pa has settled upon Sean Moore as its next city manager.
He is to replace, perhaps as early as next week, Jennifer Crawford, who has filled the role of interim city manager since April, shortly after the departure of Chris Mann, who was city manager for slightly over two years.
Moore has been the last four years the city manager of the Los Angeles County city of Lawndale. While Lawndale, at 1.97 square miles, is less than one-fourteenth the size of Yucaipa geographically, it’s population density of 14,733 per acre makes it far more urbanized than Yucaipa, with its population density of 1,982 per square mile.
It is the collective hope of the Yucaipa City Council that bringing Moore in as the city’s top administrator, making him the fourth person to hold the post in less than three years, will bring the curtain down on the most chaotic and unstable period in the 36-year history of Yucaipa.
The question at this point is whether Moore’s relatively uneventful tenure in the previous governmental posts he has held has adequately prepared for the vicissitudes of conflicting interests in Yucaipa, where the majority of residents want to maintain a slower-paced lifestyle in a semi-rural community while deep-pocketed developers and landowners of large swaths of property are focused on the opportunity they see to transform the city from the home of 56,293 residents to a community more in keeping with the likes of Fontana and Corona with a mix of subdivisions with wall-to-wall houses, complimentary commercial strip malls and a mix of warehouses that will zoom the population to upward of 100,000.
For the first 34 years of its existence as a municipality, Yucaipa proved out to be one of the most stable of San Bernardino’s cities, with only occasional changeover on its city council, while it experienced a moderate degree of growth and population increase. Ray Casey, who had been hired as the city engineer in 2003, became the city manager in 2008. Neither aggressively in favor of nor opposed to development, Casey nevertheless insisted that if development were to occur, the cost of the infrastructure that would need to be built to accompany it be built at the expense of the landowners, builders, developers and financiers who were to profit as a consequence of the residential, commercial and industrial expansion rather than the city’s existing residents and taxpayers. In October 2022, the Yucaipa City Council, as it was then composed, voted unanimously to extend Casey’s employment contract as city manager to the end of June 2024, into what was to be its sixteenth year. The following month, two newcomers – Chris Venable and Matt Garner – were elected to the council, supplanting two of its longtime members – David Avila and Greg Bogh – who had opted against seeking reelection. Garner, who was professionally involved in the building industry, immediately upon coming into office joined forces with two of the incumbents on the council, Bobby Duncan and Justin Beaver, to depose Casey. Duncan, a real estate professional, and Beaver, much of whose political backing came from the development industry, were intent on seeing Casey removed as city manager. This was at least in part because Garner and Duncan considered it to be in their personal financial interest, and because Beaver felt it to be in his political backers’ financial interest, to transfer the cost of constructing the infrastructure that needed to be built to accommodate the construction of residential and commercial subdivisions to the city’s taxpayers as opposed to exclusively to the landowners of the property to be improved and the developers and financiers paying to undertake the development.
In January 2023, in an abrupt move that came only slightly more than two months after Venable and Garner were elected, only a month after they were sworn into office, the troika of Beaver, Duncan and Garner forced Casey to resign and replaced him with Chris Mann, who was both the then-city manager of Canyon Lake in Riverside County and the principal in Mann Communications, a company that represents developmental interests in California, Arizona and Nevada. It was believed that upon being installed as city manager, Mann would bring to a halt Casey’s development neutral philosophy and approach to municipal operations and institute a more accommodating attitude toward development at City Hall, including having the city share with developers or defray entirely the cost of building infrastructure – roads, sidewalks, curbs, gutters, storm drains, sewers, schools and the like – needed for that development.
The normally sedate citizenry of Yucaipa erupted in outrage, both at the sacking of Casey and the prospect of what Mann’s takeover of City Hall presaged, which large numbers of Yucaipa residents interpreted as round upon round of accelerated development in the city, which was to include the permissible density on land zoned for residential development being doubled, tripled and in some cases quadrupled. In a way that neither Beaver nor Duncan nor Garner nor Mann anticipated, substantial numbers of Yucaipa residents objected, first, in strong verbal terms and other forms of public expression over what had occurred and was in the further offing, and then by creating a civic interest group, Save Yucaipa, which initiated the process of recalling Beaver, Duncan and Garner from office.
As Save Yucaipa’s members were circulating recall petitions, Ana Sauseda, who had worked with Mann in Canyon Lake and was brought in to serve as city clerk in Yucaipa shortly after he became city manager there, at Mann’s direction hired the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm to challenge language contained in the narrative circulated by the proponents with the recall petition. That ploy interrupted the recall petition circulation effort to prevent the proponents from succeeding in getting the requisite number of signatures within the 90-day deadline.
Thus, Beaver, Duncan and Garner were spared being subject to a recall, but the tactic used by Mann and Sauseda to protect their political masters embittered a substantial number of Yucaipa residents. Some of those initiated legal challenges/counterchallenges of their own to Sauseda’s legal action, asserting their constitutional rights to seek redress of their grievances through the electoral process had been abridged. A complaint was made to the San Bernardino County Civil Grand Jury with regard to the way the council had unanimously committed to extending Casey’s contract by 20 months in October 2022 only to reverse itself less than three months later by forcing his resignation.
One of those legal challenges succeeded. 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.”

As the calendar rolled over from 2023 to 2024, Beaver and Duncan, who supported Casey’s sacking, and Jon Thorp, who had voted in vain against accepting his resignation, were due to stand for reelection in November. The forces that had sought to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner but had been thwarted by Sauseda’s maneuvering remained committed to getting rid of the trio. The renewed the recall effort against Garner, who was not due to stand for reelection until 2026 and began gearing up to campaign against Beaver and Duncan in the upcoming election. This time around, without Sauseda or the Sutton Law Firm’s interference, Save Yucaipa qualified as recall election against Garner. Duncan, surveying the number of his constituents that were prepared to vote against him, opted out of running for reelection.
