August in the southern Piedmont is no joke. Temperatures regularly in the 90s, with sweltering humidity. It’s the bane of many a high-school football player and band member jockeying for position as practice for the upcoming season gets going in earnest.

In her bid to become one of two Kings Mountain High School drum majors in the scorching summer of 1987, Kim Scism Eagle ’93 had to contend with more than just the oppressive August weather. In fact, the weather was bearable, if unpleasant. Having grown up in Kings Mountain, she was used to it. It was her own doubts she had to overcome.

By tradition, the Marching Mountaineers had always been led by a boy and a girl, and only the male-drum-major slot had recently been vacated. “I had convinced myself that they were going to pick a boy,” Eagle says.

Eagle’s mother was having none of it. She told her daughter not to look too far ahead and instead to concentrate on the task at hand. Control what you can control. And besides, if she did her best, she’d take Kim and a friend out to eat.

Eagle, an overachiever if ever there was one, was prepared as always and earned one of the two spots (and a trip to Kelly’s Steakhouse). The process set her up for a lifetime of overlooking doubts on her way through the glass ceiling.

“It was my first recognition of, ‘Don’t be intimidated for whatever reason you make up in your head,’” she says.

Many people don’t have that realization until later in life, if at all, but as her former boss Barry Gullet says, Eagle has always been “wise beyond her years.” It helped to have her mother’s encouraging voice ringing in her ears.

“My parents played a big role in how I’m wired,” she says.

With unceasing determination mixed with a healthy dose of practicality and diplomacy, Eagle has climbed the ladder in her chosen profession, local government, and in August of 2019 she started what is quite possibly the perfect job for her: She became the first female county manager in Gaston County’s history. Eagle oversees more than 1,700 employees and a budget of nearly $330 million (and falling!), and she gets to do it a few miles from where she grew up and where she now lives.

It might seem like a fairy tale, but there’s no magic involved – just hard work, a natural curiosity about government, and a low-key ambition that has driven Eagle to very near the top of her profession.

Invaluable employee

In 1994, in the midst of earning her master’s in public administration, Eagle landed an internship at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities (now Charlotte Water). It was clear from the start that she was cut from different cloth than most interns.

“Instantly impressive lady with lots of skills and lots of talent and extremely smart,” says Gullet, then the deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities and eventually director of Charlotte Water. “I look at my career and the people I was around, and there are a few that pop up where I would say, ‘I’m going to wind up working for that person one day.’ And she was one of the strongest.”

He wasn’t wrong. After Eagle was named assistant city manager in 2016, she was technically Gullet’s boss until he retired the next year.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There was a lot of number crunching, people pleasing and strategizing to do in the intervening two decades. And it started with a project that was no small task for a newbie.

The mayor at the time, Richard Vinroot, was looking to run Charlotte more like a business, and he instructed the utility department to put its projects out for bids from private companies. The director decided to give the newly hired Eagle, not even 25 years old, the bulk of the responsibility for running the bidding process.

Some might have considered it an overwhelming task, but Eagle viewed it as an opportunity.

“I tell people when I do career-development talks that you never know what crappy assignment, when you first hear about it, will turn into something phenomenal,” she says.

“I think she wound up doing most of her doctoral work on that managed-competition process and became well known across the country as someone who had done a good job with it,” Gullet says. “She was on the speaking circuit for a while, went all over the place talking about it.”

Eagle proved invaluable as someone who could take innovative, slightly risky projects and make them work. As evaluation manager with the city of Charlotte in the early 2000s, she was something of a “utility infielder.” “I had enough capacity in my workload that I could take on special projects,” she says. One of those, a performance-management tool that until that time no public-sector entity had ever used, eventually sent her to Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago, and all around the country enlightening government employees about how it could be used to their benefit.

Eagle’s ability to think clearly about a project, take input from all quarters and map out a plan has served her well.

“I know no other person who is the equal of Kim Eagle in tackling a project,” says Ron Kimble, Charlotte’s former deputy city manager. “She is superb. She puts a team together. They set goals and expectations. They allow everyone at the table to have opinions and share ideas. They then come up with options. They bounce it around again and come out with a set of recommendations so well thought out that it’s indescribable.”

Later, Eagle became the liaison between the city and the Privatization and Competition Advisory Committee, a group of appointed citizens who monitored Charlotte’s implementation of service contracts. She essentially had to get the committee on board when the city was ready to move forward with any project that included a private company.

It wasn’t always easy, but it turned out that her mix of knowledge, competence and personality were perfect for the job.

“It was a highly charged atmosphere,” Kimble says, “and Kim was the calmness and the rational and logical thinking that helped get us to the finish line.”

Finding her ‘joy’

When Eagle arrived at Wingate in the fall of 1989, she was intent on majoring in economics. But despite ultimately becoming a “budget nerd” (her words), econ wasn’t in the cards. “That lasted maybe a week,” she says. “I do not find joy in math.”

Where Eagle did find joy was in her English and history classes. Burris Hall became her favorite place on campus, and she soon realized that being happy could be a career option.

“That’s something I tell people when I’m having career-development conversations today: ‘Think about how you’re going to spend your time every day, because you need to really think about getting up and going to that work every day,’” she says. “‘What makes your heart sing?’”

