Speech to the Panetta Institute Students

June 4th, 2026

Good morning. It is truly an unexpected honor to be here today with you. My name is Dale Byrne, and for six more months I have the honor of serving as the Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea. But I want to be honest with you right up front: I did not plan any of this. In some ways everything I have done in life has led me here, from the time I thought I was managing the project to build our new family home next door when I was five years old to managing a Foster’s Freeze at 15 ½.

When this latest chapter started. I was retired. I had spent decades building homes, a family, software companies, and even a horse business from the ground up, working hard every day, driven by a strong desire to get things done and the deep satisfaction of a job well done. Along with travelling 6 million miles running my companies, I had managed to coach my kids sports teams and refereed kids soccer…that being the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I had also served on a church committee or two. I had been a good citizen in the quiet, private ways that most people are.

When my wife Margaret and I moved to Carmel full-time ten years ago, I wasn’t looking for a new mission. I was not restless or unfulfilled. We had travelled the world and were ready to settle down, genuinely at peace living in the last of five Carmel homes we had built over nine years, ready to enjoy the life we had earned.

And then I said yes to something small. And then something else. And here we are.

I didn't have a political science or law degree or a mentor who groomed me for public life. I was the first person in my family to get a college degree, a BS and MBA from USC but what I really had was a habit of saying yes to things that needed doing, a penchant for solving problems and it turns out those habits, more than any credential, is what eventually put me behind a dais making decisions for a city.

That is what I want to talk to you about today. Not politics. Not policy. But the quiet, unglamorous, surprisingly powerful path of showing up as a volunteer.

Act One: Say Yes Before You Feel Ready

My volunteer story did not start with a grand vision. It started at the Carmel Visitors Center, which is run by the Chamber of Commerce. They needed help. I said yes. I welcomed thousands of people to Carmel and ended up creating a series of 12 VoiceMap Audio Tours covering from Big Sur to Santa Cruz. Turns out my partner and me were the largest provider of tours in the world!

From there Margaret and I got involved with the Carmel Residents Association, a civic organization focused on keeping residents informed and engaged in the life of the town. We brought in a new technology platform, launched a business discount card, penned columns for their newsletter and doubled their membership within a year. Not because I had a plan, but because I had gotten a taste of what it felt like to be useful and I wanted more of it. It was a tendency of mine over the years, whether the ice cream store at 15 ½ or the CRA, to take over leadership and transform the operation. I was getting things done again and it felt good. 

Going forward, each yes led to a slightly bigger room. Each room introduced me to people who were working on things that mattered. And slowly, without ever sitting down and mapping it out, I was becoming someone with a track record, a network, and a point of view about how this historic community worked and what it needed.

That is the first thing I want you to understand. The people who end up doing meaningful civic work are almost never the most credentialed people in the room. They are the ones who said yes when someone asked for help, before they had any idea what they were getting into.

I was a retired businessman who had built international software companies and coached little league. I was not an obvious candidate for public leadership. But I showed up. And showing up, it turns out, is most of the job.

I’m preaching to the choir to this group, but, if you wait for confidence before you volunteer to do big things, before you raise your hand, before you step into a room where you do not quite belong yet, you will wait a very long time. The world does not have a shortage of smart, capable people who are waiting until they feel ready. It has a shortage of people willing to act before the feeling arrives.

Act Two: Volunteer Work Is Resume Building in Disguise

Then COVID hit and the city shut down.If you want to understand what volunteer work can become when the moment calls for it, I want to tell you about what happened in Carmel during those years.

My wife Margaret and I co-founded an organization called Carmel Cares and asked the city if we could help. They said “yes”. The mission was simple and specific but very broad, something to keep in mind starting a nonprofit. In this case it was keeping Carmel beautiful, safe, and inviting, and give people a sense of purpose while doing it. This was not a social services agency. It was a community pride movement. Hundreds of volunteers showed up because they loved where they lived and wanted to protect its character and keep it alive during one of the most disorienting periods any of us had ever lived through. While the city was arresting people for walking on the beach, we were out restoring their city.

What struck me most was not what we accomplished for the town. It was what the work did for the volunteers themselves. People who had felt adrift during the pandemic suddenly had somewhere to be, something to contribute, and a community of people working alongside them. Giving people a purpose turned out to be just as important as anything we did for the streets and gardens and public spaces of Carmel and it has made the town a happier place. Over the last six years Carmel Cares has grown to over 300 volunteers, 17 whom are Team Leaders, 600 donors, with over $1.8 million raised and 50,000 hours contributed.

Simultaneously, with my partner Tim Allen, we launched Carmel Gives, a donor-advised fund that was dedicated to helping businesses and underserved people during COVID. The philosophy was win/win/win. We started by making $300,000 in grants to 20 Carmel restaurants that were able to bring back their staffs to make over 16,000 meals that I delivered to 20 nonprofits and individuals in need. The last win is by using the Carmel Chamber to pass the funds to the restaurants, they were able to make enough funds to replace the revenue they normally get from their annual fundraiser, keeping them in business.

