Adam Cox served as the Chester Public Utility District's contract general manager, responsible for water, wastewater, and the community's fire and ambulance service.
Three weeks into the job, he discovered the fire department had been operating for five months without liability insurance, a lapse that had gone unaddressed until he found it. He stood the department down, restored coverage within a month, and reported the full story to the board and the community. That episode set the tone for the engagement: find the problem, fix it, and say so publicly.
The harder problem was structural. The district had been sustaining a full-time professional fire department on roughly two million dollars of borrowing from its own utility funds. Cox led two fire protection parcel tax measures, transitioned the department to a hybrid staffing model to keep it alive, and then negotiated the annexation that transferred fire and ambulance service to the Peninsula Fire Protection District, putting the service on a footing that will outlast any one budget. On the utility side, he inherited a state cease-and-desist order on the wastewater system, resolved the enforcement action through a negotiated settlement, and built the grant and planning pipeline that positioned the district for a $19 million state award, at 100 percent principal forgiveness, to fix the underlying problem. The district received clean audit opinions in every year of his tenure.