He said Money magazine's recent listing of Norman as No. 6 among "Best Small Cities to Live" hasn't hurt though.

"It absolutely helps with recruiting," Lewis said.

And that detail about not having sold his Missouri house yet.

"It's a challenge, but it has worked out in previous moves and we believe it will work out this time as well," Lewis said.

Stormwater planning has occupied a lot of his attention, with creation and implementation of a stormwater master plan as a requirement of the Environmental Protection Agency for cities of more than 100,000.

"We have the data. We have a plan. We are going to be looking at anywhere between $80 (million) and $90 million worth of needed stormwater improvements and we are going to have to find a way to fund those," Lewis said, including certain improvements that are unfunded federal mandates.

"We've said it is our intent at some time to take it back to the voters for their consideration. But obviously during that same process, we're going to be looking at different revenue sources," he said. "We are going to be looking for federal assistance where appropriate. We are going to be looking at a stormwater utility. And we may be looking at other combinations -- general obligation bonds to pay for some key projects within that package. So this issue didn't occur overnight and it's going to take some time to resolve it."

When Lewis was hired, several members of the business community on the citizen committee urged him to make the city easier to work with.

"What we've done for about the past about three months, is that we as a city staff have been meeting on a weekly basis with all of our division managers that are responsible for the development review process. They are involved in our building inspection program, plat review, anything having to do with development," he said.

The group has been looking at best practices and how to streamline the development review process.

"We are looking at ways to improve our existing systems in order to be more customer-friendly," Lewis said. "Good development review processes require a good working relationship ... between the owners, the applicants within the process, with the city and then with the design professionals and by that I mean the local architects and engineers who represent these applicants. So we've been looking at the whole process and where we can improve."

He said the city needs to do a better job of explaining current rules and requirements and provide checklists to applicants, so that everybody knows up front what is needed.

"You want to build a meeting of the minds early in a project's life. And if you've got that meeting of the minds between the applicant and the city, and the applicant's engineer or the architect, projects go much smoother," Lewis said. "So we've really felt that working on our processes will help people have a better experience."

Another challenge is keeping the Robinson Street underpass project on track. Environmental approvals have been received from the state and federal government.

"I know that people in the community are saying, we voted on that project some years ago, now let's see some construction. We did just this past summer really pass a key phase when we received all our environmental clearances from both the state and the feds," he said.