Fox in the Henhouse: Redding Puts REU’s Money Man in Charge of City Finances

Interim City Manager Michael Webb named Joe Bowers as Interim Redding City Finance Director. Bowers is the utility official who sold rate hikes and explained a $9 million jump in personnel costs. The appointment came four days before Circle 6’s full efficiency report reaches the council dais.

REDDING, Calif. — Four days before a $300,000 consultant study is scheduled to tell the City Council where Redding can cut costs, Interim City Manager Michael Webb handed the city’s checkbook to the man who has been keeping the books at Redding Electric Utility.

In an internal staff memo obtained by Shasta Unfiltered, Webb announced that Finance Director Greg Robinett’s last day in the appointed post is Friday, September 11. Robinett will remain the separately elected City Treasurer through December 2028. The interim replacement is Joe Bowers, Assistant Director of Resources at REU, former utility CFO, city employee since 2016, and the public face of REU’s recent rate-increase campaign.

Webb called it “continuity.” Ratepayers who have watched REU’s payroll climb, its proposed 18 percent multi-year rate package, and a year of budget fights over incomplete reporting may call it something else: the fox guarding the henhouse.

The memo the public was not meant to debate

Webb’s announcement thanks Robinett for 11 years of service and presents Bowers as a ready-made solution. Bowers “oversees the utility’s financial operations,” the memo says. He “brings strong financial expertise, a deep understanding of the City’s operations, and established relationships across the organization.”

That last sentence is the problem, not the qualification.

Bowers is not an outside auditor dropped in to clean house. He is the inside numbers man for the city-owned utility that has spent the last two years explaining why personnel costs jumped, why rates needed to rise, and why a 45,000-customer municipal electric shop needs a roster of assistant directors drawing compensation packages that would look at home in a much larger utility.

Public payroll records compiled by Transparent California list Bowers’ 2024 total compensation as Assistant Director of Electric Utility at approximately $360,800, on a base salary of $270,249. He is one of several REU executives whose pay has drawn repeated comparison to leaner municipal utilities. REU Director Nick Zettel’s 2024 total package exceeded $586,000. Assistant Director Ted Miller exceeded $542,000.

The shop he is coming from

REU is an enterprise fund. That does not make it a separate planet. It shares a city council, a city manager, information systems, and a pipeline of Payments in Lieu of Taxes — roughly $6 million a year — that moves utility money into the general fund that pays for police, fire, and parks.

Councilmember Tenessa Audette has spent more than a year documenting what she says was incomplete and inaccurate budget reporting that helped justify unsustainable raises. In February 2026, she was the lone “no” vote on advancing REU’s public hearing for four consecutive 4.5 percent rate increases. She pointed to a $9 million personnel-cost increase that the council had not walked through with the public.

Bowers told the Record Searchlight that the $9 million reflected labor contracts the council itself approved in 2023, booked retroactively. Labor, he told a rate workshop, is “about 25 percent of our budget.” Independent reviews of REU’s own documents show personnel costs rising about 58 percent from fiscal year 2020-21 to 2025-26 and accounting for most of the utility’s expenditure growth. REU’s staffing ratio — about 4.4 employees per 1,000 customers — sits well above Roseville Electric’s roughly 2.6 and above American Public Power

Association benchmarks.

Those are not gossip-column numbers. They are the record of the department whose chief financial officer is now being asked to police the entire city.

Circle 6 arrives next week. The henhouse is already occupied.

In March 2026, the late City Manager William Tarbox hired Circle 6 Consulting for a citywide efficiency study, not to exceed $300,000. Tarbox paused REU’s rate-hike hearing in the same season. He died in July. Webb, already wearing three hats as interim city manager, assistant city manager, and public works director, kept the study alive.

On August 31, the council accepted Circle 6’s first “quick wins” — a little more than $1 million a year, some of it from vacant positions that may later be filled. Consultants had already flagged $300,000 to $500,000 in aged encumbrances and about $250,000 in idle capital-improvement funds. The mid-range and long-term recommendations, including staffing and operations, are scheduled for the September 15 council meeting.

That is four days after Robinett leaves the Finance Director chair and after Bowers is already sitting in it.

Circle 6 was not hired to admire REU. The city hired it because Tarbox said city operations, including finance and personnel, were in distress. Supervisor Kevin Crye said in August he had been “privy” to some of the findings and wanted them made public. The city chose instead to brief the council first. The public still has not seen a department-by-department accounting of what the consultants found inside the electric utility.

If those pages show unused appropriations, improper fund applications, bloated positions, or reporting problems at REU, the official now charged with implementing the cleanup will be the official who ran those finances. That is not a theory. It is an org chart.

A city running on interims

Redding is not making this appointment from a position of institutional strength. The city manager is interim. The police chief is interim. The fire chief is interim. Sales-tax revenue has been stagnant or falling. The biennial budget started below the council’s own 10 percent reserve target. Robinett spent last fall producing a 53-page rebuttal to Audette’s findings that the rest of the council largely accepted, but she did not. Then he announced a family opportunity he “can’t turn down” and stepped out of the appointed job two days before the consultants deliver the rest of the bill.

Webb’s memo says the city will “evaluate the next steps for permanently filling the position.” That sentence should be read as a promise, not a burial. An interim appointment made by staff memo, without a public recruitment and without the Circle 6 report in the public’s hands, is how a temporary fix becomes the new normal.

Questions Webb and the council should answer in public

Continuity matters when systems are mid-close, and payroll still has to run. It is not a blank check. Before September 15 turns into a rubber stamp, the public is entitled to answers that do not fit on a staff-wide email:

• Will Bowers recuse himself from Circle 6 recommendations that touch REU’s budget, staffing, transfers, or fund applications?

• Will the full Circle 6 report — not a slide deck of “quick wins” — be posted before any permanent finance appointment is made?

• Is the permanent search open to outside candidates, or is the city already grooming the internal candidate who knows where the bodies are buried because he helped bury some of them in the rate model?

• What additional pay, if any, attaches to the interim assignment, and does Bowers keep his REU title and compensation while he runs citywide finance?

• Who, exactly, is minding REU’s books while its resources director is downtown balancing the general fund?

The test is next Tuesday

Municipal finance is not supposed to be a loyalty program. The Finance Director’s job is to tell the council and the public what the numbers actually are — including when those numbers embarrass the department the director just left.

Joe Bowers may be a competent CPA. He may close the books on time. He may even be the least-bad option in a city that has burned through leadership faster than it can recruit it. None of that answers the conflict. The man who explained why REU needed more money from ratepayers is now the man who will tell the council whether the rest of city government needs less.

If that is the fix, the hens should keep one eye open.

The September 15 council meeting is where Circle 6’s remaining findings are scheduled to become public. Shasta Unfiltered will be there. The question is whether the council will treat those findings as an audit — or as an inconvenience to be managed by the same shop that produced them.