The City of San Bernardino has settled upon installing Eric Levitt as its city manager, the 13th individual to hold that post in 16 years, including two who twice served in the role and one who resigned after he was chosen but before he accepted the commission.
The appointment was accompanied by confident pronouncements that with the hiring of Levitt the city has turned the corner on an extended period of managerial dysfunction, one that echoed such predictions in the not so distant past with regard former city managers Charles Montoya, Robert Field, Andrea Travis-Miller, Mark Scott and Allen Parker, none of whom was able to remain in place longer than two-and-a-half years.
Indeed, both the dean of the city council, whose support of Levitt was crucial to his hiring and resulted in a coalition of seven votes to put him into San Bernardino’s municipal management suite, and one of the three newest members of the city council elected last year who was the one vote in opposition to turning the keys of the city over to Levitt, were in rare agreement when each stated their misgivings about Levitt’s prospect for longevity in the post.
San Bernardino’s last sustained era of municipal administrative stability came to a close in late 2008, when the City of Huntington Beach lured Fred Wilson, who had been San Bernardino’s city manager for a dozen years, to take on command of municipal operations there. Initially, at least, the city appeared to have more than overcome that setback when it was able to convince Charles McNeely, the city manager in Reno, Nevada, to head 453 miles south and serve as Wilson’s replacement. After three years of dealing with the same challenges Wilson had been struggling with – most predominantly the 1994 closure of Norton Air Force Base, which had brought in its wake a mushrooming local economic downturn – San Bernardino was drawn closer and closer to the brink of a financial abyss. McNeely found himself at the helm of a city that had engaged in deficit spending in eight of its previous 11 years and where a majority of the city’s elected leadership having come into office with the support of government employee unions. Most of McNeely’s political masters were thus resistant to his warnings that the city could not sustain continuing to increase staff salaries and benefits. In May 2012 McNeely resigned, just three months before the city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, citing $56 million in general fund arrearages, a pending unpaid $50 million pension bond, an additional $195 million in unfunded pension obligations, $61 million in unfunded retiree healthcare and $40 million of workers compensation debt and general liabilities.
Assistant City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller moved into the top managerial role place after McNeeley’s departure. She worked with Jason Simpson, who was then the city’s finance director, and the city’s legal team in preparing the Chapter 9 filing. In 2013, privately decrying divisions on the city council, Travis-Miller left to become the executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments.
She was succeeded by Allen Parker, who had been city manager in East Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Seal Beach, South El Monte and Compton in California and Oak Park in Illinois. Parker was hired on a unanimous vote of the mayor and city council. Despite his age of 71, city officials were hopeful he might remain in place until the end of the decade in 2020. In 2015, however, amidst council turmoil, he negotiated an exit from the city manager position, with the city council agreeing to confer on him a $221,976 severance in exchange for his agreement to remain silent about compromising and embarrassing information that had come his way while he was running the city.
Parker was replaced by then-Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, who served in an interim capacity until Mark Scott, Burbank’s city manager, departed from his position with Burbank in February 2016. Scott remained in place for less than two years. Prior to his exit, he had brought Travis-Miller back to San Bernardino to serve in the capacity of assistant city manager. Upon his departure, she became interim city manager and then was promoted to full-fledged city manager, which came on a unanimous vote of the city council.
Travis-Miller grew crosswise of John Valdivia, who had been elevated from 3rd Ward councilman to mayor as a result of the November 2018 election. She was suspended on a contentious 4-to-3 vote in April 2019 and then terminated, whereupon she was due to receive, under her contract, a severance of $305,715.89 to be paid out to her in 12 monthly installments of ‬$25,476.32 along with a $53,976.62 annual contribution to the California Public Employees Retirement System for the last year she worked and another $53,976.62 contribution to the California Public Retirement System for the follow-on year roughly matching 2019-20.
