Brookfield has promoted two of its employees within the village manager’s office — one to a new position for the village.
Bob Uphues was promoted July 29 to Brookfield’s communications and marketing manager, making him the first person to serve in the new role. Uphues joined Brookfield as its management analyst in December after leaving the Landmark last August, having covered and opined on the village for more than 20 years as the newspaper’s editor and main reporter.
To fill the vacancy left by Uphues, Brookfield promoted Noah Rife to be the village’s new management analyst the same day, Village Manager Tim Wiberg said. Rife joined the village in August 2022 as an administrative intern while pursuing a master’s degree in public administration from Northern Illinois University, which he obtained this year. Before that, he worked as an intern and, later, a clerk for the village of Rosemont and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Northeastern Illinois University, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Uphues said his new salary is about $73,000, a small jump from his $70,000 salary as management analyst, though Brookfield’s 2024 budget shows the village set aside $75,000 for a communication manager. Rife’s new salary is $63,000, Uphues said.
Now that Rife is no longer an administrative intern, Wiberg said Brookfield is looking to take on another in the near future; he said the village would prefer a student from NIU, like Rife, but that dwindling cohort numbers mean staff are looking at other schools in the area to find potential interns, too.
A new role
Wiberg said Uphues’ new position came about as a result of inefficiencies and errors in Brookfield’s external communications that he had noticed since joining the village in 2018, as each village department had been responsible for communicating its own programs and initiatives to residents.
“As village manager, I would say, ‘Oh, we have a parks program. Parks [and Recreation], you guys have to make sure you publicize this,’” Wiberg said in a phone interview Tuesday. “There was no one person, which often meant that I was finding that things were falling through the cracks, and then I’d find out through somebody calling me or emailing me, saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t know anything about this!’”
He said that appointing one communications manager who keeps tabs on all of the village’s projects will allow Brookfield to “increase the breadth and the scope of our outreach to educate the public on various things going on.”
Wiberg said the village has sought to hire a communications and marketing manager since the end of last year, when funding for the manager’s salary was approved as part of Brookfield’s 2024 budget. He said the time was right for Brookfield to look at hiring for the position after having brought in Public Works Director Vincent Smith and Community Development Director Libby Popovic over the past year and transitioned them into their roles.
Once Brookfield began to look for someone to fill the new role, Wiberg said officials began to see that Uphues was a natural fit, in part due to duties Uphues said he had assumed outside of the management analyst’s role when he first joined the village.
“I took on a lot of the communications. I assumed the role of putting the quarterly newsletter together, which gets sent out to all of the residents, and I also took on the responsibility of doing social media for the village,” Uphues said in a phone interview Tuesday.
“We’re a small enough and agile enough organization where I can easily identify the strengths of somebody, and [Uphues] kind of fit that niche for us since he had been here, certainly because of his work at the Landmark and his knowledge of the community,” Wiberg said. “He’s kind of, by de facto, been that person over the last few months.”
As a result, Wiberg said, Brookfield approached Uphues for the position without posting it online or opening it to external applicants, although he said the village did require Uphues to submit a resume and complete an interview for the job. Wiberg said the village underwent a similar process with Rife.
While Uphues had only been in his role for a week when he spoke to the Landmark, he said he’s already hit the ground running to help other village departments.
“I’m sort of starting to build out what this job is going to be. It’s going to be much of what I was already doing, but now I’m going to serve as a greater resource internally to all of the departments,” he said. “We’ve got a lot that we want to make sure people know about with respect to community development and economic development.”
He also said he would be working closely with the parks and recreation department to get out information about the renovations to Ehlert Park this year, which are now slated to be complete by the end of October, as residents have been “very interested in getting the nuts and bolts of what’s happening there.”
Uphues said his transition from management analyst to communications manager has gone smoothly, as he’s a recognized face around Brookfield.
“I knew so many people coming in. I’m very familiar with the village, having worked in it and interacted with so many people over the years,” he said. “I’m sort of a known presence within the community, so they’re comfortable interacting with me already. It’s been a pretty smooth transition, actually; it’s been an interesting and enjoyable change.”
