Kathy Uhrig is a realtor by training. But in her role as a real estate services agent for the City of Austin, she wears many hats: innovator, mentor, educator and more.
And according to her co-worker, Deb Cohen, who nominated Uhrig for AFSCME’s Never Quit Service Award, she is also a magician, creating order out of chaos.
On paper, Uhrig’s job might sound straightforward.
Let’s say a property owner wants to put a bike rack or a bench on a city street. Because they want to build on what’s called a public right-of-way, they need to contact Uhrig’s office.
Uhrig and her small team’s job is to review and process these requests, ensuring everything is complete, accurate, and clearly marked, before giving the applicant the green light.
But things get tricky when you want to install a tower crane that sweeps over hundreds of feet of public space, or an underground parking garage that covers critical utility lines or fiber optic cables.
Making Uhrig’s job even more challenging is the fact that her team is extremely short-staffed. There are only a few people to handle the influx of requests for a city that is busting at its seams.
Yet in the five years that Uhrig, a member of AFSCME Local 1624, has worked for the City of Austin, she’s been “doing the job of multiple people,” according to Cohen.
Not only does Uhrig do her own job — a process that involves poring through county records, plan sets, and other required documentation (some quite technical) and getting approvals from dozens of stakeholders — but she’s taken it upon herself to streamline her entire division.
“She created or helped create workflows for everyone on my team and for all our processes,” says Cohen. “There’s more work than we can possibly do. But she still volunteers for everything, even though we’re drowning.”
That includes improving the website that her customers use (before Uhrig’s arrival, applications were still asking for floppy disks), helping out other city departments, conducting interviews, hosting trainings to walk clients through the new processes, and much more.
Under her leadership, their backlog has been cut by more than half.
“She amazes me,” says Cohen. “She’s unbelievable. “She puts her heart and soul into everything she does.”
Uhrig says she tends to be an outspoken leader, always trying to innovate and improve things.
But she would not have accomplished all that she has “if it wasn’t for the team supporting me. Our team doesn’t say, ‘That’s not my job.’ We say, ‘What do you need? How can I help?’”
Uhrig says her training as a realtor drives her to provide the best service to her customers. She knows how complex and expensive building something can be.
“I know the pressure and the cost. I’ll tell people: ‘Let’s talk through it.’ We can work together. It calms them down. They’re not on their own. I problem solve with them.”
She says she often receives thank you letters from developers or builders, expressing their appreciation for improving the licensing process — even when they don’t get approved.
“It makes me feel better that it’s not such a scary process for them.”
While her workload remains hectic, Uhrig doesn’t have any plans of shedding the many hats she wears. In fact, she wouldn’t have things any other way.