More than 14 months after the headhunting firm San Bernardino hired to assist it in recruiting a replacement city manager failed to maintain security with regard to a host of the candidates who were being considered for the job, the city council voted to make a payout of $800,000 to one of those applicants who was offered the city manager’s post and then elected to turn it down, only to be fired by the city council he had betrayed when he sought the San Bernardino job.
It now appears Steven Carrigan and his attorney have been able to exploit for their own personal benefit one of the dirty secrets of the municipal managerial profession which for generations has put the taxpayers at a disadvantage when dealing with powerful local government insiders who are in a position to structure their contracts and the rules by which they are considered for employment and, ultimately in many cases, hired.
Part and parcel to these lopsided and as often as not corrupted power relationships is the excessive secrecy of local government operations, a practice that serves the interests of the high-paid public servants as opposed to the residents and citizens who pay their salaries.
As summer dawned last year, Steven Carrigan was in place as the city manager of Salinas, a position he had held since January 2021. Prior to his hiring in Salinas, he had worked in the public sector for 24 years, including eight years near the beginning of his career as the economic development director in Stockton, followed by a stint as the assistant city manager of 25,000-population Sanger in Fresno County. In 2013, he was hired as the city manager of 37,000-population Los Banos in Merced County and in 2015, the city council with 84,000-population Merced, the county seat of Merced County, hired him as city manager on a three-year contract. That contract was extended, but in 2020, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, his efforts to readily adhere to the health precautions and COVID-related mandates imposed by Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom rubbed several Republican members of the Merced City Council, in particular its then-mayor, the wrong way and he resigned rather than be terminated. He managed to land on his feet in Salinas several months later, however.
Carrigan perhaps would have remained in Salinas for quite some time. He had initiated a personal relationship with the superintendent of the Salinas City Elementary School District, Rebeca Andrade, and therefore had a reason to remain in 163,542-population seat of government in Monterey County. There did not appear to be any insurmountable challenges in the running the city and there were no overt outstanding personality conflicts with any of the city council’s seven members, although the council had aggressively reviewed his performance early in 2023.
In July 2023, Carrigan was contacted by Frank Rojas with the Berkeley-based firm of Koff & Associates, which had been retained by the City of San Bernardino to recruit a city manager replacement for Robert Field, who had left San Bernardino in December 2022 just prior to the swearing in of San Bernardino’s then-newly elected mayor, Helen Tran. Field had been hired during the tenure of former San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia, and was widely perceived as a Valdivia loyalist who would be likely to clash before long with Tran.
For executive recruitment firms such as Koff & Associates, filling the top managerial position in a place such as San Bernardino presents special challenges. A city with substantial social and economic problems that had accelerated three decades ago when the Department of Defense shuttered Norton Air Force Base, which lies on the cities east side, San Bernardino was host to an economically distressed class that included 13 percent of its households pegged as being below the federal poverty level, a violent crime rate that ranked it as California’s third-most dangerous city and 63rd most dangerous city in the United States. After its municipal operations had entailed deficit spending for nine out of 13 previous annual July 1-to-June 30 fiscal year cycles, it had filed for Chapter Nine bankruptcy protection in 2012, and did not emerge from that status until 2017. Fully two square miles of properties throughout the 62.12-square mile city are blighted and the community has an intractable homeless population which has grown on a constant basis over the last decade. While some municipal managerial professionals, of both extensive and more insubstantial experience, are undeterred by those issues, there are others who want nothing at all to do with the city. Simultaneously, in seeking to fill a managerial slot in San Bernardino and elsewhere, firms such as Koff & Associates consider candidates who are both interested and passive applicants, that is, those who learned of the opening and applied to be considered for the job and others who are on the firm’s roster of potential city managers whom recruiters think might make a good fit with that particular city but who have not asked to be considered for that specific assignment. And existence for headhunters is further complicated by the consideration that at any given time they may be recruiting for/looking to fill up to a dozen or more managerial slots. The field of candidates ebbs and flows on a constant basis, as one talented candidate after another is matched to a city here and a city there. At times, the talent pool is rich with more than a few experienced and proven candidates. At other times, the available applicants are less impressive or the numbers of truly top drawer candidates at a given time diminish. In such an atmosphere, the recruiters may tentatively assign one or more of the applicants they are working with to a specific city, and purposefully avoid considering them or letting them interview for an assignment in another city. Occasionally a city official or city officials may learn that a particularly well-thought-of manager is looking for a job but that the recruiter is “holding out” on his, her or their city and not making that desired candidate available for an interview. Under such circumstances, recruiters can find it propitious to inform a mayor or city councilman or councilwoman with one city that the person he, she or they is/are interested in is being considered at that time for employment with another city. In this way, the confidentiality that is supposed to be the watchword during municipal management recruitment is routinely broken.
