Philadelphia Managing Director Adam K. Thiel, a top mayoral appointee who supervises many of the government’s day-to-day operations, is resigning from his job in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration, the mayor announced Tuesday.
Parker said Thiel is leaving his city role to “reenter the private sector” after serving as managing director for about 2½ years.
Thiel will be replaced by Carlton Williams, a longtime city official who currently leads the Philadelphia Office of Clean and Green Initiatives. Williams, 57, will assume oversight of a 550-person staff and a vast portfolio of city operations, including health agencies, homeless services, the streets department, parks and libraries, prisons, and the fire department.
Parker praised Williams’ work implementing new initiatives such as twice-weekly trash collection, and she called him “the individual with all of the attributes the position requires.”
“Whenever we’ve had a crisis of any kind in this city, he has been on my speed dial,” she said.
The transition, Parker said, will take place over the next “four to six weeks.” It was not immediately clear who will lead the Philadelphia Office of Clean and Green Initiatives.
Thiel, 54, has been the city’s managing director since Parker took office in January 2024. Prior to being appointed to the role, Thiel spent eight years as the city’s fire commissioner under former Mayor Jim Kenney.
In the early days of Parker’s tenure, Thiel emerged as a key crisis manager, often flanking the mayor when she responded to emergencies. He was the face of the administration’s strategy in Kensington, where Parker campaigned on ending the sprawling open-air drug market that has persisted in the neighborhood for decades.
His office also played a critical role in preparing for an array of major events that the city hosted this summer, including FIFA World Cup games and events related to the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.
Details of Thiel’s new job were not immediately clear. He is a major in the Army Reserve, and he has worked as a consultant and an adjunct professor, in addition to his role as managing director. His city salary is $310,000, and last year, he made more than half a million dollars in additional income through his other jobs, according to his financial disclosure.
Since Thiel joined the Reserve in August 2024, he has been one of the administration’s least visible senior officials and was frequently on leave. He did not oversee the response to a January snowstorm that was the city’s worst in five years — despite emergency services falling under his purview — and parts of the Kensington strategy are now led by other offices.
The Inquirer reported in February that Thiel was absent for a total of about five months last year. Of that, six weeks were for military leave — the maximum the city covers for employees — and an additional 13 weeks were for general paid leave, according to city records obtained by The Inquirer. A spokesperson for Thiel said he used most of that time off for military service.
Thiel refused to discuss his role in the Army Reserve with The Inquirer. A spokesperson for the Army said Thiel is a major assigned to a civil affairs unit based in Staten Island, N.Y. Last year, the Army Reserve paid Thiel about $32,600, according to his financial disclosure paperwork.
In addition to his jobs with the city and the Army, Thiel has worked on the side as a consultant. Last year, he earned $390,000 as president of Pantheon Global Strategies, an opaque company with little in the way of an online footprint. Thiel has in the past refused to discuss the business in detail.
He also earned $120,000 last year from FACETS Consulting LLP, an Arizona-based firm that is publicly advertised as a fire safety consultancy. Thiel is a founding partner.
Thiel has said his consulting work takes fewer than 10 hours per week and did not interfere with his responsibilities as Philadelphia’s managing director. When The Inquirer first reported on Thiel’s consulting work in 2024, he would not disclose his clients but said he followed the city’s ethics guidelines related to conflicts of interest.
Before coming to Philadelphia in 2016, Thiel worked in a variety of firefighting, disaster response, and emergency preparedness roles around the country, including as Virginia’s deputy secretary of public safety and homeland security.
He is the third top official to leave Parker’s administration since she took office in January 2024. Former chief deputy mayors Aren Platt and Sinceré Harris, the architects of Parker’s mayoral campaign, each left their posts for jobs in politics outside government.
In some administrations, the managing director has been the mayor’s clear No. 2, while other mayors have preferred for power to be concentrated among deputy mayors or other staffers in their office.
Under Parker, chief of staff Tiffany W. Thurman is seen as the mayor’s top adviser and the central figure in her administration. Parker has called Thurman her “chief air traffic controller.”
She has also placed the execution of much of her agenda on Williams’ shoulders. Earlier this year, he oversaw the city’s response to a major snowstorm, despite that work in the past falling squarely in the managing director’s scope.
Still, Thiel oversaw a large team, and the leaders of more than 30 city agencies and offices reported to him.
One of his major initiatives was coordinating the administration’s efforts to improve quality of life in Kensington. Thiel’s office worked to expand homeless shelter and recovery bed space throughout the city, and he led the development of the Riverview Wellness Village, a city-run recovery house in Northeast Philadelphia that dramatically grew the city’s capacity to house people with substance use disorder.
Initially, Thiel absorbed scrutiny from community groups and, at times, members of City Council. Lawmakers grilled Thiel on the efforts in Kensington, and they occasionally criticized what they saw as a lack of details coming from the Parker administration about the plan.
Despite those early hiccups, more than 200 people live at Riverview, which has been open to residents in recovery for more than a year.
“I’m grateful for what you did,” Parker told Thiel on Tuesday. “And I’m grateful that you had thick skin.”
And while the drug market in Kensington persists, there have been other markers of success in the neighborhood, including a plummeting shooting rate and a reduction in the number of people living on the street.
Williams recently toured parts of Kensington alongside Parker and other administration officials to get a sense of the challenges ahead. He said Tuesday that his goal is to be accessible to all residents and to look at the delivery of city services “through the eyes of everyday residents.”
“You just don’t take these jobs because of the glamour,” he said. “You take the job because you believe that you can make a change.”
Staff writer Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.