Over the next six years, by averaging 1.5 grants per week, Carmel Gives has issued over 460 grants to over 160 nonprofits with a net impact of over five million dollars touching nearly every corner of the local nonprofit ecosystem in a way that a government agency simply could not have done.

Here is what I want you to take from that chapter. When the pandemic arrived, no one handed Margaret, Tim and me a role. There was no job posting, no election, no appointment. There was just a community that needed something and people who decided to build it. That is volunteering at its highest expression.

And here is the thing nobody tells you about that kind of work: it was not the reason we did it, but it is noticed. Not by everyone, and not always immediately. But the people who matter in a community, the ones who are paying attention, they see who shows up when things are hard.

The skills I built during that period were real skills. The relationships were real relationships. The credibility was real credibility. By July of 2024, when I decided to run for Mayor, I was not a stranger asking for votes. I was someone the community had already watched work and I ran with my yellow safety vest, hat, and slogan that “Together, we can get things done”. That is an advantage no resume can manufacture. Paul Miller, the editor of the Carmel Pine Cone, says that in order to become Mayor of Carmel you have to appear in the Pine Cone at least twenty times. Without trying, that had happened.

And I was retired. I had no career ambition driving any of it. That, I think, is part of why people trusted it.

Act Three: Do Not Underestimate the Leverage of Local

I want to address something directly, because I suspect some of you may be thinking it.

Local government sounds small. A 1 square mile city of 3,000 people, with sixty percent of the homes not full-time, a weak-mayor system with a five-member council making decisions, no one but the City Attorney and City Administration working for the council, and the focus on parking and sidewalk maintenance, and keeping the streets clean. Why would an ambitious person invest their energy there when there are national and global problems screaming for attention?

Here is why. Because in a small community, you can actually see the connection between your effort and the outcome. That is rarer than you think.

I have watched people go to Washington full of idealism and spend years inside institutions so large and slow that they cannot tell whether anything they do matters. I am not saying that work is not important. It is. And, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about it this week. But there is something that happens to a person when feedback loops are invisible. You start to lose the thread.

In a small city, you do not have that problem. You propose something, it gets debated, it passes or fails, and then you drive by those 16 new stops signs around town and see the beautiful new signs on Scenic Pathway every day. 

This Monday and Tuesday, as Mayor, I ran two eight-hour council meetings back to back and worked through about 25 issues. For the first time, I shepherded ballot measures for November on new TOT and sales tax measures to unanimous votes. Our amazing council passed an ordinance that memorialized our efforts to give Carmel regular street addresses for the first time in over a hundred years. We passed a $41 million budget that cuts operating expenses from 100% of revenue to only 85%, freeing up $6 million for capital projects to address over $100 million in deferred maintenance and prevent us, like most cities in California from drifting toward a fiscal cliff. Those things are real and affect the lives of all our residents, businesses, and tens of thousands of visitors every week.

We have also put a philanthropically fully funded seventeen million dollar restoration of a 1928 historic library back on course, a project that is teaching this town how to build things again after years of paralysis. Earlier this year, we even banned pickleball from Forest Hill Park, which became an international story but put peace back into a quiet Carmel neighborhood. This council is dedicated to getting things done and not kicking cans down the road any longer.

None of this story started with a plan. It started at a visitors center. It grew through a residents association. It deepened during a pandemic through volunteer work that nobody asked me to do. In fact, Letters to the Editor have attacked me saying, No one asked you and Margaret to do this. Our town was just fine. Part of being in office is growing rhinoceros skin to not let attacks get your down.

But that is the leverage of local. It is real, it is immediate, and it is still compounding, as I am continuing to grow Cares groups into surrounding cities and even into other states, and growing a new nonprofit I started this week dedicated to putting powerlines underground throughout the Monterey Peninsula.

Closing

I walked in here today wearing my volunteer vest and my hat. I wear them every day as a reminder, to myself as much as to anyone else, of where all of this came from. It also helps keep me from getting hit by a car in a town that is absolutely packed with cars.

I was a retired businessman who said yes to helping at a visitors center. I had no idea what I was starting.

You are graduating into a world that has plenty of complexity and not enough people willing to engage with it at the ground level. The most important civic work in this country is happening in city halls and county seats and nonprofit boardrooms in communities and schools like the ones you came from and the ones you are about to move to.

You do not need a title to start. You do not need a plan. You need something that bothers you enough to do something about it, and the willingness to say yes before you feel ready.

Secretary Panetta built a foundation in local and regional public life that gave him the credibility and the relationships to do extraordinary things at the national level. I am not Leon Panetta. But I understand the principle now, very clearly, by being willing to do the hard and rewarding work every day.

Start where you are. Say yes. Show up when things are hard. And do not underestimate what a small place can teach you about how the world actually works.

Thank you.

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