City Council - Special Meeting

Ready? Begin. I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Roll call on declaration of conflicts of interest. Council member Abram here and none. Council member Vixel, here none. Vice Mayor Monz, hear none. Council member Phillips, hear none. Mayor Bach, hearing none. Approval of agenda is posted or amended. Move. Second. A motion. A second. Call the role, please. Council member Abram. Yes. Council member Bixel. Yes. Vice Mayor Monet. Yes. Council member Phillips. Yes. Mayor Bak.

Yes. Passes on a 5-0. All right. Public participation. Pursuant to the government code, public participation at a special meeting is for the public to directly address the city council concerning any item that has been described in the notice for the special meeting. You'll be allowed three minutes and not necessarily will be able to respond to you. Did you want to speak, ma'am? Oh, thank you. Yeah, we don't have somebody picking up the blue cards.

Is it on?

Okay. Thank you. Um, thank you for council for allowing me to address you. Uh, I have some concerns about hiring a city manager. We can now see that what 10 years of poor hiring practices has done to our city and its mandate to work for all citizens of Turlock. I'm concerned that the churning of city managers in the past 10 years has led to the possible misuse or confusion about the use of city funds. was very concerned with Sue Bergo admitting to the Turlock Journal about not knowing how her office worked that she had no knowledge of the dollar pledge the city had to offer for WE care in order for them to get funding or to to look for grants. Did she understand how we care needed to have a chance of applying for funding grants? I don't know. That's not what I want in a city manager. Did she explain why the city was allowing the homeless to go without a toilet facility previously offered after city money was used to renovate the we care kitchen? I don't understand why city funding was used for the weare kitchen which is a big upgrade and a big amount of money and then the city decided we're not going to help we care. To me that's a big misuse of money and potential. The lack of city manager that knows and understands the working of our city government has also led to the department of housing and community development on June 19th, 2025 from Kate Quantero, planning manager. This is the this is our state government. They issued the city of Tur Turlock a notice of violation. The city of Turlock non-compliance with homelessness. That's a huge concern for all of us who go out

and about in the city. How housing the housing element law was mis was not um addressed and that's city manager uh city manager's job. Uh these issues come in part from uninformed individuals who are not invested in how the city of Turlock functions. that that is true. And for the past 10 years, we've seen that we have lost years of professional knowledge because our city managers leave for better working conditions. I mean, I'm not this I don't know this for sure. Do they leave for better pay? Do they leave for retirement demands and health demands? We've seen the health demands. They leave. They're they're older. They're at retirement age. They do one year with us. Boom. They're gone. That is churning. That's my opinion. I believe they are hired at the end of their working lives and leave quickly after acrewing retirement funding for themselves. This problem starts with a city council that does not seem to care that hiring professionals from our own city institutions might serve our town. Thank you very much for the time.

Thank you.

Good morning, Milt Treeweather. This emergency meeting that was called this morning is not legal because it was not noticed. I received no notice of this. I went on my computer and I'm on the list that's mailed out and it was not on my computer telling me about this meeting. It was just pure luck that I found out about this meeting. Pure absolute luck. This is an illegal meeting. It can't be. It can't be done because it's not properly noticed. And if you do it, we're going to take it to the FPPC and everything, every other place it needs to go. And I hope that our city manager will help us process this and make sure that this is taken care of. The appointing a a city manager in the dark without any knowledge of anyone knowing, just accidentally finding out about it is not public government. That's that is commun that's what would happen and does happen in Russia. It also happens in in Iran. It also happens in North Korea. It also happens in China. This is not any of those countries. This is Turlock, California, United States of America. We still have a democracy here. It's going very fast in this city because we've got a mayor with two council members who control everything. And that's sad to see that because that is not a democracy. That is a dictatorship right here in Turlock. And it's destroying our city in every manner, and every way it can. I can't believe that this is taking place. I've seen this before. This has been done many times. It's a strategy that's used by this mayor. That's her strategy. That's the way she operates. She calls these meetings because she knows she can get this through.

Can we get back to the city manager position thing? Yes. This is a meeting for the city manager. If you want calling names, sir, we're going to just let's just set down. I'm sorry. I'm a public citizen. I can stand here for three minutes. Okay. But let's talk about what we can talk about, please.

Okay. There's no way that you could the citizens have any review of who who have even been mentioned in this meeting. We don't know who's coming up, who's going to be told. We do know one thing for fact and that is it's going to be a 3-2 vote. We do know that. So other than that, we know nothing about how this manager is going to be selected. And this is this is sad. It's very sad in Turlock. It's very sad anywhere in the United States of America. So, we want a good man. We want a good city manager. So, I'm sure that out of the eight candidates or whatever it is, I don't even how I don't even know how many candidates there are, there must be one candidate that maybe all five could vote for an actual good honest candidate could that could be our city manager for Turlock. So, maybe that will be a possibility. But if that isn't the possibility, if it's a 3-2 vote, then this is just corruption. That's all it is. We need a city manager. We know that. We know that we have a good intern city manager. He could fill out his term. He has his 920 hours, which he's used up, but we need a city manager. Thank you. Anyone else?

