Dear City Manager Wives... | 5/26/2026

And husbands.

If you become “the story” and cost your husband or wife a job opportunity while also possibly endangering their current employment — then you are failing as a spouse.

Do you remember the meddling wife of Riverside City Manager Mike Futrell? Well, she sent me a message over the holiday weekend. And she also posted a comment on my LinkedIn page. So, I am going to give you a bit of an update.

We also have an update on another California city manager story concerning a texting scandal that has already cost the Oakland city administrator his job.

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A few issues back I spotlighted the crazy story about Riverside City Manager Mike Futrell’s wife, Susan Freeman, and how she received a damning letter from the city council. They admonished her for making unwanted and harassing calls, texts, emails, comments, social media posts, and other communications to city employees.

I had never heard of anything like this ever happening anywhere else and you all know that I read hundreds of stories each week. Well, it got on the radar of the Los Angeles Times — which is saying something, because they don’t spend a lot of time covering city hall intrigue in cities that are 60 miles away.

After receiving a LinkedIn message from Freeman this weekend, I went and did some research and learned that a resident named Keith Nelson is very unhappy with Futrell and Freeman. He posted a detailed dissection of the LA Times piece and offers up some detail that heretofore had not been published. You can read that blog post here.

Suffice to say she accused me of not knowing all the facts and smearing her. She also posted a comment on my LinkedIn newsletter post that reads:

Every marriage has their own dynamics. But it is clear to me that this woman’s ego is far more important to her than her husband’s career or respecting the boundaries and role of the city manager.

Now — we have all seen councils do some vindictive things. So while it isn’t impossible — I find it highly, highly unlikely that the council would send a letter like that to the wife of their city manager for no reason. That is also one of the key points of the Nelson blog post I linked above.

Moreover — it took months and months for that letter to leak out. And based on the LA Times article it appears that one of the reasons it leaked out is because Freeman couldn’t help herself and got into some sort of tit-for-tat with a resident who then posted the letter in a Facebook group.

Last week, a texting scandal forced Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson and I naturally wondered what the fallout might be, if any, for Brentwood City Manager Harold Duffey. Duffey was on the other side of these text exchanges where he and Johnson discussed some of their female subordinates when he worked in Oakland.

Like Oakland, Brentwood has a female mayor and the political demographics are far left making it a very dicey situation. She responded to the press by stating that the city was “discussing options” on how to proceed. The article also included a link to the text messages provided via public information request here.

I have no inside political knowledge about Brentwood — but I do know that in California most politicians will runover their mother and stab their grandmother to get elected. This mayor and councilmembers will be crucified in the next election’s campaign mailers if they do not force him out. Thus, I expect him to be pushed out of the job so that they can protect their current seat and maintain viability for the next office they want to run for in the future.

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