New Winters city manager enters a town in crisis
Kathleen Trepa will join the City of Winters as its new city manager. She joins after years of progress there — and several recent small-town controversies.
(Photo via LinkedIn, Graphic by Solano News Update)
The City of Winters announced on Tuesday it had chosen Kathleen S. Trepa to fill a city manager role that was vacated earlier this year.
Trepa, who previously served as the assistant city manager for Concord, was informed about the selection earlier this week, according to two people familiar with the matter. Her hiring was announced at the city council meeting on Tuesday.
“I am deeply honored to be your next city manager,” Trepa said during the council meeting held by video conference.
Trepa assumes the role from Shelly Gunby, the town’s interim city manager who filled the position following the departure of long-time manager John Donlevy earlier this year.
Donlevy was hired by the City of Winters in 2001. He was credited early in his career with leading a revitalization effort of the town’s downtown corridor that led to a boon in new businesses for the city.
But in recent years, Donlevy was swept up in several public controversies as residents accused the city manager of playing favorites to big-name developers who sought to bring franchised businesses and large housing developments to the small town of 6,600 citizens.
In 2018, Donlevy led the charge for what became Hotel Winters, a luxury lodge that he hoped would draw tourists to the town, with transient occupancy tax to fill the city’s coffers. That, Donlevy and other city officials said, was much-needed because the town was experiencing a significant volume of debt from unfunded pension liabilities that were steadily increasing over time.
The hotel missed several deadlines before it finally opened in late 2019, mere months before a global health pandemic would force the closure of lodges and other businesses throughout the state. The windfall from the business still has yet to materialize.
Donlevy also faced criticism for what appeared to be a close, yet professional, relationship with Greg Hostetler, a Central Valley developer who owns several hundred acres of land outside the city’s border but within the town’s “sphere of influence.”
When Hostetler expressed interest in developing the land north of Winters for hundreds of new homes, he worked with city officials — including Donlevy — to craft a plan that was intended to result in an application with county officials for the annexation of rural Yolo County land into Winters. The application has not yet been submitted.
Conversations between Donlevy, Hostetler and other city officials were first revealed during a February 2019 city council meeting in which two council members expressed concern over what they felt were back-door conversations intended to undermine the council’s process of scrutiny over city actions.
Additional information about those conversations were later revealed in a series of investigative reports published by the Winters Express newspaper that showed Donlevy and Hostetler had worked in concert to pitch plans to city and county officials on the development proposal and future annexation request. (Disclosure: The author of this story was also the reporter who researched and wrote the investigative stories for the town’s newspaper.)
Donlevy attempted to assuage concerns, saying development would be good for Winters, especially when it came to generating much-needed city revenue. A task force assembled by Donlevy in 2018 reported much of the town’s revenue was dependent on residents and businesses in neighboring cities, including Vacaville, Fairfield and Dixon.
But residents weren’t satiated with that explanation. They charged Donlevy and other city officials with playing favorites to developers in a way they felt would compromise the area’s small-town charm. Earlier this year, several of those residents assembled into a grassroots movement called Keep Winters Winters that lobbied for a measure that would give city officials and residents greater oversight over development plans. The initiative will appear on the November ballot.
Faced with increasing criticism, Donlevy announced his resignation in late June. The move came after he secured a new job as the city manager in Auburn, a Placer County town of 14,000 whose mayor is also the spokesperson for the state’s firefighting agency CAL FIRE.
Trepa will enter as Winters’ city manager at a time when the town is still reeling from the internal dissent over mass development coupled with an economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus health pandemic. But if she has any anxiety about starting, she didn’t show it on Tuesday.
“I am very excited,” she said.
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