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Carl Leivo, shown in 2003 when he served as city manager of Rohnert Park, in the City Council chambers. (JOHN BURGESS/PD)
By JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Carl Leivo says that what sets him apart as a candidate for the Rohnert Park City Council is that he once ran the city.
Indeed, Leivo is running chiefly on his record as Rohnert Park’s city manager from 2003 to 2005, when he was involved with issues that remain some of the city’s most contentious.
They include the sale of the old city stadium, the proposed Indian casino and a pension plan he negotiated with the city’s public safety officers union and that officials now consider one of the city’s major financial burdens.
Leivo, whom the council dismissed in 2005 with a $250,000 severance payment, was one of the county’s most political city managers. In this election season, he and Mayor Pam Stafford have been lightning rods for criticism and campaign rhetoric.
The most recent campaign finance reports, filed in early October, show that he and, to a greater degree, Stafford, had been the targets of about $40,000 worth of attack advertising by independent political committees. The attacks on Leivo say his election would be a “disaster” for Rohnert Park.
For his part, Leivo has been the harshest critic of the current council, saying it is dismantling “all that made our community a great place.”
In arguing for voters’ support, Leivo makes several key points. They are: the last balanced city budget was on his watch and that if the city had kept to the path he put it on, it would have surplus instead of a $2.5 million deficit; and that public safety efforts he started led to crime falling to its recent low levels.
“There’s no one better qualified to serve you,” he tells voters.
When Leivo became city manager in March 2003 the city was facing a $3 million deficit. With council approval he trimmed 30 positions from a payroll of 178. He eliminated seven department head positions and created five new ones to replace them at a lower cost.
At the same time, five public officer positions were added to the budget. That helped endear him to the city’s public safety officers union, which later came out in force to lobby the council not to fire Leivo, and this year endorsed his candidacy.
In June, at the start of the 2003-04 fiscal year, Leivo presented the council with a balanced $26.1 million budget. As he points out, the city hasn’t had a balanced budget since then.
But Leivo’s first balanced budget was also his last.
The next budget, for 2004-05, had a $2.7 million hole that Leivo, again with council approval, plugged with money from the city’s reserves.
Both the budgets showcased a tactic that Leivo leaned on: using sales of city-owned property to keep the city in the black and add to its reserves.
The practice — used by Rohnert Park city managers before and since — often is criticized because it allows city officials to defer the kind of systemic changes needed to prevent future deficits
The two budgets he proposed as city manager projected a total of $15.6 million in revenue from the sale of city-owned properties. That first budget projected property sales revenues of $7.1 million to boost the city’s reserves.
But over those two years, the combined revenue from those sales, city records show, was $4.4 million, about $11 million less than projected.
One of those land sales was that of the old Rohnert Park stadium, a sale that Leivo helped negotiate with Redwood Equities — a group led by prominent Sonoma County businessmen James Ratto and Dennis Hunter. It has turned into one of the city’s sorest subjects.
To date it has brought in just $2.6 million of a projected $7 million. And that may well be all; in 2009, Redwood Equities told the city it would not exercise its option to buy the remainder of the property.
“All I can say is, that sale was on track, when I was city manager, to be completed,” Leivo said this week.
The sale also became closely tied to the most controversial development project of Leivo’s tenure: the Las Vegas-style casino proposed by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
Along with two councilmembers, Armando Flores and Amie Breeze, who is still on the council but is stepping down, Leivo was heavily criticized for smoothing the project’s way.
He participated in negotiations that led to an agreement under which the tribe would pay the city $200 million over 20 years. And in July 2004, he, then-Mayor Greg Nordin and members of the Friends of the Graton Rancheria group urged state negotiators to grant the tribe a gaming compact, the license it needs to open for business.
Leivo this week said he never favored the casino and acted on the request of councilmembers who had courted the tribe.
“As a city staff person it’s my job to implement directions of member of the city council, that was not my initiative,” he said. “I regret the decision of the tribal council to select the Rohnert Park site.”
Regarding his lobbying the state to approve a compact, Leivo in 2004 told The Press Democrat that he and Nordin had gone to Sacramento to do that because the agreement with the tribe required city officials to support the tribe’s plans.
This week, though, he characterized the meeting as “with an assistant to an assistant,” and said, “The main thing I talked about was improvements to the Wilford Avenue interchange.”
But in a July 15 letter from Leivo to San Francisco attorney Daniel Kolkey, Schwarzenegger’s lead negotiator for tribal-state compacts, Leivo thanked Kolkey for meeting with him and the others and summarized the meeting.
And he appeared to make a case that other than the Wilford Avenue interchange, any environmental impacts of the casino that the governor might weigh when negotiating a compact had been addressed in the city’s agreement with the tribe.
“To reiterate,” wrote Leivo in the letter — which was titled “Compact for the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria” — “When negotiating (the agreement) the city anticipated every possible impact of the hotel/resort/casino project.”
The tribe’s land was taken into trust by the federal government Oct. 1, effectively making it a reservation, and it is now poised to negotiate with the governor’s office for its compact.
As to that agreement between the city and the tribe, most of which doesn’t take effect until the casino opens, Leivo maintains he negotiated the best deal possible for the city.
“My job was to negotiate the agreement; I think I did a pretty good job,” he said. “My interest there was to protect the interests of the citizens and if that facility ever gets built, the interests of the citizens of Rohnert Park will be protected by that agreement.”
