Brad Chambers has had two parallel careers- one in municipal government city management and as a Parks and Recreation Director; and thirty years as a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer, including several years on active duty, retiring as a Commander.
Brad has been the Director of park systems throughout the United States, including Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Missouri. While Director of the Columbus-Muscogee County Parks and Recreation District, they were re-accredited as a CAPRA Agency, and he is committed to the importance of the CAPRA process, having gone through the CAPRA Visitation Training process several years ago. While Director in Cookeville, Tennessee, the Agency received two separate Dottie Mullen Arts and Humanities Awards from NRPA, as well as designation as a Fitness City, USA.
He often has been hired to turn around agencies, or lead them in a new direction. He was the first Director of the Cookeville Leisure Services Department, which evolved into the Department of Leisure Services and Public Facilities, responsible for all city cemeteries, buildings and grounds in addition to parks and recreation. He was hired as Director in Columbus, GA after a one-year absence of a Director, and was hired in Grandview, Missouri to lead the process and establish policies and procedures for the newly constructed 60,000 square foot The View Community Center.
Brad left Grandview to join a unique undertaking in the Atlanta area. CH2M Hill, a Fortune 500 Engineering Company, had created a Municipal Services Division and recruited a management team of professionals to manage four separate cities in the Atlanta metro area which had outsourced all municipal operations. Brad was hired as the Parks and Recreation subject matter expert and assisted Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton, and Chattahoochee Hills in establishing policies, procedures, and contract management of all parks and recreation operations through a public-private partnership. This remains one of the largest municipal public-private partnerships in the history of the United States.
Currently Brad is a Partner with the Re-Create Park Planning Group, headquartered in St. Clairsville, Ohio, which offers strategic planning, landscape architecture, and parks foundation services to cities and counties in the tri-state region of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Brad also served in many leadership positions in the Navy, including an almost three-year tour as Chief of Joint Operations for the European Command’s Intelligence Support Element at Selfridge Air Base, MI and Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. He was mobilized to Iraq in 2007-08, serving as Assistant Director of the Law and Order Task Force, a specialized organization charged with re-implementing the Rule of Law for the Iraqi High Court (their version of our Supreme Court).
He is a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, and received a B.S. from the University of Tennessee, and a Masters of Public Administration from Central Michigan University. Leadership positions in the field include Chairs of the Board of Regents of both the NRPA-Oglebay-North Carolina State University Supervisors Management School and Sports Management School. He is a Past President of the Tennessee Recreation and Parks Association, and is a TRPA Fellow Award recipient.
Current projects include authoring a book on leadership: “S’Not Me! How Cowards Lead- Infallibility, Hubris, and Incompetence in Positions of Leadership”