By Robert Haugh
Tonight, the Santa Clara City Council will discuss their options for City Manager. It’ll happen in a closed session.
According to sources, former Acting City Rajeev Batra is being seriously considered
Batra served as Acting City Manager from April, 2016 to September, 2017.
He graded poorly in important categories like leadership, knowledge and competency, community outreach, openness and transparency.
After he left, Batra also tried to spike his pension and have it transferred to his wife. Wow.
City staff estimated that it would cost taxpayers an additional $500,000 to $744,000. Double wow.
But he lost a City Council vote and threatened to sue the City. Triple wow.
Rumors about Batra coming back spread weeks ago. So did rumors about him playing golf with 49ers owner Jed York and not reporting it on his calendar as legally required.
Batra is known to be an avid golfer. Batra would not respond to multiple contacts about the golfing rumor in texts to him during the last three weeks.
Councilmembers Raj Chahal and Karen Hardy were assigned by the City Council to find a City Manager after the 49er Five fired former City Manager Deanna Santana in a historic move.
This is highly unusual. Santa Clara usually hires a search firm to find top employees. That’s standard practice for most cities.
Chahal and Hardy also did not return multiple emails over the last ten days asking them about Batra and the golfing rumor.
It’ll be interesting to see if they did the proper vetting that search firms do about conflicts and other important matters.
It’ll also be interesting to see if Batra comes back to City Hall if he’s allowed to spike his pension for himself or his wife.
The costs of firing Santana are really adding up.
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How’s recall going? Any FPPC filing by recall committee yet?
Byron
Are you looking to help? Thanks for thinking of us, it really means a lot to me, to know how much you care for your former neighbors.
Burt Field
So, no FPPC filing for recall you previously announced. Correct?
Don’t worry Bryon..its coming…
It seems not so long ago that Batra put on that pathetic display in front of council attempting to spike his pension after he voluntarily retired. He then filed a lawsuit against the City of Santa Clara again trying to spike his pension. On 1/9/2020 the judge rejected his two charges and Batra’s attorneys asked for the case to be dismissed. In the order of dismissal, the judge did not waive the court fees or the City’s attorney’s fees. So, one question that must be asked, did Batra ever reimburse the City for its legal fees as a result of his frivolous lawsuit? These monies are public funds.
The records can easily be found on the county court web site:
https://portal.scscourt.org/search/party?firstName=rajeev&lastName=Batra
Case # 19CV342946
Rajeev Batra vs City of Santa Clara
One point of order on the article, Robert – Rajeev did in fact file suit on 2/8/19 according to Google. Looks like it died in early 2020 though.
Given how badly Rajeev got screwed the last time he came back as an acting city manager it’s hard to believe he’d do it again.
First I have to say that is a mean thing to do to my 3 heroes.
Rajeev was an interesting person to work with. He wasn’t really running the dept. and was often surprised by things happening in his dept. We were meeting with him and his dept. while resisting the Massive Mariani project so we got to see some of this first hand.
Any chance they could not find a head hunter to work with them?