- April 28, 2024
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Jan 29, 2013, EDITOR'S NOTE: The funeral mass for Dennis W. Cross will be celebrated 11 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 2, by Father John McElroy, at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church on Belle Terre. Cross' ashes will be interred into the Columbarium following the service. The family will be available in the church to greet Cross' friends and well-wishers one hour before the service. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Autism speaks at http://events.autismspeaks.org/tributes/denniscross OR The Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust at www.cst.dav.org.
Dennis Cross joined the Air Force three days after high-school graduation. He hasn’t stopped working since.
In the backyard of Palm Coast City Council District 3 candidate Dennis Cross’ two-story Grand Haven home, past the lanai and the landscaping, is a boat, floating on the water.
Cross laughs, with a slight roll of his eyes, when he admits that he never, ever takes it off the dock.
“I was one of those dumb workaholics,” he said. “And I always told myself, ‘When I retire, I’m going to have a boat in my backyard.’”
Now he has one. But as he describes his 30-year career with AT&T, his childhood as an orphan and his love of sports, it becomes evident: He never really wanted a boat. What he wanted was the boat’s symbol, to be the kind of man who goes out on the water and takes it easy.
But that just isn’t him, even in retirement, at the age of 77.
“A lot of times, people don’t really have a great love for people who live in gated communities,” he said. “Somehow, they have a notion that (their) life has always been blessed.”
For Cross, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
When he was 7 years old, his parents died in a shooting, which he witnessed. He moved in with relatives but, being a person who has never cared for the word, ‘No,’ he developed behavioral problems and was sent to an orphanage.
At 15, he believed outhouses, not boats, were a normal backyard amenity. He didn’t have a home water heater until he was 17.
Post-game hot showers were why he says he initially joined the high-school baseball, basketball, football and track teams, but over time, athletics became an outlet through which he handled stress and regained a sense of control over his life.
“It’s not competitive anymore, but it’s just a healthy lifestyle — and I like that,” he said of his weekly bicycle rides down to the public courts to shoot hoops.
Three days after graduating from high school, Cross joined the U.S. Air Force, where he worked as a cryptographer, decoding enemy Morse code. He also made the unit’s traveling basketball team.
After that, he used his veterans benefit to attend the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in geophysics and held three jobs, as a TV station’s wiring technician, a janitor and a cab driver.
Soon after, he landed at AT&T, and worked his way up to director of operations, where he eventually led a workforce of 1,700 and an annual budget of $175 million. Every three years, he was sent to new, struggling locations, and tasked with turning them around.
“I was given more opportunities to fail than I was probably entitled to,” he said. But failing was never an option.
He once took a location from the worst in its surrounding four states to the best in seven regions, and then the best in the country. He has worked with the FBI, in intercepting terrorist communications. He has reduced overdue account balances by more than $80 million.
By every third year at a new location, Cross says his goal was to become unnecessary. Year 1: identify problems; 2: implement solutions; then in Year 3, he would “feel wasted.”
That meant that he was doing his job.
Through sports and business, Cross realized that, despite his childhood issues, he genuinely loved people; he just didn’t love being told what to do.
“You can never overwork me,” he said. “Just don’t tell me how to do it.”
Cross was also elected to an Illinois city council in the 1970s. In three years, the city in which he ran had doubled in size, but all residentially. Looking back at his tenure there, he takes pride in knowing he helped in building the area’s commercial economy; a 100-acre enclosed mall was constructed soon after he left office.
“That’s what I like about municipal (government),” he said. “You can actually see something happen … and it stays long after you’re gone … There’s nothing glamorous about these jobs at all. You find different ways to take your satisfaction from it.”
Not long after retiring to Flagler in 1999, though, Cross started feeling the itch to get back involved.
“You can only play so much basketball and golf,” he joked.
He admits that it’s been an interesting re-integration. Early in his campaign, he rallied against redistricting plans which pulled him from the running. More recently, he fought for candidate tents at the Creekside festival.
He says that he has been told he “attracts lightning.” But the electricity only fuels him.
“If they want a good battle, I’ll give them a good battle,” he said. “Again, that’s what this campaign is about.”
Q&A
NAME: Dennis Cross
AGE: 77
FAMILY: wife, Bonnie; two sons, seven grandchildren
CAREER: 30 years in technical and management positions with AT&T
POLITICAL EXPERIENCE: 1972 to 1974 on the Bloomingdale, Ill., City Council; 2005 to 2010 on the Board of Supervisors for the Grand Haven Community Development District
QUIRKY FACT: Holds the record for the Grand Haven Olympics by making 10-for-10 free throws
Does the city government act under the same fiscal realities as private businesses do? Is the city budget as lean as it should be? If not, what specific changes would you make?
It doesn’t operate under all business concepts, and in many ways, it doesn’t have to. But good, sound business practices should be employed. Everybody who thinks you can run a city like a business isn’t 100% correct.
