Pasadena Man Accepts Oxnard Municipal Post

Capping the city’s nearly yearlong search, Pasadena Assistant City Manager Edmund F. Sotelo said Wednesday that he has accepted an offer to become Oxnard’s city manager.

Sotelo is scheduled to meet today with Oxnard personnel officials to work out the length of his contract, his salary and a start date.

The longtime government official, who began his municipal career 30 years ago as a heavy equipment operator in Compton, said getting the job fulfills a dream of becoming the top administrator in a large city.

“It fulfills a lot of my goals,” Sotelo said. “To be the city manager of Oxnard is a tremendous achievement.”

In his lengthy career, Sotelo has weathered controversy, including an acrimonious departure from an earlier job as city manager of Colton after a salary dispute.

He said he was warmly received by Oxnard City Council members and that he sees many benefits to living here.

“It’s the cultural diversity, the geographic location,” added Sotelo, who plans to begin house hunting in Oxnard this weekend. “And you can’t ignore the climate and the proximity to the ocean.”

Sotelo, 52, comes to Ventura County’s largest city at a time when local officials are wrestling with major long-term planning issues.

City Council members are trying to set new development restrictions that protect farmland without stifling business growth. They also want to declare a 2,600-acre swath blighted and in need of economic aid. Meanwhile, revitalization of the downtown business corridor has also become a top priority.

Some of those issues, such as downtown revitalization, are well-known to Sotelo, who has worked in Pasadena since 1991. Others, like farmland preservation, will be new, but Sotelo said he is eager to tackle all of the community’s concerns.

In Oxnard, Sotelo will oversee a local government with 1,000 employees and an annual budget of $120 million--less than a third of Pasadena’s annual expenditures. As Pasadena assistant city manager, he earns an annual base salary of $115,235.

Sotelo would become the fourth Oxnard city manager in 12 years, replacing Tom Frutchey, who was fired on a split council vote last February.

Oxnard officials would not confirm that Sotelo had been offered the job, saying that negotiations need to be finalized.

“To comment on the process could jeopardize the outcome,” City Councilman Tom Holden said.

But earlier this week, Mayor Manuel Lopez and Councilman John Zaragoza praised Sotelo as a seasoned bureaucrat with experience in several ethnically diverse communities.

Both Lopez and Zaragoza said it would be good to have a city manager who is of Mexican descent, given the city’s large Latino, African American and Asian American communities.

Indeed, local leaders said Wednesday that Sotelo’s ethnic background would be a plus.

“I think it’s important to get someone sensitive to the issues of Latinos,” said Francisco Dominguez, executive director of the Oxnard-based Latino advocacy group El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.

“In the past, there’s been a feeling Latinos have not been very well-represented in government,” Dominguez said. “But the council, and a couple of the [city management positions] are looking more colorful and diverse. It looks like Oxnard does today.”

Sotelo’s long career in local government has not been without controversy.

In Compton, where he worked from 1968 to 1990, Sotelo was one of many city officials with relatives who got jobs in City Hall--a trend that union officials said typified the local government’s nepotism and cronyism. Sotelo, who eventually became a top aide to City Manager James C. Goins, had a brother who was hired as a neighborhood center director and a nephew who became a city firefighter.

Sotelo said that both relatives were hired without favoritism and still work for the city of Compton.

“They’re both still there, and I’m long gone,” he said. “I don’t see the relativity.”

In Pasadena, a female Rose Bowl employee complained that Sotelo did nothing to punish stadium manager Dave Jacobs after Jacobs was accused of sexual harassment. Sotelo would not discuss the issue, citing pending litigation.

And in 1992, Sotelo was part of a delegation of Pasadena officials who traveled to the Super Bowl in Minneapolis at taxpayer expense. The mayor of Pasadena blasted the trip as an extravagance.

But at the time, Sotelo said the trip was necessary to gain “critical first-hand information,” because Pasadena was planning to host the next year’s Super Bowl.

Sotelo went to Pasadena from Colton in 1991. He left his job as city manager there after his request for a $17,000 raise--to $102,000 per year--was turned down by council members. He told the council they had created an “intolerable environment” for him to work in before leaving for Pasadena.

During his six years in Pasadena, Sotelo oversaw the city’s handling of many Rose Bowl events. He helped devise police and traffic plans for the 1993 Super Bowl and the 1994 World Cup. On a daily basis, he worked on the city budget, internal labor disputes and numerous City Council issues.

A native of South Central Los Angeles, Sotelo was drafted in the 1960s and became an Army drill instructor at Ft. Ord. He took a job as a heavy equipment operator in Compton in 1968, driving tractors and working on street construction. After nearly a decade of blue-collar work, he passed an exam to work in the city’s personnel department, joining that division in 1977.

As he climbed the ranks in Compton City Hall, Sotelo said, he studied nights to earn a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and a master’s degree in public administration at Cal State Dominguez Hills. He is the father of three children. A son and daughter both attend Cypress Community College in Orange County; another daughter is a Norwalk housewife.

Sotelo worked for a year as city manager of Colton in San Bernardino County before moving on to Pasadena. His resume lists skills such as public relations, employee development and budget management.

He said earlier this week that he wanted the Oxnard job badly, having outgrown his role in Pasadena. Late Tuesday night, Sotelo said, the city’s executive search firm called and offered him the job.

“I called them back, and said that I will accept,” he said.

Oxnard Council members chose Sotelo after a closed-door session Tuesday afternoon. They considered two other finalists, Richard Ramirez, the interim public works director in Modesto, and John Arnold, a former Eureka city manager.

The hunt for a new city manager began nearly a year ago, after a divided City Council fired Frutchey on a 3-2 vote. Frutchey had been accused of lowering employee morale with a tyrannical management style. He is now an executive at Oxnard’s Borla Performance Industries, a company that manufactures automobile exhaust systems.

Soon after Frutchey’s firing, several city employees expressed interest in the opening, including Police Chief Harold Hurtt and Assistant City Manager Prisilla Hernandez, who is serving as interim city manager. A council majority of Bedford Pinkard, Lopez and Zaragoza voted this summer to look outside Oxnard for Frutchey’s replacement.

This fall, the city’s executive search firm had to extend the application deadline because so few people had applied for the job of Oxnard city manager. Eventually, 33 people applied. City officials expect to pay $19,000 to the search firm.

In recent weeks, Zaragoza has said that the city might want to reverse some of the sweeping restructuring of City Hall that took place under Frutchey, who eliminated numerous department head jobs. Sotelo, however, spoke highly of the restructuring in his interview, Holden said.

Sotelo said during his visit that Oxnard employees seemed eager to get back to business with a new boss and had put Frutchey’s firing behind them.

“I didn’t get a sense of any lingering antagonism,” he said. “Just what’s ahead of the city for the future.”