Let the honeymoon begin.

The Muscatine City Council on Monday hired Gregg Mandsager, 39, who will join City Hall next month as city administrator.

Mandsager, who has been city manager in Lebanon, N.H., will succeed A.J. Johnson, who left the job in June after 19 years to become city manager in Urbandale.

By all accounts, Mandsager —who has also previously worked in Fort Dodge and West Burlington, Iowa —is the right guy for the job. What appears to be a down-to-earth personality ought to be a good fit for Muscatine. And we’ll give Mandsager bonus points for being a 21st century leader and communicator — one who writes a blog in his current job and also has Facebook and Twitter accounts.

We won’t even quibble much with his salary. Mandsager will earn $115,000 in Muscatine. That is not quite 5 percent more than Johnson was making after 19 years on the job. And though we'd rather see the city tighten its belt a few notches, given current economic conditions, we understand this sort of wage inflation often happens when new hires of this sort are made. Muscatine may even someday count itself lucky to have hired him at that price if Mandsager turns out to be the employee the Council expects him to be.

Nearly everyone who met the new city administrator and his wife, Anna, were impressed last week during his interviews and their visit to Muscatine.

“He was just easy to visit with,” Public Works director Randy Hill, Muscatine’s interim city administrator, said. “Generally, we just seem to like him.”

Those sentiments, however, aren’t likely to last forever —especially if Mandsager does his job well. It comes with some big challenges, including:

* Clarifying what the city’s role should be in economic development, which has become even more important as the local economy has slowed.

* Addressing budget issues at a time when the city has had to borrow money to repair its streets and government agencies nationwide are having to cut costs.

And these might not even be the biggest challenges facing Mandsager.

After 19 years, his predecessor had earned the respect of most city employees and seemed to have a collegial working relationship with them. This included some department heads who have also held their jobs for many years.

We can’t help but wonder how some of those veterans will react to taking direction from an administrator they may not see as a peer.

But we urge Mandsager to not take the path of least resistance. That is what has helped an employee like Hill — who received a temporary 15 percent pay raise on top of his $87, 293 annual salary during his time as interim city administrator —to live in Iowa City instead of Muscatine.

Perhaps it’s asking too much for the person who oversees our streets, walkways, storm drains, fleet of City vehicles and buildings and grounds to live in Muscatine and pay property taxes here. It should have never been allowed to happen. When these kinds of difficult decisions have to be made in the future, Mandsager will need to do what’s right and not what may be popular or easy.

We wish him well. He was hired by the City Council, but he ultimately works for all of us. We ask him to remember that when addressing the many challenges he will face.