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City manager Penny Ballem is gone; internal staff memo here

September 15th, 2015 · 46 Comments

This went out to staff in the same few minutes as the news release.

Staff team,

Today City Council has voted to initiate an important senior leadership transition for the City of Vancouver, and I want you to have the full details right away.

Dr. Penny Ballem will be concluding her service as Vancouver City Manager after nearly seven years of exceptional service, and a comprehensive global search process will soon be underway to select a new leader to fulfill that role.

Dr. Ballem has driven transformative change across the organization in her time at City Hall, and she has demonstrated outstanding commitment to the City of Vancouver and all of its residents. She was instrumental in the remarkable turnaround of the finances of the Olympic Village and a successful winter Olympics, delivered innovative policy leadership on a wide array of City priorities, and successfully managed a billion-dollar organization that routinely ranks as one of the best places to work in Canada.

As we look toward making continued progress on Vancouver’s most significant priorities though, Council has decided that our city’s toughest challenges will benefit from a new approach and a fresh perspective.

An international search process will soon commence to select a new City Manager. In the interim, Sadhu Johnston will serve as Acting City Manager. In his six years as Deputy City Manager, Sadhu has been instrumental to Vancouver’s Greenest City progress and our innovative economy, building on his wealth of prior senior administrative experience in Chicago, where he also served as Chief Environmental Officer.

We have an incredibly experienced and dynamic staff team at the City of Vancouver. I cannot thank you enough for the remarkable ways that this team serves our city every day, and I am very confident about how we can expand Vancouver’s success as one of the greenest, most innovative, and most inclusive cities in the world.

On behalf of my colleagues on City Council and everyone at City Hall, I want to thank Dr. Ballem for her extraordinary service to Vancouver and the lasting contributions she has made to the future of this city.

Thank you and see you soon,

Gregor Robertson
Mayor, City of Vancouver

 

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