Our Village Manager

Paul Schofield: Wellington Will Work Hard To Remain A Great Hometown

Story by Ron Bukley  Photo by Abner Pedraza

After 20 years of incorporation, Wellington’s next 20 years will be a time of redevelopment to make sure the village remains a great hometown.

Wellington has been in development mode for the past four decades — dating back to the mid-1970s. That puts the first homes, commercial developments and aging infrastructure in store for rebuilding, explained Village Manager Paul Schofield, who has been a senior manager at the village since 2001 and held the top spot since 2008.

“Wellington is 95 percent built out,” Schofield said. “As a municipality, we’re 20 years old, but as a community, we’re closer to 45 years old. The approval was in 1973. There are actually some homes out here that are older than that. On average, homes in Wellington are about 30 years old.”

Wellington is predominantly residential, and Schofield does not see that changing much in the next 20 years.

“Wellington is different from a lot of communities,” he said. “Only 3 percent is commercial and industrial, and in a community our size, that number is typically 20 to 25 percent, so we really are a bedroom community, and we have to focus on things that keep us that way.”

A big challenge will be to encourage owners of older developments built for markets in the 1970s to reinvest to appeal to the modern market. Part of that will involve reworking the building code to make this process easier.

“When you look around us, there’s something on the order of 20,000 units that are going to be built around Wellington and the western communities over the next 20 years,” Schofield said. “If you want to come into Wellington and buy a $300,000 house, you’re also going to put $50,000 to $100,000 into it. How do we make sure that people are still coming into Wellington? I think we do that by emphasizing the things that have kept us where we’re at.”

Schofield believes that Wellington has done a good job maintaining roads and landscaping during the recent economic downturn, when other communities cut back.

“Part of the reason that we went to the four-day workweek was so that we could save money and put it into the roads,” he said. “Part of the reason we did the staff reductions — we didn’t let anybody go, but as people left, we didn’t replace them — is because we knew that in the long term, we must put that money back into the community, and we need to continue to do that.”

Wellington also devotes a lot of time and effort to keeping residents involved, Schofield said.

“We spend a lot of money on parks because we’re a family-oriented community,” he said. “There has been a lot of discussion about seniors in Wellington. Well, Wellington’s senior population is about half of what the county average is, but it’s growing. Over the last decade, it has grown, and we will continue to see it grow.”

Schofield said Wellington gives strong support to its schools, although they are under the jurisdiction of the Palm Beach County School District. “Great schools are always one of the top five things people look for,” he noted.

Financial stability is a major, ongoing concern.

“We have a relatively low tax rate,” Schofield said. “At 2.44 mills, we’re not the county’s lowest, but we’re among the county’s lowest.”

When Schofield became village manager in 2008, he advised Wellington Village Council members that if they kept spending at the rate they were, the village would be out of money by 2016. The council put in place a business services model that dropped spending from $118 million a year to a low of about $75 million.

“You look at our budget today, it’s up to $89 million, but when you adjust that value back to 2008, it’s about a 15 percent increase, so we’re keeping our spending in line with inflation, but we’re also spending more money on maintenance,” Schofield said. “We’re using automation and other things that we can do to make sure the cost of government doesn’t go up unnecessarily.”

The village is also making great strides in embracing technology and innovation. “One of the things that’s amazingly different for us today is how we talk to our residents,” he said. “Two years ago, we didn’t have a Facebook page or social media presence at all.”

Schofield said the character of the council has changed in that several members grew up in Wellington and now have school-age children themselves, where earlier councils were looking at a growing community and did not necessarily know what Wellington was going to be.

“We now have the third generation of Wellingtonians in town,” he said, citing Vice Mayor John McGovern and Councilman Michael Drahos, who both attended school here, and returned after college to raise their children.

He added that Mayor Anne Gerwig raised her family here and now has a daughter who is about to be married and plans to find a home in Wellington.

“They’re going to be having children and looking for a place to live, so when you have that mindset on the council now — they’re looking at making it a place for their kids and their grandkids — what I’m looking to do in Wellington is find a place where we can have a sense of place,” Schofield said.

Village officials are working to give Wellington a more unified appearance. Schofield recalled 10 years ago when Wellington’s streets and landscapes had mixed styles.

“There was nothing that clearly said, ‘I’m Wellington.’ We’ve been moving toward that, and one of the things that’s important for Wellington to develop over the next 20 years is that sense of identity and sense of place,” he said. “Twenty years ago it was, ‘Let’s make a community,’ but now we’ve got kids. We’ve got the original Wellington children coming back with their children. Our goal is to build this community not just for a lifetime, but for generations, and that’s what’s really exciting.”

As the central part of the county continues to grow beyond the village’s borders, Schofield said that Wellington will be challenged to remain relevant. Part of that will be to make sure that the things that make Wellington unique don’t change. That includes improving the business mix in Wellington.

“One of the things that you’ll see us talking about when we put the council into the visioning session this year is going to be the four commercial corners,” he said, explaining that some continue to thrive while another across the street is suffering.

Improving accessibility is also an issue to wrestle with, at shopping centers, and with middle schools and elementary schools, where parents drive their children rather than letting them walk.

Maintaining a strong Equestrian Preserve Area is another challenge for the village moving into the future. “That is a vexing issue that I’ve worked on in Wellington for close to 15 years,” Schofield said.

Schofield sees Wellington in 20 years as a vital community that continues to maintain good property values. “It’s going to be a great place, a great hometown,” he said. “That’s what our goal is, to keep it that way.”