On Monday, April 14, the Yucaipa City Council unanimously voted in a closed session to appoint Jennifer Crawford as Interim City Manager. Crawford is the Assistant City Manager. She has been Acting City Manager since Chris Mann was placed on administrative leave on March 3. Mann and the Council agreed to a mutual separation on March 11, effective March 31.
Crawford will serve as Interim City Manager while the Council searches for a permanent city manager. Her contract will be presented for approval at the next City Council meeting on April 28.
“I’m honored to serve as Interim City Manager and to continue working with our dedicated City staff, City Council and community,” said Crawford. “I look forward to working with the Council to ensure our city remains strong and well-run. Together, we’ll focus on moving Yucaipa forward.”
Crawford brings 26 years of experience with the city. She began her career in 1999 as a management analyst and was promoted to director of general services/city clerk/mobilehome rent administrator in 2004. In 2015, she advanced to deputy city manager/city clerk/mobilehome rent administrator, and in 2020, she was promoted to assistant city manager.
Throughout her tenure, Crawford has managed the design and construction of five city facilities, oversaw software implementation, and handled contract management for public safety, solid waste, and animal control services. She has also led emergency operations, implemented Community Emergency Response Team and affiliated programs, managed grants risk management, and coordinated community projects, among many other responsibilities. Her new role ensures that Yucaipa remains in capable hands during this transition.
Mayor Jon Thorp shared his trust in her. “Mrs. Crawford has the experience and skills we need right now,” he said. “I know she’ll help the Council keep our City on the right path. She cares about Yucaipa’s future.”
Crawford’s selection comes more than two years and three months after a differently composed city council touched off a cascade of controversy in the city of 58,157 that outran the degree of resident discomfiture with city government than was experienced in total throughout the city’s 36-year history.
The city council as it was then composed in October 2022 extended until June 2024 the city management contract of Ray Casey, who had served as city engineer for five years before moving into the top administrative post in 2008. In November 2022 election, Chris Venable and Matt Garner were chosen to replace longtime council members Greg Bogh and David Avila, who did not seek reelection, In January 2023, Garner joined with then-Mayor Justin Beaver and Councilman Bobby Duncan in a move to oust Casey as city manager and replace him with Chris Mann, who had been working for a few years as the city manager in Canyon Lake but had a slimmer municipal managerial resume than Casey, but whose experience as a developer and lobbyist for the building industry, developers, real estate investors and land speculators more closely matched the pro-development philosophy embraced by Beaver, Duncan and Garner.
Simultaneously, the city council jettisoned City Attorney David Snow and replaced him with Steven Graham, who was the city attorney in Canyon Lake, where Mann had been employed.
Instantaneously, substantial numbers of Yucaipa residents, alarmed that the forced departure of Casey, whose cautious managerial approach emphasized having the developers who were to profit by construction in the city defraying a major portion of the costs of the infrastructure needed to accommodate that growth, began to question the motivation of the newly formed council ruling coalition involving Beaver, Duncan and Garner. Suspecting that a move to liberalize development standards to allow the construction of massive subdivisions involving single family homes on lots as small as a tenth of an acre and apartment/condominium projects involving multiple score of units per acre was under way, 194 residents undertook an effort to gather sufficient signatures on a petition to conduct recall referendums to remove Beaver, Duncan and Garner from office.
In an effort to assist Beaver, Duncan and Garner in maneuvering out from underneath the onslaught of resident discontent, Mann brought Ana Sauseda, the city clerk who had been working in Canyon Lake with him and Graham, to Yucaipa to serve as city clerk. Mann then used taxpayer money entrusted to him as discretionary funding to hire two lawyers – Bradley W. Hertz and Eli B. Love – to represent Sauseda in a suit filed against the 194 Yucaipa residents who had banded together to distribute the recall petitions targeting Beaver, Duncan and Garner. In that suit, Sauseda alleged the 194 residents had misrepresented facts about the Beaver’s, Duncan’s and Mann’s sacking of Casey, namely that the three had violated the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, when they acted to get rid of Casey and replace him with Mann.
The lawsuit Sauseda filed against the recall proponents distracted them so much that they did not get the required signatures they needed by the deadline to put recall questions against Beaver, Duncan and Garner on the ballot in 2023.
