City Gets New Economic Development Manager

The city has officially tapped Linda Babonis to lead a new economic development team in Rohnert Park, which is charged with drafting what City Manager Gabe Gonzalez calls the city's "first-ever economic development program."

While the City Council last August formally adopted an economic development plan, "what we lack here in Rohnert Park is an actual economic development program — where we actually work with current businesses, do outreach and retention of businesses and work with businesses looking to expand," Gonzalez said.

He said for too long, the city has depended on the economy turning around, public employee concessions, the sale of city assets and future revenue from development projects to operate.

"For too long the city balanced its books on projected revenues that never came in, from projects like the Casino and subdivisions," Gonzalez said. "None of that ever came to fruition, and meanwhile our costs were increasing."

Gonzalez said this is the first fiscal year that the city has been out of the red, largely thanks to city union givebacks.

"Looking back in my research, I found it was at least 2001-'02 that we started running on a deficit," he said. "That year it was about $6.1 million."

The economic development team is made up of Babonis, who also serves as the housing and redevelopment manager, as well as Marilyn Ponton, the planning and building manager and Rebecca Zito, a management analyst for the Department of Public Works.

The city said economic development means:

• Our citizens have jobs so that they can properly care for themselves and their families.
• Our business people and their businesses prosper.
• We eliminate vacancies in our commercial areas and keep these areas vital and attractive.
• We retain and help our existing businesses grow.
• We attract the right kind of businesses to our city.
• Our citizens and visitors have a full range of services-products and facilities available to them within the city.
• As a result of these actions, that the city itself prospers because of solid and consistent benefits from its prosperity, sales and transient occupancy taxes.

Over the coming months, officials will mull a set of 21 ideas meant to spur economic development. Find the full list attached to the right as a PDF. 

By December, Gonzalez said there will be between three and five goals chosen, of the 21, and the City Council will have a workshop to set up a strategy of how to implement them.

"In the coming months, you're going to see a lot of economic development activity," Gonzalez said. "We're aggressively putting a program together."

As for Babonis, she said she's excited.

"This is such a tough economy we're living in, but with the great challenge comes opportunity," Babonis said. "With a concrete plan, we can help businesses here thrive and really turn Rohnert Park around."