Since being named Redondo Beach City Manager, Joe Hoefgen has often said that filling vacancies within the city’s roster of department heads has been one of his “top priorities.”
After months-long searches, Hoefgen has named Diane Strickfaden is the city’s as Human Resources Director and Stephen Proud as Waterfront and Economic Development Director. Hoefgen says that he feels each will “play a significant role as integral members of our management team.”
Strickfaden, who beat out 53 other applicants for her job, is a known commodity in South Bay government circles, an 18-year veteran of the public sector who spent the last two years as a Swiss Army knife in Hermosa Beach.
“I oversaw HR, parks and recreation, public works, and I was [Hermosa Beach City Manager] Tom Bakaly’s assistant, so yeah, I had a lot of hats,” she said.
Now she has the opportunity to settle into a function that she considers her “specialty area.”
“Redondo is a bigger city, so it’s a bigger job, but it’s a promotion for me, because Redondo is so much larger [than Hermosa Beach],” she said. The City of Redondo Beach has 435 full-time employees, as well as 400 part-time employees, well beyond Hermosa’s 125 full-time workers.
Her job, she says, is to strengthen and streamline communications between labor and management. Relations between city executives and employees have been under repair since the firing of former City Manager Bill Workman, who was terminated without cause in a 4-0 vote by Redondo’s City Council in early 2014.
“HR functions city-wide have been neglected,” Strickfaden said. “There’s not been a lot of training for city employees, there hasn’t been a clear succession planning program — things you would have in place to help employees improve to provide service that the community benefits from.”
Coming to Redondo is a homecoming of sorts for Strickfaden, though she hasn’t drifted too far from the South Bay on her journey. Born in South Bay Hospital, her career has taken her through the cities of Lawndale and Lynnwood, and includes a quick sojourn into private consulting for public agencies.
But with a penchant for surfing, and two kids enrolled in South Bay schools, Strickfaden’s invested in the community. “I love the Beach Cities,” she said, stopping short of sounding “like a quote on a council wall.”
Since he began the job on June 1, Stephen Proud’s been immersing himself in Redondo Beach’s culture — it’s just part of the job, particularly when one has a firmly-set family vacation scheduled weeks after his start date, as Proud does.
“It’s part of drinking out of the firehose,” Proud said. “You’ve got to go to about a hundred different meetings.”
Proud comes to Redondo Beach from San Francisco, where he’s spent his career working along waterfront projects for both the City of San Francisco and private development firm Lennar Urban. His hiring ended a two-month process that began when previous director Pete Carmichael took a position in the City of Irvine.
“I’m hoping that my previous blend of public sector, private sector, and then back to public sector work helps me understand diverse ranges of interest,” Proud said. “Having been on the private side is going to be beneficial as we get into conversations with potential partners such as CenterCal, learning how we as a city can work with them and try to craft solutions to issues.”
Proud points to two major revitalization projects when discussing his past work: San Francisco Bay’s Treasure Island, and the $1 billion redevelopment of Candlestick Point. The latter is what he considers most like Redondo’s waterfront development. “The geography may be different but people care about similar issues — there, we had lots of community outreach meetings and workshops, getting their input to understand their concerns and craft a program to satisfy their needs. It takes time, and it’s difficult to make everybody happy, but we managed to find a project that people thought would work.”
The timing was right to move on, Proud said — Candlestick Point was transitioning out of his domain, and he was looking for new projects to sink his teeth into. That a community the size of Redondo Beach is working on “significant projects” struck him as a tremendous opportunity.
“The project, in and of itself, is an iconic piece of the landscape and an iconic component of the built environment in L.A.,” Proud said. “It’s about how we, as a city are going to take this beloved place and find a way to bring it back to the glory that it had in its former life,” Proud continued.
“These kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, to work with projects that are iconic components of cities, don’t come around too often.”
