Donny Diaz, Operations Manager for Special District Services

Donny Diaz, Ave Maria’s Operations Manager a for Special District Services, overseeing the town’s public works. COURTESY PHOTOS

Donny Diaz may have been given a new title last October, but he is certainly not new to Ave Maria. As Operations Manager for Special District Services, he oversees public works for the town. This position feels almost like destiny for a property management professional who has been working here in one capacity or another since 2009. Although he lives in Lehigh Acres with his wife Jenny and teenagers Anthony and Mariah, he considers Ave Maria his second home.

Leading a two-person crew (soon-to-be three), Diaz is responsible for maintaining the safety and aesthetics of all common roadways, sidewalks, landscaping, waterways, fountains, streetlights and street signs within the Ave Maria Special District. Under his supervision, lead technician Michael Davis Campbell and maintenance tech Jose Concepcion Escobedo are out in the field in their trucks, picking up fallen trash, clearing storm drains, maintaining doggie stations and patrolling public areas to identify any infrastructure issues proactively.

If there’s a pothole in the road, a fallen branch blocking a sidewalk, a rogue irrigation head or a broken fountain, Diaz will document it, assess the damage and manage the repairs. When the team can’t fix it themselves, he may call in an approved contractor for smaller or emergency items. For larger expenditures, Diaz must bring a proposal to the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District Board for discussion and approval, at which point he will assist in any required bidding process.

“My role is basically to manage all public assets, make sure they are being maintained correctly, and make sure we set and follow budgets,” he explained. “I sign off on all the work orders to make sure that the contractors we hire are doing the job up to our standards before they get paid.” Diaz can often be seen on-site with the Davey Tree landscapers. He also manages relationships with a range of vetted contractors, including an electrician who conducts monthly streetlight inspections and repairs; fountain repair companies for complex jobs; and roadway resurfacing teams when it’s time to add a new layer of asphalt.

Storm drain maintenance is another focus. “We want to keep our waterways and infrastructure systems flowing, making sure we don’t have flooding, so we’re constantly looking to make sure that nothing is getting obstructed,” Diaz explained. Mulch is no longer applied because rainstorms were causing it to flow into the storm drains. “We’re constantly adjusting, learning and asking, ‘What can we do better?’ Right now, we’re working on a contractor to come out at least once a year and inspect our storm drains and make sure that we vacuum them out as regular maintenance.”

The safety of the residents is always job number one. “With any contractor, if they’re going to work on sidewalks or roadways, I’ve got to make sure they have reflectors and set up a safety zone around their vehicles to provide the appropriate level of safety,” Diaz said. “Before we even let them come out, I want to make sure they have all the necessary equipment like safety cones, men-working signs and reflective clothing.”

Diaz embraces the customer service component of his job. “Sometimes, a resident may be irate about something we did or didn’t do, and I always tell my team, you have to listen to their concerns, always be kind and professional, never get mad, and tell people the facts and the rules that you’re following,” he said. “But what I’m really trying to do is get ahead of all that. I don’t want them to have anything to complain about.”

Diaz comes from humble beginnings. He was born and raised in Robstown, Texas, a poor town where his father worked in an oil refinery. He still remembers the terrible oil smell on his dad’s clothing, vowing never to get into that kind of work. In 1996, when he was 15, the family moved to Immokalee, and he fell in love with Florida. “Besides the heat, mosquitos and love bugs, Florida is beautiful,” he quipped.

His first job was in landscaping. He hadn’t intended to make it a career, but fate had other plans. “I just wanted to make some money until I figured out what I wanted to do, but it just took off,” he reflected. “I had a mentor at the landscape company, Clarence Grim, and he saw the potential in me. ‘Stick with it. You’re going to be my guy,’ he said, and sure enough, he came through. He was our operations guy and eventually became a branch manager.”

Grim put Diaz through the ranks, from the bottom up. “I started as an edger, to weeder, blower, mower, then irrigation, before he sent me out to do route jobs as a foreman of a crew driving the truck, where you have 45 to 60 minutes at each house, and if you don’t get all your contracts done, you’re working late,” he says. “That’s when my management kicked in, and I would tell my guys what to do so we could knock those out with no problem. Then Grim put me on an on-site job where you’re at one site all day, but now you’re responsible for 900 homes to mow, and the expectations are different.”

After experiencing every aspect of the landscape business, Diaz was ready to take on more responsibility. That’s when he was promoted to account manager, a well-paying, high-responsibility position with 36 workers under his supervision. “By then, the management was easy,” Diaz said. “Grim told me later on that the reason he put me through every part of the landscaping business was so that when I became an account manager, I would know what to expect from every position. When you know how hard it is, you know how to treat people and how hard you can push them. Grim also taught me about budgets. ‘Treat it like it’s your money,’ he told me.”

In 2009, one of his landscaping accounts became Ave Maria, where he built a great rapport with the property manager, sharing his ideas about how to oversee landscaping, as well as his vision for this community. When an opening came up to be maintenance supervisor for the Ave Maria Master Association, he was offered the job. Feeling an affinity for the town, he accepted the position in 2013.

Diaz has been committed to the betterment of this town ever since. “I want residents to know that I’m here for them. My job is to make sure that they are safe and that their town is beautiful, and when they step outside, they say, ‘This is where I want to be.’ I take so much pride in this town. Ask anybody. I’ve stuck through it here, and I want to see it out. When my time comes, I want to know that I gave them 10,000 percent, that I laid it all on the line.”

For questions about infrastructure within the Ave Maria Special District, call 239-867-4322 or email sdangelo@amscd.org or akarmeris@sdsinc.org .

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