Start the Presses: Why Napa County city manager pay sparks anger - and what residents are really upset about

Dan Evans

Dan Evans

Not long ago, the idea was straightforward: there was a clear trade-off, a cost-benefit analysis to be done, when considering work in the public sector. You might not get paid as much, the theory went, but there was significantly more job security, stronger union protections, and better benefits.

One half of this equation is true: there are certainly more job protections, on the whole, for government workers than for private-sector ones. Benefits are generally better as well - pensions, while becoming increasingly rare in the public sector, still exist in many places, while they have all but disappeared pretty much everywhere else.

However, pay for government workers has continued to rise over the years, and often outpaces salaries for similar work in the private sector. In effect, then, residents see their taxes and fees increase - to pay for these salaries - while the quality and quantity of municipal services don't seem to go up much, if at all.

That tension is especially sharp when it comes to city managers, whose compensation in Napa County ranges roughly from $300,000 to $450,000.

But context matters. First, as noted in Lauren Spates' excellent series on the subject, city managers are effectively the CEOs of municipalities with annual budgets in the tens of millions - or hundreds of millions. The chief executive of such a company in the private world would get (at least) the salary of your average city manager.

And, of course, city managers do not have the job security that lower-level municipal workers do. They answer directly to city councils, who can remove them for a multitude of reasons and often with little warning.

I mean, check out the recent dramas in our little part of the world: The city managers of St. Helena and Calistoga were both forced from their jobs in the last nine months, and let's not even get started on the issues surrounding former Napa County CEO Minh Tran. (Yes, yes, I know. Tran wasn't a city manager, but there are a lot of similarities between the jobs.)

It ain't an easy gig, to be sure. But it is well paid, with remarkably generous severance packages should a city council suddenly (or gradually) sour on the work of their chosen chief executive. (And, to be fair, many city managers quietly do difficult, competent work that residents never see until something goes wrong.)

Laura Snideman received more than a half-million dollars in severance from her last two gigs - Calistoga and Richmond – both of which she left, I think it can be charitably stated, under a cloud. And Anil Comelo, recently pressed into retirement, will get $457,287 from St. Helena.

None of the principals really want to discuss it publicly. Snideman consistently ducked our reporting - stiff-arming emails, calls, and a note sent to her home. She did indicate she would talk to Spates after the reporter followed her down to South San Francisco and buttonholed her at a meeting - but never followed through. Comelo, for his part, said he wanted to talk to me following my recent column that referenced his ousting - but then changed his mind.

So here's my attempt, as a non-governmental employee, to give my understanding of both sides of this issue. Most government workers are paid fairly, and often fairly well, for the work they do. They also (usually) have good-to-amazing benefits and (often) bulletproof job security.

When you're in that world, though, it's hard to understand what it looks like from outside the fishbowl. I have a somewhat unusual perspective, though, having both private and public-sector jobs on my resume. The vast majority has been as a journalist, but I also have been both a city employee - working as a senior investigator for the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission - and a state employee, as a journalism professor at Florida International University which, despite its name, is one of the largest public universities in the country.

The watchwords here are "paid fairly." The salaries and wages of many people in the private sector has not increased much in the past few decades, and often hasn't even kept pace with inflation. That feeling of inequity is a pervasive and grating one.

As a result, some of this is envy. But much of it is something more legitimate: a demand for fairness.

Most residents do not begrudge public employees earning good livings. What they resent is paying more while seeing little improvement, watching executives cycle in and out, and funding severance deals negotiated behind closed doors.

That is the real issue here. Not salary alone.

Trust.

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This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 7:09 AM.