A hopeful early effort by San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran to install Rochelle Clayton as city manager just a day after the three new members of the city council were seated fell through when a crucial fifth vote to do so did not materialize on Thursday.
In the initial weeks of her employment with San Bernardino, Clayton experienced a mercurial rise, as she was promoted to the acting city manager’s post less than six weeks after she began with the city.
Clayton, who had worked 17 years in the finance department with San Bernardino County and later held the positions of finance director with the City of La Habra Heights, chief financial officer for both the High Desert Water District in Yucca Valley and the West Valley Water District in Rialto, administrative services director and deputy city manager with Banning before she became assistant city manager in Menifee, had been hired by then-City Manager Charles Montoya to serve as one of his primary assistants in the role of deputy city manager, beginning on April 15, 2024. Montoya, however, was by that point on unsteady footing in San Bernardino, six months after his October 2023 hiring. When the mayor and city council pulled the plug on Montoya, agreeing to confer on him a severance pay out equal to his $325,000 per year salary on May 22, they elevated Clayton into the role of the city’s acting, or interim, top administrator on a 5-to-3 vote that same evening.
The initial plan was to carry out an executive search/recruitment to find a replacement for Montoya and that Clayton would hold down the fort until someone acceptable to the mayor and a majority of the city council was found.
Over the summer, Clayton made a favorable impression on virtually all members of the city council, including Seventh Ward Councilman Damon Alexander, Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra and First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, all of whom had opposed entrusting her with running the city in May. On October 2, after conferring/negotiating with Clayton in a closed-door session outside the scrutiny of the public, Mayor Helen Tran and the entirety of the council had concluded that they could simply dispense with the city manager recruitment effort and hire Clayton to serve as its full-fledged city manager going forward.
California cities are required by law to carry out votes to officially hire a city manager during a normally scheduled meeting of their respective city councils. As the second and last regularly scheduled city council meeting in October was canceled because council members were in attendance at a California League of Cities convention on October 16, the vote to ratify Clayton’s contract, which was to provide her with a $325,000 salary, subject to an annual cost of living increase tied to the consumer price index and capped at 5 percent, another $11,619.95 in perks and pay add-ons and $115,693.41 in benefits, for an initial total annual compensation of $452,313.36, was to take place at its first regularly scheduled meeting in November, on November 6, 2024. In addition, the contract the city council was to approve called for providing her with a one-time relocation benefit of $10,000, if she were to move to a residence within the boundaries of the City of San Bernardino within two years.
The cancellation of the October 16 city council meeting would prove significant. During the five weeks between the October 2 and November 6 council meetings, Councilman Sanchez had initiated inquiries, capped with the filing of California Public Records Act requests, for information relating to the city’s ongoing efforts to obtain state funding for planned homeless assistance programs in the city. Through the responses to his filing, Sanchez learned that less than two months after Clayton had taken on the acting city manager assignment, she had been informed by the California Department of Housing and Community Development that San Bernardino had been selected to receive a $17 million Homekey grant to pay for a sizeable percentage of a $24 million homeless shelter the city intends to build on Sixth Street. Clayton had not informed the city council about the state’s offer of the money and, again without informing the council, notified Sacramento that the city was declining the money. Sanchez would also learn that the city had under Clayton’s watch further failed to lay claim to another $3 million grant from San Bernardino County to pay for homeless service efforts because the city had not made three adjustments to its planned homeless assistance strategy that would have qualified it to receive the money. When this was brought up for discussion during the closed session prior to the public session at the November 6 council meeting in which Clayton’s hiring was to take place, the council elected at that point to pull the ratification of the city manager’s contract from the public portion of the meeting agenda, placing her hiring, or at that point possible hiring, into indefinite abeyance.
Throughout the remainder of November and into the earliest stage of this month, there remained several individuals and entities committed to having Clayton take on the city manager assignment. Those included Mayor Tran and both Fifth Ward Councilman Ben Reynoso and Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin, developer and major campaign donor Scott Beard and both the San Bernardino Police Officers Association and the San Bernardino Police Management Association.
