Supervisors appoint David Villanueva as Sacramento County’s new executive to succeed Edwards
The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors appointed Assistant County Executive David Villanueva to serve as the new county executive leading 13,000 employees. He will replace Ann Edwards, who is set to retire in January.
Villanueva will take up the reins Jan. 28. He began working for the county in 2008, in the Department of Technology. He became assistant county executive in May after serving as the deputy county executive for the Administrative Services Agency since 2011.
“I cannot tell you all how pleased I am with the appointment of David Villanueva,” Edwards said at Tuesday’s supervisors meeting. “He’s been my right-hand man since I took this job three years ago. ... I have a term that I use that I can’t say in open session, but it’s called the give-a-you-know-what factor. And David has that. He really deeply cares about the county as a whole, the constituents, the whole organization and the people that work here.”
Addressing the board, Villanueva said he planned to “continue on our cultural change journey.” He was referencing Edwards’ replacement of the previous county executive, Navdeep Gill, who was placed on administrative leave in November 2020 after eight high-level county employees wrote to the Board of Supervisors saying he had created a toxic work environment “rife with sexism, intimidation, racism, and a blatant disregard for public health.” An investigator later cleared Gill of discrimination charges, saying that he created a toxic culture but was an “equal opportunity bully.”
Supervisors praised Villanueva’s leadership skills at the meeting and Villanueva, in turn, praised his colleagues in the county ranks.
“We have an outstanding team of department heads and office leaders,” Villanueva told the board. “I’m honored to be appointed as their leader.”
Villanueva, 56, chuckled as he described the very beginning of his career in government: The Sacramento State graduate answered an ad for a student assistant at the state’s Department of General Services that was tacked to a bulletin board.
It was, he said, laughing, “actually a bulletin board ... sorry for showing my age.”
