Alejandro “Alex” Hernandez has two job titles and a full plate.
Since December, the National City police chief has also served as interim city manager — the latest placeholder in a search for permanent leadership rapidly approaching its one-year mark.
This recent opening came as former Del Mar City Manager Scott Huth, who came out of retirement in April 2025 to serve in the interim, reached his maximum allowable work hours on Dec. 5, 2025, under his California Public Employees’ Retirement System agreement — ending his tenure and prompting the council to turn to Hernandez.
The appointment wasn’t something Hernandez sought out. He said the idea originated with his fellow department directors, who nominated him for the role based on his leadership experience and training. The mayor then asked if he would volunteer for the position on an acting basis — initially for what was expected to be a short stint while the city completed its city manager search.
“To be honest with you, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea,” Hernandez said of stepping into the interim city manager position for a full six-month term. “But I saw that there was a need in our city and there was a leadership void, so I decided to move forward with it. I think doing otherwise would have been selfish.”
On a typical day, he said he begins by checking in with his two captains at the police department, who have divided the department between them — one overseeing operations and uniformed staff, the other handling administrative, civilian and detective functions. After that morning check-in, he walks across the street to city hall to focus on city management duties, while remaining available to both the captains and city directors throughout the day.
“It’s been very long hours and a lot of work for sure,” he said.
Ken Pulskamp, executive director of the California City Management Foundation, said although the move is relatively unusual, a police chief stepping in to fill the role of city manager isn’t unheard of. In fact, he said it happens more than one might think.
“It has been done before on many occasions,” he said. “I’m not sure I would say it’s normal, but it’s certainly not out of the ordinary.”
Pulskamp said when a city manager vacancy arises without a chosen replacement, councils generally have two options: recruit a retired city manager from outside, or turn to a trusted department head from within.
“Sometimes the council has a feeling like somebody who knows the community is important to have, and they want some continuity,” he said. “So they just go with one of the department heads that they know and trust and respect and have that person fill in on an interim basis while they recruit for the permanent position.”
In National City’s case, that recruitment period will hit its one-year mark in April, a fact City Councilmember Marcus Bush chalked up to a “failed recruitment process.”
“The council hasn’t been satisfied with the candidates, but I think we’ve had candidates that we could have gone with,” Bush said. “I think sometimes we need to give people an opportunity, a chance, and then go from there.”
Bush cited a lack of community engagement, employee input and a leadership transition in the city’s human resources department around the summer of 2025 that complicated matters further.
The search, he said, is now essentially restarting and no candidates have been named.
Mayor Ron Morrison said the city does not expect to have a permanent city manager in place by the time Hernandez’s term expires around the end of May. He said the position will be filled with another interim appointment.
“We have a plan in place,” Morrison said without naming names. “There will be someone capable of taking on that role, and we’re confident in that.”
Pulskamp said searches for a city manager can take a number of months, and it’s better for a council to name an interim instead of settling for a candidate who isn’t the right fit.
“It’s better to not make a decision than to make a bad decision,” he said.
Hernandez, for his part, said he has tried not to let the uncertainty of the timeline change his approach to the role. On the question of whether he views himself as merely keeping the seat warm, he was direct.
“I take this role very seriously,” he said. “I’m all about rolling my sleeves up and doing the work that needs to be done. The city has so many different projects going on and we can’t just stop the work. I think it’s a disservice to this community not to put all my effort into the role. I think it’s a disservice to the employees and the council.”
How did we get here?
National City’s struggle to fill the city manager post did not begin with Huth’s departure — or even with the search that preceded it.
Morrison traced the instability back further, to the departure of City Manager Brad Ralston in May 2023, which he described as a normal transition that nonetheless set things in motion.
What followed was anything but normal.
The city recruited Armando Vergara in 2023, first as interim and then as a permanent hire in June. By most accounts, Vergara was the right choice. Morrison said he believed Vergara “would’ve done a phenomenal job.” Bush, who also knew Vergara, agreed.
But the appointment lasted only days.
“He was working out excellently,” Morrison said. “But two days after we hired him, he had a heart attack and died suddenly. So that just left us with another void.”
The suddenness of Vergara’s death sent the organization into a scramble, Morrison said, with staff rushing to pick up the pieces.
The city’s next permanent hire, Ben Martinez, did not stabilize things as much as the city would have liked.