While strict confidentiality is supposed to apply so that an applicant who is employed by one city can be reasonably confident he or she can seek a post elsewhere and not have that information get back to his or her political masters where he or she is currently employed, such confidentiality can never be absolutely guaranteed.
And, of course, there is a very delicate and nuanced moral or ethical question that attends all of this. A city manager yet employed by one city who applies for a job elsewhere while assuming or expecting that his current employers will not be any the wiser is engaged, in a very real sense, in a betrayal of his employers. While no harm may befall the employers if the applicant is not hired by the city he or she has applied to, the circumstance can prove very different for that city when its elected officials learn that another governmental entity has hired its manager out from underneath it, necessitating that a recruitment effort on behalf of the now rudderless city be carried out, which almost inevitably will entail more currently employed managers employed elsewhere betraying the members of the city or town councils that employ them. This lack of loyalty among city managers is accepted as a way of life in the municipal world and the code of confidentiality that attends the process of managerial recruitment one-sidedly benefits city managers and disadvantages all others, including city council and town council members, municipal employees and city/town residents, citizens and taxpayers.
At any given moment, a city may be the victim or the beneficiary of this ethically and morally ambiguous code that attends the world of municipal management. If it is looking to hire a city manager, it may be luring a municipal management professional away from another city. If it has a city manager in place with whom it is perfectly content at that moment, another city might be on the verge of poaching him or her.
When Carrigan was approached by Rojas, he did not turn a blind eye or deaf ear to him. Quietly, he secretly entered into an arrangement, indeed what might be referred to as a conspiracy, with Rojas and Koff & Associates, embarking on a path that had the potential of seeing him ultimately accept leaving his employers in Salinas in the lurch to go to work in San Bernardino.
Before July 2023 was concluded and prior to the members of the San Bernardino City Council focusing on Carrigan or even being familiar with his name or his résumé and having made any conclusion with regard to him one way or the other, more than a half dozen other applicants seeking city manager positions with various cities at that time as well as an untold number of city officials at various locations throughout the state who were looking to hire a city manager knew Carrigan was, prospectively, seeking employment outside of Salinas.
On August 3, 2023, via Zoom, Carrigan was interviewed by the San Bernardino City Council. Assistant San Bernardino City Attorney Thomas Rice was a participant in that electronic interface. Then, on August 18, a Friday, Carrigan, having taken the day off and making the 356-mile sojourn from Salinas to San Bernardino, was interviewed for the job in San Bernardino in person, with the city council and Rice present.
Carrigan made a favorable impression on the mayor and five of the council’s seven members, which prompted an immediate phone call from Rojas to Carrigan to tell him he was one of the two candidates for the job the council had narrowed its focus to. Rojas asked that Carrigan lay out the conditions he would insist upon and his salary requirement. On August 21, Rojas called once more, indicating the council had decided in his favor. Thereafter, Carrigan and Rice corresponded by email and telephonically, which included Rice conveying an employment offer from the city council, followed by both hashing out an employment contract/agreement, the terms of which included an initial $291,000 annual salary, pay add-ons and perquisites worth $16,000 or thereabouts and benefits/deferred compensation in the range of $89,000 for a total annual compensation of $396,000. Rice committed to drafting the employment contract into a finalized form which was to be considered and ratified in an executive session of the city council during a specially called meeting on August 28.
