There’s learning that happens in class, and the kind that can only occur beyond its four walls.
Just ask current students Ray Kalmanowitz, Sasha Altman or any of the other 23 City Management Fellows, who have each spent 10 weeks each summer entrenched in local communities to translate their passion for public service into much-needed support for Delaware cities and municipalities.
“When you do something at the local level, you see the people that it affects,” said Kalmanowitz, who worked in Sussex County for the summer of 2025. “For better and for worse, you know these people, you know their stories.”
This spring, UD will recruit its eighth class of City Management Fellows. Established in 2019 to attract talented young professionals into local government, the summer program places students with city and town managers, where they gain a firsthand account of the issues that touch the lives of Delawareans.
“Local government offers students the opportunity to be immersed in issues that touch the lives of Delaware residents—water, wastewater, planning, land use, economic development,” said Lisa Moreland Allred, who manages the program alongside Julia O’Hanlon, staff liaison to the Delaware League of Local Governments.
Fellows don’t just observe—they produce work that municipalities actually utilize. On any given day, students may be tasked with drafting policy documents, conducting fiscal and operational research, and developing strategic plans that shape how towns function, all while making meaningful contributions to their assigned cities and towns.
“All politics is local, as anyone who’s ever experienced a sewer backup can attest,” said Allred.
“We have a lot of small municipalities in the state that don’t have a lot of staff resources. This program helps support local governments while giving students hands-on experience. There’s often a lot of focus on federal and state management in the curriculum, but this is a way to expose students to very local Delaware-specific issues,” added O’Hanlon.
Making inroads and impact
That was precisely the experience for Kalmanowitz, a 4+1 public administration student, who spent last summer working in the City of Rehoboth Beach and in the Town of Millsboro during the summer of 2024. A typical day included everything from conducting compensation analyses to navigating constitutional questions at the local level.
But one Millsboro project had a lasting impact: drafting charter changes to redraw voting district boundaries to account for population growth. When he later became a Legislative Fellow, his charter changes appeared in the House of Representatives, and passed both the House and Senate, before it was signed by the governor: “So it’s now in law.”
As Kalmanowitz’s experience demonstrates, “UD’s programs allow students to build on their work from one role to the next while gaining a comprehensive understanding of how local and state governance intersect.”
“Delaware is super interconnected,” said Altman, a 4+1 public policy student and former fellow for the City of New Castle.
While working on an Emergency Operations Plan, she recalls how her supervisor reached out to Ocean View and Bethany to ask for their plans. “Even though it’s completely different towns and different populations, they face very similar issues,” said Altman.
Her path into the program began at a local networking event, where she met her soon-to-be supervisor, Antonina Tantillo. The program’s career pipeline came full circle last summer when Tantillo, now city administrator of New Castle and a former City Management Fellow herself, hosted Altman as her intern.
“A lot of people have aspirations to work at the federal or state level because they’re serving a huge population,” said Tantillo. “But the uniqueness of local government is that you are in that community day in and day out, and you can see the impact of your work. Not only did Sasha [Altman] help us with our emergency management plan, she got to see us work to develop and adjust that in real time.”