Tran, in particular, wants to get Clayton in place as city manager for a number of reasons. Just prior to Tran becoming mayor in December 2022, Robert Field, who had been city manager since 2022, resigned. As a consequence, the entirety of Tran’s tenure as mayor so far has played out without any real certainty as to the city’s managerial echelon. Until Montoya was hired, the city was in what was essentially caretaker mode, as it was being looked after by an interim city manager – retired former City Manager Charles McNeely – who was filling the void as the city was looking for someone to take the long-term position. Thus, Tran was unable to formulate let alone actuate an integral game plan in terms of planning, organizing, directing and controlling an operational and urban evolution strategy for the largest city in the county. Montoya’s regency was marred by the distrust that Councilwoman Calvin had toward him from the start and which she slowly infused into her council colleagues over the next six months.
Tran, like her predecessor, former Mayor John Valdivia, has discovered the stifling limitations of the 2016 city charter change, which took from San Bernardino’s mayoral position the administrative authority that had been the mayor’s purview under the 1905 San Bernardino Charter. As the mayoral post in San Bernardino was already one that had built-in political limitations even before the charter change and was given no further political authority under the 2016 San Bernardino Charter, Tran found herself trying to guide and lead the city when the only tools in her arsenal were her unfettered authority to place items on the city council agenda, ability to break a tie vote of the council, veto power on votes of 4-to-3 and 3-to-2, and her authority as the presiding officer at council meetings to control the ebb and flow of debate and discussion. Under normal circumstances, with the exception of matters involving the hiring and firing of the city manager, city attorney and city clerk, the mayor was not permitted to vote on matters decided by the city council. Thus, the mayoral prerogatives were greatly limited, and for a mayor to succeed in San Bernardino at present, the holder of the office needs either/and/or an uncommon level of charisma, charm or force of personality. Having spun her wheels for nearly two years as of this November, Tran examined the circumstance, concluding that to effectively govern and achieve a record of substance by the time she must stand for reelection in 2026, she needed to recapture, by whatever means possible, the administrative authority that had been the province of past mayors. She came to an understanding with Clayton that upon Clayton being fully installed as city manager, the way would be cleared for Clayton to utilize her administrative authority to make it possible for the mayor to achieve as many of Tran’s goals as there was practical time to pursue them.
A major complication existed in that both Reynoso and Calvin were to leave the council as of December 18 as a result of having been voted out of their positions during the 2024 election cycle, as was the case with Alexander. Tran thus found herself engaged in a full court press during November in which she was seeking to recreate at least five-eighths of the unanimous consensus that had existed on October 2 to offer Clayton a contract to serve as city manager.
The city council – which consists of what are essentially amateurs in the field of municipal operations – had by that point broken into what were essentially two camps. One of those – consisting of Reynoso and Calvin – would first look to Clayton for guidance and counsel with regard to the challenges facing the city and the policy or action to be taken in regard thereto. At the other extreme was Sanchez, who gravitated more often to turning to City Attorney Sonia Carvalho for direction. Not firmly planted in either camp were Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Third Ward Councilman Juan Figueroa, Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett and Councilman Alexander. Tran’s Plan A was to see if she could in some fashion or other persuade two among Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett or Alexander that San Bernardino’s near and midterm future could best be secured by a coordinated and clear vision with regard to the city’s transformation from a political subdivision struggling to overcome its image of a municipality dogged by its 2012 bankruptcy declaration to one that is seriously engaged in creating a community dynamic of economic opportunity, and that the best hope to achieve that was to entrust Clayton with orchestrating a social, governmental and financial makeover. In executing upon Plan A, which would need to be effectuated on or before December 4, the last regularly scheduled city council meeting this month before the scheduled departures of Reynoso, Calvin and Alexander, the mayor hit upon the strategy of giving the council the opportunity to show Carvalho the door. Tran’s aim in this regard was two-fold. It would test, indirectly, the sentiment on the council with regard to Clayton, since a willingness on the part of the council collectively or any individual council member singly to dispense with Carvalho would, given the Clayton/Carvalho dichotomy on the panel, signal relative favor toward Clayton. Second, if Carvalho could be removed from her role with the city, that would leave Clayton as the logical figurehead within the city’s command echelon behind whom to unite. Tran scheduled a showdown with Carvalho for the November 22 city council meeting, at which she scheduled a vote of the council to terminate the city attorney. Knowing that she already had the votes of Reynoso and Calvin lined up to ax Carvalho, Tran calculated that if she could find two more votes to do so, she could then turn her attention to the next regular city council meeting on December 4, at which she could then leap into the breach and attempt to get the council to hire Clayton as its long-term city manager.
