Leadership: A Decade of Turnover at City Hall

The City Council appoints Laurie Murray as City Manager, an internal promotion: hired in 2006 as the City's first Administrative Services Manager and elevated to Administrative Services Director in 2014, she becomes the City's ninth city manager.

City Manager Murray announces her retirement in September 2019, effective December 19, 2019 — roughly three years into the nine-year pension-payoff period promoted during the Measure JJ campaign. The City's own retirement announcement lists among her proudest achievements “the passage of Measure JJ and the restructuring of the City's unfunded pension obligations, both of which contributed towards La Palma's long term financial stability.” Murray retired several years before the promised nine-year payoff period ended — and, as the audited numbers would later show, the unfunded liability kept growing.

After a period under an interim city manager, the council hires Conal McNamara as City Manager, recruited from the City of Whittier where he had been Director of Community Development. Two months into his tenure, the council adopts the resolution cutting its meeting schedule in half. McNamara served as City Manager for the next five years, during which several events examined elsewhere on this site occurred: the permanent meeting reduction, the repeated streaming refusals, the undocumented and uninvestigated Byer complaints, the police chief carousel, the Tripepi Smith ballot-measure contract his office administered, and the treatment of the Tiny Tots program employee.

Police Chief Terry Kim retires: he announces his retirement on August 3, 2023, effective August 18, 2023 — fifteen days' notice — after roughly 29 years with the department and seven years as chief. The compressed timeline is visible in the City's own handling of it: there was no successor ready to be named, so City Manager McNamara had to install Captain Ron Wilkerson as Acting Chief on August 17, with the formal appointment not coming until September 25.

No explanation for the sudden departure was ever offered publicly beyond the standard retirement tribute.

The sequence of dates on the record: Byer reported the discrimination to department leadership in January and February 2023, while Kim was chief; Byer resigned June 1, 2023, and met with City Human Resources on June 8, raising the discrimination, retaliation, and racial-profiling allegations that records show were forwarded to senior city officials; roughly eight weeks later, the chief under whose command the complaints went undocumented and uninvestigated announced his retirement on two weeks' notice. No evidence reviewed for this site establishes that Kim's retirement was connected to the Byer complaints. The City publicly characterized his departure as a retirement.

Kim's departure set in motion the succession that followed: McNamara promotes Captain Ron Wilkerson, a 27-year veteran one step from retirement himself, to Chief of Police effective September 25, 2023. Wilkerson's appointment simultaneously elevates Sergeant Joe Guerrero to Captain.

The City changes law firms for its outside City Attorney. No RFP or competitive review has been identified in the records reviewed for this site. For more than three decades, La Palma's City Attorney services were provided by Rutan & Tucker, LLP, one of Orange County's largest and most established municipal law firms.

Joel Kuperberg, City Attorney since 1987, retired effective December 31, 2018, and Assistant City Attorney Emily Webb — also with Rutan — succeeded him effective January 1, 2019. Ajit S. Thind, who had himself been serving as Assistant City Attorney, was then appointed to replace Webb on June 27, 2019 — meaning the Rutan relationship had already survived two changes of individual attorney before Thind eventually took the City's business elsewhere.

As recently as August 2022 the council renewed its legal-services agreement with Rutan & Tucker (a council agenda item of record), so the change came sometime after that. When Thind subsequently left Rutan to become a partner at a different firm, Colantuono, Highsmith & Whatley, PC, the City's legal business followed him there rather than staying with Rutan under a different attorney — and the City's website now lists Colantuono, Highsmith & Whatley as its contracted City Attorney firm.

The City had two documented alternatives it did not pursue: asking Rutan & Tucker — the firm it had used for three decades, and under which it had already changed the individual attorney twice — to assign a different attorney to continue the relationship a third time; or issuing a Request for Proposals to competitively select a new firm altogether. There is no public record of the City doing either — no RFP, no market survey, no comparison of rates or qualifications — before moving decades of institutional legal representation to the attorney's new employer.

The records reviewed for this site identify no competitive process, RFP, market survey, or comparison of rates and qualifications before the City's legal representation moved with Thind to his new firm. It is the same pattern that runs through the police chief promotions and the city manager hire: another significant City personnel or professional-services decision for which no competitive review has been identified in the public record.

