photo credit: City of Santa Rosa
Lori Ann Farrell [left], Santa Rosa's pick for interim city manager, and Maraskeshia Smith [right] 
the city's current city manager who is leaving for the top spot in Sacramento in January.

Santa Rosa's city manager and top appointed official is leaving the role after three years.

Maraskeshia Smith will become Sacramento's next city manager in January.

"The council is sorry that our excellent current city manager, Maraskeshia Smith, has decided to move on to Sacramento," said Santa Rosa Mayor Mark Stapp. "Sacramento's gain is our loss."

Stapp said Santa Rosa has picked out a new city manager, Lori Ann Farrell, temporarily at least.

"The specific qualities that we're looking for in our interim were a lot of financial savvy, because that is Santa Rosa's largest challenge right now, and ideally some experience in ballot tax measures because that's another option that the city is at least considering," Stapp said. "Then ideally, and this is a bit of a long shot, some experience in in working with professional sports teams, because that's a high profile opportunity that the city has right now."

"Our search firm was good enough to come back with several candidates, one of whom was Lori Ann Farrell," Stapp sad. "Who happened to check all those boxes."

Farrell is a career city official, with recent experience in leadership at the cities of Long Beach and Huntington Beach, and was most recently the city manager of Costa Mesa in Orange County, a role she was abruptly and controversially fired from in May. Farrell has filed a lawsuit against Costa Mesa over the firing.

She is set to be approved by the Santa Rosa city council on December 2nd.

The Press Democrat's Paulina Pineda spoke with KRCB News about Santa Rosa's decision to go with Farrell on an interim basis, and about her lawsuit against the City of Costa Mesa.

Below is the conversation between Pineda and KRCB's Noah Abrams.

Noah Abrams: The new potential interim city manager in Santa Rosa, you wrote about how she is involved in some litigation against her former employer, the City of Costa Mesa down in Southern California. So, what's happening on that front with the city bringing her into the role, or at least potentially bringing her into the role? And is there any indication that the litigation that she's involved in against the City of Costa Mesa might have an impact on that?

Paulina Pineda: The council, I think it was on November 20th, named Lori Ann Farrell, a veteran Southern California official, as their pick to temporarily lead the city starting in January. Pretty soon after that, I think news started circulating, locally at least, that she had left her last job in Costa Mesa under potentially questionable circumstances in May.

The council there had abruptly fired her in a split decision in closed session. So in a private meeting.

There was no public reason given for her dismissal and in looking through reporting from the LA Times and the OC Register, there really hasn't been a lot of information about what potentially led to that decision, but in a lawsuit that Farrell filed a few months after the dismissal in Orange County Superior Court, she pointed to her dismissal as retaliation in response to concerns she had raised to council members regarding illegal and improper behavior by the mayor there.

That case is working its way through court. I spoke with Mayor Mark Stapp on Friday and he acknowledged that the council was aware of what was going on in Costa Mesa, and the ongoing litigation when they made their selection. He didn't feel that it would hinder her work here and sort of saw it as a separate issue.

He declined to really say much more than that citing the pending litigation.

NA: Yeah, did they point to anything specific as to why they've turned to her as somebody to head the role on an interim basis?

PP: Yeah, you know, he said she sort of emerged as a top candidate out of a pool of prospective appointments, particularly because of her finance background.

She sort of came up in city finances, and the city is facing a multi-year multi-million dollar deficit. and Stapp said he and his fellow council members felt that that experience in particular could really serve the city in the coming months as they look to finalize the budget and what are likely to be additional and potentially steep cuts in the coming budget year.

[Stapp] said she also had experience serving in similar sized cities that had faced their own budget issues and and he also felt you know that her experience working with sport franchises in Southern California could aid the city in its potential negotiations to bring professional soccer to the region, which the city has really looked to, I think, as an economic development tool that could aid in its budget crisis.

NA: Okay, and did the mayor say anything about potentially bringing her on full-time or is this really just going to be a temporary marriage between Farrell and the city?

PP: Yeah, I think it'll just be temporary. He felt...looking for somebody to come in after city manager [Maraskeshia] Smith leaves in January, he wanted someone that could really lead in this transitional period while they could conduct a larger recruitment for someone to fill in the permanent position.

He said that recruitment should start in January and they're expecting that it will take potentially up to nine months and I think they'll look to Farrell to serve during that period, but it didn't sound like she would be in the running for the permanent job.