For Eagle, it was history. Growing up, Eagle was surrounded by history: her family’s stories of their ancestors escaping the potato famine in Ireland; the turning point of the Revolutionary War in Kings Mountain; her high-school history teacher, Dean Westmoreland, making history come alive with story after story.

She loved Dr. Robert Ferguson’s freshman history class at Wingate and decided she’d major in history and become a lawyer. But another Wingate history professor, Dr. Bob Billinger, suggested she pursue an internship one summer with Cass Ballenger, then a U.S. representative. The next year, she interned with another U.S. congressman, Alex McMillan. They changed her career thinking.

“The internships taught me that I really enjoyed getting things done for people,” Eagle says.

But not at the federal level. At Billinger’s urging, Eagle decided to earn a master’s in public administration, after which she would focus on local government, where she could see the fruits of her labor up close. But first, she wanted to see the world, or at least parts of it. Eagle did the semester-long Wingate-in-London program, traveled with Great American Heritage to Boston, and, because she’d spent a semester in London as a junior, did W’International as a senior.

The timing was fortunate. Also on the trip was Keith Eagle, a junior music major. Keith and Kim knew each other a little, both being residents of the honors apartments, but they really connected in Austria, essentially becoming a couple on the trip. “We held hands all the way back,” she says. They married shortly after he graduated in 1994.

By then, Kim was a year into an MPA program at Appalachian State, setting her sights on local government, where she would prove herself to be indispensable.

People-focused leader

The turning point of Eagle’s career, and perhaps the reason she is where she is now, came a little over six years ago, when she was tapped to be the interim director of Charlotte’s Office of Strategy and Budget. Eagle was perfectly content as deputy director of Charlotte Water, a job where she’d finally transitioned from working on spreadsheets to being a manager and “a liaison on behalf of the employees.” “That was the most fun I had,” she says. But she felt that when you were hand-picked to work in the main office, you couldn’t say no.

Eagle was extremely nervous. She’d be working for a city manager she did not know (Ron Carlee), and she was being dropped into the job in the heart of budget season.

“I remember thinking, I don’t know what I don’t know,” she says.

To top it off, the state government had begun withholding the business-privilege-license tax from municipalities. In Charlotte, that amounted to about $18 million. Add in some overestimates on property taxes, and Eagle was being asked to repair a $24 million hole in the budget.

The nervousness eventually faded as Eagle did what she always does: made lists, organized people and tasks, and got to work. She wound up working well with Carlee. They reevaluated the city’s capital program, adjusting some property-tax allocations. They “scrubbed and scrubbed” the operating budget, figuring out what they could cut that wouldn’t result in layoffs. Eagle and Carlee managed to balance an already-lean budget that had been trimmed for the past several years, and they did it without laying anyone off.

“That really taught me a lot about working with my team and doing a budget from a different perspective, in terms of being responsible for all of it,” Eagle says. “And I really got comfortable working with elected officials, which I had not been forced to do that much in the past.”

It was perfect training for her current gig, where she answers to the Board of Commissioners. In two years in Gaston County, Eagle has created a balanced budget that does not rely on using any money from the “fund balance,” or the county’s savings, and in the process she has lowered the budget and cut property taxes. She has implemented a bond-debt-restructuring initiative that could save the county $4 million over the next few years. She has created a public information office to beef up communications, tasks that had been handled previously on a part-time basis. And she has established an internal audit program (“I’m a budget nerd by training,” she says, “so that was important to me”).

Of course, she has had to do much of it while dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. “My first year was a whirlwind,” she says.

As the pandemic took its toll on Gaston County, Eagle implemented, on behalf of the Board of Commissioners, the CARE Plan, which spurred economic growth and allocated $1 million to help fund food banks, pay daycare supplements, give housing assistance and much more. It’s all part of her people-focused approach to governing, which stems from her down-to-earth nature.

“There are some managers who don’t really relate to the full scope of employees they have: the guy in the ditch or the person on the governing board – they can’t span that gap,” Gullet says. “But Kim can. Kim earned the respect of, and talked to, and was buddies with the field crews, the plant operators, the equipment operators, the people on the third shift at the wastewater plant. She knew them and got along with them, and they had a lot of respect for her. And the same for the City Council members and the mayors. Some people can’t do that, but she did, and she’s very good at it.”

She’s also very driven. Somehow, while inching her way toward the top of city government in Charlotte, Eagle earned an education specialist degree (on top of her MPA) and then a Ph.D in public administration from Virginia Tech. She also teaches part-time at UNC Charlotte and recently joined Wingate University’s Board of Trustees. Earlier this year, she received a Women in Business Achievement Award from the Charlotte Business Journal.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Eagle’s career is that she’s been able to live a stone’s throw from her childhood home for nearly all of it. In a career that usually requires periodic migration in order to advance, she’s managed to remain in her hometown while also staying ambitious.

“I do have that drive to really push myself,” Eagle says. “I think that comes from the reinforcement that my mother gave me. I’m doing the same thing with my daughter. She’s 12, and she wants to fly jets for the Navy. I might have taken it too far. I’m not sure how I feel about that!”