Two insiders eyed for interim manager, Santa Rosa sources say

With Santa Rosa City Manager Jeff Kolin set to leave for his Beverly Hills job in mid-January, Santa Rosa’s City Council is scrambling to find someone to take the city’s reigns until Kolin’s permanent replacement can be found.

A candidate recruitment, which would cost between $25,000 to $30,000, likely won’t begin until January, said Human Resources Director Fran Elm.

“We’re heading into the holidays and that is not a good time to start a recruitment,” Elm said. “We’re looking at July before we would have someone here.”

Mayor Susan Gorin acknowledged that the City Council in a closed-door session Tuesday bandied about names of potential candidates, but she declined to name any of them.

“I’m not interested in having names in the newspaper at this point,” she said.

But there has been widespread speculation, confirmed by sources familiar with council discussions, that the council is focusing on two candidates with extensive city experience.

They are Deputy City Manager Greg Scoles, the city’s second-in-command, and former Advanced Planning Director Wayne Goldberg, a potentially controversial choice.

Both men told The Press Democrat they’d be interested in the interim position.

“I haven’t talked to anybody about the job but of course I’d be interested,” said Scoles.

“The city needs an interim city manager and I think I’m qualified to do the job,” said Scoles, who before he came to Santa Rosa to be Kolin’s right-hand man was city manager for Ashland, Ore.

Goldberg said some citizens had asked if he’d be interested, but no one from the city has approached him. “What I have told them is I would be happy to help with the transition in some way. I still care about the city,” he said.

Goldberg, 64, resigned as advanced planning director in August. He said he could do the job despite being a lighting rod for criticism, including from some current council members, over the past few years.

“Your basic function is to support them (council members) as they develop policies,” he said. “Your job is not to change their minds, but to carry out what they want.”

Four years ago, efforts to force him to resign failed after on-going criticism from the building industry.

In the aftermath, however, Kolin reassigned Goldberg, then Community Development Director, to lead a newly formed advanced planning division not directly involved in day-to-day planning activities.

Goldberg has been viewed by the building and development community as fostering a bureaucracy that slowed their efforts to build and made it more expensive to do so.

But the city’s more environmental and neighborhood-leaning voices supported him as a buffer between what they saw as unchecked growth and someone demanding more accountability from the building industry.

Goldberg often found himself buffeted between ever-changing council majorities that reflected those differing opinions.

Goldberg resigned in September, months after the council’s labor and environment-leaning majority saved his job on a 4-3 vote by rejecting Kolin’s efforts to alternately eliminate Goldberg’s position or demote him and lower his pay.

Both efforts, Kolin said, were driven by massive budget cuts the city needed to make and a virtual standstill in development that generated much of the revenues needed to fund the advanced planning function.

Gorin would not comment on whether there had been council contact with Scoles or Goldberg. Except for noting the council will discuss the issue further at Dec. 1 and Dec. 8 council meetings, she said, “there is nothing to report.”