ABOUT
Why GovStrategist exists
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.
Local government is that river. The council changes. The budget changes. The community you serve changes, and so do the people on staff who carry the work. Nothing about the water you governed last year is guaranteed this year.
Most governments are run as if the river holds still. A policy written for one set of conditions hardens into permanent practice. A budget process built for the problems of one decade is still running three decades later. The result is a government that solves yesterday's problem a little more slowly every year, always a step behind the current.
GovStrategist exists for the opposite premise. A government can read the river it's actually in and steer on purpose, instead of drifting on decisions nobody would make again today.
THE IDEA UNDERNEATH THE WORK
Public stewardship
A servant government reacts, answering whoever is asking loudest, whoever filed the request, whoever showed up. A steward government works from its priorities and builds toward the public value it owes the people it serves. The shift from the first to the second is the whole of our work, and it's the difference between a government that stays busy and one that gets somewhere.
That belief comes with a second one: the people inside government are almost never the problem. Public servants tend to be working hard inside a structure that fights them. We diagnose the structure, not the people, because the structure is the thing you can actually change.
who does the work
Someone who has sat in the chair
GovStrategist is led by Micah Intermill, and the firm's perspective is his: more than twenty years working in and around local government, most of it in the chairs his clients sit in now.
He was budget director for the City of Minneapolis, where he overhauled how the city built and ran its budget. He served as chief financial officer for the Minnesota Department of Administration, where he reorganized the department's financial operations. At OpenGov, as director of solutions engineering, he helped more than a hundred governments move onto modern budgeting and performance software, and watched the same pattern repeat: the tool a government buys rarely closes the gap with the paradigm it keeps.
He holds a master's in public policy from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School, where he studied strategic planning and public value, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska.
The through-line is simple. Micah has been the person on the other side of the recommendation, the one who has to balance the budget, defend it to a council, and live with the plan after the consultant goes home. That's the perspective the firm brings: not advice from above, but a partner who has done the job.
- Budget Director, City of Minneapolis
- Enterprise Director of Federal Funds, State of Minnesota
- CFO, MN Dept. of Administration
- Dir. of Solutions Engineering, OpenGov
- MPP, Humphrey School (U of Minnesota)