POINT PLEASANT BEACH — In many workplaces, some employees, especially those who have been around for a long time, become fixtures of their offices as well as the communities they serve.
For many in Point Pleasant Beach, that person is Christine Riehl, the 40-year borough employee who simultaneously served as borough administrator, chief financial officer (CFO) from 2005 until her retirement on Tuesday.
Riehl recently sat down with The Ocean Star for a look back at some of the milestones of her career in Point Beach, starting from the end with how she made the decision to retire.
“I had thought that 40 years was a nice, round number — I’m still young enough to go live life and enjoy it, and Mayor (Doug) Vitale had asked me to give him a year when he came into office,” she said. “This will be a year-and-a-half, so I spoke with him and decided it was time.”
Born and raised in Point Beach as the second of five children — all daughters — Riehl grew up on Inlet Drive on the site that is now occupied by Captain Bill’s Landing. She said she first considered the option of working in municipal government while a senior at Point Pleasant Beach High School in 1985.
“My dad was a diesel boat mechanic with five daughters, so I was in all honesty looking at OCC (Ocean County College),” Riehl said. “But one of my business teachers, Mrs. Loughran…said, ‘You know, borough hall is looking for someone for a couple hours in the afternoon,’ literally just to make photocopies and do filing…I graduated high school in June and they said, ‘Do you want to stay part-time?’ So I did, because I didn’t have a plan.”
Within a month, she was offered a full-time position at the borough, becoming a data entry operator. When Riehl was asked whether she preferred a financial or clerical position in the borough, she chose finance, and went to Rutgers University, where she earned her four-year degree to become a certified municipal finance officer. When the tax collector retired in 1993, she went back to Rutgers for her tax collector certification. She took over that job in 1997.
“They interviewed me and they made a recommendation — they thought I would make a good fit with the finance combo and having been here and familiar,” Riehl said, “and in 2005 I was appointed borough administrator, and still have all three titles (borough administrator, chief financial officer, tax collector).”
Out of all the challenges Riehl as an employee faced over her 40 years with the borough, she said that Superstorm Sandy in 2012 was the most difficult, but also rewarding. Recalling previous hurricanes, nor’easters and snowstorms that hit the area during her tenure, Riehl said they paled in comparison to Sandy.
“Sandy was, by far, the most challenging and the most rewarding (event) I would say,” she said. “I had never had destruction of that magnitude before…Sandy was total destruction. At the end of the day, we were at a little more than $10 million in repairs…A huge shout-out goes to the public works department, superintendent John Trout, engineer Ray Savacool. Without my employees and staff, it would have been so much more difficult; but I would say that was probably one of the biggest accomplishments — bringing the town back to some sort of normalcy.”
“With Hurricane Sandy, I had never worked with the Red Cross and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and they swooped in. First and foremost, safety was everybody’s issue,” said Riehl. “We had to get the streets cleared. There were wires down…We set up almost daily meetings of the borough council. At the same time, I had staff that had been affected as well — were they OK?”
“It was all hands on deck,” she said. “On the CFO side, I was worried about how much money this was going to cost. There’s particular procedures for procurement, and that was all out the window. FEMA was like, ‘If you need it and you can rent it, rent it; if you need it and can’t rent it, buy it.’”
This is an excerpt of the print article. For more on this story, read The Ocean Star—on newsstands Friday or online in our e-Edition.
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