In short order there was word that San Bernardino’s two-thirds-of-a-year-long hunt for a city manager was over and the Sentinel and other elements of the media in San Bernardino County, through the process of elimination and comparison of the information put out that summer by Koff & Associates among job applicants and city council members of the cities that had retained it, deduced Carrigan was going to be San Bernardino’s next city manager. The Sentinel published an article to that effect on August 25.
Over the weekend of August 26/27, Carrigan informed the members of the Salinas city council by phone and the city’s department heads by email that he was “a finalist for the city manager job in San Bernardino.” By the end of the weekend, the media in Monterey County were aware of Carrigan’s impending departure.
The San Bernardino City Council headed into the August 28, 2023 meeting with First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Third Ward Councilman Juan Figueroa, Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett and Mayor Helen Tran completely sold on Carrigan and Seventh Ward Councilman Alexander favorably disposed toward him, as well, but less enthusiastically than his five colleagues. Fifth Ward Councilman Ben Reynoso and Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin, while not overtly critical of Carrigan, felt the city had not fully explored its options with other worthy candidates and should not end the recruitment drive and evaluative process.
Carrigan was not on hand at the August 28 meeting in San Bernardino. In the open public portion of the meeting before the council adjourned into closed session to discuss the Carrigan hiring, some city residents addressed the council, some of whom advocated against making the hiring at that time. Councilwoman Calvin sought ahead of the closed session to close out the recruitment process and the contract with Koff & Associates and to reagendize a discussion about reinitiating the recruitment process anew. The council voted 4-to-3, with Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett prevailing, against Calvin’s motion and adjourned into a closed session. When the council emerged from behind closed doors, it was announced it had taken no reportable action. Rather than having made a definite decision to hire Carrigan at that time, which would have allowed the council to hire him at its next confabulation, the regular scheduled meeting of September 6, 2023, the council was put in the position of being scheduled to finalize negotiations with Carrigan during a closed executive session at that time, which would involve Carrigan, Rojas and the city’s human resources director, Suzie Soren. It was the intention of some, at least, that the September 6 meeting would be capped with Carrigan being given the city manager appointment, pursuant to the signed employment contract. For reasons that remain unclear to the public, perhaps because Carrigan was not in attendance on September 6, the deal was not finalized that night.
When the council emerged from its closed session on September 6, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho announced, “The mayor and council are very pleased this evening that a formal offer of employment has been made to a city manager candidate.” She did not, however, identify Carrigan as the selection. A vote on confirming the appointment and the candidate’s acceptance of the contract was set for the October 4 city council meeting. The identification of the council’s selection as city manager – Carrigan – was to be provided in the agenda for the October 4 meeting, which was scheduled for posting no later than September 29, 2023.
What might have been a fateful interruption of the process to hire Carrigan consisted of the cancellation, well ahead of time, of the September 20 city council meeting at which Carrigan’s hiring might have been finalized. Because, Carvalho asserted, “State law requires that an employment agreement for a city manager be on a regular meeting agenda and due to the fact that the September 20 regular meeting has been canceled,” she said the city manager appointment would be delayed until the city council meeting of October 4. Had the September 20 meeting been held, Carrigan likely would have been hired officially as of that date and, perhaps, no further difficulty would have ensued.
The preparations for Carrigan’s hiring proceeded, including putting the final touches on the form of his employment agreement, and were in full swing, indeed completed except for the official signatures, by the last week of September.
