Perrault retires as Grover Beach city manager

Bob Perrault’s office at Grover Beach City Hall is littered with the detritus of a decade of city management.

Framed pictures of Perrault and other city workers line the walls — somewhere among them is a picture of Perrault riding his horse in the annual Christmas parade, he notes — along with various certificates and maps of the city.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall are filled to bursting with colored binders, packets of papers and books. Old staff reports, leftovers from city council meetings past, line his desk. His “broom closet” as he jokingly calls the office, is the most visible evidence of Perrault’s near decade as city manager of Grover Beach, capping a total of 41 years in various city management positions throughout the state.

It’s a career he ends this week.

“Forty years sneaks up on you,” he said. “One minute you’re 20 years in, in the middle of it all, and you don’t think it’s going to end. Then you get here.”

Perrault will retire on March 1, although he is taking two weeks of paid vacation beforehand, so Tuesday was his last day in the office.

“It’s been quiet,” he said Monday — a city holiday, but Perrault was in the office anyway. “But it’s good. Today has given me a chance to take care of a couple more things before the interim city manager takes over, probably tomorrow.”

Former Police Chief Jim Copsey will act as interim city manager until a replacement is found, which should take about two months, Perrault said.

In the meantime, it’s not easy to leave a profession that has taken up the majority of your life, Perrault said.

“The first couple of months I think I’m just going to decompress,” he said. “It’s almost like a 24-7 type of job. You are on call all the time, and especially when you live in town, you are always looking at things from a different perspective.”

Perrault came to Grover Beach from the Northern California city of Colfax in June 2006. At the time, Grover Beach was working on putting a half-cent sales tax increase on the ballot to augment the city general fund, which was operating at a deficit.

The tax adjustment was approved by voters that November, and brought in $480,000 in revenue in its first year.

“I had the opportunity right off the bat to do that, which was exciting,” Perrault said. “It gave me a chance to get to know the city.”

From there, Perrault jumped into another of what he called his major accomplishments: Developing the city’s first written economic development strategy that helped guide the city’s growth (this was formally adopted and implemented in 2008).

Around the same time, the recession hit, forcing the city to scale back services while still trying to encourage economic growth.

“That was very tough,” he said. “The recession is one of the difficult times. But I think we came through it very well. We were fortunate in that we were able to preserve or maintain our reserves.”

Perrault said the city weathered the economic downturn by furloughing employees, offering incentives to those nearing retirement, cutting building permit fees in half for a six-month period and implementing a “shop local” campaign.

The city’s biggest achievement during Perrault’s tenure, however, came in November 2014 when voters approved Measure K-14 — which authorized the sale of up to $48 million in general obligation bonds to be used to pay for the city’s long-awaited street-repair program.

“Probably in my mind, that was the single biggest major economic development project because as streets are repaired, individual property values will go up and I think the quality of life overall will improve,” he said. “So it was just huge. The rehabilitation of the streets just would not have been possible without the passage of K-14.”

Over the next few years, Perrault said he expects to see the city continue to grow as it completes several long-standing projects like the Grover Beach Lodge and Conference Center and expanding the city’s broadband network.

“You’ll see that more businesses will begin locating to town as a result,” he said. “There will be more stability with city revenues, and we’ll be able to increase our services and do some of the things that we haven’t been able to do because of constraints during the last few years. I think the city is basically on the cusp of really moving the town forward and more or less coming into its own.”

But the city will have to do that without Perrault at its helm.

After a horseback riding accident in June last year, Perrault said he realized it was time to retire to spend time with his family and travel while he was still fit enough to do so. Though he is leaving voluntarily, Perrault said there are many aspects of the job that he will miss, from friends on the city staff to the hectic work pace.

“The fact that you got to deal on any given day with a variety of issues — it may be a police issue, a fire-related issue, public works, something working, something not working, personnel, planning — you dealt with it every day and just sort of went from one issue to another,” he said.

“It’s that level of activity, and diversity that I’ll probably miss the most.”

This story was originally published February 19, 2016 at 6:44 PM with the headline "Perrault retires as Grover Beach city manager."