“I realized early on in life that I see things from a broad perspective, and I enjoy seeing how all the dots connect,” says Paul Casey, who serves with passion as the city administrator for the City of Santa Barbara. “You can feel the immediacy of the things we do. It feels like you have more impact.”
Extremely easygoing, Paul has a perennially positive outlook. I’ve known him for about 15 years, and I don’t recall ever seeing him without a smile. He jokes a lot — when planning our lunch for this interview, for instance, this very public official quipped that he likes to “lay under the radar.”
He was born in Whittier and attended UC Irvine because “we’d always vacationed in Newport Beach every August.” He chose social economics as his major, for he’d been intrigued by “how economics can influence public policy and how cities grow.” He graduated first in his class. “I started hitting my stride, but I was trying to find my niche,” he says.