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When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stood in the city’s emergency management center last month and announced that her administration was preparing for the worst winter storm Philadelphia had seen in years, she was flanked by the police commissioner, the head of public schools, and a dozen other deputies.

Missing from the news conference of Philadelphia’s top officials was Managing Director Adam K. Thiel, whose job it is to oversee the delivery of city services.

It wasn’t the only time over the last year that Thiel, Philadelphia’s No. 2 public official, was noticeably absent.

Thiel, who is effectively the city’s chief operating officer, was out of office last year for a total of nearly five months, much of which he spent on military leave, according to 2025 payroll register records obtained by The Inquirer. His increasingly low profile in Philadelphia City Hall has generated frustration and fueled questions about his job performance among some lawmakers, especially as the city faced criticism over the recent snow cleanup.

Almost half of Thiel’s $316,200 city salary last year was for paid time off, according to payroll records. He is one of the highest-paid officials in the government and made more than Parker, who last year earned $280,000.

In addition to his top city role, Thiel is a major in the U.S. Army Reserves. He joined the reserves in August 2024, eight months after beginning his job as managing director.

Thiel also holds other positions outside government. In 2024, while he was managing director, he made more than $300,000 working as a consultant, according to financial disclosures. He is an adjunct faculty member at two universities and sits on several nonprofit boards.

Five City Council members told The Inquirer that it has been months since they interacted directly with Thiel.

“The managing director of the city is an extremely important job,” said Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, a Democrat from West Philadelphia. “I do not understand how someone who is absent as much as Thiel is able to carry out this job effectively.”

The administration declined requests to interview Thiel and Parker for this article. In a statement, Thiel thanked Parker for her “continued support of our city of Philadelphia employees who also serve the United States of America.”

Sharon Gallagher, a spokesperson for the managing director’s office, said in a statement that Thiel has been employed by the city for nearly 10 years and “earns leave offered by the city the same way as other city employees accrue vacation, sick days, family, medical, military and other leave categories.”

Payroll records show that Thiel logged six weeks of military leave time last year — the maximum amount the city offers employees. Gallagher said he also used 11 weeks of accrued vacation time to cover additional military assignments.

The administration declined to answer questions about Thiel’s military service, including details about his location and unit. His LinkedIn page says he “helps provide emergency management subject matter expertise to combatant commands and partner nations.”

Thiel is also founding partner of one consulting firm and the president of a second, though the specific nature of that work is not known and he has declined to disclose his clients publicly.

In 2024, Thiel said his consulting work took fewer than 10 hours per week. Gallagher said Tuesday that “nothing has changed” since then.

The Parker administration did not publicly announce when Thiel was on leave last year, but officials acknowledged it once asked by reporters last summer. At the time, Deputy Managing Director Michael Carroll filled in on an interim basis.

Thiel, 53, is a nationally recognized expert in emergency management. He held a variety of firefighting, public safety, and disaster preparedness roles across the country before coming to Philadelphia in 2016 to serve as fire commissioner and deputy managing director under former Mayor Jim Kenney.

Despite that, he did not appear alongside the mayor at multiple briefings the city conducted to update residents on the response to last month’s snowstorm. Instead, the face of the snow emergency response was Carlton Williams, the head of the city’s Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, a position Parker created.

Thiel said in a statement Tuesday that Williams was “the best choice to lead our city’s unified response to the recent snowstorm operation and is the right leader for future snow and ice events.”

Gauthier said the city’s handling of the storm “needed a higher-level emergency response.” She said while she respects Thiel’s military service, she raised his consulting work as a concern.

“A decision needs to be made what he wants to do. Does he want to serve locally, or does he want to do other things?” Gauthier said. “We need a managing director who will serve full time.”

The administration did not answer questions about whether Thiel was in town through the duration of the city’s 26-day winter emergency response.

Parker’s chief of staff, Tiffany W. Thurman, said in a statement that the city is proud to offer benefits such as military and administrative leave that support employee well-being and professional development.

Thurman said Thiel “is always reachable and fulfills the responsibilities of his position as needed based on the situation.”

