Transitional management

Mark Orme currently has two offices on the third floor of City Hall, each with his name attached to the wall next to the door. On June 3, the City Council voted unanimously to appoint Assistant City Manager Orme to temporarily replace outgoing City Manager Brian Nakamura, who announced on May 26 that he was taking the city manager job in Rancho Cordova after less than two years in Chico.

Nakamura was hired out of the Riverside County city of Hemet, where he’d served as city manager for three years. Orme served as Nakamura’s assistant city manager there. When Nakamura came to Chico in September 2012, he said the finances were a mess, promptly made drastic cuts, and along the way several longtime city employees left their posts with no public explanation, which raised questions as well as suspicions.

In his letter informing the council of his decision to move on, Nakamura wrote, “My tenure here in Chico has been the most challenging, difficult and rewarding in my career to date and I wish to formally thank the City Council for its full support, personally and professionally.”

Nakamura has said he was scheduled to remain in Chico until June 30 to help with Orme’s transition.

Orme’s résumé tells a much different story than Nakamura’s, which is filled with many short stints in cities across this state and Oregon. Orme, rather, spent 14 years in Hemet, where he served in a number of government positions.

“They were management assistant positions that progressively grew year after year after year until I became interim city manager after Brian left,” he said during a recent interview.

He was also, according to the Press-Enterprise newspaper, the city’s chief labor negotiator and before that, worked for five years as a congressional aide to Sonny Bono, the singer turned Republican congressman who died in a 1998 skiing accident.

Orme was born in Palm Springs and raised in the high desert town of Yucca Valley, which he describes as a “great place to grow up. We had heat there just like we are having right now in Chico. I’m very familiar with this hot weather, and I love it.”

The assistant city manager position opened up in Chico with the sudden and mysterious retirement of John Rucker in January 2013. Orme had first come to town at the invitation of Nakamura on the Thanksgiving weekend of 2012, three months after Nakamura was hired and a little more than a month before Rucker left.

“Brian wanted to build a team of professionals that could really contribute to fixing whatever the issues may have been at the time,” Orme said. “I don’t think he knew the depths of the situation.”

He said it was a difficult decision to leave Hemet for Chico.

“I’m one of those types who is very committed to the organization I am with and so it was a big decision for me,” he said. “Particularly in the fact that Chico was nine hours away from everything I knew and everything I called home and so it had to be the right thing. After much prayer and consideration, it turns out this was meant to be.”

Orme and his wife have two children, a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son.

“They are the centers of my heart and I think that is the core reason why I came here—for them,” he said. “We enjoy hiking and this was just absolutely perfect—a vibrant downtown where you’ve got everything you could ever want. A university, a hospital, all those specialties that I think any young family would love to have.”

He said he is “absolutely” going to apply for the city manager position but isn’t exactly sure of the process.

“The City Council is going to further evaluate how they are going to move forward at the June 17 meeting,” he said, “and there is one of two ways of going: They can make a determination that they put me in as permanent or they can go out for recruitment.”

He said he will stay on as assistant city manager if he doesn’t get the top job.

City Councilman Randall Stone, who was elected after Nakamura was hired, gave a mixed review of Nakamura’s performance and said that he respects Orme, but the city should still recruit for the best candidate.

“Nakamura’s tenure with Chico was as tumultuous as the tasks we had before us as a community,” Stone wrote in an email. “The city was in severe fiscally challenging times and that mandated considerable and swift action to rectify.”

As for filling the city manager’s seat, Stone offered this: “We clearly need a manager for a different purpose than two years ago, so we will likely have a different kind of manager than Brian. I know that Mark Orme is a strong candidate. But we’ll have to see who applies for the job and determine exactly how best to move forward.”