The Sausalito City Council is expected to appoint Elaine Forbes as its next city manager at its May 5 meeting, bringing over a decade of experience with the Port of San Francisco to the office.

Beginning July 1, Forbes will succeed outgoing City Manager Chris Zapata, who is leaving to become an assistant county executive for Marin County.

Forbes’ experience includes nine years as director of the Port of San Francisco, where she oversaw waterfront infrastructure, maritime operations, public access and real estate management. She led a staff of 270 and helped advance major capital projects, including the Embarcadero Seawall Program and a $425 million bond initiative addressing earthquake and sea level rise risks.

“The challenges of sea level rise and infrastructure investment cannot be addressed through reactive decision making,” Forbes said in a letter to the Sausalito City Council. “They require a clear framework, sustained partnerships, and disciplined execution over time.”

Raised in the Bay Area, Forbes spent part of her childhood in San Rafael, where she attended Bahia Vista Elementary and Davidson Middle School. She holds a master’s degree in urban planning from Mills College and previously served as chief financial officer and deputy director for finance and administration at the Port of San Francisco. Earlier in her career, she worked with nonprofit land-use and economic-development organizations, including the Urban Strategies Council and the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

“Elaine is a seasoned local government executive who knows Sausalito well and brings an extraordinary combination of experience, judgment, and leadership,” said Sausalito Mayor Steven Woodside in a press release Wednesday.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.