“His leadership — as is the case with the leadership team of any large city — is not limited by time designated as leave,” she said.

The purpose of the Philadelphia managing director

The authors of the 1950s-era Philadelphia Home Rule Charter created the position of managing director to serve as a barrier between the mayor’s political appointees and the city’s operational departments.

The idea was that having a bureaucrat at the helm would ensure city service delivery would be apolitical, and the mayor cannot fire the managing director without cause.

In reality, different mayors have granted their managing directors varying levels of power.

For example, former Mayor Michael Nutter dispensed with decades of tradition and assigned robust portfolios to several deputy mayors. While his managing directors were important figures in his administration, they oversaw fewer operating departments than their predecessors.

Nutter’s first managing director, Camille Barnett, left the administration after facing criticism for going on a two-week vacation in 2009 while the Phillies made a World Series run and SEPTA workers went on strike.

Kenney, Parker’s immediate predecessor, sought to re-empower the city’s managing director position, while his deputy mayors took on advisory roles. He reassigned almost all departmental oversight to the managing director’s office.

“We’re going to have a managing director that’s actually a managing director,” Kenney said before he took office.

Council members who were in office before Parker’s 2024 swearing-in became used to the managing director being accessible. Several lawmakers said that under Kenney’s administration, they routinely communicated about constituent services matters with ex-Managing Director Tumar Alexander and his predecessor, Brian Abernathy.

That hasn’t been the case with Thiel in the role.

“Since the beginning of this administration, I have gone to Carlton Williams,” said Councilmember Jeffery “Jay” Young Jr., a freshman Democrat who represents parts of North Philadelphia.

Several other members said that instead of going to the managing director’s office, they take administrative needs to legislative affairs staff, agency heads, or Thurman.

“Almost everything goes through Tiffany, and she’s able to get things done,” said one Council member who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with the administration.

Parker doesn’t deny that little happens at the top rungs of city government without Thurman’s involvement. The mayor has come to see her chief of staff as the central figure in her administration and calls her the city’s “chief air traffic controller.”

Phil Goldsmith, who served as managing director for two years under former Mayor John F. Street, said Thiel’s minimized public role may be because Parker appears to favor “a very strong mayor’s office.”

“It seems to me that the managing director may have to go through more hoops to get things done than, for example, I had to do,” Goldsmith said. “That’s just a function of what a mayor wants and feels comfortable with.”

Fading out of public view

Thiel’s lack of public appearances over the last year has been unusual for a managing director.

It has been 10 months since he testified before City Council, despite the managing director in previous administrations being a mainstay in hearings to answer lawmakers’ questions about city services ranging from street repaving to emergency preparation.

And in December, when a half-dozen top Parker administration officials spoke during the mayor’s State of the City event, Thiel was not on the roster.

The decrease in visibility marks a departure from his first year in office, when Thiel had a more consistent public presence and was often seen beside the mayor.

Ahead of a snowstorm in January 2024, Thiel stood with Parker during a news conference about preparations. He donned a suit while snowflakes fell, and he reassured the city that the administration was ready for the service disruptions that bad weather can bring.

Through his first year in the position, Thiel also faced scrutiny as the face of some of the mayor’s most controversial initiatives.

He took a leading role in Parker’s efforts to end the open-air drug market in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, and he oversaw the development of the Riverview Wellness Center, a new city-owned recovery house for people with substance use disorder.

Today, much of Kensington initiative is overseen by the public safety director, who reports directly to Parker. A new head of community wellness is leading development at Riverview, and Williams was the face of the storm response.

Last summer, during the eight-day strike by municipal workers that brought city services to a halt for the first time in 40 years as trash piled on sidewalks and streets, Thiel initially spoke nearly every day at news conferences to update citizens on the crisis.

But by the time the strike was resolved, Thiel had faded from public view, departing from his city job for one of his stints on military leave. After Parker reached an agreement with the union, she held a news conference with 20 top deputies and thanked each of them by name.

Thiel, absent from the City Hall news conference, was not one of them.

Staff writers Ryan W. Briggs and Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.