After less than one year as chief, Wilkerson retires effective September 7, 2024, closing out a 28-year career with a single year at the department's top salary. The same day's announcement names his successor: City Manager McNamara promotes Captain Joe Guerrero — himself a 28-year veteran — to Chief of Police effective the following day, September 8, 2024.

Chief Joe Guerrero and the command staff of the La Palma Police Department end the La Palma Police Reserve Program. According to two former Reserve Program officers who contacted The La Palma Record, participating reserve officers were directed to return department-issued equipment and leave the station, with little acknowledgment of their service.

The former officers said this occurred despite some participants having served 20 years or more. This account has not been independently corroborated against a City record, and no City statement explaining the program's discontinuation has been identified.

Source: email to La Palma Record from two former Reserve Program officers — see Sources.

City Manager McNamara resigns to become City Manager of Whittier — the city he came from — departing almost exactly five years after his April 1, 2020 start date. Consistent with everything else in this record, the City never issued its own standalone announcement of the resignation itself: his departure became publicly known through discussion during public comment at a Cypress City Council meeting and subsequent news reporting, and the Event-News Enterprise confirmed it through the Whittier Daily News, which reported Whittier's council was scheduling his contract approval.

The ENE headlined its coverage “Exodus continues from La Palma City Government”: the Assistant City Manager was also resigning, City Clerk Kimberly Kenney had just retired, and Community Services Director Andy Ramirez had departed for another agency. At the City's final regular meeting before the news broke, parents had publicly criticized McNamara's administration over its treatment of the Recreation Specialist who ran the Tiny Tots preschool program — the same former employee who would file suit against the City a year later.

The City's only formal acknowledgment came three weeks later, on April 16, 2025, in a news release announcing Michael Egan as Interim City Manager and the start of an executive search — McNamara's departure appears there only as context, alongside a parting quote from Mayor Waldman, not as a notice of the resignation in its own right. McNamara departed before the Byer verdict, before Torres filed suit, and without a public accounting of the police-chief turnover, the consultant contract, or the Tiny Tots matter; the City spent the following months under Egan's interim management, effective April 28, 2025.

A recurring name — According to Event-News Enterprise's coverage of his appointment, interim City Manager Egan's own website describes prior work as a director for Tripepi Smith — the consulting firm the City separately paid to draft Measure W's ballot language and outreach materials in 2024. This document does not allege any connection between that prior professional relationship and Egan's interim appointment; it is noted because the firm recurs across this record. Event-News Enterprise, "Egan Hired as La Palma's Interim City Manager"; see Term Limits for Tripepi Smith's role in Measure W.

The council unanimously appoints Peter L. Kim as the next City Manager, effective October 27, 2025, ending roughly seven months under interim management. The City's published biography identifies no prior experience serving as a city manager or municipal administrator. Kim is a former two-term La Palma City Councilmember and Mayor (2012-2020), the very Mayor who signed Conal McNamara's employment agreement in 2020.

His professional background, per the City's own news release and press coverage, is in communications and legislative staff work — most recently a Chief Communications Officer role, previously district staff for an Orange County Supervisor and staff in the California State Assembly — with no prior experience managing a city or serving as a municipal administrator; his local-government experience consists of his elected La Palma council service and the regional board seats that came with it.

The recruitment that produced him was conducted by an ad hoc subcommittee of Mayor Waldman and Mayor Pro Tem Nitesh Patel, with finalists interviewed in multiple closed sessions; the City notes 87 people applied. Waldman — who had served on the council alongside Kim — praised his “terrific record of success,” in a release echoing nearly word-for-word the quote the City issued when it hired McNamara five years earlier.

The appointment raises an institutional-independence question because the City Manager is expected to provide professional advice to the same council that made the appointment.

Unlike a career municipal administrator, Kim previously served two terms on the La Palma City Council and had served alongside members of the council that later selected him as City Manager — including a 2016 council that made the Measure JJ promises this document audits. Readers can judge for themselves whether that background strengthens or complicates the City Manager's role as an independent professional adviser to the Council.

