Above: New Town Administrator Richard Rainer checks his e-mail in his office at Town Hall last week.
PORTSMOUTH — As a longtime executive in the U.S. Naval Forces, Richard Rainer has called many different places home over the previous three decades.
“I think this is our 18th move in 30 years,” he said of relocating to Portsmouth, where he started work July 1 as the new town administrator.
But Mr. Rainer wants to make it clear that he has no intention of packing up and leaving town after a few years.
“I would just like everyone to know I’m here, I’m dedicated, I wanted the job,” Mr. Rainer said during an interview in his office last week. “I just retired from the Navy and probably could have lived anywhere, but I wanted to live here. We were going to move to Aquidneck Island regardless of whether I got the job or not.”
By unanimous vote in May, the Town Council hired Mr. Rainer to succeed John Klimm, who left the job in April to become city manager of Aiken, S.C. He was one of 57 original candidates for the position, and the only one from the Netherlands. He retired from his position as chief operations officer for NATO Joint Force Command Brunssum in April.
“I don’t want to be insulated from people’s concerns,” says new Town Administrator Richard Rainer.
His wife Bente (pronounced BEN-da) hails from that country and teaches in the Danish school system. “We don’t know what she plans on doing here, Mr. Rainer said. “Their school system is completely different from ours.”
His daughter Emma will enter 11th grade at PHS this fall, while son Jonathan will be a seventh-grader at the middle school. Their oldest child, Ashley, is married and living in Jamestown, N.Y.
Mr. Rainer is familiar with Aquidneck Island, having lived here during several stints at the Naval War College in Newport. The more the Rainers visited here, he said, the more they knew this is where they wanted to end up.
“I did OCS (Officer Candidate School) in Newport and I was a surface warfare officer,” said Mr. Rainer. “For 30 years I’ve been coming to Aquidneck Island. I lived in the Navy Melville housing. Then I got the offer to come back to be the director of the Navy staff college at the War College. We ended up living at Coasters Harbor for four years and that solidified the fact that we always wanted to come back to Aquidneck Island.”
Although this is his first foray in municipal government, Mr. Rainer said there are many similarities between being an administrator for a town and the military.
“This is obviously larger — you’ve got a town of 17,000-plus people — but it’s surprising how similarly the organizations are set up,” he said. “If you’re in the Navy you have an admiralty that you work for and you’re the captain and you’ve got all your department heads. Well, it’s the same thing here. I have a Town Council, I’m the town administrator and I have all my department heads working for me.
“The difference is that you don’t have the churn of personnel here. In any military setting, people get orders and they ramp up the end of their job and then they transfer out and then you get another person into that job. Here, you get a job working for the town and essentially that’s your career.”
‘Deep concerns’
In less than three weeks on the job, Mr. Rainer’s also learned that in a small town like Portsmouth, everyone seems connected to one of the “players.”
“The Navy is not so big that you don’t get to know a lot of people, but people are coming and going all the time,” he said. “Here, I’ve run out of fingers to count the number of people who have come to me and said they’ve been a member of the Town Council or they’re married to somebody who was a member of the Town Council, or my husband used to work for the town, or my wife. There’s lot more involvement and much deeper roots, and you have to be cognizant of the fact that the people you’re talking to have deep concerns. What I’m really trying to emphasize to folks is, so do I.”
He knows he has his work cut out for him.
“I’m walking into a lot of long-term projects — the windmill, the tank farms, business development and what businesses we want to attract while preserving the character of Portsmouth,” Mr. Rainer said. “People are obviously very dedicated to keeping Portsmouth, Portsmouth. I can line up 10 ‘Portsmouthonians’ in a row and I will get 10 slightly different versions of what it is to be Portsmouth. It’s my job to try to assimilate that and work with the Town Council and the citizens to strike what the balance is.”
He explored “every nook and cranny” of the town during a drive-by tour with Town Council President Keith Hamilton, and is busy gathering information from his department heads.
“I want to see the town through the police chief’s view, through the fire chief’s view, through the department of public works’ view, from the tax assessor’s view,” he said. “We have a saying in the Navy. When you walk into a situation like this and you’re trying to assimilate a lot of information very fast, it’s like trying to drink water from a fire hose.”
And he wants to hear from citizens — but call first. “While I want to have an open-door policy, there has to be a bit of a buffer,” he said. “It’s best they work through Barbara (Ripa, his administrative assistant) and make an appointment or to at least find out if I’m available so they can come up and see me. I don’t want to be insulated from people’s concerns.
“I have a vested interest in this, too. I think that’s important for people to see, that this isn’t some guy coming here trying to pad a résumé and move on to something else. I’m not looking at this as a stepping stone.”
Kids, guitars, karate
Not only is he well-traveled, Mr. Rainer said he is “kind of all over the place” in terms of his interests, too.
Being a sailor — Mr. Rainer is a qualified off-shore skipper — he loves the ocean, which is one of the reasons he wanted to be on Aquidneck Island. However, he doesn’t have a boat, saying it’s too big of a financial commitment. “I’ve sailed extensively throughout my career but those days are kind of behind me.”
But he’s got plenty to keep himself busy, an addition to his new job. Along with all the activities with his kids, Mr. Rainer’s a black belt in karate and plays acoustic guitar.
“More than play guitars, I want to eventually build guitars,” he said. “Over the years I haven’t been able to build a shop, but I’m finally in a house big enough to make the shop.”
He inherited an extensive set of tools from his late father, a millwright. “I would love to be able to build something that somebody could play and get pleasure out of. I’m not looking to start a new business, though.”
Mr. Rainer said he’s always been a DIY kind of person.
“We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so if the car broke down it stayed broke until you fixed it. I want to teach my kids to do that. I don’t ever want them to rely on someone else to change a tire or change the oil.”