Kiff will assist with COVID-19 recovery
Correction: Dave Kiff will be temporarily helping the city of Healdsburg on a part time basis with COVID-19 recovery. He is not indefinitely filling the assistant city manager role. The assistant city manager role will remain vacant for the time being.
At the Healdsburg City Council meeting on April 6, it was announced that Healdsburg resident Dave Kiff will be temporarily helping the city on a part-time basis with COVID-19 recovery. While he is not filling in the assistant city manager role, he is helping with a few duties that an assistant city manager would take on, such as crisis recovery.
The city’s former assistant city manager, Joe Irvin, recently accepted a city manager position with the city of South Lake Tahoe.
“We want to congratulate him for that opportunity moving on, however, we do need to fill that resource,” City Manager David Mickaelian said of Irvin’s transition. “In the short term, the city is contracting with Dave Kiff, he is a local resident and was actually born and raised in the area.
You probably know his parents through the farmers market.”
Kiff is a retired city manager from the city of Newport Beach. In 2019, Kiff served as an interim city manager for the city of Huntington Beach.
“He is an incredible resource,” Mickaelian said during the meeting.
As the part time interim assistant city manager, Kiff will help out with a number of things, including the city’s emergency operations center (EOC).
“Some of the things he is working with the city on include helping with the EOC, but also as we get back into recovery mode, he’ll be working with the sustainability and recovery plan with the chamber and maybe some community groups,” Mickaelian said.
Mickaelian added they have already started that recovery plan process and have met with the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce over the past several weeks with Kiff.
“Two of his charges are to help operate the EOC, but also to work on recovery and look at this legislation coming out of the state and coming out of the feds and how we are able to tap into some of those monies. The real challenge is the CARE Act only allows the cities to get reimbursed for actual expenses,” Mickaelian said during a virtual check-in meeting with the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce on April 10. “He’s already jumped in and he has been a great asset so far.”
