Steve Heide, is the Finance Director for Chino Valley Fire District and CSMFO’s 2020 President. He’s been a CSMFO member for 15 years and today shares memorable experiences and life lessons.

1. What is your favorite book, movie, or TV show and why?

Hawaii Life on HGTV. I’m dreaming that someday my wife and I might opt for the aloha life in retirement. One can dream…right??

2. How has a previous or current mentor impacted your career?

By encouraging my active involvement in CSMFO, mentors have very positively impacted my career in leading by example and urging me to get more involved. I’ve benefited so much through the professional and personal networks I’ve developed through this great organization.

3. What do you enjoy most about your job?

Working for a smaller government agency, I have the ability to be involved in lots of different projects and initiatives, which I find to be very rewarding.

4. Knowing what you know now, if you were new to government finance what would you do differently when you started your career?

I would have gone into local government finance sooner. I’m a CPA and I got my start out of college in public accounting, which provided a solid foundation for the beginning of my professional career. Going through school, I never thought I wanted to work for government, so it wasn’t until about mid-career that I was at the right place right time to transition into the government sector.

5. What is your current position and what do your children or friends think you do at work?

Finance Director. For the most part, my friends really don’t understand the special district form of government, so I think they struggle a bit in understanding what I do. As I meet new people outside of the government sector, I’ve found over the years that if I tell them I’m a CPA, they usually assume that I do income tax work, and we leave it at that.

My kids’ views have changed over the years. When they were young, my children used to ask me if I had a fun day at work with my friends, so I suppose they thought I played all day. As they’ve grown older, I think they better understand that it’s not all fun and games, plus my first born ended up going to work for a water district after college, so I guess that my public service role resonated with him on some level. However, it didn’t totally rub off on him since he chose not to pursue finance.

6. How do you keep up to date with upcoming regulations?

That’s an easy one. Not the keeping up with regulations part, but how I get up to date. I turn to my CSMFO network of peers and our commercial partners whenever I need to understand what’s happening in government finance and how that impacts my local government.

7. How do you motivate staff and yourself?

In our back office support-type roles, we don’t have a lot of direct contact with the public. However, our small finance department is tight knit, and we are motivated by the satisfaction of knowing that we’re actively contributing to the important public service mission of our fire district.

8. What has been the most challenging time in your finance career and how did you overcome it?

Prior to coming to work for the fire district going on 16 years ago now, I bounced around a bit working in a number of different industries after my first professional job working for a CPA firm. For the most part, I didn’t feel a great sense of accomplishment and fulfillment in those different roles. My challenge came in finding a career rather than just another job. Call it fate, divine intervention or luck, but I found my career working here, and the rest is history. God willing, I’ll finish out my career here at the fire district and retire, maybe to Hawaii, in a few years.

9. What is something about you that no one would ever guess or expect?

I wish I played minor league ball and I could only dream of playing three instruments. Instead, how about a year or so of childhood drum lessons which went nowhere and a couple of very humbling years of college baseball which also went nowhere before I finally hung up the glove and cleats for good? In addition to those claims to fame, I like to cook, and I like to shop.

10. What advice do you have for a CSMFO member on getting more involved with the organization?

#1, Get more involved. #2, See #1.

Trust me on this one, you’ll get more out of it than you put in, and active involvement in CSMFO will pay personal and professional dividends in so many fulfilling ways. If you’re having trouble figuring out what direction to go in with your desire to get more involved in CSMFO, reach out to your chapters leaders, our committee leaders or anyone on our board of directors and we’ll help in any way we can.