Apopka Mayor Nick Nesta
By Reggie Connell, Managing Editor
Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series examining Mayor Nick Nesta's first month in office. In a wide-ranging interview with The Apopka Voice, Nesta discussed everything from City Hall culture and employee empowerment to budgeting, growth, economic development, and major infrastructure projects. In Part 1, the focus is on what Nesta calls the most important challenge facing his administration: changing how City Hall operates.
*****
When Nick Nesta walked into Apopka City Hall for the first time as mayor at age 36, he began his first term as the youngest leader since John Land took office in 1950 at 30.
But Apopka circa 1950 and current-day Apopka could hardly be more different.
In 1950, Apopka was a small agricultural town of just 2,248 residents surrounded by citrus groves, vegetable farms, and packing houses, where much of the local economy depended directly or indirectly on agriculture.
Today, Apopka is home to over 66,000 residents and has evolved into one of Central Florida's fastest-growing cities, with an economy driven by logistics, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and a still-significant nursery industry.
Having served on the Apopka City Commission for four years, Nesta already knew the lay of the land. He expected to face challenges. A growing city struggling with infrastructure, development, and rising utility costs would take strong leadership immediately.
There would be no honeymoon or time to ease into the job. However, Nesta didn't choose one of those challenges to take on first.
A little over a month into his administration, Nesta says the biggest change underway in Apopka is not a new policy, project, or department. It is a shift in how City Hall operates. It is a deliberate effort to change how decisions are made, how employees interact with leadership, and how a city government with over 700 employees functions on a daily basis.
A culture shift inside City Hall.
One of the first things that stood out to him was the amount of time employees spent in groups and how many decisions seemed to move through the highest levels of government before action could be taken.
“What surprised me the most was the amount of meetings and meeting times that everybody's going to,” Nesta said. “Different department heads were in different meetings, and how long those meetings were.”
Nesta also pointed out that in some cases, employees attended meetings simply because their calendars included the invitation.
“There were too many people in the meetings, and some things just wouldn't be relevant for a certain department head,” he said. “And I would ask, ‘Why are you in the meeting?' And they said, ‘Hey, it was on my calendar.'”
In his first month in office, Nesta has streamlined that process.
“We are getting more specific and strategic with who's in the meetings,” he said. “And if you don't need to be in the meeting, don't waste your time. You've got plenty of other things to do.”
But the issue was not simply the number of meetings. It was what those meetings revealed about how the organization operated.
“Everything was required to be run by the administration, the leadership,” he said. “So, whether it was the mayor or the city administrator, it was required that almost every decision come up to that level. And with an organization this size, that's impractical, and almost nothing will get done.”
For a city the size of Apopka, and operating with hundreds of employees across dozens of departments and divisions, Nesta believes that approach creates bottlenecks that slow decision-making and frustrate employees.
"Everything was required to be run by the administration, the leadership. So, whether it was the mayor or the city administrator, it was required that almost every decision come up to that level. And with an organization this size, that's impractical, and almost nothing will get done."
Nesta, the owner of Nesta Real Estate Consultants, had a radically different approach to meetings and to job flow.
“Working in the private sector, you have 30-minute meetings, maybe twice a week max, because everyone is autonomous,” he said. “They have the ability to make decisions. They know what their job is, and they run with it.”
That experience has become the foundation of what may ultimately define Nesta's administration: a push to decentralize decision-making and empower department heads and managers to operate with greater independence.
“What we need to do, and what I changed very quickly, is to allow them (City Staff) to be autonomous, to make decisions,” he said. “They're the experts in the field. Go make the decisions. If you have a problem and you need me to be involved, that's fine, but bring me some solutions with the problem.”
The philosophy sounds simple, but implementing it has required changing ingrained expectations. According to Nesta, many employees entered the transition period with concerns about what a new administration would mean for their jobs.
“There really was a narrative and a spirit of fear in City Hall that I was going to come in, clean house, and fire everyone day one,” he said. “People were really concerned about that, and you could feel it in there. There was a lot of tension here.”
"What we need to do, and what I changed very quickly, is allow them (City Staff) to be autonomous, to make decisions. They're the experts in the field. Go make the decisions."
Instead of personnel changes, Nesta says his focus has been on building trust.
