After 40 years of public service, Linda Bailiff reflects on her OHIO roots

After nearly 40 years of public service, Linda Bailiff celebrated her retirement from the Ohio Public Works Commission in November. Bailiff remembers her time at Ohio University as the starting point to her successful career.

Bailiff graduated from OHIO in 1987 with a Bachelor of Business Administration and Finance from the College of Business.

“I took every single political science course I could get my hands on,” Bailiff recalled. “I graduated in ‘87 and spent a year in the private sector when I realized that this was not what I am meant to do. I was just so passionate about public administration.”

She came back the next spring to pursue her master's in public administration under the guidance of Professor Mark Weinberg, a political science professor, who was later named the founding dean of the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. Bailiff credits much of her academic and professional success to his mentorship.

The two originally met during Bailiff’s undergraduate degree program, when she took his class on public budgeting. The two stayed close, even after Bailiff graduated, and frequently spoke on the phone. About a year after graduating, Bailiff called to tell him she was considering attending Miami University for a master’s degree in public administration.

“Mark said ‘That's not going to happen, I’ve got a deal for you,’” Bailiff said. “Mark opened the door for me to come back to OHIO. He thought I would be a perfect candidate for the MPA program. He said, ‘Come work for me and be a student.’ So, I did, I decided to go back, and it was the best two years of my life.”

Master's degree program led directly to her career

During the program, Bailiff interned with the Ohio Legislative Budget Office (LBO) in Columbus, who offered her a full-time job which she resumed upon graduation in 1990. Since then, she has served as a public servant in the Columbus metropolitan region.

“Working for LBO was truly the best way to start a career,” Bailiff said. “To know state government, you need to understand budgeting. That is the door to understanding how things work, why they work.”

Bailiff worked at LBO through three budgets and described the job as “very intensive.” Through the years, she interacted with a variety of boards and departments including public safety, agriculture and transportation.

“The deputy director of finance had asked me on three separate occasions to come to work for him over at the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), and the timing was just never right until the third time,” Bailiff said. “After three budgets, I was ready to go on to ODOT.”

Bailiff joined ODOT in 1997 as a policy analyst and was promoted in 2002 to administrator. At ODOT, she oversaw dozens of infrastructure projects and established a number of policies and procedures for local funding programs.

“Talk about another great opportunity and growth experience,” Bailiff said. “I learned so much and I enjoyed it, and I got a lot out of it, and I got a lot done.”

As administrator, Bailiff attended a variety of conferences, including OTEC, the Ohio Transportation Engineering Conference. It was at the 2007 conference that she was asked to interview for the administrator position at the Ohio Public Works Commission.

“I needed work-life balance desperately,” Bailiff said, recalling that, at the time, ODOT was going through major changes, and she needed a better schedule as a single mother. “OPWC said ‘We can give you flexibility and we can give you that balance.’ They knew exactly what to say.”

Bailiff worked as OPWC’s administrator for 11 years, where she provided recommendations to the Ohio Small Government Capital Improvements Commission and assisted with policy decisions and program representation.

Skills learned at OHIO were key throughout her career

“Then, the opportunity came up for the director, and I was actually eligible to retire at that point,” Bailiff said. “Then I started thinking about everything I would change and that needed to be done. And I thought, ‘I cannot pass this up.’”

Bailiff became the director of OPWC in 2019 and worked there until retiring in November. She continues to look back on her time at OHIO fondly, noting that what she learned as a student helped bring her to where she is now.

“What that degree gave me was critical thinking, problem solving and, of course, phenomenal communication skills,” Bailiff said. “It taught me teamwork, and it taught me how to think and be open minded.”

In 2023, Bailiff was awarded OHIO’s Outstanding State Government Alumni Award, which happened to be presented to her by her mentor, Mark Weinberg.

“I think mentorship is so very critical to success, because without that mentor I would not have had the journey and the experience that I had,” Bailiff said. “I owe Mark everything.”

Bailiff’s advice to students is to find their own version of Dr. Weinberg: “Find your champion, you're going to learn so much from them and have so many inroads by having a friendship with that champion.”