Apple Valley, which over the course of its 37-year history has proven itself to be among the most stable of San Bernardino County’s 24 current municipalities, has selected as its next manager an administrator who has never overseen an entity with as much as one eighth of the town’s population.
The Apple Valley Town Council recently chose Todd S. Bodem, who has been the top administrator for the city of Guadalupe for the last six years, to replace outgoing Town Manager Doug Robertson upon his retirement as of December 1.
Robertson is the fourth town manager that Apple Valley has employed since its founding in 1988. When Bodem succeeds him, he will step into a position in which the holder of the title has averaged a tenure of nine and a quarter years or 111 months.
Throughout the vast majority of its time as an incorporated town, Apple Valley has been relatively free from political or operational dissension. Shortly after its incorporation in 1988, the maiden town council hired Bruce Williams to serve as the senior administrator at Town Hall. He lasted in that position 19 years. He was replaced by longtime Victorville City Manager Jim Cox, who came out of retirement to guide the city for two years, whereupon he was succeeded by Frank Robinson in 2009. Robinson remained in place for nine years. He was replaced by Robertson, who took a pay cut to leave his seven-year long assignment managing the larger and far more complex and challenging assignment of running Victorville.
Other than minor bumps in the road and some legitimate differences of opinion with regard to public issues, at only two times did the circumstance in Apple Valley boil over into a major contretemps, that being after the November 1998 election, when Patrick Jacobo joined David Holman and Barbara Loux, who had been elected to the town council in 1996. Jacobo, Holman and Loux, all of whom had ties to the development community, formed a three-member ruling coalition on the council that was philosophically at odds with the controlled growth principle that had permeated the town from its outset and had been enshrined in a a firm and fast rule that all single-family homes built in the town be constructed on lots of no less than one-half acre. When Jacobo, Holman and Loux politically outmuscled their two council colleagues, Mark Shoup and Bob Sagona, in a push to reduce the town’s standards to allow four residential units to the acre as a prelude to even further density concessions, a counter-reaction among town residents ensued, resulting in a committee qualifying a recall election against the troika for the November 1999 ballot. All three recall efforts succeeded.
A somewhat shorter-lived but intense kerfuffle played out in 2007 when a majority on the council, as it was then composed, moved to terminate Williams as town manager, holding discussions to do so in a closed session meeting without disclosing the rationale for doing so. That crisis passed without further incident when Cox, who had managed Victorville for three decades prior to his retirement in 1999, agreed to come in to steady the situation.
Most recently, in 2021, the town sustained something of a black eye when it undertook and failed to wrest control of its water system from its private sector owner, Liberty Utilities, expending $8.5 million in its own and its opposition’s legal fees in the process. A three-judge panel of the California Fourth District Court of Appeals overturned the ruling in that case. The matter, however, has not been fully resolved, and will entail the case again being litigated in San Bernardino County Superior Court before a resolution is reached, as well as the eventual expenditure of at least $150 million in bond money, to be debt serviced by increased property tax payments by the town’s landowners, to pay for the acquisition of the water facilities.
That, however, requires that the town government keep pace with the infrastructure and other demands of providing for the needs of the town’s 78,808 residents, which includes employing a workforce of 239 employees.
In contrast, the City of Guadalupe, where Bodem is currently employed, has 27 employees.
Bodem, 61, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in local and urban affairs with a minor in minority studies from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and a Master of Urban Studies from Minnesota State University, Mankato. He pursued a career in municipal management, but did so originally within the confines of Minnesota, where cities and governments, on average, function on a smaller scale than those in California.
In the initial nine years of his career, Bodem obtained the position of city administrator with three different cities in Minnesota, those of Red Lake Falls from September 1994 to December 1995; Belle Plaine from May 2000 to September 2001; and Jordan from September 2001 to March 2003; as well as servicing as the city clerk and treasurer of Grand Marais from December 1995 to April 2000. He subsequently found city administrator positions with the cities of Corcoran and Claremont and Claremont in Minnesota. From March 2010 to February 2011, he was the county administrator for Waseca County in Minnesota.