As it would turn out, however, Carvalho maneuvered to place onto the November 22 agenda a council evaluation of her performance that was to take place in that meeting’s closed session. This would give the city attorney an opportunity to say things to the council members in confidence and outside the scrutiny of the public. It is publicly unknown what deep secrets Carvalho, who was the deputy city attorney from 2018 to 2020 and who has been the city attorney since 2020, has knowledge of with regard to the city, its staff, the council and mayor. At the November 22 meeting, Councilman Sanchez, working in tandem with Councilman Shorett, repeatedly used parliamentary procedure to prevent Mayor Tran from bringing the question of whether to terminate Carvalho to a vote that evening. In that way, Tran’s effort to jettison Carvalho to prepare for Clayton’s ascendancy failed. The meeting did, however, serve the purpose of giving an indication that Shorett’s vote to promote Clayton would not be forthcoming if doing so meant that the city would need to end its arrangement with Carvalho and her firm, Best Best & Krieger. Tran further learned that evening that Alexander was not in favor of the city council of which he was then a member taking any action with regard to the future of either the city manager or the city attorney while he, Calvin and Reynoso were yet members. His position was that the reconstituted council that was to come into being on December 18 – which would have Kimberly Knaus in Reynoso’s place, Mario Flores occupying Calvin’s spot and Treasure Ortiz as his replacement – should be permitted to participate in the determination of who should hold the city’s two most influential staff positions, since Knaus, Flores and Ortiz would be in the position of working with the city manager and city attorney over the next four years.
The failure to get Carvalho fired before the council changed three of its personnel on December 18 was a setback for both Tran and Clayton. In reaction, Clayton, anticipating that the city was going to conduct a recruitment and competitive comparison of city manager applicants before filling that position, informed the council in the afternoon of December 4 before that night’s council meeting that she would self-demote back into her deputy city manager post as soon as the council found another interim city manager. Clayton at the same time indicated she would apply for the city manager’s post. Tacitly, Clayton was conveying that while she was indeed interested in becoming the city’s long-term city manager, she was aware that if she competed for post and did not get it, there was no guarantee that she would be able to remain with the city as deputy manager. Indeed, if she was not hired as city manager, her role as interim or city manager would come to an end with the hiring of one of the other candidates. And the newly hired city manager, whoever that was, might not want to have as his or her chief assistant someone he or she had competed against – and outshone – to get the job.
But while Tran was taken aback by the developments, she was not daunted. She went to Plan B. As a consequence of public statements made by Flores and Ortiz, the mayor knew that both were in favor of conferring the fully-empowered city manager’s post on Clayton. This, essentially, meant that the pre-December 18 and post-December 18 circumstances were identical in that Clayton had in her favor three solid votes in the form of Tran’s and those of two of the members of the council, such that by waiting until after the new council was installed, Tran could effectuate Clayton’s hiring by yet getting two more votes to promote her from among Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus. What was more, Knaus had publicly stated that she was looking forward to working cooperatively with the mayor and other members of the council and stood ready to engage in consensus-building for the betterment of San Bernardino. While that fell slightly short of an out-and-out endorsement of Clayton, it presaged a willingness to engage in a dialogue that the mayor considered to be promising. With the prospect of a fourth vote for Clayton in sight, it opened the way for those among Tran’s support network to approach Shorett, Figueroa and Ibarra to make the case for Clayton while simultaneously making the point that joining what was slowly coalescing into a ruling coalition on amicable terms with city management would offer them and their wards a definite advantage over being isolated as a single vote on a fragmented council. Indeed, representatives of the two police unions and Beard approached council members, advocating on Clayton’s behalf.
Tran sought to lay the groundwork for Clayton’s hiring by the post-December 18 council by once again seeking, ahead of the installation Knaus, Flores and Ortiz, to ease Carvalho out the door. At the December 4 council meeting, she placed on the agenda a closed session discussion of the dismissal of the city attorney and the appointment of an interim city attorney. Though she recognized that Sanchez, Shorett and Alexander would not be willing to terminate Carvalho, she was willing to explore whether Ibarra and Figueroa might be convinced that doing so would be in the best interest of the city.