On September 26, 2023, Mayor Tran hosted a fundraiser to bank money toward her anticipated 2026 reelection campaign. During the course her interaction with the public and her supporters at that event, she was importuned by some in attendance to reconsider her support for Carrigan, with some suggesting that if he were to not work out as the city manager, his failure would be perceived as a discredit to her administration. It is not known beyond Tran’s immediate circle the degree to which she took those admonitions to heart. Some have suggested that she was prepared to withdraw her support of Carrigan and that in doing so, Carrigan was to have been left high and dry, as his appointment would fail on October 4 on a 4-to-4 vote, with Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett voting for the hiring and Tran, Reynoso, Calvin and Alexander opposed. Others have said that even if Tran defected from the camp supporting Carrigan, he still would have been appointed on, at the very least, a 5-to-3 vote, and perhaps on a 6-to-2 vote, with with Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett, Reynoso and Alexander in support. Still others insist that Tran was not going to waver, as she was convinced Carrigan was a capable municipal manager and she could ill afford to allow the city to remain adrift and without crucial long-term staff leadership any longer, as she was approaching her first anniversary in office without having an actual city manager in place.
How things might have gone on October 4, however, will never be known with certainty, as Carrigan, on September 28 had an abrupt change of heart. He called Koff & Associates/Gallagher Benefit Services and informed the company he would not take the San Bernardino job, after all. He then drafted a memo to the Salinas municipal staff. “Earlier this morning,” he began, “I contacted the recruiter and removed my name from consideration for the position of San Bernardino city manager. Over the past few weeks, I have had time to think about what’s important to me from a personal and a professional standpoint and I have decided that Salinas is the best place for me. In Salinas, we’ve made a lot of progress on major issues like homelessness, affordable housing, crime and infrastructure and I want to be here to continue that momentum. I cannot see myself working anywhere else.”
Carrigan then alluded to something many people already knew, which was that his decision to remain in Salinas was influenced by his desire to maintain the relationship he had developed over the previous two years with Salinas City Elementary School Superintendent Rebeca Andrade. “I have met someone in Salinas that I’m crazy about,” he wrote.
In San Bernardino there was a mad scramble on at City Hall, particularly in the city clerk’s office, where staff had to redraft the by-then fully prepared October 4 city council meeting agenda by deleting the item relating to Carrigan’s employment with the city and renumbering the items that followed it on the agenda, with each given an identifying number one less than what had already been assigned, and likewise altering the agenda packet to remove the staff report relating to and recommending Carrigan’s hiring, which had been augmented with an employment agreement.
Over the weekend of September 30/October 1, Carrigan was looking forward to life with a renewed purpose: He was committed to continuing to meet, and overcome, even more than before, the challenges facing Salinas, which included many issues not unlike those in San Bernardino: the city’s institutionalized budget deficit, crime, homelessness and efforts to create affordable housing.
On October 3, the day before the San Bernardino City Council would have voted on approving Carrigan’s contract with the city that was to provide him with a total annual compensation of $396,000, six of the seven Salinas City Council members met in a two-hour closed session, after which it was announced they had voted 6-to-0 to terminate him from his $355,899.38 total annual compensation job as city manager.
Later in October, San Bernardino went to Plan B, which consisted of hiring another applicant, Charles Montoya, as city manager. During Montoya’s nearly seven-month run as city manager until he was terminated by the council in May, Carrigan filed a $2.31 million claim against the City of San Bernardino, alleging that members of the city council had purposefully and with malice violated his confidentiality as a city manager applicant; the relationship between members of the city council, in particular Sanchez, Figueroa and Shorett on one side and Calvin on the other, deteriorated; Montoya, who’s hiring had been opposed by Calvin, Reynoso and Alexander, developed a bitter enmity toward Calvin; complaints about Calvin bypassing the city manager’s office in seeking information from city staff were registered; Montoya persuaded the council, essentially over the objections of Calvin, Reynoso and Alexander, to publicly disclose, first in December 2023 and then April 2024, the executive summaries of investigations conducted by Laguna Niguel-based JL Group into accusations of Calvin’s direct interaction with city staff and into potential breaches of confidentiality in the 2023 city manager recruitment process, which, respectively, offered the conclusions that Calvin had improperly interacted with the city’s line employees and was responsible for the revelation that Carrigan had applied for the city manager job; Calvin at first subtly and then with greater resolve moved to challenge a unilateral effort by Montoya to have the city enter into an exclusive no-bid contract with the bond underwriting firm, Stifel Financial, Inc., to have it serve as the city’s financial advisor and underwriter with regard to what was to be an initial issuance of $120 million in bonds, the proceeds from which Montoya intended to use to shore up the city’s infrastructure and finance the seismic retrofit of City Hall; the council majority of Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett began the process of censuring Calvin; and the council collectively in May moved to adopt what had been Calvin’s position from the outset, namely that Montoya was overstepping his authority in his role as city manager.