When the city balked at making the first of those monthly payments and then a second monthly payment, she filed a claim against the city. Upon the city failing to make a fast response to the claim, she sued the city. Ultimately, that lawsuit was settled in April 2020, with the city agreeing to pay Travis-Miller $750,000 to resolve all of her claims in exchange for her waiver of further claims and dismissing the suit. This exceeded by $336,330.87 the $413,669.13 that was due her under the terms of her contract.
Valdivia arranged to have Travis-Miller replaced with Teri LeDoux, who had been Travis-Miller’s handpicked assistant city manager. Ledoux remained in place until early 2020, at which time she retired.
In September 2020, two months before three new council members were elected and three months before they were installed, Valdivia managed to get enough votes on the council as it was then composed to hire Robert Field, who had been the head of economic development with the County of Riverside, as city manager. Field remained fiercely loyal to Valdivia, even as it was growing increasingly clear that Valdivia, who had once dominated the council through his political affiliations with its members, had burned his bridges with three of them and was no longer calling the shots among the city’s elected officials. With Valdivia’s political and administrative reach eroding, Field became more and more strongly identified with the moribund Valdivia political machine. After Valfivia lost his bid for reelection in June 2022 and when his erstwhile political ally, Jim Penman, was defeated by Helen Tran in the November 2022 mayoral race, Field, even before Tran was sworn in in December 2022, resigned as city manager.
After Field’s departure, Tran 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 who should next be given the top administrative assignment. McNeely, then 70 years old, contemplated coming out of retirement to serve in the role for a longer term, but there was insufficient support on the council for him to do that.
In August 2023, after considering 67 applicants, 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. The council tarried, though, and by the time it was scheduled to finalize the matter at its October 4, 2023 meeting, 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 San Bernardino job offer, indicating he wanted to remain in Salinas. On October 3, 2023, the Salinas City Council, upset that Carrigan had been contemplating leaving Salinas, 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 an $800,000 payout.
Shortly after Carrigan’s withdrawal, 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 just 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 it was discovered 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 and instead, on her own initiative, rejected the state’s offer, believing it came with too many strings attached. The discovery of this outraged council members Ted Sanchez, Sandra Ibarra, Juan Figueroa and Fred Shorett and displeased then-Councilman Damon Alexander. An effort to salvage Clayton’s nomination to serve as city manager for the remainder or a good portion of the remainder of the 2020s was made by Mayor Tran and then-councilmembers Ben Reynoso and Kimberly Calvin, but that initiative no longer had the momentum it once did. Penultimately, in January, Clayton returned to her former position as assistant city manager and in February, the city council appointed Deputy City Manager Tanya Romo to serve as interim city manager. Ultimately, in late February, Clayton left San Bernardino to become city manager in Barstow.
Clayton, in the meantime, has filed a claim against the city, a precursor to a lawsuit. That suit, if indeed it is ever filed, would be based upon the city council’s failure to follow through with the tentative job offer it made to Clayton in October, and would seek, at the least, a payout equal to her annual salary – $325,000 – and perhaps, on top of that, the $115,693.41 in benefits she was due to receive in her first year as city manager.
In late February, San Bernardino also arranged for William Gallardo, who had retired as city manager in Brea in December, to step in as acting city manager in San Bernardino until a full-fledged city manager was hired. When the state retirement system cleared Gallardo to return to work the first week of March, he took the helm in San Bernardino, and Romo returned to her deputy city manager post.
Over the last three months, the city council intensified its focus on finding a city manager replacement. What evolved was a subcommittee, consisting primarily of council members Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Kim Knaus, who scrutinized the field of applicants and closely considered an outside executive search firm’s evaluations of the candidates. By May 10, the Sentinel is reliably informed, eight semi-finalists for the position had emerged. All had, according to one knowledgeable source, “experience in the role of city manager, some for extensive periods of time. Some worked for large cities, some for smaller cities. Some had worked with strong and aggressive employee unions. Others had dealt with employee unions that were way less aggressive. All eight were qualified to serve as city manager here, no question.”
