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Norfolk — Kristen Lentz was the face of one of those often-faceless parts of city government that residents rely on every day.
She spent 19 years at the helm of Norfolk’s Department of Utilities, its first female director, managing a water system serving nearly 1 million people across the region.
Norfolk officials credit her with enhancing and expanding the city’s utilities operations, from updating old infrastructure to inking major new water deals.
They also point to her as the reason Norfolk’s residents didn’t have to boil water in the weeks after Hurricane Isabel devastated the region. Her foresight to get generators in place for water treatment plants meant that even without power, water customers would be served.
Friends and colleagues remember her as a self-depreciating leader who not only took a great amount of pride in keeping residents’ sinks and showers running, but who imparted a personal touch to an often impersonal fact of life.
Lentz died Jan. 7 after a lengthy battle with cancer. She was 63.
Lentz had passions for literature, travel, and being out and about in the community. Old Dominion University football games became a favorite, even though she was still occasionally fuzzy on the rules, her sister Marina Murphy said.
The oldest of four girls, Lentz was among the first women to graduate from ODU’s engineering program.
She had the mathematical mind — meticulous and exacting — but defied the stereotype of the aloof or impersonal engineer.
“She was genuinely interested in people. She had a way of talking to people that kind of drew them out,” Murphy said. “She was like the queen of the thank-you note. She would write thank-you notes for everything, from dinners at your house, to ‘thanks for being my sister.’”
In a field more often associated with infrastructure and water quality, that ability to connect would prove invaluable in Lentz’s career.
Bob Carteris, who was Lentz’ number two in the utilities department and is heading the department for now, remembered her as a boss who went the extra mile to know her staff.
“She had a one-on-one meeting with every employee who started at utilities to get to know them. She took detailed notes and took pictures of them, and they went into her book, because she wanted to know them,” he said.
Wynter Benda, the chief deputy city manager who oversees utilities, said Lentz’s knack for the personal was particularly integral for one big piece of city business: a 40-year, $225 million water deal with the city of Virginia Beach.
“Virginia Beach wasn’t necessarily always warm and fuzzy about it,” Benda said. “It was Kristen’s relationship with Tom (Leahy, Virginia Beach’s utilities director) that established trust between the cities and forged us forward.”
Leahy, the now-retired utilities head for Virginia Beach, got to know her well over nearly 20 years as each other’s counterparts.
When the water deal was being negotiated, her integrity was critical, he said.
“The cities were always partners, but there are a lot of negotiations that are adversarial,” Leahy said. “Kristen was one of the few people that I so trusted that whatever she told me, I’d take back and pass it on as fact. Not one time was I let down in that trust.”
Lentz’s dedication to her job — providing safe and clean water to hundreds of thousands of people without disruption for nearly two decades — led Norfolk’s City Council to posthumously rename a water treatment plant near her beloved Old Dominion University in her honor.
Mayor Kenny Alexander also announced the city would be setting up an internship in her name for young women studying engineering.
“She entered a field dominated by men and she excelled,” Alexander said. “She outpaced them and outran them and accomplished so much for our city.”
Alice Kelly, a longtime friend, said Lentz had been adamant about helping people along in their careers, mentoring and giving advice, particularly to young women.
“One thing she did like to do was encourage women in fields that were male dominated, and made sure females knew how to work in that field to succeed,” Kelly said.
Kelly knows because she was one of those women, way back when.
She worked under Lentz for several years at the city, eventually succeeding her as assistant director of public works when Lentz became the head of the utilities department. Kelly eventually rose to the director of finance in Norfolk before going to do the same job in a couple of other cities in Hampton Roads.
Murphy said her sister graduated into a world far different than today and never forgot how difficult breaking in had been.
“Men didn’t necessarily want women in the workplace and certainly not in engineering,” Murphy recalled.
But Lentz refused to hold a grudge. Murphy said her sister would invoke the adage, “you’ll never know how small the world is until you burn a bridge.”
As she climbed the ranks in the city, Lentz ended up working alongside some of those same men who had treated her badly in the early years of her career because of her gender.
“It speaks to her social skills too that she could walk that tightrope,” Murphy said. “That took a lot. Navigating that dance for my generation of women was not easy.”
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But navigate she did, to the top of her field. Many remembered Lentz as supremely capable and confident, but never to the point of hubris.
“There wasn’t any kind of bravado you had to get by. She was very down to earth, very professional, very confident in her abilities so she didn’t have to put on any kind of show for people,” said Leahy, the former Virginia Beach utilities head.
Benda, the deputy city manager, said she had no problem setting her superiors straight.
“While always respectful, she didn’t have any problem telling them they were wrong. She never minced words,” Benda said.
Lentz would occasionally preface such straight talk with “I may get in trouble for this, but …”
Benda said she never did.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com