When a recruiter contacted Scott Adams about an urban development job in Las Vegas, he recoiled at the suggestion.

It was 2004, and Adams was living in New Orleans and working as the director of the Jefferson Parish Economic Development Commission. He had criss-crossed the eastern United States, starting with planning and development positions in his hometown of Jackson, Michigan, before swings through cities in Tennessee, Florida, Virginia and Louisiana.

“Why would I ever want to live in Las Vegas?” Adams wondered.

But he accepted the interview opportunity, boarded a plane and started driving as soon as he landed. Adams put 150 miles on a rental car that Sunday, trying to get a sense of the city he only visited once as a child.

“I went downtown. I went out into the city, went out to Summerlin,” he said. “I went up in the northwest. I went all the way down to Southern Highlands.”

His self-guided tour brought him to a condominium complex off Ann Road in the northwest valley, where he learned just how hot the Las Vegas real estate market was at the time. Demand was so high, interested buyers had to enter a lottery. The rampant growth coupled with a downtown corridor ripe for development convinced Adams to take a chance.

He got the job. Nearly 13 years later, he’s still here and about to start a new position as the Las Vegas city manager.

THE DOWNTOWN DYNAMIC

A pragmatic gentleman.

That’s how former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman describes Adams, whom he interviewed and then worked with during his years in office. The three-term mayor had a mission — to revitalize the city’s inner core — and Adams, who had experience in the public and private sectors,  seemed like the person capable of shepherding that process.

“He never let me down,” Goodman said.

Today, downtown’s renaissance stands out as one of the city’s crowning achievements over the past decade, especially considering how the Great Recession rocked the region within that time period. In 2012, Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos, invested $350 million of his personal wealth into the city's revitalization efforts and, a year later, moved his company downtown. Meanwhile, the Smith Center for Performing Arts, Mob Museum and the new Las Vegas City Hall building also opened downtown. The city’s once blight-prone streets suddenly experienced media hype — not to mention a cosmetic transformation as new bars, eateries and shopping places opened their doors, drawing tourists and locals alike.

The “Cinderella”-esque story of downtown Las Vegas is no secret to residents who’ve watched it gradually go from the often-ignored step sister of the famed Las Vegas Strip to an attention-grabbing destination in its own right.

For an urban planning guru such as Adams, now 61, the opportunity to help reimagine downtown was enough to entice him to make another move. He started as director of what was then called the Office of Business Development before becoming the city’s chief urban redevelopment officer and then deputy city manager.

“We were literally a region that was like a doughnut, where everything was happening around the periphery and there was a hole in the middle,” he said.

The recession did stall some downtown progress, particularly within Symphony Park. The city had every parcel under a development agreement, Adams said, but the developers paused any activity when the economy tanked.

Adams is hopeful the city will see development finally come to fruition in that area soon.

“We’ve done a lot of workouts with all those developers, so now we have almost every bit of that property back on a development agreement,” he said.

As for the rest of downtown, Adams said the city must stay the course. In other words, follow the downtown master plan, which calls for more parks, housing and transportation options.

Goodman, whose wife, Carolyn, succeeded him in office as mayor, said he’s confident Adams will maintain the energy that he helped create downtown. The former mayor said Adams is a gifted finance expert, especially in terms of bonding, and a dedicated employee who shows up early and brings his lunch to work.

His advice to the incoming city manager?

“Keep your head down and keep pushing ahead,” Goodman said. “There’s nothing easy about making the city a better place.”

A NEIGHBORHOOD FOCUS

After longtime city manager Betsy Fretwell announced her departure, the City Council selected Adams to replace her from a pool of five internal candidates, including the other deputy city manager, Orlando Sanchez.

Adams takes the reins as city manager July 7.

Seth Schorr, who chairs the communications committee for the Downtown Las Vegas Alliance, said he was pleased the city chose an existing employee as its next manager. Adams worked alongside Fretwell on numerous city initiatives and deserves much of the credit for downtown’s redevelopment, he said.

“Continuity is so important, and there’s so much going on in downtown Las Vegas, and it’s so positive,” he said. “Sometimes new blood is good when things aren’t going well or things have stalled. That’s not the case in my opinion. You want to do the least disruptive thing possible to maintain the continuity.”

While Adams has vowed to stay the course on many ongoing initiatives, they won’t be his only focus. For starters, he’s eyeing aging neighborhoods surrounding the urban core.

“The recession ravaged some of our commercial corridors in our older neighborhoods,” he said, referring to some of the residential areas along Charleston Boulevard and Sahara Avenue. “They’re tough, and they’re coming back, but they probably need more of a push.”

Adams said he wants to target neighborhoods with high levels of code enforcement activity and property decay  — often an indicator of residents’ unemployment or financial distress — and help fix up those areas.

The catch: Federal dollars. The city traditionally has relied on federal grant programs to fund neighborhood-centric efforts, but some of those are at risk of being eliminated under President Trump’s proposed budget.

“For example, the community development block grant program is pretty much focused on that, and if that goes away, it means we lose $5 million a year that we’re not going to be able to invest in older neighborhoods anymore,” he said.

Other priorities include continuing economic diversification — whether it be bolstering the fledgling medical district or building a business park in the northwest valley — as well as nailing down a plan for the Cashman Center complex and bringing more business travelers to downtown Las Vegas, he said

“I think we’ve got to really take a hard look at maybe a boutique convention center,” he said. “I’m talking about something that would serve the hotel base downtown and draw more people on a (continual) basis.”

Above all, Adams said he operates under the mantra of building community to make life better for Las Vegas residents. The ability to make a difference led him to study urban planning at Michigan State University, setting in motion his career journey that would ultimately bring him to Las Vegas.

But he’s a realist. Just because the city’s economy has rebounded since the recession, that doesn’t mean the government is flush with cash, he said, noting the importance of strategic investments.

“The rock-and-roll days of double-digit tax growth, redevelopment agency growth and all that are over,” he said. “So we’ve got to fit that investment inside a much shallower margin of revenue than we’ve ever had, but at the same time, we (have) to maintain service levels throughout the city.”

Read our other story about Betsy Fretwell, the outgoing Las Vegas city manager.

Feature photo: Deputy Las Vegas City Manager Scott Adams stands in the Council Chambers on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. Adams will replace City Manager Betsy Fretwell in July. Photo by Jeff Scheid.