects too, which can either be postponed or never get off the ground.

When Dunlap first came to the city, for example, the City Council entered into a redevelopment agreement with the property owners of the Totem Lake Malls properties, promising $15 million in public improvements associated with the Mall. The contributions would only occur after the property owner completed at least 250,000 square feet of retail and 600,000 total square feet of development.

Dunlap said that at the time the impression was that redevelopment was on the near horizon.

“They said, ‘You need to know this, breathe this,’” she said. “Then it dropped.”

Nearly 10 years later, the redevelopment agreement has been extended, this time to a new potential owner. A similar situation has occurred with Parkplace, where a redevelopment was planned in 2010 only to be scrapped for financial reasons until new owners rebooted the project with a new design in fall 2014.

“That’s what I find so interesting about this work,” she said. “It’s never a dull moment. It’s been really interesting all along.”

Now that the city’s revenue has stabilized, she said, the new challenge is prioritizing spending so that they can successfully downsize if the economy takes another hit, which may be triggered by events in other countries.

“As much as our day-to-day work isn’t affected (by the global economy), keeping an eye out is important,” she said.

With her new position, Dunlap said she will still be focusing on the budget, but her role’s will involve a more active handling of mjaor city projects, such as the upcoming City Hall renovations.

“I think there’re a lot of expectations,” she said. “[City Manager] Kurt [Triplett]’s job and the council’s position is to balance those things. What people expect is public safety, but what they enjoy is quality of life. What attracts businesses is quality of life, so you want to balance all of them.”

One thing Dunlap plans to emphasize is community outreach and communication as the city goes forward.