In the November 2024 election, Garner was recalled. Judy Woolsley prevailed in a three-way race to replace Duncan. Beaver managed to fight off the substantial show of disfavor among his constituents, as 1,833 or 38.24 percent of the 4,793 voters in Yucaipa’s District 4 voted for his strongest opponent, Kristine Mohler, and another 503 of District 4’s voters cast their ballots in favor of Gordon Renshaw. Still, Beaver was able to poll 2,457 votes or 51.26 percent to remain in office.
Shortly after the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters confirmed the outcome of the November race, including that Garner had been removed from office, the city council voted to replace him with District 1 resident Bob Miller, who was a member of Yucaipa-Calimesa School Board and the former Colton police chief.
Earlier this year, Mann found himself in the uncomfortable position of occupying the administrative suite in a city where only one of the members of the city council had supported his controversial hiring some two years before. Throughout January and into February and then March, secretive backroom discussions were held about what terms he could be offered to simply go away. What was worked out was he was provided with a severance of $279,045 as part of a negotiated separation agreement between him and the city council. Shortly thereafter, Crawford, who started with the city as a management analyst in 1999, was promoted to director of general services/city clerk/mobile home rent administrator in 2004 and then was made deputy city manager/city clerk/mobile home rent administrator in 2015 prior to being designated as the assistant city manager in 2020, was chosen to fill the city manager gap until such time as a replacement for Mann could be found.
There was talk for a time about bringing Casey back as city manager and there was some consideration of simply moving Crawford into the top administrator’s post.
The city instead undertook a recruitment, ultimately settling upon Sean M. Moore, who has been since 2001, the city manager of Lawndale. Documentation shows that Moore began with the City of Lawndale in 2016 as its director of community development. He remained in the community development director post into and through 2017, 2018, 2019, 2010. At some point in 2021, while he was still serving in the capacity of community development director with Lawndale, he left that city to take on the community development director position with the City of Rialto. In February 2022, he was brought back to Lawndale, this time in the capacity of city manager.
Despite Moore’s status as a primary public figure, some degree of mystery attends him. He was the planning division manager with Imperial County in 2012. There is no record of his having been employed by a public agency in 2013. He was the director of planning with Tehama County in 2014 and 2015.
At present, he has just 20 years of service as a public agency employee. In addition, his work history includes a stint with the City of Indio.
Moore uses the title “Dr.,” but there is nothing in the public record that is readily available identifying where he received his PhD, in what discipline or from which institution of learning.
While in Lawndale, Moore has, at least ostensibly, conducted a public information campaign that places a premium on transparency. He regularly posts to YouTube, short videos under the title A Minute Moore with Lawndale City Manager Sean Moore. Examples of the topics covered in these briefings are fireworks and municipal regulations relating to them, development projects, planned or recent openings of commercial businesses, the city’s Youth Development Center, what is to be featured at the city’s Blues Festival, an amnesty program for unregistered and unpermitted structures, the need to obtain permits for improvement projects involving construction or additions to structures.
In May 2025, the City of Yucaipa undertook a survey of residents to ascertain what they want in a city manager. Thereafter, based in part on the input from the community in the form of 471 responses to the survey, the city undertook to recruit a successor to Mann and Casey. The city has made a fuller disclosure of the process of recruiting an executive headhunting firm to carry out the recruitment of the city manager than it has with regard to the actual recruitment of the city manager. According to the city, it solicited bids from 71 executive search firms on July 29 and received 11 responses by the August 18 deadline. City officials then interviewed representatives of three of those responding firms, and on August 25 selected HR Dynamics & Performance Management, Inc. to conduct a nationwide search for the city’s next top administrator. In consultation with city officials, HR Dynamics & Performance Management, Inc. on September 10 “opened a recruitment window,” which was shut on October 10. The city has not disclosed how many applicants responded to the invitation to compete for the Yucaipa city manager job.
On October 13, 2025, HR Dynamics & Performance Management, Inc. presented a summary of the candidates in a matrix format to the city council, “categorized by most highly qualified, qualified and not qualified.” Without disclosing whether the council restricted itself to those deemed most highly qualified, according to a staff report, “The council then identified the finalists to panel interviews and on October 30, 2025, the city council conducted closed session interviews with the finalists, with HR Dynamics facilitating the process.”
According to the staff report, which was authored by City Attorney Stephen Graham Pacifico, “As a result of this competitive, multi-month process, the city council identified Dr. Sean M. Moore as the top candidate and directed staff and the city attorney to negotiate a city manager employment agreement for council consideration in open session. HR Dynamics also performed reference checks and coordinated comprehensive background checks using a third-party firm (USA Fact), including verification of educational degrees, employment history, credit and criminal and civil case records nationwide.”
According to Graham Pacifico, “Dr. Moore is an experienced municipal executive with an extensive background in city management, public administration, budgeting, and organizational leadership. Over his career, he has served in key management roles in California local government agencies, including positions involving oversight of city operations, financial stewardship, and community-focused service delivery. His background reflects a strong commitment to ethics, transparency, and collaborative leadership, aligning with the community priorities identified through the city’s survey and council’s direction during the recruitment process.”
By relocating to Yucaipa, Moore will realize a handsome raise in pay. Whereas in Lawndale, he was provided with an annual salary of
$218,824.41 some $4,831 in perquisites and pay add-ons, and 77,824.20 for $297,129.61 in total annual compensation, in Yucaipa he will receive a base salary of $290,000 annually along with $20,565 in perquisites and pay add-ons, and $87,090.20 in benefits for a yearly total compensation package of $397,655.20