The Lodi City Council’s May 6, 2026 agenda includes the appointment of Jamie Bandy as the city’s next Director of Administrative Services, with an effective start date of May 12, 2026 and a fully-burdened compensation package valued at approximately $315,000 per year. The same agenda action designates Bandy as the city’s City Treasurer, the statutory officer responsible for the custody and investment of public funds. The appointment closes a high-profile vacancy that has shadowed the city since the 2025 forensic-audit fallout, returns a Lodi-rooted public-finance professional to City Hall after roughly seventeen years away, and pulls together Finance, Human Resources, and Information Technology under a single executive who has run each of those functions in different forms during her career.

After a year-long investigation involving five independent firms and costing taxpayers well over $1 million, the Hoslett Forensics final report — to be presented to the Lodi City Council on April 15, 2026 — finds no intentional fraud at City Hall. Credit card policy violations totaled $8,625 over five years, and a utility deposit discrepancy originally claimed at $1.2 million was determined to be approximately $67,000 in clerical errors. By state, national, and private-sector benchmarks, Lodi’s violation rate of 0.077% ranks at the extreme low end of the scale. The report confirms that real internal control weaknesses exist and recommends structural reforms — several of which are already underway.

In 30 months, the City of Lodi has cycled through five people in the city manager's chair, lost key personnel in finance, human resources, and community development, spent more than $1 million on consultants and interim staffing, and endured a public rupture between its city manager and city council that made regional and statewide news.

This is not a story about one bad hire. It is a story about institutional erosion — and Lodi is far from alone. Across the Central Valley and throughout California, the machinery of local government is losing the people who know how to run it. The question is whether Lodi's elected leadership, at both the city and county level, understands the depth of the problem.

Per Steve Mann’s recent About Town article, John Lindsay, a “Range Rider / Senior Advisor” will be appointed Lodi’s acting City Manager.

What’s John Lindsay’s background?

Who are the “Range Riders”?