• The Manteca Visitors Center will be holding its 10th annual Women’s Connection sponsored by Doctors Hospital of Manteca on Saturday, Feb. 17, from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Calvary Community Church, 815 W. Lathrop Road, featuring keynote speaker Donna Hartley. She is a gifted motivational speaker who addresses audiences across the country and inspires audiences with humor, straight talk and motivation on how to change their attitudes and “Fire Up Their Life!” The $50 ticket includes the key speaker, lunch, tradeshow, 10 breakout sessions, a special 10th-year celebration honoring influential women of Manteca and networking opportunities. Tickets are available at the Manteca Visitors Center at 1422 Grove Avenue or by calling the Manteca CVB at 823-7229.
Karen McLaughlin works for almost 70,000 people, oversees a workforce of 340, and is the CEO of a Manteca concern with an annual combined budget of $124.5 million.
“I was talking to the Sierra High leadership class and I realized most people have a good idea of what a police chief does, what a fire chief does or what a finance director does, but not what I do,” McLaughlin noted. “(Being city manager) is kind of like being CEO as I oversee all of the departments.”
McLaughlin - who was elevated to the position of city manager in mid-2011 after 25 years on the job, sees herself as just part of a team of 340 workers dedicated to providing municipal to Manteca’s nearly 70,000 residents.
McLaughlin is one of 10 people being recognized as Women of Distinction during the upcoming Feb. 17 Women’s Conference hosted by the Manteca Convention & Visitors Bureau. The others are Dorothy Indelicato, Evelyn Prouty, Rose Albano Risso, Lucille Harris, Toni Raymus, Bea Bowlsby, Linda Abeldt, Patty Reece, and Sister Ann Venita Britto.
“The local level in government is the closest to the people and it is the one the public knows the least about,” McLaughlin noted.
And it is because it touches everyone’s daily lives from being able to flush a toilet to providing streets and sidewalks for travel to drinking water, police and fire protection, and more is why local government intrigues McLaughlin.
McLaughlin didn’t start out in life with the goal of becoming a city manager.
Government service wasn’t even on her radar when McLaughlin started her post-secondary studies at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa after graduating high school in Newport Beach. At Orange Coast she got hooked on English while earning her associate of arts degree.
Upon completing community college, McLaughlin and a friend looked for the college campus farthest away from Newport Beach “without leaving California.” That is how she came up with Humboldt State College. Researching the catalogue she saw they offered journalism. And since that had something to do with writing, she delved in.
It was at Humboldt that she met her future husband Bob who was majoring in journalism but with an emphasis on marketing and the business side. After graduation she returned to Southern California for a year. She was working at a bank when she landed her first job as a reporter with the Oakdale Leader.
“I was working in a bank in Anaheim on Friday, packing on Saturday driving to Oakdale on Sunday, and started working as a reporter on Monday,” McLaughlin recalled.
Joins city staff as executive analyst
She remembers walking to the first assignment that Monday morning for a story on an auto parts store and crossing a seemingly deserted street that seemed like it was out of the Old West at the time and thinking how sharply it contrasted with Newport Beach.
McLaughlin said she liked working for newspapers as she “loved being the first to know about things.”
She spent two years working at the Leader from 1983 to 1985 before joining the Manteca Bulletin where she covered everything from schools, police, and the irrigation district to city hall. She started with the city on Jan. 16, 1987 as an executive analyst.
McLaughlin figured she’d apply given the fact it involved a lot of writing as well as research. It also helped the pay was $975 more a month than her $1,325 a month salary as a reporter.
“The joke was that (City Manager) Dave Jinkens hired me to get me to stop writing stories about the city,” McLaughlin said.
Over the years McLaughlin has served as assistant to the city manager, assistant city manager, and deputy city manager before becoming the first woman city manager in Manteca city history.
McLaughlin said she never thinks in terms of her gender and being city manager since she said opportunity was always there for her to pursue with a father who was a middle school teacher and a mother who was a nurse.
McLaughlin said she never takes any criticism personally noting it comes with the territory.
“I know I’m in the public eye,” she said. “But I worry about a lot of the front-line city employees who take the brunt of anti-government sentiment.”
Having said that, she hopes people understand that rank-and-file city employees are hard working who - just like many private sector employees - have taken pay cuts and are paying more for benefits while at the same time having their workload increased and new jobs assigned to them after the city pared down 90 jobs to balance the budget.
As for the job she is doing, McLaughlin said she “likes to think I’m making a difference” in terms of helping make sure Manteca provides its citizens with essential services.
“We are a government serving the people,” McLaughlin said of municipal level government.
Her best advice to anyone - young or old - is “to try different things.”
“I never thought I’d be working in city government,” she said.
At the same time going from conservative Newport Beach to liberal Humboldt was going out of her comfort zone as was moving from Southern California to the Northern San Joaquin Valley.
McLaughlin and husband Bob have two children. They are Amy, 21, who is in her final year at Sonoma State and Ryan, 19, who is in his first year at Stanislaus state and lives on campus.
