City Of Charlotte: Fast Five With Patrick Baker ...

Press release from the City of Charlotte:

Nicole Eaton

2/17/2022

Welcome to the first interview in the City of Charlotte’s Fast Five with Leadership series. In this series, you’ll learn more about the people who lead various parts of our organization and our organizational priorities.

This month, we caught up with City Attorney Patrick Baker.

City Attorney’s Office

From 1997 to 2018, I worked in the Durham City Government as an assistant city attorney, city manager and city attorney. Though I fully expected to retire with that organization, by 2018 with eight or so years until retirement, I felt like I had accomplished all I really could there during my 21-year tenure. When the Charlotte city attorney position came open that year, I felt that it represented the perfect opportunity to take my extensive municipal law and government experience and apply it in a substantially larger community with a more nationally recognized platform. Durham provided me with wonderful challenges and opportunities during my tenure there and I just felt the time was right to take on the challenges and opportunities here in Charlotte.

We are moving several high importance priorities forward together at once but the one that stands out to me the most right now is helping the organization better manage public records requests. I truly believe we can improve to best in class in a short period of time by implementing certain workflow adjustments and reducing redundancies.

As a relative newcomer to the team, I am quite impressed with the quality of the workforce at all levels of the organization. The organization is well respected in local government circles nationwide.

That’s a tough question because the answer is contingent on my mood at the moment. I really enjoy the entire food hall scene at Optimist Hall and my favorite restaurant there is Bao & Broth. The three Charlotte restaurants my wife and I frequent the most are Lang Van, Mama Ricotta’s and Brewers at 4001 Yancey. The crab cakes at LuLu’s bring me to tears as do the lobster rolls at The Waterman or Sea Level! I am leaving several great restaurants off the list. Needless to say, the food and beer scene in Charlotte is amazing!

This press release was produced by the City of Charlotte. The views expressed here are the author’s own.