Yountville is the second city he’s left under the same cover story. The math on his exit doesn’t match a voluntary resignation — and the project he built is on the May 7 council agenda without him.

YOUNTVILLE — At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, the Yountville Town Council went into closed session. The agenda had one item: a performance evaluation for Town Manager Brad Raulston.

When the meeting ended, the town issued a news release. Raulston had resigned. The stated reason: he had “decided to care for his wife and make way for a leadership transition.” His last day on payroll will be August 31, 2026. Until then, he is on paid administrative leave.

That is the official story. Three facts make it hard to square with a clean, voluntary resignation.

The pattern

This is the second time Raulston has resigned from a city manager job, and the second time the cover story has been family care.

In April 2023, Raulston resigned as city manager of National City, in San Diego County, after the City Council had reviewed his performance in three closed sessions since the start of that year. Earlier in April, he had announced he would take a leave of absence to care for his family. Two weeks later, the council accepted his resignation and approved a separation package: six months of pay plus deferred compensation totaling $127,601, continued health benefits at $1,200 a month through the end of the year or until he found a new job, and a $750-a-month car allowance through May. The deal included a mutual release barring either side from suing.

The 2021 push by Service Employees International Union Local 221 and the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, urging National City’s council not to renew Raulston’s contract, foreshadowed those closed sessions. The council renewed it anyway, 3-2. Two years later, he was out, with the family-care script as the public face of a negotiated exit.

Raulston was hired in Yountville on June 30, 2023 — about a month after his National City resignation took effect.

The math

Yountville’s standard executive employment template, visible in the contracts the town has posted online for other directors, treats voluntary resignation cleanly: thirty days’ notice, no severance, just accrued vacation and any payments required by law.

Raulston is getting four months of paid administrative leave.

His base salary, set by a Second Amendment to his employment agreement effective July 15, 2025, is $286,440 a year. Four months of that is roughly $95,500 in salary alone, before the benefits and pension contributions that brought his 2024 total compensation to $418,615, according to Transparent California. The town has not posted any separation agreement, mutual release, or third amendment to his contract. As of Thursday afternoon, the public has no public-facing document explaining why a voluntary resignation triggered four months of paid not-working under terms that, on their face, the standard template doesn’t authorize.

There are two possible explanations. Either Raulston’s original June 2023 employment agreement was negotiated with non-template severance terms — in which case the agreement’s language has been hiding in plain sight on the town’s DocumentCenter for nearly three years — or there is a separation document executed Wednesday that hasn’t been released. The first is verifiable through a public records request. The second is, too. Whichever it is, residents of a town of fewer than 3,000 people are paying the bill, and the bill is significant.

The Second Amendment also reveals what was supposed to happen this year. Beginning in 2026 and continuing through 2030, Raulston’s base salary was scheduled to increase by 5 percent every year — but only “following a successful, annual performance evaluation during which the Town Manager receives a satisfactory rating or above.” The June 17, 2025 review found him satisfactory; the recital is in the amendment. The review scheduled for the closed session of April 29, 2026 — the one that ended in his resignation — is the one that didn’t happen. The 5 percent raise it would have triggered won’t either.

The timing

Raulston’s signature accomplishment, per the town’s own announcement, was completing the $11 million purchase of the former Yountville Elementary School site in April 2024 — the property now branded as the Yountville Commons. The town meant the acquisition to anchor a long-term workforce housing project of up to 150 units, intended to address a state-mandated requirement that Yountville produce 72 affordable units by 2031.

The project is in crisis. On March 4 of this year, resident Jessi Bugden filed a referendum to repeal the January 13 ordinance that established the Commons zoning district and approved a tentative subdivision map. By March 12, organizers had collected 235 signatures, well above the 180 required. On March 17, the council voted 4-0 to remove related agenda items.

Behind the citizen-led label, the opposition campaign has been substantially funded by Gary Jabara — a telecom billionaire who paid roughly $300 million in 2021 for The Estate Yountville, a 22-acre luxury hotel and vineyard complex in town. Jabara has been the most prominent public opponent of the Commons in council appearances. On April 1 of this year, Jabara filed a California Public Records Act request to Town Attorney Gary Bell, the funder pattern documented in a Wine Country Daily investigation published April 28.

The Yountville Town Council is scheduled to return to the Commons on May 7. That meeting will determine whether the town fights the referendum at the ballot or repeals the January ordinance. The man who shepherded the $11 million acquisition — the staff lead the council had directed to manage the next phase, including the selection of a neutral facilitator — is not on the agenda. He is on paid leave. The Commons returns to the council seven days from now, and the staff member who knows it best is gone.

The unanswered questions

Mayor Margie Mohler, who once defended the project by saying “we designed a Cadillac here,” issued a statement Wednesday praising Raulston’s “outstanding service, dedication, and tireless commitment.” She did not address the closed-session timing, the gap between his exit terms and the standard town template, or who will direct staff on Commons strategy at the May 7 meeting.

Raulston, asked for comment by The Press Democrat on Wednesday, did not immediately respond.

The next council action — and the next public release of any document explaining the financial terms of his departure — is the public’s first chance to see what was actually negotiated behind that closed-session door.

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