Charlotte has a new city manager. Meet Marcus Jones.

The city council announced Wednesday evening that it had named a new city manager — 49-year-old Marcus Jones. He most recently served as a city manger of Norfolk, Virginia, and is now coming to a city three times the size. He’s also the first African-American to hold the top job in Charlotte.

Here Jones is posing with a giant inflatable duck.

Marcus Jones. Photo by city of Norfolk via Facebook

What does the city manager do?

Charlotte has a weak mayor form of government, meaning that the mayor job is a part-time position without any true management requirements. Some cities have the opposite — a strong mayor form of government — where the elected mayor actually runs the city. In cities like Charlotte, the mayor and city council instead hire a city manager.

The city manager is responsible for making the city run: overseeing all the city departments and implementing policies passed by the council.

That’s going to be especially important in Charlotte over the next year as the city sorts out the fallout of riots and protests stemming from the police shooting of an African-American man. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has promised an external review, and the city council has pledged to speed up affordable housing and workforce development. It’s going to be Jones’s job to figure out how to do it.

[Agenda story: The City Council has pledged progress in these 3 areas after the protests in Charlotte]

It’s a big job. The city of Charlotte has about 7,000 employees and a $2 billion annual budget. The most recent city manager had a salary of $245,000. Jones will make $300,000 and begin December 1.

What is Marcus Jones known for?

If you research him, you’ll see that Jones talks again and again about running government as a data-driven organization.

“We want to be efficient, we want to be effective, we want to be accountable, responsive, inclusive — but most importantly we want to be customer focused,” Jones says in a taped interview with a public TV station. “We’re not just going to have gut reactions. … What do we have that we can show that’s empirical evidence that what we’re doing is the right thing?” 

He also talks a lot about community engagement, and about finding efficiencies in government by breaking down silos.

Who is he replacing?

Jones is taking over for Ron Carlee, who had served in the role since 2013. In an ironic twist, Carlee actually just packed his bags for Norfolk, where he’s teaching at Old Dominion University’s School of Public Affairs.

Photo via the city of Charlotte