Dean J. Pucci has been with Jones Mayer for approximately 23 years and currently serves as the city attorney for the City of Bishop and Nevada City, as well as assistant city attorney for the cities of Citrus Heights, Clearlake, and Colusa. Mr. Pucci has previously served as assistant and chief deputy city attorney for the cities of Fullerton, Westminster, Costa Mesa, La Habra, and Whittier, primarily assigned to police, fire, building, planning, and code enforcement divisions of those cities.
Mr. Pucci’s entire legal career has been spent representing public agencies. Mr. Pucci has extensive experience handling complex personnel and labor issues. Mr. Pucci negotiates employer/employee MOUs and handles employee disciplinary matters throughout the state. Mr. Pucci has conducted hundreds of administrative/internal affairs investigations, hearings, and appeals for clients across the state, having served as both investigator and independently as lead counsel to the advisory/adjudicatory bodies. Mr. Pucci is also the only known city attorney/superior court appointed receiver statewide.
In addition to his experience as city attorney, Mr. Pucci’s legal experience includes police litigation and city prosecution. His practice has involved representing cities, counties, and the state as legal advisor to their chiefs of police or sheriffs and in that capacity has represented over 100 agencies throughout California. In this capacity, Mr. Pucci represented law enforcement management in a variety of contexts, including personnel disciplinary proceedings, civil rights litigation, constitutional law, appellate/writ practice, as well as conducted high-profile internal affairs investigations for departments across the state. Mr. Pucci has handled numerous complex litigation cases in both state and federal court, successfully defending municipal and county clients.
Mr. Pucci has also served as both designate and deputy city prosecutor for approximately thirteen California cities. In this capacity, Mr. Pucci was responsible for handling all aspects of the criminal prosecution of city municipal code violations. Specifically, Mr. Pucci has extensive experience litigating complex health and safety and housing matters and class action lawsuits in both state and federal courts involving allegations of constitutional violations and complex land use issues.
Mr. Pucci serves as the chair of the Municipal Law Handbook published by the League of California Cities. In that capacity Mr. Pucci supervises and coordinates the annual editorial revisions and publication of the preeminent statewide resource for public agency attorneys. Additionally, Mr. Pucci serves as general counsel to the California Association of Code Enforcement Officers.