Dale Byrne retired from a career as a CEO to become Carmel Cares CCO – chief caring officer.

Everyday, Dale Byrne wakes up thinking of ways to make Carmel just a little better. For over three years, he’s been leading Carmel Cares, a nonprofit group of residents he founded with the mission to keep Carmel “beautiful, safe and inviting.” Byrne has a five-page list of tasks completed as evidence – the more than 100 volunteers have done everything from restoring Forest Theater’s benches to re-landscaping street medians to picking up and sending off for recycling over 20,000 cigarette butts.

“I have a clear vision of what I want to accomplish that day and I make sure that I don’t stop until I have achieved it,” Byrne says of his morning ritual. “When you do that every day, you get at least 365 things done in a year. When you have an entire organization thinking that way, you can create transformational change in your community.”

Byrne started working as a clerk for Alpha Beta supermarkets when he was 15 and continued while a student at the University of Southern California, stocking shelves at night, taking a full load of classes and working a part-time campus job. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from USC, got into cloud computing and over his career started and sold technology-based companies. He and his wife Margaret have renovated five homes in Carmel since 2012. “I’m now working on the whole city. So it keeps me busy,” Byrne says.

The fledgling Carmel Cares took off during the pandemic, growing into a supercharged volunteer group. Byrne says they’ve provided about $150,000 in materials and professional contractors to the city, and over 20,000 hours in volunteer labor since 2020.

Weekly: Where does your drive to get things done come from?

Byrne: I probably was more influenced by my mom than anybody. She was a strong-willed person and always encouraged us to be active.

There’s a picture that I use at the start of a talk I give to the Carmel leadership program group every year. [It] shows me sitting on a dirt pile in front of a construction project in San Gabriel. My dad decided to build a house next door to our existing house. So every day I would go over there and think that I was managing a construction project. And I’m like, 4 or 5 years old, in Bermuda shorts with no shirt, no shoes. And I felt that I was managing a construction project.

You started Carmel Cares as a project to slow down traffic, but it became something much more after the start of the pandemic. What inspired you?

I started seeing all the weeds growing. Weeds don’t stop growing when the money stops flowing – it was the same time the City had cut its budget 30 percent. They had laid off the landscape company. I drove around and made a video that showed what was going on. And then I did a 15-page PowerPoint, and I called up [Carmel Public Works Director Bob Harari] and said I’d like to make a presentation to you about setting up a volunteer organization. And they said OK.

We probably just did our 175th weekly cleanup with five to 13 volunteers and three professional landscape contractors.

What’s Carmel Cares’ next project?

We have developed a new business model of how to work with the city. They like what we’re doing, they know that we do high-quality work. So at this point, the city is budgeting money for the landscaping services on Scenic pathway, which we really appreciate. That’s $20,000 a year. We hire the contractors, we invoice the city and they pay us back.

The other thing that they did was the first year, they budgeted $50,000 for improvements to landscape barriers on Scenic pathway. It took us a while to get the project going. But this past year we actually did it… it came out beautifully. In that case, we raised and paid the $54,000 for the contractor, or part of it; the city paid $54,000 for the materials. So it’s a matching fund.

We actually have set up some approval levels where we can get our own bids for the materials, and the city pays us back, or they pay it directly. So that’s pretty innovative.

What’s your favorite only-in-Carmel activity?

Walks on the beach with the dogs. We try to go every day if we can. We have a miniature poodle named Hamilton who is an athlete, and he absolutely loves to run. He doesn’t need to chase a ball. He just goes to the beach and does figure-8s around people. It’s just absolutely pure joy to watch him. Everybody just stands there and watches him run. He’s like a cutting horse, he loves the feel of turning. And it’s just wonderful to watch.