Leadership Transitions

Covers every change of City Manager, Police Chief, and City Attorney across the decade — the pattern of internal promotions, limited public explanation, and absence of competitive searches that recurs across all three roles.

November 17, 2015 — 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.

September–December 2019 — City Manager Murray announces her retirement in September 2019, effective December 19, 2019 — barely three years into the nine-year pension-payoff clock her administration sold to voters. 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.” The architect of the promise departed long before the promise could be measured against results — and, as the audited numbers would later show, the unfunded liability kept growing.

April 1, 2020 — 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. Over the five years that follow, virtually every failure documented here occurs on his watch: 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.

August–September 2023 — Police Chief Terry Kim retires abruptly: 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. Whether those events are connected has never been publicly addressed; no public explanation has been located, consistent with everything else in this record. 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.

September 2024 — 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 September 8, 2024.

March–April 2025 — 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, his resignation was never publicly announced to La Palma residents: word of it slipped out during public comment at a Cypress City Council meeting, 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 scolded McNamara's administration over its treatment of a beloved employee who ran the Tiny Tots preschool program — the same former employee who would file suit against the City a year later. McNamara left without ever answering for the Byer failures, the chief carousel, the consultant contract, or the Tiny Tots matter; the City would spend the following months under interim management.

After August 2022 — The City changes law firms for its most important outside adviser — the City Attorney — without any competitive process. 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; the individual serving as City Attorney, Ajit S. Thind, was a Rutan partner. 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 for a different firm, Colantuono, Highsmith & Whatley, PC, the City's legal business followed him there — and the City's website now lists Colantuono, Highsmith & Whatley as its contracted City Attorney firm. There is no public record of the City issuing a Request for Proposals, conducting a market survey, or comparing rates and qualifications among firms before moving decades of institutional legal representation to the attorney's new employer. It is the same pattern that runs through the police chief promotions and the city manager hire: a consequential decision about who advises and represents the City made on the basis of a personal relationship rather than an open, documented search for the best value to taxpayers. Retaining a trusted attorney who changes firms can be entirely reasonable — but doing so with no competitive review, for a contract of this importance, is one more instance of the due-diligence vacuum that characterizes this council's major personnel and vendor decisions.

September 2, 2025 — The council unanimously appoints Peter L. Kim as the next City Manager, effective October 27, 2025, ending roughly seven months under interim management. Kim is not a professional city administrator — he 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 steered 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 structural problem is independence, and it is not subtle: in the council-manager form of government, the professional city manager is supposed to be the politically neutral check on the elected council — the City's own website touts the manager's adherence to the ICMA Code of Ethics, which is built on political neutrality and professional management. La Palma's council instead reached past 86 other applicants to install one of its own former members — a former colleague and ally of the sitting majority, and a member of the 2016 council that made the Measure JJ promises this document audits. Whatever Kim's personal qualities, the arrangement means the person now charged with giving the council independent professional advice — and with administering any honest accounting of the council's own past decisions — is a product of that same council.

October 25, 2025 — 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 were buried, litigated, and lost.

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 lifetime pensions are calculated from their final compensation. Promoting a captain on the cusp of retirement to chief for roughly a single year permanently bases his pension on the chief's salary rather than a captain's — a benefit paid for decades out of the same CalPERS accounts whose unfunded liability has grown 30% since Measure JJ passed. This structure is widely criticized in California public finance as pension spiking. Whether that was the intent here, only the City Manager and council who approved the compensation for these successions can say; what the record shows is that it happened the same way, 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 Employment Litigation, below.