Late today, the San Bernardino City Council voted to hire recently retired Brea City Manager Fred Gallardo as its seventh top administrator/city manager in 25 months or eighth such entity in 26 months.
Officials expressed hope that the ongoing effort to select a full-time and full-fledged city manager and provide the city with administrative stability will reach fruition soon.
Since the election of Helen Tran as mayor in 2022, there has been a cascade of intensified changeability in city’s executive suite, which was already prone to impermanence.
Not since Fred Wilson served as city manager from 1996? until 2008 has the city had a top staffer in place for anything approaching even half of a decade. Wilson’s successor, Charles McNeely remained in place from 2009 to 2012 before returning in 2023 to serve nine months in an interim capacity and Alan Parker lasted from 2013 to the end of 2015. Both rode herd over municipal operations in the county seat only a fraction of the time that Wilson was in charge, yet their tenures were virtually interminable compared to most of the rest of San Bernardino’s city managers in the last decade.
Robert Field, the last city manager before Tran took office, lasted two years and three months before he resigned out of concern that his service to the mayoral administration of the politician Tran had displaced, John Valdivia, would not sit well with her. Field had replaced Teri Ledoux, whose tenure as city manager lasted a mere 15 months. Ledoux had replaced Andrea Travis-Miller, whose slightly more than 18 months as city manager ended in May 2019 and had begun in October 2017, some four-and-a-half years after she had served in an interim city manager capacity between McNeely’s first tour of duty and that of Parker.
After Field’s departure, Tran had prevailed upon McNeely to reprise his managerial role with the city, this time in an acting or interim capacity, just long enough for her and the city council to come to a determination about whom they should hire to plan, direct, organize and control city operations. At one point, McNeely, who was then 70 years old, contemplated coming out of retirement, dispensing with the acting/interim qualifier to the title he had just assumed and reestablishing himself as the city manager. There was insufficient support on the council for him to do that, and as 2023 dragged on, the council had difficulty coming to a consensus about which of the 68 applicants for city manager should be selected. In August 2023, the mayor and seven members of the council came to a six-person consensus to hire then-Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan as San Bernardino city manager. Throughout September 2023, the city council temporized with regard to formally ratifying the contract it had formally offered to him and which he had accepted. On September 28, 2023, six days before the council was scheduled to vote upon approving the contract with Carrigan, he withdrew his acceptance of the city manager’s appointment in San Bernardino, indicating he wanted to remain in Salinas. On October 3, the Salinas City Council, upset that Carrigan had contemplating leaving Salinas in the lurch, fired him. Thereafter, in November 2023, Carrigan lodged a $2.2 million claim against San Bernardino, based on what he said was the $731,250 that he would have earned during the remainder of his contract in Salinas, $500,000 for damages to his reputation and $1 million from the loss of what he stood to earn in San Bernardino or elsewhere. In June 2024, he followed the claim up with a lawsuit against San Bernardino, which the city then settled with a $800,000 payout. Shortly after the debacle with Carrigan, in October 2023, the mayor and four members of the San Bernardino City Council settled on hiring Charles Montoya, the one-time city manager of Castroville and Avondale, Arizona. Montoya, in response to Mayor Tran’s desire to have the city make progress with regard redressing homelessness and blight issues plaguing the city, moved aggressively with regard to a host of initiatives, in some cases without council authorization of his actions. While this was initially supported, by late spring 2024, one month after he had hired Rochelle Clayton to serve as the city’s deputy city manager, Unanimous sentiment on the part of the mayor and council developed against Montoya, and he was terminated without the citation of cause, triggering a clause in his contract calling for him to receive a severance payout equal to 12 months’ salary – $325,000. When the $182,812.50 in salary and $40,832.43 in perquisites and benefits that had been paid to Montoya from October through May were taken into consideration and added to the $325,000 severance, it thus cost San Bernardino taxpayers $548,644.93 for the roughly 6.75 months that Montoya worked for them as their city manager. To fill in for Montoya, Mayor Tran and city council members Juan Figueroa, Fred Shorett, Ben Reynoso and Kimberly Calvin elevated Clayton, who had been with the city for right around six weeks at that point, to the acting city manager role. By late September, Clayton had sufficiently impressed the entirety of the council, including the members who had not supported appointing her into the interim city manager role in May – Ted Sanchez, Sandra Ibarra and Damon Alexander – that they were ready to dispense with any further efforts to find a suitable long-term city manager candidate and simply move Clayton into the position. During a closed session discussion on October 2, 2024, the mayor and city council unanimously resolved to offer her the city manager post, in which capacity she was to receive a $325,000 base 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 yearly and $115,693.41 in benefits, for an initial total annual compensation of $452,313.36. Over the next few weeks, council representatives and the mayor negotiated with her to add the incentive of a provision of 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 from her home in Riverside within two years.
The council was set to approve that contract with her on November 6, 2024, but in late October, through a response to a public records request made by Councilman Sanchez, it was learned that in July the State of California Department of Housing and Community Development had offered the City of San Bernardino a $17 million Homekey program grant to cover the city’s cost in constructing a homeless services facility and that Clayton had not informed the council of that grant offer. The documentation obtained by Sanchez showed that the following month, again without informing the council, Clayton had declined the city’s acceptance of the grant.