The basic differences between the candidates, the Sentinel was informed, came down to “issues of personality, really. A question that was at the front was how well could each of these get along with not just the council but city staff, and in particular department heads. Once you got to the point where you looked at their experience, examined their résumés, which were all impressive, what you were looking at was how were they dressed? Really, what kind of clothes were they wearing? How did they speak? Did they look you in the eye? Were they direct?”
The council subcommittee met, at which point the eight semifinalists were whittled down to four finalists. Another meeting was held, at which, the subcommittee members claimed, the others empowered to ultimately vote on the city manager hiring – Mayor Tran, Councilman Mario Flores and Councilwoman Treasure Ortiz – were invited to participate. Mayor Tran and Flores did attend. During the course of that meeting, a decision to confer the appointment upon Fullerton City Manager Eric Levitt was made.
Levitt was the top choice of two council members and was among the top three of three others, the Sentinel is told.
According to Ortiz, both Shorett and Sanchez, for reasons that are not clear, were anxious to be rid of Gallardo at the earliest opportunity and were not particular about which of the eight semifinalists turned out to be the consensus city manager replacement, their priority being only that the replacement take place sooner rather than later.
By May 22, council members Ted Sanchez, Sandra Ibarra, Juan Figueroa, Fred Shorett and Kim Knaus had settled on Levitt, at which time the momentum and will to hire him on the spot was present. Once five votes to support any one candidate emerged, pressure to proceed was immense, according to Oritz. Nevertheless, the council was not able to take immediate action to proceed with the hiring, as there was a technical noticing protocol that had to be satisfied, which included the scheduling of a meeting and the posting of an agenda that included the item relating to the hiring vote 72 hours in advance.
It is reported that at one of the discussions, Councilman Sanchez was in favor of taking a vote, with seven of those qualified to vote on the matter present and only Councilwoman Ortiz not there, to hire Levitt on the spot. That was not done, however, and the matter was scheduled for discussion at the council’s first meeting in June, on June 4.
Levitt has more than a quarter of a century experience as a city manager, roughly half of which, at this point, consists of working for cities outside of California.
He worked as city manager in 9,000-population Sedona, Arizona from 2001 to 2008 and 60,000-population Janeville Wisconsin from December 16, 2008 to May 7, 2013.
Levitt moved to California in 2013 to become the city manager of 120,000-population Simi Valley. He remained there for just under six years, pulling up stakes to become city manager in 73,000-population Alameda in the Bay Area. In 2022, he abandoned Alameda when the chance to be city manager of 136,000 population Fullerton in Orange County presented itself.
Levitt’s foremost apparent strength as a top city administrator is his financial sense. He is credited with improving the bond rating for several of the cities he has led. A better credit rating for a public agency pushes down the cost it must bear in obtaining loans and financing, as the city is then able to borrow money at a lower interest rate.
There were no major scandals or high profile problems in the cities Levitt managed.
There was one disturbing element to his work history in that he appears to be driven less by the prestige of the managerial assignments he takes on than by the money he stands to earn in assuming such a role. This reflects, accordingly, questions about his loyalty. This stretches back at least as far as to his departure from Janeville in Wisconsin. While there were no complaints on record, as best as the Sentinel can ferret out, about his performance as the staff leader in Janeville, his exist appears to have taken city fathers there by surprise. Likewise, when he made his departure from Simi Valley in 2019, where he was drawing $225,167.27 in annual salary and total compensation of $320,471.75, to go to Alameda, where he was provided with a $272,413.54 salary and $363,857.24, he left his former employers – the Simi Valley City Council – in the lurch. When he jumped from Alameda to Fullerton, which arranged to provide him with total compensation comparable to what he was making in Alameda, he again took his employers by surprise. And most recently, in departing from Fullerton, where he was pulling down a $265,225 annual salary and total annual compensation of $395,363.24, he has put the city council in Fullerton in the position of having to scramble to find his replacement.
A major incentive in getting Levitt to come to San Bernardino was the $333,000 in annual salary he is to receive, which is to grow by as much as 5 percent per year, depending upon the increase in the consumer price index, along with roughly $12,000 in perquisites and pay add-ons yearly and $116,000 in benefits, along with a one-time $6,000 residential relocation stipend, for a first-year total annual compensation of $467,000.
