Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves is moving to stabilize and streamline City Hall as City Administrator Tim Kinsella departs, launching a national search while elevating interim leadership and adding two strategic roles designed to push complex projects across the finish line.
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Kinsella, who took the job less than a year ago, will step down Sept. 3 to take a position with Navy Federal Credit Union. He described the move as a career opportunity he could not pass up. Reeves praised his service at a press conference on Tuesday, saying, “We’re gonna miss him, no doubt about it. He did so many amazing things for the city, and we are a better city today than we were before he started.”
To keep operations steady, Reeves said Deputy City Administrator Amy Miller will serve as interim while the city searches for a permanent replacement.
“She stepped up for us before,” he said. "She has decades of experience here … and I'm glad to have her on our team to step in (now).”
The mayor would not set a hiring deadline but argued the transition should not stall city business.
“I hesitate to put a timeline on it,” he said, “but, certainly, we have urgency … because it's the top position in the city and we don't want to miss a beat … I don't expect there to be any delay or additional hurdles to all the things that we're working on right now.”
Reeves also described a reorganization of City Hall’s management structure. Past administrations split departments between deputy or associate administrators, which he said created communication bottlenecks.
“We just found some inefficiencies in terms of upstream-downstream communication,” he said.
Under the new model, the city administrator remains the top non‑elected executive, with a deputy and an associate beneath. But those roles no longer oversee bundles of departments. Instead, Reeves said, “It’s not you get a third of the departments. It’s you are going to be focused specifically on these larger complex strategic initiatives that we’re pushing through in the city.”
To support that model, Reeves announced two additions focused on cross‑department projects. Retired Navy Capt. Cliff Collins will serve as associate city administrator for strategic initiatives.
“His final tour with the Navy was as Chief of Staff at the Naval and Training Command here in Pensacola,” Reeves said, “and he's also served previously as the Director of Administration for the White House Military Office. … He brings not only military experience, but … lots of administrative experience in that Chief of Staff executor kind of role.”
Adrienne Walker, promoted from historic preservation to strategic initiatives project officer, will manage multi‑department efforts. “She was our point person for the strategic plan that we feel like was very successful. So everything I've ever given Adrienne … she's figured out how to do, whether she has immense knowledge in it or very little knowledge in it.”
Both Collins and Walker, Reeves said, are intended to serve as connective tissue for projects that span multiple departments, of which there are many in the city's pipeline.
“We’re proud of the long laundry list of big, multi‑million dollar projects coming our way,” he said.
As for the administrator search, Reeves kept the focus on fit rather than speed. “I'm a 'find-the-who-and-figure-out-the-what' kind of guy,” he said.