The council adjourned into the closed session that night where, presumably, such a discussion ensued. Upon returning from the closed session, however, it was announced that no reportable action had been taken by the council.
Carvalho remained city attorney, but over the next week, as the countdown toward the December 18 changeover on the council proceeded, signals were exchanged, ones to which the public was not privy, but which nonetheless indicated to those in Tran’s camp that Clayton’s stock was rising. Word was that there was better than an even chance that Knaus would join with Tran, Flores and Ortiz to promote Clayton into the permanent city manager’s post and that among Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett, there was a fair chance that one of the three would come through with a vote to back Clayton. Even more encouraging to Tran and Clayton, there was a clearly discernible potential that once one among Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett swung behind Tran on the Clayton issue, two and maybe all three would vote to elevate her, leaving Sanchez as the lone council member in opposition to her.
A tangible indication that something was up came when Clayton emailed the council with a “clarification” of what she had stated on December 4, when she more or less rescinded her self-demotion.
On December 18, the regularly-scheduled council meeting began with the seven members that have been in place since 2020, as the mayor and the community commemorated the service of Reynoso, Calvin and Alexander over the last four years. Thereafter, Knaus was sworn into office by Assemblyman James Ramos, Mario Flores was sworn in by Ernest Roney IV and Treasure Ortiz was sworn into office by Kimberly Calvin.
After those ceremonies were completed, Mayor Tran, using her authority as the council’s presiding officer, called for making a deviation from the standard seating arrangement on the dais that had Council Ward 1 through Ward 7 in numerical order situated left to right from the gallery’s perceptive with her between Ward 4 and Ward 5. Instead, the mayor rearranged the placement of the council, such that Councilwoman Ibarra was at the far left next to Councilwoman Knaus next to Councilman Sanchez next to Councilwoman Ortiz next to Tran, next to Councilman Figueroa, next to Councilman Flores, with Councilman Shorett at the far right. She said this order would benefit the new members by placing them in proximity to the experienced members. “We have a rare opportunity as part of a transition of council,” Tran said. “As mayor and presiding officer of the council meetings, my primary goal is to help improve communication and help build consensus among the council. My goal, our goal, is to foster dialogue, collaboration and mentorship between our newly elected members and our more seasoned council members.”
Thereafter followed a relatively short, by the council’s standards, 37-minute and 28-second meeting which dealt with a public hearing on an updating of the city code with regard to accessory dwelling units and two quick items relating to the annexing of certain areas of the city into facilities maintenance districts and the levying of fees upon those properties. The council then voted on appointments of its members to various regional and governmental auxiliary and augmentation boards, which entailed substituting Sanchez’s recommended list of appointments for Trans’. The council further voted to designate Figueroa as mayor pro tem, replacing Shorett.
The entire meeting played out in an atmosphere of goodwill and bonhomie, a far cry from what some expected, given that over the last two years Ortiz had been a recurrent critic of the council, that she was, in 2019 when she was a resident of District 3, Figueroa’s opponent for his council seat and in 2022 she was one of Trans’ opponents for mayor.
Striking while the iron was hot, Tran had previously scheduled a special closed session meeting of the council for the following morning at 11:15. To be discussed during that meeting were three items, listed as the appointment of the acting city manager, the appointment of the interim city manager and the appointment of the city manager, all of which pertained to Clayton.
While ratifying the contract of a city manager was not something that could take place at a specially-called meeting, what Tran was hoping to accomplish was to get a vote of the council replicating an approximation of what had occurred on October 2, when a consensus to hire Clayton was expressed.
On October 2, that consensus was unanimous. While Tran was realistic enough to recognize that unanimity was out of the question at this point, she still hoped she could achieve majority direction to once again place Clayton’s contract on an upcoming agenda, potentially the council’s next regularly scheduled meeting on January 15, 2025.
The council convened at 11:17 a.m. on December 11, with both Councilwoman Ibarra and Councilman Flores absent. The council adjourned into its closed session at 11:21 a.m.
Upon returning from the closed session, Carvalho announced, “There is no reportable action on the closed session items this afternoon.”
Word emanating from those involved in city operations is that Tran is yet incubating a workable consensus that will keep Clayton as the city’s top administrator for the remainder of the 2020s.
-Mark Gutglueck