Nevertheless, some of the recall proponents made responses to Sauseda’s lawsuit, ultimately prevailing in that Judge Michael Sachs ruled that the allegations contained in the statements circulated with the recall petitions, particularly with regard to the Brown Act violations were factual. Judge Sachs ordered the city to pay the legal costs of the one woman who challenged Sauseda’s lawsuit on the grounds that she was merely exercising her rights by participating in the recall effort.
Simultaneously, the recall proponents called for a civil grand jury investigation into the city’s tactics in having the newly hired city clerk file a lawsuit to thwart the recall effort. The grand jury made a finding that based on the way Casey had been forced out, Mann had been hired and the tactics used to keep the recall effort from playing out “the Yucaipa City Council has developed a reputation among many residents of ignoring the concerns of the public and of fostering an atmosphere of mistrust, disdain, anger, resentment, lack of transparency and appearances of conflicts of interest.”
With the 2024 election, in which Beaver and Duncan were scheduled to stand for reelection, approaching, Duncan, sensing widespread voter disapproval of how he had conducted himself, opted against running. Beaver did seek reelection. Voters in the city’s District 1, yet miffed with Garner over the Casey/Mann affair, undertook another recall petition drive against him early in 2024. Without functioning against the distraction of Sauseda’s lawsuit, those proponents succeeded in getting a recall question regarding Garner on the November 2024 ballot.
While Beaver did manage to get reelected, Duncan’s term ended in December 2024 as a consequence of his not running for reelection. The recall election against Garner succeeded.
Judy Woolsey, who was potentially a supporter of the Mann camp, prevailed in the three-way race to replace Duncan. In December 2024, after Woolsey and Beaver were sworn into office along with Jon Thorp, who had been on the council since 2020 and had opposed the sacking of Casey, the hiring of Mann and was unopposed in the 2024 election, the council voted to replace the recalled Garner with Bob Miller, a member of the Yucaipa Calimesa School District Board of Trustees.
Quietly, in closed sessions of the council conducted outside the scrutiny and earshot of the public, a consideration of whether Mann should be allowed to remain a city manager. While Beaver wholeheartedly to keep Mann as the shot caller at City Hall and Woolsey was less forcefully in favor of continuing his administrative tenure in Yucaipa, both Thorp and Chris Venable, whose efforts to keep Casey in place in January 2023 failed in the face of Beaver’s, Duncan’s and Garner’s determination to blow him out of the managerial position he held, felt compelled to draw the Mann era in Yucaipa to a close. Miller, too, recognizing the wellspring of resentment toward Mann and the distrust the voters had of his pro-development agenda which many believed to be a threat to the less intensive and relaxed pace of existence/quality of life for which Yucaipa is widely celebrated, had come to the conclusion that Mann had to go.
Rather than firing the city manager outright and citing cause for doing so, which would have entailed putting the pay-for-play ethos that many Yucaipa residents believed Mann was in the process of entangling City Hall in on display and damaging the city’s reputation, Thorp, who is now mayor, and Venable and Miller decided it would be best to cut ties with Mann by conferring on him a severance package consisting of a one-time $279,045 payout as well as the provision of one year of health benefits for him Mann and his family.
Reportedly, though no one wants to confirm it, the new ruling council coalition – Thorp, Venable and Miller – are interested in seeing if the now-64-year-old Casey would be interested in reprising his role as city manager. It is reported that Beaver is adamantly opposed to making such an offer to Casey.
In the meantime, Crawford is settling into caretaking mode, though some residents, and perhaps even Thorp, Venable and Miller are expecting her to take some ugly, though want many consider to be necessary, steps to fully eradicate the Mann legacy. That would include easing Sauseda out as city clerk. Sauseda is considered not just a vestige of the Mann regime, but his willing handmaiden in cutting the residents who were seeking to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner off at the knees. Those 194 recall proponents are among the most civically active and involved of Yucaipa’s residents. Sauseda’s action in filing suit against those residents, even though she was doing so at the behest of Mann, has made her position as city clerk untenable, a large number of residents believe. The council may be counting upon Crawford to get Sauseda out of the way of Casey, or whoever will be managing the city in the months and years ahead.