I don’t think the budget has been scrubbed. I see pockets of funds, some of which is good financial planning: You create a few reserves. I think this city has quite a few reserves ...
For years, we’ve had a half-cent sales tax for repaving roads, and we were repaving 50 miles a year. We no longer needed to repave 50 miles a year, but we were doing it … At many of my meet-and-greets, I had people say to me, “Why are we repaving my road? My road doesn’t need it” …
I don’t pretend to know it all … but this is where you need to get on the inside and analyze it … I don’t think this city is lean and mean at all …
In every organization I ever headed up, I had formal cost-reduction programs and incentives. If someone could save me $100,000, I gave them a $5,000 incentive reward. These programs are top down and bottom up.
You tell me one person who’s doing a job who didn’t know how to do that job better than how his supervisor explained how to do it a year or two years ago … I think this city has to come up with formally recognized cost-reduction programs … There are a lot of ways to (make things more efficient) … So, in one sense you can’t run it as a business, but you can use sound business practices ...
What are the biggest obstacles to economic recovery in Palm Coast? What can you, as a City Council member, do to remove those obstacles?
The biggest obstacle is jobs. What can the council do to help remedy that? First of all, government doesn’t create jobs. You have to create an environment where businesses feel welcome and where, once they’re started, they don’t feel abandoned. And I think that starts right at the front door of your City Hall ... You have to develop some customer relations skills …
You take those key interface positions in the city, and you make sure they’ve had the benefit of customer-relations training, so they know how to defuse and rationalize, because that’s your image. And when you’re all finished with it, you need to go find the person who’s going to fix it …
If I was going to pass out pats on the back, that’s it — the Business Assistance Center. That is a workable plan ... A guy comes in with a business plan, and he needs financing. One guy looks over the business plan, fine-tunes it, and they go the bank. And hopefully if we get our $50,000 or whatever from Enterprise Flagler, we can do our loan guarantee …
That’s what you can do. But anybody who wants to put all their eggs in the basket that we’re going to attract one large company in here — folks, that doesn’t happen overnight. And the cost to create those jobs is what, $20,000 a job?
We have this massive unemployed workforce. And are they all holding their breath to go back into the construction business? Because they better not be. What you’ve got to do is get those people in some of the technical schools …
The existing businesses are already here. They’ve made the investment. Let’s do all we can to help them. That’s the person who, when he wants to grow his business, I want to make sure he understands where to go …
Someone has to pay for the lighting and striping of athletics fields. Should the users of the fields pay the bills, or the taxpayers as a whole?
The predominance should be the taxpayers, but every user organization has to pay something. And this whole controversy, I approach it this way: You really ought to step back and ask what your objective is. And, to me, what’s happening is wrong. The objective should be to keep every kid we can engaged in some type of athletic activity so he isn’t out there trying to find a way to be a nuisance.
So, if I’m going to spend taxpayers’ money, I want it to go toward that objective. And if the objective is to get more kids to participate, why then would I put fees on that to restrict it? …
I would take that right back to the Leisure Services Committee, and I would take every one of those volunteers, and I would assign them a time and say, “You make your case.” Make them part of the solution ...
I don’t want to argue about whether it’s $25 or $40, I want to see what I can do to get more kids involved …
And I want to put some of this on the volunteers. Where were you when the Leisure Services Committee was asking for input? And I don’t appreciate some of (the volunteers) coming in and threatening people, either. That’s great for your neighbors and friends, but if you want to accomplish something (that’s not helpful).
Hypothetically speaking, if the research and data lead to conclusion A, but some residents are vocal that they want conclusion B, what is your responsibility as a City Council member?
If my data or my logic or my rationale or my thinking tell me one thing, and a lot of people want to parade into the podium and do some screaming and shouting, I don’t listen to them.
When the company transferred me from Illinois to Wisconsin, the local newspaper did a little write-up and said one thing they liked about me that would be missed was that even though I ran with a party, I didn’t vote party lines and I didn’t acknowledge every irritated resident. And it was noted that quite often, I could be very abrupt with them …
I would challenge people and say, “Now, you haven’t really thought that through, have you?” I like people, but I don’t like unreasonable people.
When you sit on the council, watch the expression on the council’s faces: When you get up there and scream and shout and wear the shirts and all that crap, you just ticked them off even more.
In the Grand Haven CDD, that’s how people characterized me. You want me to do more maintenance on the croquet courts? “I’m spending $28,000 on maintenance on the croquet courts now for 75 people already. No! You’re not getting any more.” I can be very blunt.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want input. I’ve had people come to podiums with the greatest ideas in the world. And then I admit to being a thief. If anybody’s got a good idea, I steal it.
If you elected me, you must have elected me because you thought I had some common sense. And if I make my decision on that, and you haven’t been able to convince me to do differently — if you convince me, that’s fair, but if you just want to come in here to scream and shout, no.
