Shuffle at Santa Rosa City Hall hints at planning changes

Two high-level staffing shifts at Santa Rosa City Hall signal that major changes may be on the horizon for the city’s Planning Department.

Chuck Regalia, who had been a manager in the Community Development Department for nearly 41 years and its director since 2005, has been reassigned to special projects in the city manager’s office on a full-time basis.

City Manager Sean McGlynn announced the changes late last month and they became effective July 1.

“I felt like I needed to make a switch,” McGlynn said.

Regalia was promoted to assistant city manager early last year, with his time split between the annexation of Roseland and his continued oversight of the Planning and Building departments.

Now Regalia, 67, has been relieved of his oversight of community development to focus full-time on Roseland and other projects. Those include a study of planning fees, increasing affordable housing and planning for the southeast greenway.

“Those are high-level projects that really need the organization’s complete attention and need focus,” McGlynn said.

Regalia called the shift a “welcomed change” that will allow him to focus on complex issues without the day-to-day management duties of the Planning Department.

Regalia said he looks forward to moving the Roseland annexation forward, even though he said he doubts he’ll still be with the city by the time the process is complete several years from now.

“I really think that the Roseland project is something that’s very important to the city and I’m really glad to be a part of it,” Regalia said.

He is respected for his knowledge of the city’s development history and for helping council members navigate complex and at-times controversial planning decisions.

The director of the city’s utilities department, David Guhin, has been named interim director of community development.

Guhin, 40, has been credited with helping the utilities department, now called Santa Rosa Water, expand its water conservation programs during the state’s ongoing drought. He is viewed by many as a smart, collaborative leader, though one with little planning experience.

He will continue to oversee the utilities department while he steps in to lead community development.

Guhin was similarly tapped to be interim head of the Transportation and Public Works Department while the city recruited a replacement for longtime director Rick Moshier, who retired at the end of last year.

But the city isn’t going to recruit a replacement for Regalia right away. McGlynn said he wants to see how changes in the department unfold before opening a recruitment process.

The city is working with a management consulting firm to help it make the department more efficient and customer-friendly. Developers in particular have long bemoaned the city’s planning and permit processes as arduous, expensive and unpredictable.

Guhin said he is working with the consultant and city planners on ways to improve turnaround time for applicants, create greater certainty in the permitting process and build a more customer service-focused culture. He declined to provide specifics, but said the possibility of expanding the department’s public hours was “a reasonable guess.”

“There are things that we can change and there are things that we can do better tomorrow,” Guhin said.

The move is similar to - but also quite different from - what happened to Regalia’s predecessor, Wayne Goldberg, in 2005. Under pressure from a building industry frustrated by the city’s development review process, former City Manager Jeff Kolin moved Goldberg out of community development and into a new position as director of advanced planning. Kolin later tried to have Goldberg’s job eliminated from the budget, but the council thwarted those efforts. Goldberg resigned in 2009 and later was tapped by a deeply divided council to be interim city manager.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.