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Oviedo Returning To Santa Clarita As Striplin’s No. 2

BY LEON WORDEN / SCVNEWS.COM

Frank Oviedo is returning to Santa Clarita as assistant city manager under Ken Striplin, officials confirmed Monday.

Oviedo, 42, worked for the city of Santa Clarita as a management analyst from 1997 to 2002. In 2009 he was hired as the first city manager of the city of Wildomar, which is located between Lake Elsinore and Murrieta in Riverside County.

Wildomar incorporated as a city in 2008. The 2010 Census showed a population of 32,176. By comparison, the latest annexation pushed Santa Clarita’s population above 203,000.

“It was a tough decision but in the end, having (relatives) in the Santa Clarita Valley tipped the scale,” Oviedo told the North County Times, the area’s local newspaper, explaining his decision to give up the No. 1 spot in Wildomar for the No. 2 spot in Santa Clarita.

Oviedo gradated from Clovis High School in 1988 and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Fresno State University in 1994. He completed graduate studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, earning a master’s degree in public administration in 1997 before coming to Santa Clarita the first time. He’s married to a 1995 Hart High graduate, Erin Lillibridge (UCLA 1999), who was in the first 6th grade class to graduate from Valencia Valley Elementary School and now works for the California Department of Finance. They have a 6-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son who starts kindergarten in the fall.

Between Santa Clarita and Wildomar, Oviedo served as deputy city manager of Elk Grove in northern California from 2002 to 2009. He’d been recruited to that city by another ex-Santa Clarita staffer, John Danielson, who was Elk Grove’s city manager at the time.

Oviedo earned a base salary of $179,000 in Wildomar, according to a report in the North County Times.

His future salary in Santa Clarita isn’t yet known. Striplin’s base salary is $220,000; presumably it would be less than that. City officials were preparing to discuss the decision more fully Tuesday, but by way of background, Striplin has sole hiring and firing authority over his staff, so Striplin would have been the one to hire Oviedo to fill the position that Striplin previously held under Santa Clarita’s last city manager, Ken Pulskamp.

No. 3 in the chain of command is the deputy city manager, Darren Hernandez; then come the department heads, in no particular order: Robert Newman in Public Works, Rick Gould in Parks and Tom Cole in Planning.

Oviedo Returning To Santa Clarita As Striplin’s No. 2

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