Emeryville City Manager Announces He's Quitting

 Paul Buddenhagen Lasts Less Than Two Years as Emeryville City Manager

Is City Hall Dysfunction a Reason For His Departure? 

And so another Emeryville City Manager bugs out.  

Paul Buddenhagen announced to the people of Berkeley yesterday he will be leaving his Emeryville job where he’s been for less than two years, to take up the position of Berkeley City Manager.  While he will take a much larger salary than the $280,000 he receives in Emeryville, that fact was not mentioned as a contributing factor.   Mr Buddenhagen is familiar with Berkeley, having served as Berkeley’s Deputy City Manager before his Emeryville stint.

During his short stint in command at Emeryville, Mr Buddenhagen’s governing style dovetailed with the City Council majority.  One of his first acts was to close down Emeryville’s formerly popular ‘Coffee With the City Manager’ program that invited average citizens to come to City Hall to freely ask questions and solicit ideas.  Coffee With the City Manager has been a once a month scheduled event since 2015 (with a break during Covid), started by then Manager Sabrina Landreth.  Every Emeryville City Manager up until Paul Buddenhagen continued on with the tradition. 

Paul Buddenhagen
Emeryville's newest former City Manager.
Despite a guiding philosophy matching the 
City Council majority, he departs in September.

 

The curtailing of citizen engagement has not happened in a vacuum.  The City Council majority, led by the two termer John Bauters, has largely forgone accountably, commanding a government famously unresponsive to its constituents.  Mr Bauters and now Mayor Courtney Welch have tightly controlled citizen participation, disallowing constituents or the local press access.  Unlike previous Council members, they are not available - not by phone, emails or any other venue.  The only way the Tattler has been able to get any answers to questions at all from Mr Bauters has been as a result of rushing him with our camera as he is caught in public.  Mr Buddenhagen has also governed with a ‘no public access’ policy, probably taking his cues from Mr Bauters.  Notably, two Council members do make themselves available to answer constituent’s questions, Vice Mayor David Mourra and Council member Kalimah Priforce.

Mr Buddenhagen has managed City Hall with an illiberal undemocratic guiding philosophy with timidity as a default.  In response to a man with a camera, he permanently closed down more than 90% of the people’s building in 2023.  More recently he closed down the popular Zoom capability for citizens to remotely speak at meetings because of some Nazis who had called in with racist comments. 

While it is compelling that the City of Berkeley is offering Mr Buddenhagen more money than Emeryville is willing to pay, we can’t be sure that's the only or even the primary reason for his leaving.  For the last two years, the Council, controlled by Mr Bauters and gladly taken up recently by Ms Welch, has been a locus of uncivil and boorish behavior.  Recriminations are routinely handed down from the dais against citizens as well as against the dissenting Council member Priforce.  The dysfunction and turmoil may have contributed to Mr Buddenhagen’s decision to depart.  

City Manager Buddenhagen will leave for Berkeley in September.  He did not answer calls for this story.