City manager hopefuls have range of backgrounds

The formative years and education experiences of Carson City’s five city manager candidates range from down the block to across the country, while their different careers were spent right here and around the world.

Fire Chief Stacey Giomi is the most local of the pair with local connections, though he was born in the Bay Area. Robert Stacey Giomi is a 1980 Carson High School graduate and later earned an associate’s degree of applied science in fire science technology at Western Nevada Community College.

He went on to earn Bachelor of Science degrees in fire-prevention technology and fire administration from Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, Calif., graduating summa cum laude. He also did postgraduate work in the executive fire officer program at the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Academy in Emittsburg, Md. Those treks didn’t turn his focus to places other than Carson City, he said.

Among his community sidelights was freelance work in his twenties and thirties as a broadcaster, much of it covering regional and state sporting events.

Jeffrey Fontaine, the other candidate with local ties, has lived here 27 years but grew up and did his initial post-secondary education work in liberal arts and environmental engineering on the East Coast. A Pennsylvanian then, he earned a 1976 Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Temple University in Philadelphia. He then moved on to Northeastern University in Boston, where in 1979 he earned a Master of Science degree in environmental engineering.

Fontaine also has a master’s degree in public health, environmental health sciences from the University of California at Berkeley, which he earned in 1987, to complement his government-related career of more than three decades. Before coming to Nevada, he was with the federal Environmental Protection Agency office based in San Francisco.

Nicholas Marano, who now lives in the San Diego area, also started life in Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in finance in 1984 from St. Joseph’s University, a Jesuit school offering both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Now a retired Marine colonel and consultant, he also lists training at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Defense College in Rome, Italy. That came in 2007.

Marano has a background that includes running the Camp Pendleton military base and community, as well as postings during his Marine Corps service in Europe and the Middle East.

James Nichols, a third candidate hailing from the East, stayed in Massachusetts for his initial degree. He did his undergraduate work at Northeastern University, where Fontaine got his master’s in environmental engineering in the 1970s. He graduated with cum laude honors.

Nichols earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering from that Boston university in 1989, and five years later obtained a master’s in environmental engineering from the University of Connecticut. Nichols, who has worked in city government in four states — including as deputy city manager in Las Vegas — also has a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, public-management certificate he picked up in 2010.

Timothy Hacker, former city manager in Nevada’s North Las Vegas and Mesquite, hails from the Midwest, working and studying during his younger years before coming to Nevada in 2006.

An Iowan, he has a 1987 Bachelor of Science degree in community and regional planning, with a minor in political science, from Iowa State University in Ames. His Master of Public Administration degree was earned from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; he picked it up five years later.

Hacker’s government work has been in his native Iowa, in central and southern Illinois and in Southern Nevada.