Santa Rosa City Attorney Teresa L. Stricker told the city Saturday she is stepping down on Tuesday, June 2, citing “new professional opportunities.” The City Council, which holds the appointment, plans to name an interim replacement at the same June 2 meeting.
The departure had not been picked up anywhere outside the city’s own Civic Alert and a Facebook post as of Monday morning. The Press Democrat, the Bohemian, and the Sonoma Index-Tribune carry nothing on it.
Stricker took the permanent job in November 2023, succeeding Sue Gallagher. It was her second turn in the seat: she also served as interim City Attorney during 2016 and 2017, bridging the gap between Caroline Fowler — who left for the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office — and Gallagher’s appointment. Counting Stricker’s two stints and Gallagher’s tenure, the city has now cycled through three top lawyers in a decade. That is a churn rate worth noticing in a job whose entire purpose is institutional memory.
Why the seat matters
City Attorney is one of only two positions the Santa Rosa Council appoints directly. The other is the City Manager. Whoever holds the chair advises closed sessions, signs off on settlements, vets ballot language, and is the city’s frontline on every land-use, labor, and police-conduct case that ends up in court. Stricker’s eighteen months on the job included the SMART Jennings Avenue at-grade crossing negotiation — a fight that has been running, in one form or another, since the rail line opened.
What the city has not said
Mayor Mark Stapp’s statement is the boilerplate kind a city puts out when the bench is short on time: warm on Stricker, thin on what comes next. The release does not name an acting attorney, lay out a search timeline, or say whether the council intends to recruit nationally, as it did for Gallagher.
Three questions are still open:
- Where is Stricker going? “New professional opportunities” is a placeholder. It can mean private practice, an in-house counsel job, or another public-sector seat. The city has not said and Stricker has not.
- Who is the interim? The council can elevate one of the office’s senior deputies or bring back a familiar outside hand. Stricker herself filled that bridge role in 2016 from Meyers Nave, a public-agency firm with deep Bay Area municipal bench strength.
- Local hire or outside recruit? Gallagher came from inside the office; Fowler left for the DA. The council’s next choice will signal whether it wants continuity or a reset.
The pattern question
Three City Attorneys in ten years is not, by itself, a scandal. Municipal lawyers move on. But Santa Rosa has spent that decade absorbing the 2017 Tubbs Fire, two PG&E bankruptcies, a homelessness state of emergency, the SMART build-out, and an unfinished downtown. Each of those generated litigation the City Attorney’s office had to hold the line on. Asking why the people who hold that line keep leaving is a fair question — and one the council can begin to answer in public on June 2.
Until then, the only document on the record is the city’s own short note.
— Roger Coryell, Wine Country Daily