Covering the news in the same city for 38 years, you develop a lot of respect for good public servants. Rochester's had more than its share of those people since we started this newspaper, and later this month, one of them is retiring. I can't let him go without my own tribute.

Bill Sullivan will leave his position as City Council's chief of staff on January 22. Like many bureaucrats, he has done his work and made his contributions well out of public sight. Journalists and government staff and elected officials know him, but much of the public does not.

Hard-working, dedicated - to the city and to the Council he has served - and exceptionally bright, he knows absolutely everything about Rochester's city government.

Rochester has undergone remarkable changes since the 1970's: a shrinking tax base and population, middle-class flight to the suburbs, exploding poverty, declining downtown retail, the Kodak decimation. City government also underwent a major change, from council-manager form of government to our current, "strong mayor" form.

From the late 1920's until 1986, City Council had enormous authority. It elected the mayor, and it appointed - and was boss of - the city manager, who ran city operations. When voters approved changing Rochester's form of government, Council's power moved to the mayor, who is in charge of city government operations - trash pickup, development, and all - and who is elected not by Council but by voters. To help balance the mayor's resources and power, in 1986 Council created its own staff, which provides the information Council needs to vote on the mayor's initiatives and to come up with their own.

From the beginning, Bill Sullivan has been in charge of that staff.

It has been an interesting career for a man who came to Rochester, in 1974, as a PhD student in English at the University of Rochester. His plan was to be a college English professor.

But when he finished his UR studies in 1978, he says, the job market was "horrible." He and his wife Barbara were living in the 19th Ward - where they still live - and the 19th Ward Community Association was starting a program to try to counter the growing number of vacant, foreclosed houses. Sullivan became a researcher for the association's new program.

Three and a half years later, he joined city government as a housing planner in what was then the Bureau of Neighborhood Development. Among the Bureau's initiatives was a program that helped developers build high-quality, affordable housing in inner-city neighborhoods. The houses, designed to fit well architecturally with their older neighbors, "still look pretty new today," says Sullivan.

In 1986, with the strong-mayor system in place, City Council members ask Sullivan if he would be interested in creating and heading a new Council staff.

"I figured I would stay there for a couple of years," he says. Instead, he has helped guide his staff and a diverse group of Council members through nearly 24 years of change: the early years as Council tried to get used to its new role, and major, emotional decisions like the establishment of a civilian police-review board, the city's purchase of the ferry, and, most recently, its deliberations over Renaissance Square.

Council has been almost exclusively Democratic during that period, but there have been plenty of differing opinions - and, Sullivan notes, "some real political adversaries." Sullivan and his staff have worked for them all. "I do not work for a Council member," he says. "I work for a corporate body named City Council, and I look out for the long-term interests of that body - which may be in conflict with the short-term interests of an individual Council member."

Sullivan is "fiercely loyal" to City Council as an institution, says Council member Carolee Conklin, "as only an Irish Catholic growing up in Brooklyn can be."

And he is unquestionably a policy wonk. When I asked what he's proudest of, he named two things. One was helping craft the city's 2002 Zoning Ordinance, a thick bundle of maps and legal language that determines what individual properties in the city can be used for. The second: "The way Council has handled the budget."

And in fact, "handling the budget" is one of the most important functions of both Council and the mayor. Running a city is seldom sexy work. "We spend six or seven weeks every spring" picking apart the mayor's proposed budget, says Sullivan. The challenge: "How to continue to manage the very difficult balancing act between protecting the interests of the taxpayers who can't afford to pay another nickel and providing the services that taxpayers think are important."

Sullivan is a passionate believer in the importance of cities. And he has understood, he says, that "if you couldn't maintain a middle class in the city to pay the taxes, you couldn't provide the services for the poor, and cities would just become a warehouse for the poor."

When I told him I thought his change from English major to public policy was a curious one, he said he had always been interested in politics. "My parents were interested in politics," he said. "My father was an old leftie, a union organizer. We were politically active during the Civil Rights and Vietnam War stuff. I grew up in and around New York City and was always interested in cities."

"You get some core principles down," he says, "and you learn from your colleagues."

He seems to have retained everything he has learned, about everything. Ask him a question about any development in city government over the past quarter-century, and he'll usually rattle off the specifics from memory. If not: "Wait a minute... I've got it right here," and he starts searching through files.