At the City's 2025 State of the City event on October 16 — held at CA JPIA and presented by Mayor Waldman to roughly 80 attendees — the City's own presentation included a slide titled "2025 Executive Team Changes," introducing that year's senior staff: City Manager Peter Kim, Community Development & Public Works Director Belinda Deines, Public Works Manager Jake Chavira, City Clerk Norma Alley, Deputy City Manager Joe Cisneros, Assistant to the City Manager Alisha Farnell, and Police Chief Joe Guerrero, whose retirement the slide itself already noted. Farnell's title is the one Cisneros himself held before his most recent promotion to Deputy City Manager, per City Council minutes from earlier in 2025.

Four of those seven — Deines, Cisneros, Alley, and Guerrero — have left since this slide was presented. Guerrero's departure was the one already flagged, as a retirement, at the time of the presentation; Deines, Cisneros, and Alley left without similar advance notice. The red X marks on the image below were added by this site's author to the City's original slide, to show which of the seven pictured have since left the City — the marks are not part of the City's own presentation.

This is the second wave of departures inside about eighteen months. The Event-News Enterprise headlined an earlier round in early 2025 "Exodus continues from La Palma City Government," covering City Clerk Kimberly Kenney's retirement, an Assistant City Manager's resignation, and Community Services Director Andy Ramirez's departure (see March 25, 2025, above). Counting both waves and the police department separately documented on this page, at least six senior positions — City Manager, Deputy City Manager, City Clerk (twice), Community Development & Public Works Director, Assistant to the City Manager, and Police Chief — have changed hands since early 2025.

Alley's departure — Norma Alley left the City Clerk role in August 2026. As with McNamara's resignation above, the City issued no standalone public announcement of her departure; it became documented only when the September 1, 2026 council agenda listed, under Presentations, the “Designation of Assistant to the City Manager Alisha Farnell as Acting City Clerk” — a routine appointment item, not a departure notice.

Cisneros's replacement — The same September 1, 2026 agenda also introduced Sea Shelton as Assistant City Manager, in the same Presentations item that introduced two other new employees, a title distinct from Cisneros's own "Deputy City Manager," though it fills the vacancy his departure left. As with Alley's, the City issued no separate public notice or press release naming a new Assistant City Manager; it is documented here only through that same routine agenda item. There is also no public record of the City of La Palma job posting for the Assistant City Manager or an open recruitment. This is now the third senior appointment or departure on this page that became public only through incidental agenda language rather than a dedicated announcement.

The author's research indicates four of seven senior executives leaving within roughly a year of being presented as the City's leadership team has no precedent since the City was founded in 1955, and reflects a problematic pattern of staff exodus that, in his view, negatively affects the City's institutional stability and continuity.

After about thirteen months as chief, Guerrero retires, ending a 29-year career with roughly one year at the top rank. The Event-News Enterprise notes the pattern in its own coverage: he is the latest La Palma police chief since 2023 to serve approximately one year and retire. The department has now cycled through four chiefs in about 26 months — Kim, Wilkerson, Guerrero, and Interim Chief Todd Mattern — spanning precisely the period in which the Byer complaints went uninvestigated, then were litigated and lost.

September 25, 2023 - October 25, 2025 — Laid end to end, the City's own announcements document the full arc of a single officer's rise and departure: Sergeant Joe Guerrero is promoted to Captain effective September 25, 2023; promoted again, from Captain to Chief of Police, effective September 8, 2024; and retires as Chief effective October 25, 2025. Sergeant to captain to chief to retirement in 25 months. City's official announcement; Event-News Enterprise, "La Palma Police Chief Set to Retire".

Why the one-year chief tenures matter financially: both Wilkerson and Guerrero joined the department in 1996, making them “classic” (pre-PEPRA) CalPERS members, whose pension is calculated from final compensation. For members on this formula, a higher-paid chief appointment near retirement can increase the compensation used to calculate the pension; the precise effect depends on each employee's benefit formula, pensionable compensation, and retirement calculation.

This document does not allege that increasing pension benefits was the purpose of either promotion; only the City Manager and council who approved the compensation for these successions can speak to intent.

What the record shows is the sequence: a captain promoted to chief roughly a year before retirement, twice in a row, back-to-back, under the same city manager — while that same city government was telling residents from the dais that its pension debt had “gone down.” The council marked each retirement with tributes and never publicly discussed the pension cost of either one-year chief appointment.

December 9, 2025 — The council selects Nitesh Patel as Mayor for 2026 the same day a jury returns its verdict in Byer v. City of La Palma. See Litigation, below.