Despite Councilwoman Knaus’s assertion that San Bernardino was offering Levitt less than he could make elsewhere, the salary and benefits the city is offering him top anything he has made previously by a substantial margin. He will be, after Ontario City Manager Scott Ochoa and Rancho Cucamonga City Manager John Gillison, tied with Fontana City Manager Matthew Ballantyne as the third highest paid among San Bernardino County’s city and town managers.
On June 4, when the council considered Levitt’s contract, Knaus asserted that Levitt represented the best the city could do, and her words of confidence echoed those that had been uttered by other members of the council in the not-so-distant past about Montoya, Field, Travis-Miller, Scott and Parker. She was dismissive of those who said the city should be more circumspect in embracing Levitt, whose contract promises him a severance payout equal to nine months pay – $249,750 – if the city council elects to terminate him without citing cause as it did with Parker, Travis-Miller or Montoya.
“A lot of fanfare was created with this recruitment process, unfortunately,” Knaus said.
She said those questioning the council’s wisdom in settling on Levitt were wrongheaded in their opposition to him. She said getting a suitable city manager in place “is imperative for rebuilding the foundation for the City of San Bernardino. It is unfortunate that a lot of the narrative has been skewed to mislead the public to think that this process was nefarious. It’s unfortunate.”
She implied that someone on the council opposed to Levitt’s hiring – she implied but did not state that this was either Tran or Ortiz – had leaked his name to the public and the names of other candidates during the selection process.
“It seems that people were given the name of the city manager recruitment, because I don’t recall this being in the backup,” she said. “So, how they knew where he was from would mean they had to know his name, so that is a bit concerning because we really prided ourselves on handling the city manager recruitment vastly different from what we saw before, in order not only to recruit the best talent for our city but be respectful of those individuals that were coming and signing up to work for the City of San Bernardino. So, I do apologize, because that should not have happened.”
Knaus said the city desperately needs a city manager in place and working hard.
“To have stability in that position is key, is integral to us truly achieving the substantial progress that we want to see in the City of San Bernardino,” she said. “Without a permanent, stable city manager, we cannot continue to get things accomplished. The turnover in this city is tremendous, and its still happening”
Having once leveled the charge against Ortiz that she had compromised the city manager selection process and had tried to prevent the hiring of Levitt by leaking his identity, Knaus took aim at her council colleague again, dismissing Ortiz’s accusation that the selection process had been rushed.
“People are not knocking down the door to work for the city of San Bernardino,” she said. “There are over 400 cities in the State of California that have a lot less challenges and pay more than the City of San Bernardino. We have not had a permanent city manager in well over a year. It was not rushed.”
Nor was it true, Knaus said, that she, Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett had commandeered the selection process and excluded the remainder of the council. She said the process had been opened up for input from all members of the council and that the mayor and Councilman Flores had participated.
Ortiz said that the selection of a city manager is indeed a “big decision” that should be carefully considered but that because of the council’s approach, rather than getting one suitable city manager who remains in place for as long as a decade, the decision is “made year after year after year after year after year in our city.”
Of the three key staff appointees – city manager, city attorney and city clerk – the city manager is by far the most important and influential, Ortiz said. “The city manager is the most important figure in government” in the city of San Bernardino, she said. “Everyone knows from our history that we don’t operate that way. Our council moved forward with a recruitment that I and the mayor were not a part of outside of the recruiter. He [the recruiter] didn’t schedule the meetings. He didn’t schedule the interviews. They [Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus] did. They didn’t care that we weren’t there. So if that wasn’t a red flag, I don’t know what was.”