Red Lake Falls has a population of 1,333 and encompasses 2.03 square miles; Grand Marais has 1,344 reidents within 2.9 square miles; Belle Plaine boasts 7,400 inhabitants spread over 6.11 square miles; Jordan, numbers 6,788 inside its 3.32-square mile confines; Corcoran with 6,190 residents covers 36 square miles; and 1.15-square mile Claremont is home to 513 people. The population of Waseca County is 18,680.
Bodem made a sojourn into the private sector between 2003 and 2007 as a project manager with Tollefson Development on several residential and commercial projects, but that phase drew to a close with the economic downturn that gripped the nation in the aftermath of the 2007 subprime mortgage collapse.
Also in 2007, Bodem’s career and life was interrupted and thrown off track by an extremely unfortunate domestic incident when on August 25, 2007, his 11-month old daughter, Cecelia, drowned in the Bodem home’s bathtub while his wife, Katherine Bodem was distracted and engaged browsing the internet. The following year, his wife was convicted of second degree manslaughter.
After resuming his function as a public administrator in his role with Waseca County, which he left in February 2011 he landed an assignment as the city manager of 4.56-square mile Lake City, which has a population of 5,200. He served in that role from from August of 2011 to June of 2014.
In 2014, Bodem left the employ of Lake City, where he was receiving a salary of $115,000 to accept a position as the city manager with Sand City in Monterey County at a salary of $151,252.50 plus pay ad-ons and perquisites of $4,320 and benefits $35,117.63 for a total annual compensation of $190,690.13. He remained with Sand City, which has a population of 325 and encompasses 2.9 square miles two miles northeast of the City of Monterey, for four years, by which point he was being paid $173,502.68 in salary, another $23,478.52 in perks and pay add-ons along with $20,464.95 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $217,446.16.
Despite Bodem’s desire to remain as Sand City city manager, in 2018 the city council there balked at renewing his contract. Rather than being terminated, Bodem resigned.
He found some work thereafter as a management specialist with Monterey County. He was on the verge of leaving California when the following year, the 8,900-population City of Guadalupe in Santa Barbara County, which is a 1.3-square mile jurisdiction located on the far western periphery of the City of Santa Maria, hired him as its city administrator, extending him a contract that provided a salary before benefits of $146,028.
Bodem is still with Guadalupe. The most recently available document shows that he is currently pulling down a salary of $154,552 per year, $2,289 in perks and pay add-ons and $27,049 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $183,890.
Landing the job in Apple Valley was something like winning the lottery for Bodem, who will see his salary jump to $290,004, which is to be augmented with perks and add-ons totaling roughly $34,000, including a $700 per month vehicle allowance, and $60,000 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $384,004. His contract carries a guarantee that if he is terminated without cause being cited he is to receive a severance equal to six months of his salary.
In addition, the town agree to provide him with a $10,000 moving allowance.
The town council retained the executive headhunting firm of Bob Murray & Associates to carry out a recruitment for a candidate to replace Roberston. It is unknown, at this point, how many applicants there were for the post, how many were interviewed by the town council or how many reductions of the list were made throughout the process as the candidate in the running were winnowed to Bodem as the final selection. The town, on its website stated, “Bodem was selected from a nationwide pool of candidates following an extensive recruitment process.”
In the aftermath of his selection, as is customary when a manager is selected for a municipality, there followed a series of accolades and notation of his qualifications by town officials.
The town’s website states, “Bodem brings a wealth of experience in local and regional government and real estate development. He has served as a city and county administrator for over 23 years in Minnesota and California and has also worked in real estate land development on multimillion-dollar residential projects. His leadership philosophy emphasizes collaboration, innovation, and integrity, with a commitment to building strong teams and high-quality results.”
Bodem was quoted on the website as well.
“Apple Valley is a truly special community, and I am excited to join a team that is so deeply dedicated to its residents,” the website reported Bodem as saying. “I look forward to working with the council, staff, and community partners to continue building on the town’s success.”