Lake County Administrative Officer Susan Parker will retire Dec. 31, the county announced Wednesday. The announcement came three weeks after the Board of Supervisors met in closed session to evaluate her job performance.
The county’s release names no successor. It doesn’t say how the board will fill the job, the top staff post in county government. The administrative officer answers to the five supervisors, prepares the county budget and supervises the department heads the board appoints.
“This is a significant loss for our County organization, and our Board is also committed to maintaining continuity of services and moving forward in the best way we can,” Board Chair Brad Rasmussen said in the release. He thanked Parker and wished her well in retirement.
Parker joined the county in 2019. The board appointed her permanent administrative officer May 23, 2022.
The Oct. 6 evaluation
The board’s Oct. 6 agenda listed a closed-session item titled “Public Employee Evaluation: Title: County Administrative Officer.” Supervisors went into closed session at 4:50 p.m., according to the clerk’s notes posted with the agenda. The retirement release doesn’t mention the review.
Two Lake County residents sent written comments on the evaluation. Both were posted with the agenda item.
Dirk Slooten of Clearlake asked supervisors to “terminate the employment of the CAO.” He wrote that he had recently been named chair of LACOSAN, the Lake County Sanitation District board. Parker “did not recognize the budgetary shortcomings in the Community Development Department and did not present a balanced overall County budget,” he wrote. He also wrote that she hadn’t updated sewer fees within the required five-year cycle. At his first meeting with her, he wrote, he found that county departments, including County Counsel and the Tax Collector, hadn’t talked with each other about what forming the new sanitation board would mean.
Sterling Wellman sent a written comment with charts on county finances. He asked supervisors to judge Parker on “financial oversight, timely warnings, and recommendations to bring spending into line with sustainable revenue.” By his count from the county’s audits, general fund spending grew about 45% from 2022-23 to 2024-25 while revenue grew about 26%. He also wrote that he was “not claiming the county was perfectly balanced before Parker or that she alone caused its condition.”
The budget she leaves
Supervisors adopted the 2026-27 budget Oct. 1, after the county pulled almost $3.5 million from contingencies, the money set aside for emergencies, and stopped paying for vacant jobs funded by the general fund, Wine Country Gazette reported.
The fund summary posted for that meeting estimates general fund revenue at $88.8 million and spending at $101 million. It covers the $12.1 million difference with an estimated $12.1 million in unreserved fund balance, money carried over from earlier years.
Supervisors plan to take up the unfunded positions again Nov. 17. A proposal to add an administrative analyst auditor position to the county administrative office was pulled from the board’s Oct. 20 agenda and moved to the same date.
Her record
The release credits Parker with a land swap that gave the county the former Armory building, now the permanent Lakeport home of the Sheriff’s Office. It also credits her with work on the Pallesen Place housing project, a countywide housing action plan and the Lake County Regional Housing Trust. It says she created a county tribal liaison job, the first in California.
While running the county, Parker also served as interim director of Public Works, Health Services and Community Development, according to the release. Public Works is now run by another interim director, Stephen Carter.
The release counts 27 years in county and city executive jobs. Before Lake County, it says, her work included the emergency response after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and a living shoreline project in North Carolina.