Above new Cottonwood City Manager Mario Cifuentez II’s office door is a road sign that reads “Cifuentez Way.”
“I’m a huge policy guy,” Cifuentez said. “So in Visalia, [California], the first city I worked for, they had a policy where when someone retired, they would make them a street blade.”
But the problem was, he didn’t retire from Visalia. He moved to Handford, California, in 2019, as its new city manager.
“My going-away party, they presented that to me, and right away I was like, ‘no, no, you guys can’t give me this, like I didn’t retire,’” he said. “And they said, ‘no, … we changed the policy.’ So, if you retire or leave the city with more than 25 years of service, because I had 33, you get a street blade.”
Hanford staff also gave him a similar one when he left, but it was too big to fit in his office, Cifuentez said.
“I think that was one of the things that I was able to kind of reinforce when I met with council during the process,” he said. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m not jumping around, you know?’ I [have], almost 40 years with two organizations, if I come here, I’m here till I retire. I’m not going anywhere else.”
Cifuentez took over as city manager of Cottonwood on Aug. 18. Since then, he’s been getting to know business owners, going to Rotary club meetings and familiarizing himself with the community.
“One of the things that I talked to council about that [is] very important for me in my first 60 to 90 days is to start building those relationships,” he said. “Not just with people in the community, but our stakeholders, the colleges, the school districts … Northern Arizona Healthcare is a big part of our community.”
Cifuentez said he wants his own policy to be availability. For people to talk to him so he can know what problems fall to the city and its partners and so he can tell people why the city is doing what it does.
“I asked my staff a lot of the ‘whys,’” he said. “Why do we do things this way? Why are we where we at? And I tell them, it’s not for any reason other than when I’m talking to these folks, I want to be able to be that trusted source for them.”
History in Arizona
Cifuentez’s history with Arizona dates back to when he graduated high school. He thought, back then, he wanted to be a car mechanic.
“I actually attended Arizona Automotive Institute down in Phoenix,” he said. “Worked for a car dealership there. Realized during that process that I’d always have a passion for working on cars, but didn’t want to do it for a living.”
After that time, he moved back to Visalia, where he had grown up, and started working at the local airport to get him through college.
“Started [at the airport] in 1986,” he said. “1997, the city manager asked me to kind of take over the operation as a superintendent. Five years later, he made me the airport manager.”
Eventually he would take over operations of the Valley Oak Golf Course, then animal services and would be asked to take on more duties until in 2016 he was asked to be the deputy city manager.
“Was a city of about 140,000 and then the opportunity came up in a neighboring city for Hanford, for a city manager, and I put in for that, and that’s where I spent the last six years,” he said.
His plan was to retire from California and come live in Arizona. He grew up coming here and loved to vacation here as well.
“My wife and I were married in Sedona. We’ve always loved the area,” he said. “My oldest went to [Arizona State University] and never came back to California. Both my wife’s twins went to University of Arizona. One of them still lives in Tucson, so we had family here, and the plan was to retire here.”
He said he knows a lot of locals have concerns about people coming here from California. The moment they knew for sure they’d be here, he and his wife changed their phone numbers to be Arizona phone numbers.
“You know, we won’t be going anywhere else,” he said. “We wanted a place where we could come and when I’m done working, finally, we can call it our forever home. “This isn’t an interim stop for us. This is where we plan to spend the rest of our days.”
His wife, Michelle, was an educator in California. When they moved here, she retired from teaching, but now she does volunteering in the area.
Similarities and Differences
The biggest difference he’s seen so far is the tourism.
“The cities I worked for were large communities, but … those locations were about 45 miles south of Fresno,” he said. “So there was a portion of those communities that were bedroom communities. A lot of folks lived there.”
He’s learned how show-term rentals are affecting housing costs in Sedona and how it affects housing availability here now a lot of people are buying homes in Cottonwood to work in Sedona.
“The things we have to look for is, how do you provide the infrastructure that’s necessary for a growing community?” he asked. “I mean, when you look at the neighboring communities, and the fact that we have the bulk of the retail, you know, that’s also where you’re going to start to see an increase in the housing.”
Cifuentez said he recognizes the population growth and also the necessity of maintaining the small-town charm of Cottonwood, and when he was being interviewed for the position he said managing that is difficult but important. Another surprising thing for Cifuentez was the emphasis Arizona has on rural communities.
“The first week I got here was the annual League of Arizona Cities & Towns conference in Scottsdale,” he said. “So I started, had one day in the office, and then went and spent the rest of the week down there in Scottsdale. … One thing that really struck me was the focus in several of the sessions on rural communities, smaller communities like ourselves.”
He said in California, he knew people who would stop going to conferences like this because of the emphasis on California’s larger cities. All this to say, the government aspect is very similar to Cifuentez.
“Staff will laugh, because I’ll frequently say, ‘OK, in California, this is done this way. How is it?’” he said. But the main difference really has been terminology and acronyms.
“We’ve been talking a lot about the Arizona Gift Clause and kind of how it relates and fair market value. They have a similar thing over there. We just refer to it as a gift of public funds. You can’t have a gift of public funds. We have highway funding over there, they call it the gas tax. Here it’s the HURF [Highway User Revenue Fund] fund.”
Get Involved
In the Cottonwood City Hall in Old Town there’s a list of city positions its looking to fill.
“We just reduced the size of the Historic Preservation Committee from seven to five because we just couldn’t get enough folks to have the quorum,” he said.
The city has job opportunities but also plenty of volunteer opportunities for those who can’t commit to the time of a job.
“We just had a planner that got stolen by another city,” he said. “The records clerks in the police department. We’re always hiring part time transit drivers. Those are ones that you’ll generally see up there [on the job board] all the time.”
