Flagstaff County welcomes new Municipal Services Director

Jonathan Dahl will be Flagstaff County’s Municipal Services Director, on the retirement of Darrell Szott later this fall. Szott has retired after spending over 45 years on and off at Flagstaff County.

Dahl, who originally hails from Sedgewick, graduated from CHSPS in 2010. He apprenticed as a pipefitter at A&B, and got his schooling at SAIT, then spent the next few years chasing work all over the province.

When jobs in the oil patch dipped, Dahl decided to spend a year in Australia.

When he returned to Canada, he returned to school, this time getting his Petroleum Engineering Technologist diploma. He says, “My parents told me my body will wear out, but my brain never will, so I wanted to start indoor work.”

Dahl’s been involved in two super oilfield construction projects, including a propane dehydrogenation plant, during COVID, and spent time working on the Trans-Mountain project in Coquitlam.

He says that was during BC’s last atmospheric river, and wasn’t particularly nice. “It was very dreary.”

After that project, Dahl took a job with EPCOR at its wastewater treatment plant in Edmonton. He says this was his first experience with a publicly owned venture. Edmonton City Council set what projects would be done, and set the budget for the plant’s operations. There for two years, Dahl says, “It was a very good set up for coming into a municipal position.”

He says a friend pointed out the Municipal Services position ad in The Community Press. “I started considering it. I’d always had it in the back of my mind that I’d return to Sedgewick one day, and this seemed like a way to make it work.”

He ended up applying, and getting hired, and started working at Flagstaff County at the end of July.

As he starts his new position, the whole department is revising its name from Public Works to Municipal Services, which includes Transportation, Fleet and Shop, Ag. Services, Parks, Hamlet Utilities, and more.

“So I’m entering the job with that change, and over the next three years we’ll be updating our policies as we catch up to the name change.”

Dahl has some very experienced department heads under him, including Nick Dunn, John Guhle, Randy Brodie, and Kevin Kinzer. He says, “What Darrell has built here is the core and foundation of people he has recruited. They are all highly educated and trained.

“And it’s not just these four, it’s the entire department staff.”

He says he sees how well the staff collaborates between divisions, and will work on that continuing to be the case. “It’s not silo’d; the collaboration here is terrific, and I hope to keep fostering it and promoting it.”

He says Szott really pioneered the inter-organization sharing of resources that has cut down on equipment purchases for items that are used once or twice a year. “We have situations where tractors are used by different departments for short periods of time, and now those are shared.”