Valley Vision CEO Bill Mueller Stepping Down
September 27, 2019
Sacramento Business Journal
In this recent article from the Sacramento Business Journal, Downey Brand partner and flood protection attorney Scott Shapiro comments on Bill Mueller’s announced departure from the CEO position at Valley Vision. Scott also weighs in on Valley Vision’s choice for interim CEO, Meg Arnold. Scott currently serves as Valley Vision’s board chairman.
See full article below or view it online at Sacramento Business Journal.
By Emily Hamann for Sacramento Business Journal
Bill Mueller, CEO of Valley Vision, will be stepping down next year, the local research and advocacy group announced Friday.
Mueller will leave on Feb. 1, 2020.
“I’ve been at Valley Vision for 15 years,” Mueller said. “I think it’s important for any leader to think about when there is what I call a good exit.”
Mueller said the organization is in a good place, fiscally, and in terms of its board and mission.
“It’s a good time to hand the keys over to the next leaders who can take the organization to even higher heights,” Mueller said.
Mueller plans to start a consulting business.
“I’m getting back into the private sector, and hopefully contributing to prosperity and trying to make the world a better place, but doing it from a different seat,” he said.
Meg Arnold will serve as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.
Arnold has been working with Valley Vision in various capacities since 2014, including as managing director. She previously served as CEO of the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance.
“We just knew that she was the perfect person to provide that bridge,” said Scott Shapiro, Valley Vision’s board chairman and managing partner of law firm Downey Brand LLP.
Sacramento-based Valley Vision is a civic leadership group that works with public, private, nonprofit and community groups to try to improve the Sacramento region in key areas, including sustainability, agriculture, infrastructure, community health, and workforce development.
One of the group’s most challenging projects, Mueller said, was working with Sacramento County and local nonprofit health care systems to expand access to behavioral health care.
Mueller joined the organization in 2005. He was previously a manager with Intel Corp. in Folsom.
Mueller helped oversee an organizational shift at Valley Vision, where it expanded its staff and switched from working as more of a consulting group to an organization that launches its own board-led initiatives and conducts research.
“There needs to be a place outside of government, where government and business and civic groups, community groups and organized labor can sit around a table and talk to one another,”
Mueller said. “At the end of the day we’re all in this together. We are one region, one Sacramento area.
When he started, Shapiro said, “Valley Vision was a much smaller organization, it was just starting to find its footing as a safe place in the community to have conversations,” Shapiro said. Now, he said, it’s grown to become the place in the community to have big, tough conversations.
“Much of the DNA of the organization comes from Bill’s leadership,” Shapiro said.
The board will begin the process of finding a new CEO in the coming days, and plans to hire a permanent replacement in the first half of 2020.