Shohreh Dupuis left her job as city manager of Laguna Beach two years ago, in the wake of a squabble with a city council member, a threat of a harassment lawsuit, and an inquiry into into how her house came to be smeared with feces.
Details of that municipal soap opera were unique, but at least one aspect of her departure was not: Laguna Beach agreed to pay Dupuis nine months salary and health insurance, a separate settlement of about $223,000, and another $10,000 to cover her legal fees. In all, taxpayers paid the former city manager about $450,000 to not work for them.
It was all legal.
It was also routine.
Since 2020, at least 12 cities in Orange County have cut ties with top officials before their contracts were done, essentially paying people not to do their jobs because of some kind of high- or low-profile conflict. At least three local cities cashiered well-paid executives in the first half of this year.
In every case, the cities paid their former officials a severance — usually six months to a year of salary plus health insurance, as is routinely stipulated in top city worker contracts. In many cases, cities also paid extra, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, to settle lawsuits or threats of suits over claims related to some form of toxic work conditions or on-the-job harassment.
Some cities publicly disclosed terms of the settlement deals. Others did not.
And, always, the settlements were negotiated by lawyers using other people’s money — city taxpayers.
None of this is new. Charter city governments in California are built for conflict, with elected officials holding part-time, temporary status even as they oversee full-time, long-term city managers. As a result, high-profile exits of city leaders have always been part of the municipal landscape, in Orange County and throughout the state.
But veteran city officials say the recent rate of turnover at city halls in Orange County — where more than a third of the county’s municipalities have fired or otherwise negotiated buyouts with top leaders in the past five years — has been unusual in both volume and cost.
One reason, according to many, is politics.
Demographic shifts have turned Orange County’s politics from deep red to purple, with the county and many cities narrowly divided between Republicans and Democrats and people who choose neither party. At the same time, the left-right polarization that’s weighing down national and state politics has seeped into municipal governments, with locals running for office on a promise of bringing change to their City Hall, while officials in that city are being paid to maintain longer-term policies and projects.
The result, according to experts, are many city governments riven by workplace tension.
“I’ll say a new council gets elected and they want to change priorities, because they want to have their own city manager, have someone that they feel matches their particular philosophies,” said Shauna Clark, a former city manager in San Bernardino and La Habra Heights who teaches public administration at Cal State Northridge, when asked why so many city councils are blowing out their top paid staff.
Few proponents of effective government believe such conflict is good for residents.
“There are ramifications for terminating a city manager, not just politically but financially,” said Ken Pulskamp, executive director of the California City Management Foundation and a former city manager in Santa Clarita and interim city manager in Burbank.
“It creates unnecessary turmoil where they ought to be focused on how to improve the community.”
Harassment? Even for the boss?
Last November, Barbara Salvini, director of human resources for the City of Newport Beach, filed a lawsuit accusing the city of permitting a hostile work environment and age and gender discrimination against her because she felt unsupported after making what she described as a whistleblower complaint involving City Manager Grace Leung.
Though city officials denied Salvini’s claim, Leung recently reached a severance agreement in which she’ll finish out this calendar year but receive pay through all of 2026, a deal worth more than $370,000.
Again, while the details of the Newport Beach dustup are unique, complaints about harassment — in lawsuits and in day-to-day municipal work life — are increasingly common.
About 3 in 4 city workers and elected officials around the country said they had personally experienced some form of harassment because of their work, according to a 2024 survey by the National League of Cities. About 6 in 10 city workers and office holders said political harassment has become more intense since they took their job or were elected, and nearly a quarter said their families also had been harassed.
That vibe is playing out in court, and costing local taxpayers money.
Though the claims often are filed under similar terms (“discrimination” and “toxic work environment” are common) lawsuits broadly related to some form of harassment often are parting gifts, or threats, when public workers leave.
Clark, among others, notes that younger city managers have modern ideas about what does or doesn’t constitute actionable work behavior. The same comments or conditions that older workers might’ve felt frustrated by — but not litigious about — increasingly are viewed as payout-worthy.
“A lot of people think ‘hostile work environment’ just means people are argumentative here, (and) there’s bullying (and) there’s this and that. And I think the meaning of that in people’s minds have changed,” Clark said.
“Now people feel, you know, and rightfully so, that they have more rights and more liberty to exercise those rights,” she added.
And, because verdicts typically are more expensive than negotiated terms, harassment lawsuits become negotiation tools for city workers being forced out of a city job.
“Cities often don’t go to court,” Clark said. “They just settle and pay another settlement.”
Private payouts, public money
On Oct. 27, 2023, the city of Tustin announced that it had reached a severance agreement with City Manager Matt West, who had been on that job since 2019.
Why was West leaving before the end of his contract? How much would he be paid as part of the settlement? For how long?
The city didn’t say. In its official statement Tustin officials offered no details about West’s severance, saying only that the city appreciated West’s four years of work and that the agreement — involving public officials and public money — was “mutually acceptable.”
At least one former Tustin resident doesn’t feel that was adequate.
“Acceptable to who? I lived in Tustin then, so presumably I helped pay that guy’s salary — and his severance. And I didn’t agree to anything,” said Stan Madden, an Irvine retiree who lived in Tustin until last year.
“That’s pretty brazen.”
It’s also common. Not telling the public about public spending is a norm in settlement agreements. Worker employment contracts often include language that voids the deal if a former worker, or a representative of the city, says anything negative about either party when they part ways. A contract in Huntington Beach, for example, says communicating a city manager’s termination can be made only through a joint statement, which can’t “contain any text or statement that is disparaging to either party.”
That provision seemed to have played out in November 2023. In a joint statement, Huntington Beach announced that its City Manager Al Zelinka was retiring from public service one day after the City Council met behind closed doors to discuss his position.
Zelinka moved on to a private sector job shortly after. While no severance package was announced at his departure, the State Controller’s Office later reported he received $506,000 for the just over 10 months he worked in 2023, far beyond his annual base salary of $320,000. More than $180,000 of the compensation is listed as “other pay,” according to the state database.
Some city officials say silence about such deals save taxpayers money.
Others suggest they’re often about saving face for people with political ambitions.
“Most of the time the council will say, ‘We don’t like these things about you, but we’ll give you a severance package if you agree not to talk about these things you know about us,’” said former city manager Clark.
“It’s kind of a quid pro quo,” she added. “I’ve seen it many times.”
If such old-school secrecy and deal making reflects a lack of political stability, if not corruption, it might also become a barrier to getting talent at City Hall.
Clark, who teaches many current and future civil servants, said she knows assistant city managers who don’t want to move up to the top job because it’s so precarious and political.
“I think people expect civility. And it looks civil until you get into it, and it’s not that civil,” she said.
“A lot of city managers, they always say that you’re not really a city manager till you’ve been fired at least once.”
Clark said after the public pay database Transparent California launched, more than a decade ago, more people become aware that city managers were getting big checks on their way out. But over time, she added, that information has left taxpayers somewhat numb.
“It’s tolerated more because it’s become so common,” Clark said.
“I think it’s more that the public tolerates it more than they should.”