Dr. Yehl joined the VSU Political Science Department in 2011 after a 30-year career in the public sector. Dr. Yehl has served as a street-level bureaucrat to city manager and most recently as a governance consultant for USAID. Highlights of his career include:
   
   
    > Assistant Urban Development Director, City of Des Moines, Iowa 1981-1987
    > Assistant City Manager, City of Des Moines, Iowa 1987-1996
    > City Manager, City of West University Place, Texas 1996-2002
    > President/CEO, Community Associations of The Woodlands, Texas 2002-2005
    > City Manager, City of Sanford, Florida 2005-2009
    > Senior Governance Advisor Local Governance Program - Iraq, Creative Associates International, 2009-2011


Dr. Yehl graduated from Indiana University at Fort Wayne in 1976 with a BA in political science, an MPA in 1978 from the American University, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Houston in 2010.

Dr. Yehl is a member of the International City/County Management Association, the American Society for Public Administration and served on the board of directors of the Michael Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Indiana-Purdue Universities of Fort Wayne, Indiana (2006-2012). He previously served as chairman of the Committee to Bring Moose and Squirrel to Central Iowa TV in 1987.

His outside academia interests include classic rock, smooth jazz, American history, the Cold War, political biographies, bicycling, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the Chicago Cubs (hope springs eternal). He is the proud owner of a rescued beagle, The Shadow.

Some would say that Dr. Yehl is an expert on local government management and has studied extensively the issue of local government fragmentation (he prefers the term differentation) and public choice theory. Classes taught at Valdosta State include Public Administration, Organization Development and Theory, Information Technology (Summer, 2012) , the Politics of Managing Urban Areas (Fall, 2012), and Governmental Budgeting and Finance (Spring, 2013).

Dr. Yehl served two "tours" in Iraq working for the Local Governance Program. In 2008 he was assigned to the Muthanna Provincial Reconstruction Team as a budget advisor and 2009-2011 as a monitoring subject matter expert for the South Region Service Center serving the provinces of Al-Basrah, Dhi-Qar, and Maysan.