David Callahan is Kootenai County's new director of community development. A San Antonio native, Callahan started work here in November of last year after holding a similar position in Fort Morgan, Colo.

If you had it to do over, what would you do with your life?

I'd be a jazz pianist. Jazz is one of the art forms that is cerebral while being all at once emotional. It can reach people in a way that gets to them on multiple levels.

After high school, I was already in the jazz program at University of Texas, Austin, when I realized I had to switch careers. When I saw talent like Lyle Mays and others of that caliber barely eking out an existence, I realized there was some real competition out there and that I wasn't really that talented. I decided that my strengths were in other areas.

How did you learn about landscape architecture as a possible career?

I had some vocational counseling while I was in junior college and that was when the idea of landscape architecture first popped up.

At the same time, my best friend was at Texas Tech and Texas Tech, as it turned out, also had a good landscape architecture program. Oh, and I wanted to get as far away from home as I could and still stay in Texas.

Sounds like the educational equivalent of the trifecta. Do you think you made the right choice?

In the end, I was thrilled with the idea of being a designer. I was at the top of my class and very good at it. It was something entirely new and I positively sank into it and embraced it. I figured I would be a practicing landscape architect for the rest of my life.

What do landscape architects do?

Well, architects do buildings; planners do the entire layout of the community and landscape architects do the space between buildings, be it rural or urban.

If you're doing a boulevard design, say, you would have to work with transportation engineers; understand the challenges that come with traffic volume; learn the parameters of the project and work through all that to know which plant materials would best serve the project in terms of things like visual delight and providing shade or no shade. To the average citizen, bare concrete is not very attractive.

Why has landscape architecture become increasingly popular in recent years?

It's a program that has gained traction with the advent of ecological programs and people becoming more concerned about the environment.

But what drives landscape architecture is the availability of projects. The landscape architect is solely dependent on the client - they can only do what the client's willing to pay for.

What makes you, a landscape architect, different from the professionals you've just described?

As a planner I can, for example, do a single ordinance that can affect the lives of many.

Now that I know all I know about the profession, I'd still want to be a planner. In my view, a meaningful life means I made a useful, constructive difference to the benefit of others.

Can you tell me in one sentence what you do for a living?

I do a lot of problem solving.

Community development includes things like long-range planning, current planning, building inspection and code enforcement for the county.

Community development nomenclature has changed in the last decade. It encompasses a broader view of things. We want to make sure people realize there's more to growing a community in a way that's productive and safe and efficient than merely enforcing rules.

Our jobs here are about growing Kootenai County in a way that balances the natural beauty we have here with the necessity of development and growth.

So, what is the power of the planner's job?

The planner's job is to find the values and aspirations of the community and meld that with health, safety and welfare. Yes, I have some authority involving growth and development in the county for regulating how things are built, but I don't think of it in terms of my having power.

The other way to look at that is that the "director" part of my title has to do with providing direction to staff.

What about your staff? How big is it?

We have 22. There are a lot of good, hard-working and brilliant people in my group. When people ask about past accomplishments, it's always easy to point to something like projects or ordinances. For me, though, the best accomplishment is when the people I work with say, "He's the best boss I've ever had."

I'm looking forward to working with this group to become the best public service entity we can be so that people find us useful and practical.

To the extent I can make people feel more comfortable with their government, I will feel I've achieved something useful.

What are some of the challenges you're looking ahead to in the near future?

We still need to rewrite the development code - to streamline it, eliminate conflicts, add intelligibility and make it practical.

The biggest problem overall is that it creates circumstances that make it hard for our staff to enforce it fairly because you have to make so many interpretations with all the various codes.

How about the comprehensive plan?

Part of the code rewrite is merely streamlining and that's just writing. A much broader and more difficult issue is that some of the zoning districts don't embrace the ideas in the comprehensive plan and so they don't implement them.

A lot of zoning codes date back to the 70s and don't reflect today's comprehensive plan. In this county, the way planning works is the comprehensive plan is the broad-brush view of how the community ought to grow and develop. It's both a values exercise and a physical map.

Here we have the predicament that the comprehensive plan hasn't been implemented - the last one was adopted in 2010 - and the problem is that the zoning, subdivision and other developmental regulations aren't yet tied into it in a meaningful way. The zoning code, for example, has had 130 amendments to it since the 1970s.

How does a new code get implemented?

The community development staff is responsible for getting the document produced. The planning commission has been extraordinarily helpful in drilling down through policy issues. Of course, it is the County Commissioners who make the final decision in these matters.

Do you enjoy your job?

It gives me cause to get out of bed - it's the motivating factor that is all at once exhilarating and terrifying.

I'm an introvert at heart and it's terrifying to be in the public limelight.

And looking ahead five years?

I'm old enough to have learned that the vicissitudes of life often intervene and it's not always useful to predict where I think I'll be physically or emotionally or any other way in five years. What is useful to me is staying focused on a meaningful life. For me that means knowing that at the end of the day my work mattered to others.