Good morning. I'm Mary Jackson. Welcome back, Chief Hampton. We missed you. I think what I'd like the council members to know because I think Miss Bublack is aware of most of this information is that we've had what 10 city managers or I don't know 12 whatever a lot in the last 10 years that you've been involved. Um but in the past prior to John Lazar, John Lazar and prior we had one city manager. His name was Steven Kite. I believe he worked for either 28 or 30 years. And when you have that, you have stability. You have people who do that are allowed to do their jobs. They're hired and they do their jobs and they stay here forever. They're retired here. I can name them. Dan A. Dan Avala was a city planner. I went to high school with his kids. He was here for he went to Cal Berkeley and he came back and he worked here for the rest of his career. Longevity is important. Institutional knowledge is important. So here's who you've lost in those last 10 years because I don't know if Miss Phillips and Miss Monz, Mr. Bixler or Miss Abram is aware of who it is. So number one, we lost Michael Cook to T. And I believe it was poor working conditions and probably overworked and stressed. That's just my opinion. We lost Michael Pickock who's the city manager of Waterford. He was our development services director. Nathan Bray has left. He's in Merrced. Debbie Whitmore retired. She didn't have to. I know that for a fact. Um Allison Van Gilder left and she's a deputy city manager I believe in Modesto. Marin Pit left. Um I'm not even counting. So that's what seven. Um Steve Williams who is a police captain and applied to be the police chief

is now the interim city manager in series. Chief Hampton when he was chief and he was our first acting city manager back in 2008 when the the Miss Bublack, Ted House, and Kurt Spicer voted to fire Tim Kerr. And he told me that after my first meeting when I was um after our first like five hour meeting in December, he said, "They're going to fire me." And I said, "No, no, they have to wait until January." And they did that. So, what you need to understand is when you start playing politics like that, I saw it happen in Illinois. Um a new mayor got elected and they fired the police chief. Well, ironically, then the police chief ran a year later and he won and he fired the police chief that took his job. It's instability. It's not good for our city. You need to hire whoever it is. Mr. Hampton explained to me what the process was and I'm really respectful that you did that and the work you put in for that process. You have good candidates. You have people who have experience. Please allow hire someone and allow them to do their job. Thank you.

All right. Anyone else out there? Okay, we're closing public comment. Mr. Hampton. Mayor, council, uh just a few points of clarification. First of all, um just to uh call recollection on the fact that I recommended that we not hire um an outside contract uh head hunter or search firm, whatever you want to refer to them. The cost would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to $120,000. And I believe that we could probably um do a better job recruiting ourselves by simply taking the approach of tapping people on the shoulders that are either ready to step up to a bigger city from a city management position or a deputy city manager who's looking to break in as a city manager. And that's exactly what we did. And um our efforts turned out 17 qualified candidates. Um following that um we hosted a uh panel interviews uh for eight of those 17 what we believe to be the top eight. Uh we had a community panel, we had a business panel and we have an executive panel that occurred one week ago yesterday. Um from that uh we have that the panel interviews has reduced it from eight to two finalists that you will be introduced to today that you will interview yourselves. Um I think we had a great turnout. uh we probably turned out more uh qualified candidates than we would have gotten from a head hunter relative uh and and you know um so former city manager uh Steven Kite I know him as Mr. Kite because he brought me here and um he was included in the community panels as was individuals like uh Mr. Grazia. So, our community panel

was strongly represented by long-term community members. Um, our um our professional panel uh was uh interviewed by u many business CEOs in our community and then um our executive panel was interviewed by our directors so that they would have a say in who their next boss would be to some degree. Obviously, these recommendations are now before you, the two final candidates, and we narrowed and we narrowed it down to two. Um, if in fact uh um you believe that one of those two is a fit, uh then HR is ready to pursue contract negotiations just as you've done um recently with your city attorney's position. So if any of you have any question about the process,

would would you share what uh how you came to the conclusion of the people on the panels? Did we did we tell you who to put on there?

No, I did not ask your recommend I did not ask for your recommendation on any by the appointed panels. We looked at individuals that have a vested interest in our community, which is our community panel. Um and people who have been residents for a long long time. We looked at our business panel um and we looked for individual business owners uh CEOs of larger businesses who have both been supporters and critics of the cities of this city and uh we had a strong panel there and then we brought four of our department directors. They were the third panel so that we had uh some input from our directors um all who know this local government inside and out. So, I believe it's been a great uh process. Uh I believe it yielded two highly qualified, diverse candidates and um if in fact uh they don't meet your expectation, we're prepared to repeat it.

Madam Cler, yeah, thank you. I just want to go on go on the record that um we did post this meeting in accordance with the Brown Act. Um, it was posted more than 24 hours in online at 8:57 yesterday and emails were sent out at 9:03 yesterday. So, you are in compliance. This meeting is held legally. Thank you. All right. Uh, we have close session now. Yes. We have public employee appointment, California government code 54957, title city manager interviews. Okay. And we will uh report out should there be something. I wouldn't anticipate anything because we even if we were to hire somebody, the background is comes first before we would ever see who they are. But you're welcome to stay as long as you like.

Sam, you said a minute. What's going on back there? You having lunch? Okay, we are back from close session. There's nothing to report out and we are in adjournment. You're here. Thank you guys. Thank you all for coming. Happy Mother's Day tomorrow. Happy Mother's Day as well. All of you moms. And yes, count. Yes, they do. And some uncles are really mean to them. What happened over here? Thank you, Sam. I think we had a Here we go.