South County Report: Meet the New Boss

Chula Vista City Hall soon will have a new boss. 

Last month, the City Council voted unanimously to promote current Assistant City Manager Tiffany Allen to the city’s top bureaucratic job following current City Manager Maria Kachadoorian’s announcement earlier this year that she would retire in October. 

Allen, who has worked a long and varied career in Chula Vista government since starting as a City Hall counter clerk issuing engineering permits in 2001, will take the reins on Oct. 3. 

She will oversee 1,300 city workers and a city budget of roughly $600 million. She will earn a salary of close to $350,000 per year. Chula Vista, with a population of close to 280,000 residents, is the second largest city in San Diego County. 

Councilmembers’ decision to hire Allen amounted to a vote of confidence in the city’s current direction. Allen, 47, has been a key lieutenant to Kachadoorian during a period of robust residential construction in Chula Vista. She also helped to shepherd the city’s bayfront redevelopment plan, including the recently opened Gaylord Pacific Resort and Convention Center. 

Earlier this year, the city passed a balanced budget without cutting programs or eliminating staff, a stark contrast to the budget woes of northern neighbor San Diego. 

By her own admission, Allen is the ultimate City Hall insider. Chula Vista has been her only employer since college. And she said she has no intention of shaking things up or altering the city’s current trajectory. 

“Growth, with respect,” she said when asked to describe her vision for the city. She said her goal for Chula Vista is not a profound transformation or some grand new vision. Rather, she said, she wants the city to become the best version of what it already is. 

“I really am very much a known commodity in this city,” she said in a recent wide-ranging interview with Voice of San Diego. “I’ve been in their [city employees’] shoes. I know the challenges they’re facing.” 

Born in Oklahoma and raised in San Diego, Washington, D.C. and the Pacific Northwest, Allen earned a political science degree at the University of Oregon and moved to Chula Vista to start her career in public service behind the counter of the city’s engineering department. 

The earliest line on her resume reads: “Issued administrative engineering permits.” 

“I’m like the nerdiest of the bureaucrats,” she said. “I just want to sit in my office and do spreadsheets and solve problems and not talk about myself,” 

Throughout her interview, Allen periodically voiced embarrassment at the long series of technocratic jobs she has worked. “This is so boring,” she said at one point. 

Still, she did not sound bored as she tallied up the two-decades’ worth of experience she has accumulated that, in separate interviews, City Councilmembers cited as the reason they voted wholeheartedly to promote her to the city’s top job without interviewing a single other candidate. 

Allen became especially animated describing any job that involved working with other people, figuring out how things work and devising new ways to promote or protect the city’s interests. 

What was her most formative work experience? Selling shoes at a department store, she said, which she did to help put herself through college. “Everybody should have to work in either food service or retail,” she said. 

Why did she like staffing the engineering counter so much? “I just found it really interesting,” she said. “I was scanning plans in the engineering department and helping them set up their database, and I kind of went, ‘What’s this report? What’s a geotech report? What’s this map?’…I started learning more about local government.” 

Why did she want to move up to analyzing budgets? “I got to sit down with departments and really talk to them about, ‘What are the services you provide? How do you provide them? How could we do it better? What are the resources you need?’…I really got to engage.” 

True to her stated don’t-rock-the-boat goal, Allen did not announce any big new plans for city government. Asked what residents could expect with her in charge, she named continued progress redeveloping the bayfront and completion of close to 13,000 housing units in several developments under way in the Otay Ranch area. 

One new initiative she mentioned already enjoys broad support. The city recently hired a new economic development director, who is overseeing a comprehensive plan to attract more high-paying jobs to Chula Vista. 

One of residents’ number one complaints, Allen said, is the long commutes they must endure to reach job centers north of the city. A major goal for city leaders is persuading technology and other advanced companies to open offices in Chula Vista employing city residents. 

Allen herself lives in Chula Vista with her husband and elementary-school-age son in one of the planned communities on the city’s east side. Her commute to City Hall is not long. But she said living in the city gives her a clear vision of what she wants for her neighbors. 

“You’re born here, you go to school here, I want you to have a university here, and I want you to be able to have the job of your dreams here,” she said. “And I want you to have something cool to do on the weekends.” 

In city government, it falls to elected leaders to vote on policies affecting those various stages of life. Bureaucrats turn those votes into concrete action. 

Good city managers give Councilmembers good advice as they weigh policy options and provide supportive, steady leadership to city employees tasked with paving roads, keeping libraries open, policing city streets and putting out fires. 

Ultimately, residents will see the fruits of Allen’s work, for good or ill, in their day-to-day lives. 

Allen said she understands her neighbors ultimately will hold her accountable as she leads the city. 

“I am literally part of building the community that I live in,” she said. “And I think that when you work for the community that you live in, or you live in the community you work for, I think you do approach it from a very personal place of how this is going to impact the residents…I have to look at my neighbors in the eye and they are not shy to ask me about, ‘Wait, what’s going on? What are you guys doing?’” 

“I take this role very seriously,” she said. “I am in this role out of love for my community and wanting to serve my community…I’m passionate about it and I am committed to it. I don’t take it lightly.” 

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