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By Mike Allen
April 25, 2025 (Santee) -- Santee’s City Council hired Gary Halbert, a former city manager for Chula Vista, as its interim city manager on the same day, April 23, that the prior city manager, Marlene Best, officially ended her nine-year tenure in a mutually agreed separation.
Neither the City Council nor Best provided any comment about Best’s sudden departure, which occurred following a closed session on April 18, Good Friday. Best, 64, appeared not to have any apparent conflicts with any particular members of the five-member council, and she sounded upbeat at several previous meetings, prompting a lot of speculation over what happened.
“I didn’t have any problems with her,” said Councilman Ronn Hall. “She just decided to move on….Really, this just is what it is.”
Both Hall and Mayor John Minto said they were prevented from saying anything about the separation, which will cost the city six months of Best’s salary as per her agreement. Best earned $269,000 annually.
Halbert will earn a monthly compensation of $21,863, a bit less than Best, which comes to $126.14 an hour a salary that was mandated through his membership in the CalPERS pension system. His contract stipulates that he cannot work more than 960 total hours, which is 24 weeks or about six months if he works 40-hour weeks.
Minto said the city will hire an executive search firm to find a permanent city manager, which shouldn’t take more than four months to get a replacement.
“We’ve done this before,” he said.
Indeed, before it hired Best, Santee terminated its previous city manager, Keith Till, in 2014, and didn’t fill that job until 2016.
Halbert has some 30 years in government, mainly with the city of San Diego where he began as a traffic engineer in 1990. In 2006, Santee hired him as a deputy city manager, a post he held for two years. From there he went to Chula Vista, the second largest city in San Diego County, where he was named to the city’s top job in 2014 until he retired in 2020.
Santee, with a population of about 60,000, has a budget of about $64 million and 156 full-time employees.
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