Official stays put for now

By CHARLES HAND/The Valley Chronicle

Len Wood

Hemet has decided to keep interim City Manager Len Wood for a year instead of seeking a permanent replacement.

Wood said he has no intention of becoming the permanent city manager, but Mayor Marc Searl said the city is not going to advertise the position, at least for now.

“As far as I'm concerned, he's the city manager,” Searl said.

The council unanimously appointed Wood after a closed session Tuesday morning, the latest in a string of closed meetings on the topic.

Searl said a major factor, if not the major factor, in Wood's selection was his relationship with the city staff. “This guy has won the confidence of the departments,” Searl said.

The contract with Wood expires June 30 of next year.

Wood said his primary focus for the foreseeable future will be balancing the budget, which could go as far as $5.6 million into the red by the end of next fiscal year, though developing a new general plan is also high on the priority list.

“Moving the general plan along is extremely important,” he said.

Neither the general plan nor digging the city out of its financial hole is likely to be finished by the end of his year in office, Wood said. “I doubt that our problems are going to be over by the end of this year,” he said.

Wood said he believes he and members of the city staff have found ways to bring the deficit down to $4.1 million. “There are all kinds of different strategies in that,” he said.

Wood said he has been meeting with department heads and representatives of employee groups in the quest for money-saving ideas and those meetings continue. He may report the first of his recommendations to the City Council next week.

The greatest help to resolving the remainder of the economic problem would be an increase in revenue. “If revenue doesn't improve appreciably, we'll be right back in the same problem,” he said.

The loss of tax revenue from a combination of the collapse of the housing market and the decline of the economy is the primary cause of the budget, say city officials. The $3.1 million deficit in the current fiscal year mirrors the loss of sales tax revenue, Finance Director Laura Nomura has told the council.

Wood said he is not interested in staying as city manager beyond the one-year contract. “I still have one more book to write,” he said, and his heart is in helping city officials improve the ways they deal with the issues facing them.

Though Wood has served as city manager with two other cities, he retired to a consulting business and has written books on municipal administration.

While he is Hemet city manager, Wood will live in a city-owned mobile home in Simpson Park, at least during the week. Wood said he does not find that daunting. “We used to have a cabin in Grass Valley,” he said.

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