City Hall Financial Job Dream Come True

4-9-10

Opportunity Exciting For Meg Hungerford

By LAURA COX


Even while growing up on a farm just over the Delaware County line, Meg Hungerford was always “playing bank.”
“I always knew what I wanted to do,” she said Monday, April 5, the day before Common Council was expected to appoint her permanently to the job of city chamberlain.  “I get excited to go through numbers and have them come out right in the end,” said Hungerford.
After a retirement, two new hires and two resignations, City Hall must be equally excited about having its top financial position filled with a candidate who has been proving what she can do since her provisional appointment last September.
A 1997 SUNY Oneonta graduate, Hungerford earned an associate’s degree in business management and a bachelor’s degree in accounting while a bank teller at Sidney Federal Credit Union in Oneonta.
Since, she has been an auditor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, worked for the state Comptroller’s Office and most recently has been consulting for municipalities.
Hungerford launched her consulting business when she and her husband Randy  started their family. They have two daughters, Morgan, 8, and Jillian, 6, and a son Jesse, 2. The family resides in East Meredith.
Hungerford said she was attracted to the position – left vacant by longtime city chamberlain David Martindale when he retired after 22 years of service in June of last year – because she liked the idea of being able to focus on one municipality.
“I didn’t know Dave Martindale was retiring,” she said, but caught up to the news on reading a news story about his first replacement resigning.  “I thought it was for me.”
Hungerford was hired on as deputy city chamberlain last September, then elevated to full-time city chamberlain in a provisional capacity in November until she completed a required exam. The Common Council passed a local law in September removing the residency requirement for the job, so that wasn’t an obstacle.
 “The job is what I expected. This is what I’ve done; it’s what I do. I work with a great group of people and I am very fortunate Dave Martindale left things in a way that made it easy to come in and pick it up.”