Steve Sharkey
Steve Sharkey is the Director of the Department of Transportation. For more than a decade, he has worked to improve city government. Mr. Sharkey began his career as an intern and rose to become the Director of the Department of Transportation. During his tenure, Mr. Sharkey has served in a myriad of administrative capacities. Through careful administrative oversight, financial responsibility, and innovative executive management, Mr. Sharkey has made quantifiable improvements to the functionality of local government.
In his prior role as Director of the Department of General Services, Mr. Sharkey managed over three hundred employees while improving operational efficiency in fleet management, facilities maintenance, and capital design and construction. By initiating a bi-weekly accountability review with top managers, he has overseen a sixty-percent decrease in the building maintenance backlog and faster turnaround time for capital projects. By initiating better financial tracking measures, the agency has come in under budget three consecutive years. Under his leadership, DGS has focused on creating jobs for Baltimore’s youth by setting up partnerships with area trade high schools to help train and hire mechanics. Also, DGS has an innovative partnership with Code in the Schools, a local nonprofit, to help train data scientists for careers in city government.
Throughout his time working for the City of Baltimore, Mr. Sharkey’s efforts to improve government efficiency has garnered awards and attention locally and nationally. His accomplishments in graffiti removal were chronicled in The PerformanceStat Potential by Harvard Professor Bob Behn. He was named one of the Baltimore Business Journal’s top 40 leaders under 40-years-old and to the Maryland Daily Record’s VIP List. Mr. Sharkey was also a winner of the 2016 NextGen Public Service Award. As a result of his leadership, the Department of General Services has received awards from the Downtown Partnership and the Baltimore National Heritage Area.