Within two weeks of his appointment as Burlington’s newest assistant city manager, Tony Lo Giudice had already begun to stamp his personality on his assigned workspace at city hall.
Save for some Seinfeld memorabilia and a novelty sign that warns “Dad Jokes Told Here,” most of Lo Giudice’s office décor consists of mementos from his truly eclectic career in public service. There’s a miniature battleship, for instance, to recall his formative stint in the Navy, as well as a commemorative plaque from his decade as both a firefighter and a paramedic in Mesa, Arizona.
Lo Giudice has also surrounded himself with souvenirs from his more recent role as a public health administrator in North Carolina. These relics include a scale model of an antique ambulance and a covid mask from his Greensboro synagogue that declares “shalom, y’all” in in a mélange of Hebrew and English characters.
The one question that may leap out of this sundry collection is what any of it has to do with Lo Giudice’s current gig at Burlington’s city hall. But the answer is not all that mysterious to the 50-year-old native of Arizona.
“My long-term goal is honestly to be a city manager, and it’s never been a secret in the past,” Lo Giudice said in an interview during his second week on the job. “If you look at my background, you’ll see public administration and municipal government. In fact, my first job out of the Navy was assistant to the mayor [of Phoenix].”
It was arguably Lo Giudice’s time in the armed forces, even more than his stretch in the mayor’s office, that really set the depth charge for his subsequent vocation in government.
Lo Giudice admits that his choice to enlist in the Navy may seem a bit counterintuitive for someone who hails from a landlocked desert state. In his case, there was an added family dynamic – a father and an uncle who had respectively served in the Army and the Marines. Yet, in the end, it was a sailor’s life for Lo Giudice.
“I knew I wanted to go into the military after high school. My position was whichever branch reaches out first is the one that I’ll join, and the Navy called first.
“What I was exposed to was great leadership,” he added, “which I was able to adapt, learn, and be part of.”
– Tony Lo Giudice
“I knew I wanted to go into the military after high school,” he explained. “My position was whichever branch reaches out first is the one that I’ll join, and the Navy called first.”
Lo Giudice embarked on his tour of duty in 1994 and spent much of the next four years on an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer dubbed the USS Milius. Although commissioned in a period of relative inaction, this ship would help to patrol the “no fly” zone that the U.S. and its allies imposed on Iraq in the wake of the First Gulf War.
Lo Giudice concedes that the skills he learned the Navy weren’t necessarily translatable to a civilian career.
“What I was exposed to was great leadership,” he added, “which I was able to adapt, learn, and be part of.”
In order to better prepare himself for the civilian world, Lo Giudice enrolled at Arizona State University, where he graduated in 2004 with a degree in political science. Three years later, he obtained a masters in government from Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Later in his career, Lo Giudice would also obtain a doctorate in public administration from Minnesota-based Capella University. But by the point he acquired his masters, Lo Giudice had exhausted his benefits under the GI Bill. So, in 2007, he went to work as a firefighter and paramedic to make ends meet. He ultimately got a position with Mesa’s fire and medical department, where he would rise to the rank of a captain within this dual-purpose agency.
Among Lo Giudice’s most memorable contributions during this period was his oversight of a Community Care Program that teams up first-responders with experts in fields like behavioral health. Among the program’s pairings were certified social workers who accompanied firefighter-paramedics during their rounds, nurses who performed triage services at 9-1-1 call centers, and post-hospitalization outreach teams that checked on the wellbeing of recently discharged patients.
Lo Giudice would later help export parts of this model to North Carolina, where he moved in 2017 after his wife Emily decided that she’d had enough of Arizona’s oppressive heat.
Following his relocation, Lo Giudice went to work as an assistant health director in Forsyth County. Then, at the tail end of 2020, he landed the top spot at Alamance County’s health department, which had found itself without a director at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lo Giudice’s first mission in Alamance County was to oversee the rollout of the covid vaccine that had just been released to the public. His next big objective was to tend to the frayed nerves of the agency’s staff, which had been running on fumes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I was working in an office where people were putting in 14, 16, and even 18 hour days. They were tired; you could see it in their faces; and their one consolation had been what was happening with the vaccine.”
– Tony Lo Giudice, former Alamance County health director (pictured addressing alamance county’s commissioners)
“I was working in an office where people were putting in 14, 16, and even 18 hour days,” he recalled. “They were tired; you could see it in their faces; and their one consolation had been what was happening with the vaccine.”
Lo Giudice said that, once the vaccine began reaching the public, he ordered some of his work-addled colleagues to take long-overdue breaks from the grind. In the meantime, he saw other signs that the staff’s work-life balance was way out of kilter, and so he introduced policies to encourage the health department’s employees to inject physical fitness and stress relief into their daily routines.
Lo Giudice said that, as part of this institutional reboot, he tried to model the behaviors that he hoped to inspire – much like an effective commander would do in the Navy. It wasn’t long before he was bewildering his co-workers by sprinting up stairwells and swanning into staff meetings with protein shakes in hand. There were moments, however, when in his devotion to duty, Lo Giudice was forced to imbibe a dose of his own medicine.
“In the first evaluation I got from the board of health,” he recalled, “they dinged me for not taking enough vacation days.”
Lo Giudice concedes that his own hectic schedule has made it hard to maintain the appropriate balance between his own life and career. Fortunately for him, things have been relatively quiet on the home front since his son and daughter have left the proverbial nest. These days, he and his wife can watch from afar as their adult son busies himself with some AI-based startups in Miami, while their grownup daughter, who resides in Arizona, scurries after their one-year-old grandchild.
Meanwhile, Lo Giudice makes sure to set some time aside for extracurricular activities such as crossfit, yard work, and cooking – especially the sour dough breads that he bakes from a culture he started 10 years ago.
In addition to shaking up the health department’s routine, Lo Giudice has shepherded the agency through several noteworthy initiatives. These ventures have included several interagency partnerships reminiscent of those that Lo Giudice had overseen during his tenure in Mesa.
More recently, Lo Giudice has been on the front lines of an organizational overhaul that has seen the local health department merge with veterans services and the county’s family justice center. In a testament to Lo Giudice’s success as an administrator, he was tapped to head this new health and human services agency when it got off the ground in the fall of 2025.
Suffice it say, it was with a fair amount of regret that the county’s top brass bid farewell to Lo Giudice during his final week in Alamance County’s employ.
“He has done an excellent job for the health department, for veterans, and for every other department he has been put over. It is really going to be the county’s loss.”
– Alamance County commissioner chairman Kelly Allen, when announcing Lo Giudice’s departure to Burlington
“He has done an excellent job for the health department, for veterans, and for every other department he has been put over,” Kelly Allen, the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, publicly declared when she announced Lo Giudice impending departure on October 5. “It is really going to be the county’s loss.”
Lo Giudice, meanwhile, has had little time to dwell on the past as he plunges into his new duties, which include oversight of Burlington’s public works, transportation, workplace safety, animal services, and capital projects.
Yet, the new assistant city manager, who’s one of two in Burlington’s employ, insists he’s up to the task – given that he receives the collegial support he has come to expect from the city.
“I love the city of Burlington,” he added. “I have worked with the city since 2020…and on the day we got [our batch of coronavirus vaccine], the first call I got that morning was from [then-city manager] Hardin [Watkins], asking me ‘what do you need?’”
