Who should be Glendale’s next City Manager?
(2nd post attempt, hopefully don’t get censored this time)
Who do you think would be the best candidate for our next city manager?
Do you think the next city manager should come from within the city ranks or should a newcomer from another city be appointed by City Council?
The current city manager, Roubik Golanian, has been CM for the past 5 years.
Mr. Golanian is known for lacking people management skills and creating a toxic work environment that has forced out talented department heads.
Mr. Golanian has also created a culture of fear in which not all Glendalian’s are welcome. He summarily fired a highly qualified senior gay employee for no apparent reason.
Other gay staff in the city government have chosen to stay in the closet fearing that coming out would negatively impact their careers.
It’s wonderful the first openly gay council member has been elected, but there’s a lot of institutional change that is needed to transform the city government’s workplace culture —and that’s going to take a lot of hard conversations and difficult decisions.
If you’ve watched the recent city council meetings Mr. Golanian’s humanity towards his own staff has really been lacking.
For example 2 or 3 meetings ago there was the employee who gave a report to council who apparently had come running from another commitment and was seriously out of breath. And it didn’t get better, she was really struggling —looked like she might have a stroke. And it went on and on and Mr. Golanian should have stopped the report right away to let her have a few minutes to catch her breath but he didn’t.
Another recent city council meeting incident was when all the kids came to speak up in support of their local library branch to keep it from being closed from budget cuts.
District staff had obviously been directed by the City Manager’s office to provide plans on making a 5% cut across the board. So the library staff clearly complied. But after the very endearing presentations by the kids and their parents, outgoing Councilmember Ara Najarian essentially retorted:
Why are you complaining to us, it’s the library department head who proposed the cuts. Complain to her!
(And he did it again last week) This very public berating and blaming of the library department leader was no doubt an awful experience, but again, Mr. Golanian did not speak up to defend his own employee. Instead he stayed silent.
Glendale deserves so much better.