"He is probably one of the last people in City Hall that has that amount of institutional knowledge," says Carolee Conklin, "and he has it available at his fingertips."

In the operations in City Hall and on City Council, that matters. For one thing, Conklin notes, Sullivan knows what has been tried in the past, what worked and what didn't, and why. And he knows the City Hall bureaucracy and its staff. He knows who to call to get information. Mayors and their top administrators may change, says Conklin, but career city planners, for example, stay longer, "and those are the folks he has a strong working relationship with."

When Sullivan retires, says Conklin, "one of the things that will be hard to replace is his understanding of the budget process, land use, zoning law...." During all of the major zoning changes in the past 20 years, "he's been there," says Conklin.

As the only person who has ever held his job, Sullivan "has really defined the role," says Conklin, "and he has set the bar very high."

Sullivan and Conklin - a former deputy city treasurer and city clerk - have been friends and City Hall colleagues for nearly 30 years. She describes him as "a very patient person." As head of the Council staff, Sullivan has served under four City Council presidents. "Each had a different persona and a different approach," says Conklin, "and Bill has had an excellent relationship with each of them."

He has also tutored newcomers to the nine-member City Council. He cautions them: "The fact that you're elected doesn't mean you have expertise in anything immediately."

And he tells them: "A good idea is one that can get five votes. A bad idea is one that can't. You need to work with your colleagues."

Sullivan is also self-effacing. "He never felt the need to step up, thump his chest, and say, Well, you know, I did that," says Conklin. "He has always stepped aside and let Council accrue the credit. One of the phrases he uses is, ‘I'm staff; we know our place.'"

His biggest disappointments: The city's inability to "get enough money from the state and - a topic on which he and I have disagreed for much of our careers - the Rochester school district. "Dealing with them has been the single most frustrating thing I've dealt with in the 23 years I've been here," he says. He complains about the state's Maintenance of Effort law requiring the city to provide the same level of funding for the school district, regardless of the city's own financial situation. And he blisters over the district's granting 3.5 percent raises for its teachers and administrators. Managers in City Hall have gotten no raises in two of the past four years, he says.

And there are the two high-profile problems: the ferry and Ren Square.

Sullivan, like me, continues to believe in the ferry's potential. "People need to remember what the ferry project was: a private project that we did the land-based things on to make it succeed," he says. "The city was encouraged strongly by the business community and others to save the project."

When the city bought the ferry, it brought in "a terrific partner," Bay Ferries, to run the operation. Everything that could have gone wrong with the ferry seemed to, though. "We bought it too late in the season," Sullivan says. "Winter came early. There was a spike in fuel costs."

Sullivan spent "a substantial portion" of his time on the ferry project. And, he says, soon after Bob Duffy was elected mayor, the two discussed the project. "We told him it would take a tremendous commitment of his time and effort," he says.

"I believe to this day," Sullivan says, "that if we had had a few more years, it would have been successful."

He says he thinks that in shutting down the ferry operation, Duffy "made a logical decision." But he adds: "I believe there's a market for it, and that we could have created a much bigger market for it."

And the Ren Square failure?

"It was not anybody's finest hour," says Sullivan, "and that includes City Council, the city administration, the transit authority, and the county administration."

"The Council members clearly believed they did not have all the information they needed to make a decision in the time they had to make it," he says. "That's probably the thing I regret the most. I keep looking back and asking: What could we have done to make it happen?"

"I think the project had merit," Sullivan says. "There was a whole load of federal money on the table that would let us develop the worst block in downtown. I don't know what else we could have done. There was tension between staff and Council, and I'm willing to take responsibility for not providing them what they needed."

Conklin adds another adjective to her description of Sullivan: "the eternal optimist." And when I asked him what he predicts Rochester will be like in 10 or 20 years, he says he believes downtown development will continue. "Every day, we hear about new developers interested in new sites," he says. And he thinks that despite the financial challenges, cities like Rochester will become stronger.

And then Sullivan, whose 41-year-old son is critically ill, launches into praise of Rochester: "This community has so much to offer. My son is in the hospital, and he's receiving care as good as or better than any place in the world. I don't know of a community that has the caring people that Rochester has."

Succeeding Sullivan as City Council's chief of staff will be Andrea Guzzetta, a city employee since 2004 who is currently an executive assistant in the mayor's office.