On May 22, the city council, acting unanimously, terminated Montoya without citing cause, in so doing conferring on him a specified severance equivalent to 12 months of his base salary, or $325,000.
One day shy of a month later, on June 21, 2024, Steve Carrigan, represented by R. Craig Scott of the Irvine-based Executive Law Group, sued the City of San Bernardino, claiming the city failed to maintain the confidentiality of its 2023 city manager recruitment process, which either directly or indirectly led to his firing by Salinas shortly after he signaled he was not interested in the San Bernardino job.  Moreover, according to the suit, the City of San Bernardino or its officials interfered with a contract he had entered into; intentionally interfered with his prospective economic advantage; damaged his reputation; intentionally and/or negligently inflicted upon him emotional distress; engaged in racial discrimination against him because, it was alleged, he was white and Calvin, Reynoso and Alexander, as African Americans, were opposed to his hiring as city manager; invaded his privacy by depicting him in a false light; and violated the Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, by discussing matters pertaining to him with the public after obtaining that information during closed, executive sessions of the council.
Carrigan and Scott proceeded with the lawsuit against San Bernardino despite the consideration that information had emerged that the so-called leaking of Carrigan’s name first as a candidate for the San Bernardino job and then as the council’s final choice to be given a contract for the post had come about not because of the actions of anyone with the city but because of the lack of security and confidentiality maintained by Koff & Associates. As an attorney, Scott made the calculation that his client should go after San Bernardino for three reasons. The first of these was that San Bernardino, backed by taxpayer money, was deemed to have “deeper pockets” than Koff & Associates, and would thus be better situated to make a larger payout if Carrigan managed to prevail. The second reason was that, given Koff & Associates’ reluctance/aversion to having its practice of compromising the identities of the individuals being recruited or applying for city management positions publicly disclosed, Koff & Associates employees, including most particularly Rojas, could be counted upon to provide testimony against the city on behalf of Carrigan. The third reason was that the city itself or at least some of its officials and employees had taken action which weakened the city’s legal position. This included the city having commissioned JL Group to look into the alleged breaches of confidentiality in the 2023 city manager recruitment process and then releasing the executive summary of the investigation and its conclusions in April, which contained the statement that a “preponderance of credible evidence overwhelmingly points to Calvin as the originator of the closed-session leaks.” The city’s position had been further weakened, according to Scott, by Suzie Soren, who was the city’s human resources director during the city manager recruitment process, phoning Carrigan on the morning of October 5, 2023, following the previous night’s city council meeting at which Carrigan had been, previous to his decision to withdraw his candidacy, scheduled to be hired, to tell him that during the October 4 closed session discussion of the city council, “There was a lot of talk last night about you and there was a lot of talk about how we cost you your job.”
Scott intimated that he would be able to marshal evidence that Carrigan had been discriminated against because he was white. In the narrative Scott had included with his claim on behalf of Carrigan, the attorney stated, without being specific as to the date, “After Carrigan’s possible appointment as city manager of San Bernardino was considered in a closed session of the San Bernardino City Council, Rojas informed Corrigan that three of the council members wanted a different candidate. Pressed for more information, Rojas told Carrigan, ‘This is about race.’ Carrigan is white. Two of the three council members who did not vote to extend an employment offer to Carrigan are African American and they wanted the other candidate, who is African American. One or more members of the city orchestrated this effort to squash Carrigan’s candidacy because Carrigan is not the correct, favored race (Black).”
