When Kara Wacker graduated from Missouri State University in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, she wasn’t originally planning to go into law.
“I had originally started college thinking I would go to veterinary school,” she said. “I didn't prove to be as proficient at the sciences as is required, and I didn't have a lot of options. And so someone suggested law school, and there I went.”
Wacker is Nixa’s new city attorney; she started with the city on Monday, Aug. 10.
Wacker has been an attorney for 15 years. After graduating from law school at MU Kansas City in 2011, she worked as a criminal defense attorney at a Springfield firm for a couple of years, and then was a prosecuting attorney at Phelps County and then Taney County. For the last two years, she was also a prosecuting attorney for Christian County. She said her decision to work for Nixa was influenced by her mother’s career.
“I thought I wanted to be in-house counsel,” she said. “My mother worked my whole life at Cox Health, closely with their legal department, and I thought I wanted to do in-house type work, (but) that is not what happened at all until now.”
As Nixa’s city attorney, Wacker operates in multiple roles for Nixa. She acts as the city prosecutor, as well as legal counsel for the Nixa CIty Council and counsel for City administrator Jimmy Liles, among her many other responsibilities, some of which she is still sorting out.
“I believe that I also serve as legal counsel for all of the department heads (in) dealing with communications, dealing with human resources, dealing with the police department, utilities, finance, etc.,” she said. “Those are the things that I've dug in so far, but I am sure that there are many things that are going to crop up.”
When Wacker first started her job as city attorney, she was afraid that she might find it dull compared to some of the work she did as a county prosecutor. She said that she has found the job to be quite the opposite.
“It is very fast-paced,” she said. “There was some concern, coming from criminal law and doing murder trials and those types of things, that this might be kind of boring perhaps. I have not found that to be true at all. There are so many new things for me to learn and it's actually extremely fast-paced.
“And it is very varied. Once you've done criminal prosecution for so long, it becomes rote, and you get into a routine. And (there is always some) new thing that some department head has for me to look at … every single morning … and I get to start learning something new. And so, it's been very varied, and it's been very exciting.”
Wacker said another draw of the job is that she believes she will be able to balance work and personal time, something she said that was hard to do as a county prosecutor.
“That was not something that prosecutors do very well at all,” she said. “It was one of the draws also to this job. My daughter just started school at Nixa; she's a kindergartner. And so, my hope is that there will be some of that, but I don't actually have a great answer (on how to do that) right now. I haven't learned that, but it is a priority.”
Looking to the future, Wacker said she plans to spend the rest of her career as Nixa’s city attorney.
“My hope is to stay here,” she said. “My hope is that this is where I retire from, that I can learn the ins and outs of municipal government, and that I would be able in the future to find a (successor), train them and make sure that there is an easy step down and that the representation of the city is sort of seamless for the next decade (or) two decades.”
