As Bakersfield chills, its new city manager diagrams a recovery
One of California’s most distinct, up-trending cities, teeming with challenge and personality, beckoned. His predecessor, also an outsider, had built a life and a legacy here. Perhaps he would, too.
Get those traffic cones out of the way, Bakersfield. Make way.
And with that, Christian Clegg embarked on what, he truly seems to have imagined, would be the defining geographic change of his life.
No sooner had he identified the shortest route to the executive washroom, however, the world stopped. This was not the nuclear holocaust his parents must have drilled for in their grade-school classrooms, thank goodness, but it had a vaguely similar sense of fractured reality.
This sci-fi plot, however, had actually come to pass. COVID-19 had crashed the stage of his professional debut and halted the U.S. economy along with it.
Fortunately, Clegg, just 41 and in the midst of life’s dad phase, doesn’t seem to have the same overwrought sense of the dramatic that I do. He is pragmatic and measured, which makes him the perfect guy for the job he was hired four months ago to perform: city manager of California’s ninth-largest city.
Clegg was probably getting sick of answering questions, anyway, about the man he replaces, Alan Tandy, who did a generally remarkable job over the course of his 27 years, when the City Council wasn’t trying to fire him for stubbornness. Ah, but if only Tandy were still the measuring stick. Now the gauge by which government types are
judged, rookie city managers included, is Dustin Hoffman and the assorted other contagion-fighting everymen of cinematic history. Their primary supporting cast, at least, anyway.
Pandemics aside, Clegg almost couldn’t have arrived in Bakersfield at a better time. Voters had approved Measure N a year before, a rare act of popular largesse that would fund new projects, revitalize the Police Department and, though some grumbled when they realized exactly what they’d OK’d, take a bite out of the city’s staggering pension obligations.
The city was promoting a new image campaign that urged visitors and residents alike to appreciate “the sound of something better,” and the effort had piqued at least as much enthusiasm as sarcasm. The city’s once derelict downtown was blossoming, and so were other sections of the city. We weren’t Santa Monica, but neither were we Blythe.
Then this.
Instead of telling service club members over broiled chicken and broccoli about road projects and park enhancements, Clegg is attending public health department news conferences that regularly begin with sobering scorecards.
Clegg is still banking on the assumption that the Bakersfield economy will emerge, if not completely intact, then largely equipped to return to its recent vitality. “We’ll be well-positioned to hit the ground running,” Clegg told me Friday evening in an interview via Zoom.
Revenue from Measure N, the 1-cent sales tax increase narrowly approved by voters in November 2018, has not been entirely committed, Clegg said, so “we’ll have some ability to still recover as a city from the hits of COVID and still be able to have priorities around public safety and priorities around economic development.
“We will not be able to do as much as we planned, we will not be able to do as much as we hoped … but (the additional tax revenue) allows us to be strategic, so we could put together an economic recovery plan for our small businesses and help them get back on their feet.”
The coronavirus pandemic, in fact, may just hasten a reckoning that will ultimately serve Bakersfield well, Clegg said.
“What better time is there to have somebody come in and take a look at the market and say, you know, here are some of the realities moving forward,” Clegg said. “We’re actually positioned at a uniquely interesting moment to create ... a plan that can serve us for three years and five years, not just in the next six to 12 months in recovery mode.”
Clegg, a native of Orem, Utah, currently has plenty of time to think about these things. His wife of 18 years and their three children — boys, 12 and 9, and a girl, 5 — are still in Stockton, where Clegg was most recently the deputy city manager. The plan was to have them finish the school year there, but statewide school closures have rendered that idea unimportant. The kids can just as easily upload homework from a kitchen table in Bakersfield as from their more familiar one in Stockton. In the meantime, the young Cleggs have already dipped their toes in the local water, having hiked the Wind Wolves Preserve and trails near Lake Isabella; Dad is trying to inspire outdooriness in his bookish three.
Clegg isn’t spending a lot of time, as he waits for a more permanent family reunion, in the company of Netflix. During this odd limbo, he’s all about the job, both the minutiae of regional economics and the broader value of positive office culture.
“Part of my first 30 days was going to be getting to know the organization,” he said. “And this was a real quick way to learn a lot about this organization, both in how it operates but also the character of the team and the community. And I’ve been very pleased with the character of the team.”
It is with that team’s help that Clegg must negotiate this difficult year and beyond.
The local economy was already facing dire prospects in its oil sector. OPEC’s internal rivalries and conflicting strategies, combined with California’s contradiction-marred commitment to climate change mitigation, had the price of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, gasping at the break-even point; now, with overall consumer demand in the toilet, thanks to the government’s stay-at-home guidelines, it’s worse still.
Forward-thinking civic leaders must look beyond vulnerable regional commodities like oil, and that’s what Clegg is trying to do.
The city will soon undertake a real estate market analysis and the development of a strategic plan to decide how to best use properties in both the public and private sectors, he said.
Where are “the target clusters that the city can continue to build out?” he said. “What are our current assets and who are our competitors? What is our competitive edge to build out those market industries that we are well positioned for, so that we can target our efforts?”
Those industries haven’t been determined, he said.
Though information technology and related fields are on every lip, he confessed, that may not be the way for Bakersfield to go. It’s certainly not the only way.
“We do have land here to develop, and it’s affordable,” Clegg said. “That’s a big asset. But do we have the workforce with the skills and the training and the broadband to do some of that technical stuff? (Consultants) may come back and say, you know, everybody needs to do a little bit of that, but you and Bakersfield, maybe you should focus on this other industry because we don’t have a competitive advantage compared to other communities” in a given field.
That said, Bakersfield’s relationship with Bitwise Industries, the Fresno-based software development/programming school/ entrepreneurial incubator/workspace sharing enterprise coming to the city later this year, is looking more promising — and essential — by the day, Clegg said.
“We’re excited that Bitwise is moving forward with their project here in town,” Clegg said. “They’ve done an interesting thing. ... Not only are they trying to work on this project in Fresno, and in Stockton, but they’ve reached out to the state and they’re becoming a state resource for taking people who have lost their jobs because of COVID and saying, ‘Can we train you and bring you into a higher earning wage category and a new industry?’”
And so to have them as partners in Bakersfield is important.
“We can leverage Bitwise and leverage the fact that the city is going to have some money to spend when most cities are going to be cutting.”
The streets are half-empty, the Sierra Nevada are visible again to the east, and Netflix is occupying idle minds across America, but Clegg is still working. He is still driving to his mahogany-paneled office at mostly deserted City Hall and still envisioning how his newly adopted city might emerge from this disaster.
Every responsible city manager in the country, of any tenure, must surely be doing the same sort of thing, but Clegg likes to think he has raw tools to make Bakersfield stand out.
Sometimes it takes a new guy to see it. And at such a time as this, we don’t dare try to dissuade him.