Flores, the former councilman who is strong supporter of Leivo’s candidacy, is among those who concur that the agreement was the best Rohnert Park could extract from a casino that they had no legal ability to prevent.
Flores, the former councilman who is strong supporter of Leivo’s candidacy, offers an account of the negotiations in which Leivo played a much more secondary role.
“Myself and (then councilwoman) Vicki Vidak-Martinez, we negotiated the agreement,” Flores said this week. “Carl was involved but it was basically Vicki and myself.”
Leivo, to support his claim that his efforts have led to a safer city, points to a section of that agreement under which the tribe in 2004 started making annual contributions to the city public safety department.
The money was used to fund a new police unit focused on neighborhoods and repeat offenders. “I worked with … the police chief to implement that and create that new enforcement in the community,” Leivo said this week.
In a Leivo campaign mailer, Dale Utecht, president of the public safety officers union, credits the former city manager, saying he “jump-started efforts that brought crime to its lowest level in years.”
Utecht did not return phone calls and e-mails seeking further comment.
As the city’s top administrator, Leivo came in close contact with the public safety officers on other fronts: most notably perhaps at the bargaining table during the labor negotiations.
The contract that Leivo negotiated in 2004 took effect in 2007. Starting that year officers, who pay nothing into the plan, became able to retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their salary, depending on years employed.
The cost to the city was immediate. The city’s payments into the pension system rose by $2 million, from $3.4 million to $5.3 million. The bulk of that — $4 million — reflected the cost of pensions for public safety employees, who make up the great majority of city employees.
In March, all five current councilmembers — including Joe Callinan and Breeze, both of whom have endorsed Leivo — agreed that the pension benefits were a “burden” on the city’s finances that need to be brought under control.
Leivo this week said that Rohnert Park was the last Sonoma County city to adopt the improved pension plan, and said it was needed to attract officers qualified to serve in both police and fire protection services, as is required under the city’s public safety department structure.
And he called the issue “a smokescreen for what’s really happened with the budget.”
He said: “What’s really happened is they’ve given management big raises, and the city has gone through a big hiring bump of 25 additional employees and has just brought it back down again.”
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The people of Rohnert Park remember Carl Leivo.
Carl Leivo is the guy who “negotiated” with the unions by asking them what they wanted and giving it to them without asking for any concessions.
Carl Leivo is the guy who claimed to balance the budget, leaving a $55 million dollar unfunded liability in health care and retirement benefits.
Carl Leivo is the guy who was fired in 2005 by a 5-0 vote. Even two members of the council who voted to hire him voted to fire him after just two short years.
Carl Leivo is the guy who is so lacking in talent that he hasn’t found a job as city manager of another city since being fired in 2005.
The good voters of Rohnert Park remember Carl Leivo.
And they are not fooled.
You run on your 2003 – 2005 record. That is reason enough NOT to vote for you. Obviously you, and the others forgot WHO you actually work for. I hope everybody remembers how YOU and the other city council members went behind the voters back. You can’t justify that or make it right. You and the others were wrong.
In a society where stupidity is glorified and the bookshelves are filled with books for dummies, there’s just no way a smart guy like Leivo can succeed on the city council in the real world.
In a perfect world, Rohnert Park would want the smartest guy in a position to make a difference. However, the polarizing politics of Rohnert Park it makes no difference. The truth can not be recognized even when it is told.
I’ve commented many times that Rohnert Park’s problems can be solved by merely deciding to solve them. In the past as city manager, Leivo on many occasions did just that. Without the reserves he created long ago, Rohnert Park may have already gone bankrupt.
However, being a councilperson and being a city manager with council support are two very different things. Leivo will not be able to solve problems with a decision. He will likely be unable to persuade anyone of anything regardless of any logic, reason, or evidence.
The typical voter in Rohnert Park has no idea and does not want to know how the fudge is packed or the sausage is made. The want the roads clean and the pot holes fixed. They want the parks open and clean. They want a nice school and pool in their neighborhood. And they want a lot of police and firefighters living and working in the city taking care of the business of pushing out the criminals, parolees, probationers, sex-offenders and so on.
They don’t want the city council to waste time and effort on identity politics, i.e., climate protection, United Nations Day, walk or ride to school, world polio day, domestic violence awareness month, fire prevention week, healthy eating and active living cities and all the other complete and total baloney that interferes with actually running a city.
Can one smart councilperson decide to set up a two-tier retirement system for the employees? Can one councilperson privatize city services? Eliminate multiple layers of bureaucracy? Get a new car dealership to set up house in Rohnert Park? Write a ballot proposal to fairly allocate the actual costs of sewer and water so that billing revenue covers the costs and the voters will approve of it?
Let’s say Leivo decided to do all those things. Is that going to shut up political opponents with a grudge? The Press Democrat prints allegations without any proof all the time. They re-print attack mailers right in the regular newspaper and call it “news reporting.”
How can any smart guy who has the answers and ideas and solutions possibly compete in the real world? The voters in Rohnert Park are just not smart enough to sift through all the noise. It’s simply impossible for an intelligent person like Leivo to put even a scratch in the wall between problems and solutions in Rohnert Park.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Leivo can never make it past the first two hurdles in the intellectual vacuum that is in charge of Rohnert Park today and will be after the election.