“It was nice to come in, be able to instill confidence and let them know, ‘Look, I'm not trying to get in the way. I'm here to speed up the process. I'm here to provide the resources you need.”
That effort, he says, has become one of the accomplishments he is most proud of during his first month in office.
“It's starting to build that confidence within our departments,” Nesta said. “It's letting them know that your expertise and your experience and the passion you have for your job are noticed, it's valued, and it's going to be put into practice.”
To Nesta, confidence means allowing department heads to make decisions. It means encouraging managers to solve problems without waiting for approval from the mayor's office. And it means creating an environment where employees are not afraid of making mistakes.
"You cannot have somebody be in every single decision at this level because nothing gets done. That's the culture shift that I'm working on."
“We're going to mess up,” he said. “I pretty much re-echo this every single week. We're going to mess up. Just own the mistake, and let's keep it moving. It's going to be okay. Just keep it moving. Don't hide your mistake.”
That mindset extends beyond department directors and into the broader workforce.
Beginning this summer, Nesta plans to meet one-on-one with city employees throughout the organization, a process that could ultimately involve hundreds of conversations. The task is substantial, but Nesta believes hearing directly from employees is essential.
“The best way to do that is to talk to those who are doing the day-to-day work,” he said. “As the CEO, you should be vision-setting. That's one of your biggest goals, set the vision and then give the resources, advocate, and provide those resources to those that you're vision setting for.”
The emphasis on looking ahead to Apopka's future, rather than on the daily workflow, reflects another major distinction in Nesta's view of the mayor's role. Rather than becoming involved in every operational detail, he says the mayor should focus on larger priorities while allowing staff to execute.
“At the end of the day, I shouldn't be in the day-to-day,” he said. “I shouldn't be in the weeds of every single decision. I should be advocating for resources for our staff and ensuring that the commissioners understand what the true needs are of each and every department.”
That approach has also influenced how he views relationships throughout City Hall.
Nesta said he is working to create a clearer chain of command in which managers report to department heads, department heads report to the city administrator, and only the most significant issues rise to the mayor's office.
“If I'm in everything, it slows down everything,” he said.
The structure is designed to ensure routine decisions are made where expertise exists, rather than continually moving upward through layers of approval.
Nesta often compares departments to individual entities operating within a larger platform.
“What I'm really, really trying to get them to do is almost run each and every department as its own organization within an organization,” he said. “They should be able to look at their income, look at their expenses, budget accordingly, make the decisions they need to make, and prioritize.”
The philosophy may eventually lead to structural changes.
Nesta indicated that adjustments to the city's organizational chart are already being discussed as part of a broader effort to improve efficiency and clarify responsibilities.
“We'll be making some changes in the near future as well to our organizational chart, across the board, almost,” he said. “Because there's a lot of efficiencies we can build in that, again, builds autonomy within the departments, that we need to be doing because things need to be moving a lot quicker.”
Underlying all of these changes is a broader belief about leadership. Nesta believes that successful organizations cannot depend on a single individual to keep operations moving. Whether that individual is a mayor, city administrator, or department director, an organization becomes vulnerable when too much responsibility is concentrated in a single position.
“You should be able to be gone for two weeks, and everything still runs perfectly because they know what to do,” he said. “They know how to do it. You should not be the linchpin that is required to keep an organization this large going.”
That statement serves as both a management philosophy and a critique of the system he inherited.
Throughout the interview and in City Commission meetings, Nesta has avoided assigning blame to previous leaders. It's a rare and disciplined quality among candidates and newly elected officials who typically want it to be clear who is at fault before they begin their terms.
“We're not playing the blame game,” he said. “The issues are here. I've got to fix them regardless of who did it.”
For a mayor who campaigned on change, that may ultimately become one of the defining questions of his administration: whether a cultural shift inside City Hall can produce measurable results outside of it. The answer may take years to fully evaluate, but one month into the job, Nesta is convinced he has identified the starting point.
“You cannot have somebody be in every single decision at this level because nothing gets done,” he said. “That's the culture shift that I'm working on.”
*****
Coming next in Part 2: Nesta discusses his plans to reshape Apopka's budget process, his views on city reserve levels, and why he believes commissioners and residents should have a clearer picture of how spending decisions are made before the annual budget is approved.
