Carmen Medrano began working for the City of Gilroy’s finance department in 1972 as a part-time office hand while a freshman at Gilroy High School, as a temporary means for extra cash.
Thirty-seven years later, Medrano retired this week at age 55 as the current longest working city employee, after a lifelong career in the same department she began in.
“When I was hired full-time after high school, somebody had been here five years, and I remember thinking ‘Oh my, that’s a long time, I’m not going to be there that long,’” Medrano said.
But as the years went by, Medrano fell in love with her work in finance, and steadily moved up through different positions, where she eventually sat as a supervising accounting assistant.
“I’ve seen Gilroy grow a lot. We didn’t even have computers when I started,” she said, laughing.
A full-time empoyee and single mother of two, one in high school and the other in college, Medrano attended evening classes and obtained a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Phoenix in 2005.
“I always wanted to do that and it never happened, so I finally decided I needed to do it,” she said.
Her son, Michael Horta, said his mother’s example inspired him to seek a career with a city.
“I grew up in a public agency household, and I always knew I wanted to work for a municipality,” said Horta, who is the human resources director at Los Altos.
“I got to see the comradere she had at the city, how close her relationships were with coworkers, and I wanted that too,” he said.
Medrano’s supervisor, Barbara Voss, assistant finance director, said that Medrano will be “deeply missed.”
“I don’t think I could name all the things that are wonderful about Carmen. She is one of the originals in the city who were hired around the same time, and she knows everything there is to know about every area of finance,” Voss said.
Medrano, a Gilroy resident since the second grade, looks forward to staying in the area so she can spend more time with her son, daughter and three young grandchildren.
First on her retirement to-do list, however, is getting to all the house projects she has let pile up for the past 37 years.
“All these years, the weekend goes so fast. Before you know it, it’s Sunday night, and it’s back to work on Monday,” she said.