When Sanchez shared what he had learned with his council colleagues, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Alexander balked at approving the contract with Clayton on November 6. Over the next three months, as Reynoso, Clayton and Alexander served out the remaining time on their council terms and as the newly elected members of the council who came in to replace them on December 18 – Kim Knaus, Mario Flores and Treasure Ortiz – took up their places on the council dais, Mayor Tran redoubled her efforts to achieve, first, the unanimous support for promoting Clayton to city manager and, when that failed, to get at least the bare minimum number of votes needed to add to her own – 4 – to effectuate Clayton’s hiring. While Tran had the votes of Calvin and Reynoso to promote Clayton before the changeover in council personnel on December and the votes of Flores and Ortiz after the new council members were installed, she was unable to assemble from among Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett, Knaus and Alexander the two further votes she needed at any given time to make Clayton city manager.
Despite the consideration that the city had as recently as 2023 accumulated a list of no fewer than 67 applicants for the city manager position, a decision was made to conduct yet another recruitment of city managerial candidates and select from the new list finalists for the position, vet and interview them and ultimately select a finalist. The mayor and council sought to hire the consulting firm of Jacob Green & Associates to assist it in that process.
It was revealed that among the first of those to show interest in applying for the post was Clayton. At one point, it was indicated that Clayton, in addition to wanting the city manager post, was intent on remaining with the City of San Bernardino even if she were not promoted to city manager. For that reason, she declared here intention to return to her previous position as deputy city manager so that if she did not prevail in the competition for city manager, she could remain with city as deputy city manager instead of being let go by the city manager against whom she had competed for the job. She said she would return to the deputy city manager post as soon as someone to serve as interim city manager was found.
There were grounds to believe that Clayton’s prospect of becoming city manager was diminished as a consequence of Jacob Green & Associates offering guidance with regard to determining the desirable traits in the eventual holder of that position and moderating the selection process. Ultimately, the city disengaged from Jacob Green & Associates and arranged with Arthur Andersen and Associates to have it assist the council in determining who should be elected to run the city.
Last week, it was announced that Clayton was returning to her position as deputy city manager and that Deputy City Manager Tanya Romo would step into the acting city manager post. In some circles, this was interpreted as an indication that Clayton was under consideration as a top candidate for the city manager post and that a list of leading candidates for the post was in the process of being refined.
It turned out, however, that the reason Clayton had returned to her original deputy city manager slot with the city was that she is on the brink of leaving. In December 2024, more than ten months after then-Barstow City Manager Willie Hopkins had abruptly left that city to take the city manager’s post in Compton, the Barstow City Council redoubled its efforts to recruit a permanent replacement for Hopkins after having the city function under Barstow Police Chief Andrew Espinoza, who had been temporarily promoted to acting city manager there. In response to Barstow’s stepped-up recruitment determination, Clayton had applied for consideration. As of January 31, the Barstow City Council had reached a four-fifths consensus that the city could not do any better than having Clayton take the helm of the 24,815-population, 41.4-square mile city. The following week, Barstow Mayor Tim Silva and Councilwoman Barbara Rose met with Clayton to begin negotiating with her the terms under which she would come to work for the city. They ultimately arrived at a deal by which she was to be provided with a an annual salary of $274,000, up to $39,171 in perquisites and pay add-ons and $44,450.12 in benefits, or $357,621.12 in total annual compensation.
With Romo functioning as San Bernardino’s acting city manager, San Bernardino officials or those acting on its behalf – possibly Ralph Andersen and Associates – reached out to former Brea City Manager William “Bill” Gallardo, who resides in San Bernardino, to ascertain his willingness to temporarily serve in the top administrative post in the city in which he lives.
Gallardo retired in December 2024 after a 35-year career with the City of Brea, including serving as City Manager since 2015. Gallardo also held the positions of assistant city manager/administrative services director, finance manager, and revenue manager there.
He holds a degree in business from Cal Poly Pomona.
Gallardo responded positively to San Bernardino’s inquiry.
As a recently retired employee, Gallardo is currently receiving a pension through the California Public Employee Retirement System. Retired participants in the California Public Employee Retirement System are permitted to return to work for a California public agency, but only for six months, consisting of 26 week minus two weeks of vacation or 24 total weeks equating to 960 hours per fiscal year, running from July 1 through June 30. Under the terms worked out between Gallardo and San Bernardino, he will be paid $160.47 an hour. Assuming he works no more than 40 hours per week, when the current fiscal year ends at midnight on June 30, 2025, Gallardo will have worked approximately 760 hours, well within the 960 permissible hours in Fiscal Year 2024-25. He would then be able to continue working into Fiscal Year 2025-26, beginning July 1. Assuming he works 40 hours per week thereafter and takes no vacation, he would be able to remain on the job until December 12, 2025 or thereabouts.
Upon Gallardo making arrangements with the California Public Employment Retirement System to return to work, which will take place most likely by Tuesday or Wednesday next week, he will begin his assignment in San Bernardino, at which point Romo’s time as acting city manager in the city will be capped at around two weeks. She is to return to her post as deputy city manager.
“Bringing Bill Gallardo on board will ensure a smooth transition while the Council and I take the next steps to find our next City Manager,” said Mayor Helen Tran.
“I am honored and excited to take on the role of Interim City Manager,” said Gallardo. “I will work diligently to become a valuable resource for the Mayor, City Council and staff and, just as importantly, maintain crucial relationships between City Hall, the community, and agency partners during this time of transition as we search for a permanent city manager.”