Governor Gavin Newsom announced a series of appointments this week, with the majority of them involving positions at the California Department of Veterans Affairs.

Xochitl Rodriguez Murillo, 36, of Woodland, is the new deputy secretary of Minority Veterans Affairs. Murillo has a long history of public and military service.  She is the mayor of Woodland and, from 2018 to 2019, served as the appointments consultant for the Office of Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. She was a consultant for Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins in 2016. Murillo served in the U.S. Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and has been an Army Reserve since 2012.

Beth Muszyinski, 40, of Folsom, is now the assistant deputy secretary of Veterans Homes. She has been CalVet’s chief of Veterans Homes Operations since 2014, after serving as a project manager at the Little Hoover Commission from 2009 to 2014. Prior to that, she was a staff writer at the Davis Enterprise newspaper, from 2001 to 2009.

Lisa Peake, 53, of Sacramento, became the administrator of the Veterans Home of California (VHC)-Yountville, promoted from the deputy administrator position she’s held since the summer. Her long career in the Army included two deployments to Kosovo and another to Kuwait before spending her last three years in the military as Deputy U.S. property and fiscal officer for the California Army National Guard.

Stephanie Weaver, 45, of Sacramento, has been appointed deputy administrator of the VHC-Yountville. She brings year of experience in the health, mental health and substance abuse services administration, most recently as the senior director of SAFE Veterans Treatment and Recovery.

Steve Cope, 39, is now the administrator of VHC-Redding, where he had been the skilled nursing facility (SNF) administrator since 2017. He began working in the senior healthcare industry after serving in the U.S. Army as a medic, including a tour of duty of Afghanistan in 2010.

Jessica Koppes, 36, of Redding, replaces Cope as the skilled nursing facility administrator at VHC-Redding. She previously worked as the standards compliance coordinator at VHC-Redding, while also teaching business as an adjunct professor at Shasta College.

Caroline Vigil, 44, of Fresno, is the new skilled nursing facility administrator at VHC-Fresno, where she worked as a contracted SNF administrator for the past year. She has an excellent resume in healthcare, serving as an executive director and administrator at various facilities in the Central Valley since the early 1990s.