In August 2023, following Vergara’s death, the City Council appointed Martinez interim city manager. By December of that year, he was hired for the role permanently.
Morrison, who praised Martinez for filling a difficult role during a tumultuous time, was nonetheless candid in his assessment.
“He was basically having to be trained to be a city manager, which was not a position that he should have been thrown into,” Morrison said. “Since then, I think that there’s been some confusion with people and their roles. Both what their responsibilities are, what their limits are.”
Bush attributed Martinez’s departure to performance issues, including the mishandling of employee investigations.
“For me, it was mismanagement,” Bush said. “There was a lot with the city manager (Martinez), performance issues. Like investigations were getting mishandled, employee investigations — which are a very big deal. Those can result in lawsuits. And one of the investigations, which was a sexual harassment investigation, was completely mishandled and ended up leading to threats of a lawsuit or increased liability for us.”
Via a contentious 3-1 vote in April 2025 — with Bush opposed and Councilmember Jose Rodriguez abstaining — the City Council and Martinez agreed to “a mutual separation.”
Afterward, the city cycled back to interims — first Huth, and now Hernandez.
Morrison said the cumulative effect of years of leadership turnover has been a kind of organizational drift, with staff and even council members gradually stepping outside their defined roles.
“People at all levels forget their roles or forget what their boundaries are,” he said. “And as a result, that causes a lot of confusion. People sometimes have a hard time trying to figure out who it is they’re supposed to be reporting to and who they’re not, and they’re getting directions from too many different directions.”
Hernandez, who has spent 29 years with the National City Police Department and has watched the city’s leadership landscape shift over that time, said the dynamics with the council have at times been challenging — but was careful to distinguish between the council’s internal dynamics as a body and his own individual working relationships with each member.
“The interactions that they have is one thing,” he said. “The direct relationships that I have with them is a different thing. Individually, I always approach them as my bosses with respect and I feel like I have a really good relationship with them.”
What does a city manager actually do?
Pulskamp described the city manager’s function in straightforward terms: the city council sets policy, and the city manager is responsible for carrying it out — overseeing all city staff, building and managing the budget, and ensuring every municipal service runs as it should.
“They’re the boss for all of those people,” Pulskamp said. “If you compare it to the private sector, it’s like a CEO for the city.”
The qualities that make for a good city manager, Pulskamp said, go beyond administrative competence.
“It’s important that they’re a solid communicator,” he said. “It’s important that they conduct themselves with integrity, that they’re willing to work with the community, that they’re willing to work with the council to get a consensus to build a vision for the community. And then they just have to have a certain amount of technical skills.”
Those technical skills, he said, span municipal finance, planning, economic development and a working familiarity with the full range of city services — police, fire, parks and recreation, and beyond.
Typically, a city’s police chief answers directly to the city manager. Bush said their current situation hasn’t posed any challenges, as Hernandez now answers to the council instead of a city manager.
“If Alex (Hernandez) needed to raise a concern in his capacity as police chief, he would bring it directly to the council rather than to himself as city manager,” Bush said. “There hasn’t been any issues with dynamic.”
Hernandez said he has leaned into learning as much as he can about National City’s municipal issues, relying on city staff to bring him up to speed on areas outside his background in law enforcement.
“I’ve always been a life learner,” he said. “I kind of geek out on the idea of learning about our Balance Plan with the port, our housing, affordable housing, looking at land, how we do these deals. And it’s just been excellent having our staff teaching me.”
One of his first moves as acting city manager was appointing Martha Juarez — then serving as assistant city engineer — as acting deputy city manager. Hernandez described the pairing as deliberately complementary: his strengths lie in leadership, organizational structure and managing the city’s largest department, while Juarez brings expertise in capital improvement projects and a different operational perspective.
“She compliments me very well,” he said.
Looking ahead to the end of his tenure, Hernandez said he and Juarez have been actively planning for their successors, assessing whether the organization has the internal depth to sustain the momentum they have built — and cautioning against rushing to fill the seat for its own sake.
“I’m very fortunate to be surrounded with really good employees that have had some struggles with leadership because it’s been a revolving door at the city manager’s office,” Hernandez said. “And hopefully I’ve been a little bit of a keel to stabilize things and make sure that the city doesn’t rush to just find somebody just to fill a seat — they need to make the right choices moving forward for whoever the permanent city manager is going to be.”