On July 18th, the Town of Sunnyvale announced that our Town Manager Jeff Jones had resigned and retired from his position as Town Manager. Just a couple months ago, our Assistant Town Manager left for a bigger role in a different town. This means our town has had to lean on Police Chief Bill Vegas as Interim Town Manager, and town staff have had to move forward with implementing our ambitious capital improvement plan and engage with the Town Council directly.
There may be some hard feelings. At the Town Council meeting on August 5th (video link will be added when it’s available), it came out that the Town Council wasn’t getting a clear picture from Jeff about a lot of the town’s finances and projects. There was a lot to cover in the budget at tonight’s meeting and I’m going to cover this more in depth later in the week, but it was clear that some of the projects our town cares about hadn’t been properly funded or started yet, and that there are some odd decisions in how Jeff presented the Town’s accounts to the Council.
For example: immediately after the May election, our Town Council directed the town to move forward with improving the sports fields at Jobson Park, a field by the Sunnyvale Middle School, and the fields at Vineyard Park. At the June 9th Town Council meeting, Jeff Jones told the council that “the Vineyard Park field should still be in by the Fall, or maybe by the end of the Summer” (1:49:50 timestamp). Today, it turns out that the Vineyard Park fields haven’t even been started yet–and they will take 18 months to finish from their start date. Parents of kids in Sunnyvale sports are already flummoxed by the delays we’ve had to date, and it puts the Town Council in a tough spot when the now need to explain to residents that their fields are still not going to be ready until 2027.
Another example: our town budget has been including rosy assumptions about sales tax growth–probably too rosy, like 5% growth per year. To account for that, we’ve had a “contingency fund” set aside of money we don’t spend just in case sales taxes don’t reach our high target for the year. This goes against good practices of budgeting for a more conservative sales tax growth rate–like 2%–and then not needing to set aside a pool of cash in a contingency fund. Also on the budget topic: Jeff had been presenting the Town Manager expense account as separate from the Assistant Town Manager (who was lumped in with the Finance Department expense, which is a whole different department). I’m left wondering if this was to make the Town Manager item look smaller on the budget, or what purpose does it serve to commingle accounts like this?
I’ve reached out to Jeff Jones on LinkedIn (where he remains somewhat active) over a week ago asking to connect so I could get his side of the story, but he has not responded. However, the decision to leave Sunnyvale may have been mutual: Jeff did decide to share a podcast today called “The Problem with City Hall: Why Great Leaders Quit.”
Thank you for this information.