Ortiz said, “As as far as stability, this is the fourth city manager in six months. The problem is not what you see up here [on the council dais during open council meetings]. That’s never the problem. The problem is what you can’t see behind closed doors That is truly where the real dysfunction, where the real failure lies. We could have had Bill [William Gallardo, the current interim city manager] until December. We could have had real stability in this city. You could have a true foundation, but it doesn’t work because when the city manager says no, we move on [i.e., fire the city manager and get another]. The city manager disagrees with [the city attorney or the city clerk], we move on [i.e., fire the city manager and hire another]. Nobody can come into this city and be successful as a city manager with the current political climate because it is happening where you cannot see it. That’s why there’s turnover. That’s why we have a new guy. Now, we had an opportunity to do something different, to build a foundation and to set goals and objectives, but that’s not going to happen. So, we rushed into this, pushed into it.”
Ortiz, who of late has rarely agreed with Knaus, said her observation that not many people wanted to take on the city manager role in San Bernardino was accurate, but that Knaus either did not recognize what the reason for that was or was psychologically unprepared to acknowledge it.
“The pool [of talent looking to get hired] is not deep here,” Ortiz said. “That’s our [the city council’s] doing. Why would you want to come to somewhere where the council undermines the city manager, puts together wish lists, bargains? Why would you want to do that? I appreciate you, Mr. Levitt for taking on what you know is going to be a very difficult role because you have two options: Either you will fall in line or you will fall out of place. Ethics and integrity do not sit well in the midst of corruption and wrongdoing. I will not be able to support you coming here because we are not prepared to truly have a city manager in this city and do any good because you cannot poor into people when you are empty yourselves. You cannot give something to someone that we do not possess.”
Mayor Tran said she was initially troubled by Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus confining the city manager-hiring discussions among themselves. Ultimately, however, she said, she and Flores were brought up to speed with regard to the qualifications of those who had applied for the job.
“I was disappointed when the council met without some of us present,” she said, but at this point, after considering everything she has learned about Levitt, she added, “I rate him high enough” to, she told him, “say I am comfortable supporting you.”
She said Levitt will need to work hard from the outset, given some recent resignations of department heads. She said the vacant slots were “critical positions” and for the departments to be functional, Levitt will need to “find a full team to fill all the departments.”
Shorett rejected Ortiz’s assertion that the city has burned through four city managers in six months.
“We have not lost four city managers in a year or year-and-a-half,” he said. “We have had interim city managers.”
Shorett said, “This process was fair. It was done appropriately. It was unfortunate that we had a couple of members that could not attend [the discussions relating to the hiring].”
Shorett told Levitt, “You do have our support. We need stability now and we need to get a permanent city manager in place that everyone can look at and know is permanent, not interim, not maybe going to be here, not whatever. We’ve got a permanent city manager now, and you will have my 100 percent support and I will do all I can to work with this body and you and our other leadership to make you successful.”
Despite his enmity with Ortiz, Shorett stated that he concurred that the city’s difficulty with city managers over the last decade or more has stemmed not from inadequacies with the managers but the overbearing, unrealistic, improper, unethical and illegal demands put on them by the members of the city council.
“That’s up to us,” he said. “We can make you fail as well as we can make you successful. So, Mr. Levitt, I’m glad to have you on board.”
After the meeting, Ortiz said members of the city council in recent years have sought to impose on city managers demands unilaterally made which were not ratified by votes of the entire council. Orders to a city manager are not legal or binding, she said, unless they are delivered as the result of majority vote in open session that the public witnesses or as the result of a majority vote taken in closed session which is publicly announced after the council adjourns out of the closed session.
In his remarks to the council after its vote to hire him, Levitt said, “I appreciate very much that I’m going to be a part of your team, and I think it’s important that we come together collaboratively with the community. I think it is important to work with the community and (for me) to understand all eight of your values.”
Levitt’s current agreement with the City of Fullerton requires a 45-day notice of his departure, pushing his starting date in San Bernardino to August 4.
Mayor Tran stated the following day, “Eric sees the potential of our city, shares our vision, and has the leadership skills to bring a stronger, more vibrant city to the residents we serve. Today marks a significant moment for the City of San Bernardino. I am proud to officially welcome Eric Levitt as our permanent city manager.”