Coleen Clementson, one of two deputy chief executives at the San Diego Association of Governments, has been named interim CEO and will take over management of the regional planning agency next month.
The board of directors for the organization known as SANDAG voted unanimously to hire Clementson, who is expected to serve until a permanent chief is brought aboard later next year.
Clementson, who has managed planning, projects and programs for SANDAG since early last year, will succeed Hasan Ikhrata. Ikhrata announced in July that he would resign by the end of this year.
“I am thrilled that there was unanimous support for Ms. Clementson to serve as our interim CEO,” Nora Vargas, the SANDAG board chair who also oversees the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement.
“With so many projects in the pipeline, she is exactly the leader we need to hit the ground running,” Vargas added.
The new chief has a lot on her plate besides the agency’s ongoing transit programs.
SANDAG has been the subject of numerous unflattering audits that have raised questions about the agency’s management practices.
The agency also was named in a wrongful-termination lawsuit last month, accusing Ikhrata and other officials of firing a finance official after she questioned whether the contractor could fix bugs in the tolling system serving the 10-mile stretch of state Route 125 acquired by SANDAG in 2011.
At the same meeting last Friday during which Clementson was named interim CEO, the SANDAG board spent hours grappling with a flawed tolling system that wrongly charged thousands of drivers on the toll-road section of state Route 125.
In a lawsuit filed last month, former finance director Lauren Warrem said she had raised questions about the project in October and was fired days later, in early November, for blowing the whistle on the flawed software.
Ikhrata and other officials said they informed the SANDAG board about the bookkeeping issue in October and acknowledged they could have told them sooner.
SANDAG staff also noted they paid the contractor and another consultant millions of dollars in extended agreements after they knew the software was problematic. They said they reconciled almost all of the affected driver accounts.
It was not immediately clear how much Clementson will be paid for her new responsibilities. The planning agency has not released the employment agreement or compensation details.
During the board meeting last week, board members said Clementson would earn the equivalent of $380,000 a year plus benefits. She was paid a base salary of $271,000 last year, according to the Transparency California database.
The regional planning board spends more than $1.2 billion a year on transportation, mobility and other projects. The new CEO search is expected to take months to complete.
