City manager leaving Colusa for Gridley

After less than a year on the job, Colusa's city manager is moving on to lead the administration in Gridley.

Council members in the southern Butte County town accepted Rob Hickey as the new administrator in a vote this week. The longtime Live Oak city manager is slated to take over the post Sept. 2, after only 10 months as Colusa's highest-ranking appointee.

Colusa council members are scheduled to discuss finding Hickey's interim replacement at their meeting Tuesday night, during a closed session.

Hickey called the change to help guide Gridley's economic growth a strong lure — including an electricity cooperative and a proposed plant to distill fuel ethanol from rice chaff, a common farming by-product in the Mid-Valley.

"I've got a great job, a great staff here," the 52-year-old Wheatland resident said Friday. "But the city of Gridley has opportunities that were too good to pass up. There are some jobs that if you pass them up, you'll always wonder if that was a mistake.

"There was no one thing that was the reason" for switching cities, said Hickey, who will draw a $120,000 annual salary in his new post. "It was the whole package, the tremendous opportunities available in Gridley."

At Colusa, Hickey was paid a base salary of $100,000 with the possibility of up to $10,000 in bonuses.

Hickey succeeds another Colusa alumnus: Randy L. Johnsen, the outgoing Gridley administrator, who filled the same interim role in Colusa before Hickey's appointment in October.

A longtime maintenance supervisor for the U.S. Air Force, Hickey spent seven years as Live Oak's chief administrator. The City Council dismissed him in February 2007, three months after a trio of political newcomers won council seats with financial backing from developers who had clashed with Hickey on the pace and scope of home construction.

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune at 458-2121 or at hyune@appealdemocrat.com.