Santa Ana’s Bobb Resigns to Take Post in Virginia

Robert C. Bobb, Santa Ana’s often controversial city manager, announced Saturday that he has accepted a job in Richmond, Va., that offers “a great career move.”

Bobb, 41, said he will become Richmond’s city manager on July 7 but might remain in Santa Ana a few weeks past that date to finish the new city budget.

Bobb’s announcement at a news conference outside his City Hall office culminated two days of speculation that he would accept the $110,000-a-year post in Richmond. Bobb said Richmond also will pay him $7,500 deferred compensation yearly in addition to his base salary.

Some Santa Ana council members had held last-minute discussions about offering Bobb a substantial raise from his $84,000 yearly salary. But both Bobb and Mayor Dan Griset, who was at the news conference along with council members Dan Young and Patricia A. McGuigan, said no raise had been offered.

Career Move

“Richmond is strictly a professional career move,” Bobb said. “It is a great career move, and I would have not stayed” for more money, he added.

Ironically, the council had planned a June 10 meeting to discuss Bobb’s salary. Before interviewing for the Richmond job, the city manager had proposed that his salary be increased to $104,000 a year.

In Richmond, Mayor Roy A. West said the City Council had reviewed 50 applicants and had voted unanimously to offer Bobb the job.

Bobb “is committed and unafraid to move this city forward,” West said after an executive session of the council Saturday.

Although Richmond’s population of 219,000 is comparable to Santa Ana’s, Bobb said he would have considerably more responsibility there. He will direct 4,600 city employees, more than twice the number in Santa Ana, and he will also oversee programs such as public transportation and social service agencies that counties traditionally govern.

Richmond, the capital of Virginia, is not part of any county.

Griset said the council would decide Monday how to replace Bobb temporarily and how to search for a permanent replacement. The mayor, a close supporter of Bobb’s, praised him for directing the city during a tumultuous period.

“We will miss him,” Griset said. “Each of us (council members) have thought of this as a time of great energy and commitment to the future.”

Bobb, who came to Santa Ana on Feb. 1, 1984, from a similar job in Kalamazoo, Mich., was in the limelight--and the center of controversy--almost from his first day on the job. In his first year alone, a record-shattering investment of $220 million was approved for new construction in the city, primarily in the still-ongoing downtown revitalization project.

Recently, Bobb has been a target of a citizens’ group that is pushing to change Santa Ana’s system of city government. The Santa Ana Merged Society of Neighbors (SAMSON) will learn on Tuesday--when voters will decide on the group’s ballot proposition, Measure C--whether its six-month struggle to have individual ward elections for council members and a direct election for mayor is successful.

Citizens’ group members have claimed that Bobb had too much power in the current city council system. But group leader Jim Lowman refused to criticize Bobb on Saturday in light of what is expected to be a close election on Tuesday.

“We are not surprised that he has accepted the position and we wish him well,” Lowman said.

Bobb, however, said he had almost relished the controversies during his tenure and that he never took the criticism personally.

“It comes with the territory,” he said. “I never lost any sleep over it.”

Bobb said he had no disappointments about his tenure and that he had fashioned the city’s staff into a top-notch organization.

“I think we built an internal organization capable of responding to any direction the council wanted to take,” he said. “We added a particular charisma to the organization.”

Still, Bobb said he considered Santa Ana, with its multifaceted personality, a difficult city to govern.

“It is one of the most unique and toughest cities in the country to manage. It is multi-ethnic and even international issues (such as immigration) are found here,” he said.

A native of New Orleans, Bobb received an undergraduate degree from Grambling State University in Louisiana and a master’s degree in business from Western Michigan University.