That element of the claim and suit, however, was problematic, in that Carrigan’s selection as city manager was at one point endorsed by Alexander and not opposed by Reynoso, who are African American. Moreover, it was not any of the votes or action taken by the city council, which by a majority vote on at least three occasions selected Carrigan for hiring or ratified extending an employment contract to him, but rather Carrigan’s choice, which Scott acknowledged, to withdraw as a candidate which resulted in Carrigan not being hired as San Bernardino city manager.
“Carrigan contacted Rojas, requesting that his name be removed from consideration to be the next San Bernardino city manager,” Scott wrote in the narrative accompanying Carrigan’s claim filed with the city on November 30, 2023.
At its August 7 meeting, the city council was scheduled to discuss in closed session nine existing lawsuits it is involved in, including “Steve Carrigan v. City of San Bernardino and Kimberly Calvin, Superior Court of the County of San Bernardino Case No. CIVSB 2419810.”
Prior to the council adjourning into that closed session, Calvin addressed the city council, as did Treasure Ortiz, who vied for Mayor against Tran in the 2022 election and is currently a finalist candidate in the November election for Seventh Ward councilwoman after having finished first among three candidates in the March 5 Primary Election.
Ortiz told the council the city should not settle the case.
“Steve Carrigan on his end had told people and used his own employees at Salinas as references to come and apply for the job here,” Ortiz said. “He was being evaluated for poor performance earlier in the year, which was why he applied. They appointed a city manager in his stead and two days later, at his own voluntary admission, said, “I love Salinas and don’t want to come to San Bernardino.’ Where else in the world can you give up a job and then expect people to pay you for voluntarily walking away from that position? It doesn’t happen, so why is San Bernardino entertaining that? What he is using, then, is, ‘Well, if I can’t get you on that, I’m a white man and how dare black people show up – even though he wants to discount that the other half was all Hispanic – speaking out about what they want in a city manager, not what they do or do not want in him. Why are we here?”
Ortiz asserted the JLGroup report blaming Calvin for the leaks regarding Carrigan would not stand up to scrutiny.
“I want you guys to go fight for the city because the political attack toward Kim [Calvin] did not work,” Ortiz said. “Everything you guys put in that investigation report has been proven false, fabricated or altered. So, do your due diligence and what we need to do as a community is shut Steve Carrigan down because he’s done nothing but try to take advantage of our community because of the political infighting that happens.”
Calvin, having come down from the council dais to speak at the public speaking podium, told the mayor and her council colleagues that she wanted to “remind you that in your role as a governing body for 227,000 San Bernardino residents, you have a fiduciary responsibility to make only financially prudent decisions on our behalf. I see that the matter of Carrigan vs the City of San Bernardino and myself, Kimberly Calvin, is on the agenda for discussion and possible settlement. Before anyone again falsely accuses me of improperly disclosing closed session information, I should tell you that the possible settlement comment was conveyed to me by someone outside closed session and not from the city attorney’s office or any city staff. In fact it was my personal attorney who informed me, so I am at liberty to say, if I choose: This case completely and utterly lacks all merit, and to vote to settle now, only about a month after it was filed, is arguably a violation of your fiduciary duty. Before you vote to settle, you need to know the facts and all the facts, as your decision should be based solely on the facts. To vote to settle this case before ascertaining all the facts is tantamount to giving away all the hard-earned income that our residents pay in taxes and, arguably, another violation of state law. Why would you want to place the City of San Bernardino in such a failed light? I respectfully ask you to wait just 30 days … one month before settling. The only legally prudent and responsible thing to do is to wait 30 days so the council can make an informed decision based on all the facts.”
The council adjourned into a closed session. After it reconvened in public, Assistant City Attorney Jason Baltimore stated, “The following reportable action is noted: By a vote of 5-to 1, with Councilmember Ibarra voting no and Councilmember Calvin absent from the discussion, the city approved a payment of 800,000 [dollars].”
Of that payout, $266,666.67 is to go to Scott in legal fees. Carrigan is to collect the remaining $533,333.33.
-Mark Gutglueck