Kollmeyer retires after 22 years of service to Belleville

Feb. 3 is Diana Kollmeyer’s last day as city manager of the city of Belleville.
The city council is in the midst of a search for her replacement and it won’t have a new city manager by the time Kollmeyer walks out the door after almost 22 years in city hall.
The council has discussed getting an interim city manager to fill in until a new city manager is hired, but no decision was made.
Kollmeyer said she had been serving in municipal government since 1980.
She was born in New Castle, Indiana, and grew up there. In the fall of 1979 there was a local election and her mother worked in the mayor’s campaign. When he won, he told her mother she could have one job for whomever she chose and she chose daughter Diana. Her other daughter had recently found work.
Kollmeyer served as executive secretary to the mayor for five and a half years, but they didn’t get along. The coffee was too strong or she didn’t play country music enough and other things.
After a while, she earned enough time to have the summer off. She said she would decide when she came back if she would stay.
When she returned, the mayor said he would be better, but it didn’t last.
A clerk-treasurer was needed in city hall, so she walked across the hall from the mayor’s office and applied there and got the job. She worked there as chief deputy clerk-treasurer until 1997, when she remarried and moved to Michigan.
While she was in New Castle and was still the mayor’s secretary, the clerk-treasurer and her husband, Pam and Bob Jarvis, who had a rug-weaving business, went to jail. Kollmeyer was there when the police came and she had to give a statement and a handwriting sample. The two were sentenced to one-and-a-half years in jail each.
She said in Indiana the cities are audited by the State Board of Accounts and New Castle had a male and female auditor in the office. The male told an off-color joke and the clerk-treasurer complained. The auditors investigated and found that the clerk-treasurer had been stealing money.
“If Dennis hadn’t told an off-color joke, they never would have been caught,” Kollmeyer said of the auditor.
The scheme had to do with Pam typing up checks to her or her husband and cashing them. Although she didn’t have to be in the office but once a month, she made sure she was back when bank statements and cancelled checks came in.
She lifted up her signature from the cashed checks and replaced it with the Farm Bureau Co-op and then on the back she stamped “Farm Bureau Co-op for deposit only.”
The Farm Bureau was where the city went for fuel for the police and DPW so the fuel bills were pretty large, she recalled.
After Kollmeyer moved to Ypsilanti she decided she would look for a new job, although her husband told her she didn’t have to work. She wanted to work and wanted to do something different. She said she thought it would be fun to sell real estate, as she had in the past, or to be a travel agent, but didn’t find those jobs.
She saw a help-wanted ad in The Ann Arbor News and applied to be Belleville’s clerk-administrative assistant and got the job.
She said before she was hired, City Manager Kerreen Gellert (now Conley) invited her to lunch at Dos Pesos restaurant. She said the city manager wanted to tell her about the political climate at city hall between her and Mayor Dennis Fassett.
“I told her it’s not my first rodeo,” and then got the job, Kollmeyer said.
She said she got her name removed from handling any money when she later became city manager because she didn’t want any of that.
Kollmeyer said Jay Hartford and Angela Power made up the Civil Service Commission at that time and they interviewed her.
Koll meyer said in June 1998, she became Belleville’s clerk/administrative assistant and City Manager Gellert was terminated in July.
“This has been a wonderful ride back home and here,” Kollmeyer said of her work in municipal government, noting the people she met were the best thing about the jobs.
“A lot of what a city manager does is talk to people,” she said. “People want to yell, or you can work something out.”
She remembered in New Castle, after the psychiatric hospital closed, former patients used to come to city hall and yell out, “Damn government workers.”
She said City Manager Steve Walters wasn’t real good at talking to people. He worked at home in the morning where he was undisturbed and would come into city hall with a load of work that had been completed.
Kollmeyer recalled one incident that embarrassed her so much she wanted to slide down through a crack. She said after former fire chief and DPW chief Tony Talaga died, his coffin was put on a fire truck and all the firemen were there. At the funeral at St. Anthony Catholic Church, Kollmeyer said she sat next to Richard Smith and Rick Dawson and she hadn’t muted her phone. She had different ring tones for people who called her. “Who Let the Dogs Out” blared out during the service. It was her brother calling. She said Jay and Kae Hartford put their hands on her neck from their seats in the pew behind her, which comforted her.
She said she loved working on Harvest Fest and the scarecrows in town. As she continues to purge her office of unneeded documents, she said she came across notes from the late DDA chairwoman Rosemary Loria. Kollmeyer said she is still mourning the loss of Loria. She said she and DDA Coordinator Carol Thompson would visit Loria in the hospital and at home during her battle with cancer.
Kollmeyer is the mother of Kimberly Diane, 46, and grandmother of Kendra, who will graduate from Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, in May with an environmental degree with a minor in soils. Kollmeyer said Kendra will graduate totally debt free because in the sixth grade she became a part of the 21st Century Scholarship for Tuition program.
Kollmeyer’s grandson Garrett will be graduating from New Castle High School.
Her mother still lives in New Castle and her brother and sister are in Indianapolis. A brother died of cancer at age 25.
She also has three step-children and four step-granddaughters.