Lakesite Names New City Manager

Headshot of Kirsten Ert (Courtsey: Bridgett Raper/Small Cities Coalition of Hamilton County)

LAKESITE, Tenn (WDEF)- The Lakesite Board of Commissioners has named a new city manager after an unanimous vote on Tuesday evening.The new city manager is Kirsten Ert, who previously held the position of senior community planner for the City of Collegedale. In that role she served as the city liaison for all planning and community development projects and programs.

She is a native of Germany and graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2014. While in Hawaii she worked for the Hawaii Legislature as a Senate Research Coordinator. After moving to Chattanooga she got her Master’s in Public Administration and worked at Chattanooga State in the Center for Academic Research and Excellence.

Ert is replacing the retiring Dr. David Edwards who will retire in June after serving in the position for 30 years.

David Howell, the mayor of Lakesite, issued the following statement.

“Lakesite has been extremely fortunate that for the last 30 years we’ve had an excellent city manager running our city like Dr. David Edwards. He has fundamentally changed Lakesite for the good and his impact will be felt forever. I personally have been very blessed to work alongside him for the last 14 years and it’s with a heavy but appreciative heart that I wish him an amazing retirement and I will forever call him a friend. With that said, the business of Lakesite must go on and we are super excited that after a long nationwide search we were able to find such an excellent candidate in Kirsten Ert to begin a new era in Lakesite and take our community to the next level. She is extremely qualified and Lakesite is very blessed to have been able to hire such an outstanding city manager and I can’t wait to see what our future holds.”