Frank Adomitis

San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge David Williams has entered a judgment against the City of Highland and San Bernardino County in a legal action brought against them by 2016 Highland Ward District 4 city council candidate Frank Adomitis, who alleged the city and the county loaded the dice against political outsiders in last year’s election.
In particular, it appears, Williams found credible Adomitis’ contention that the city and the police/sheriff’s department militated in favor of John Timmer and Larry McCallon, incumbent councilmen running in the election who emerged victorious over, respectively, three challengers and a single challenger.
In the 2016 election, Highland, its political institutions and its office holders found themselves under an uncommon attack of historic significance. In the light of Williams’ ruling, it appears city officials reflexively sought to insulate the city’s powerful insiders from having to participate in an open and unbiased political process.
Traditionally since its 1987 founding, Highland’s elected leaders – the members of the city council from among whom they designated one of themselves on a rotational basis to serve as the city’s mayor – were elected in at-large elections in which all Highland residents of the age of majority were at liberty to run.
In 2014, however, Highland resident Lisa Garrett, who claimed Latino lineage, publicly asserted that the city’s Hispanic population was not properly represented given that approaching half of the city’s residents – 48 percent of its 53,104 citizens – are Hispanic and the city had never elected a Latino to the council. Represented by the Lancaster-based R. Rex Parris Law Firm, Malibu-based Shenkman and Hughes, along with attorney Milton C. Grimes of Los Angeles, Garrett filed a lawsuit, alleging that the city was violating the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 by continuing to hold at-large elections and not switching to a ward system whereby minority voters would stand a greater prospect of electing one of their own ranks to office.
In response to the lawsuit, the city council directed Highland City Attorney Craig Steele to draft documents that were later enacted by the council, placing a measure on the ballot in the November 2014 election, Measure T. Measure T would have divided the city into five voting districts. Ward district elections would have begun in 2016 with two districts. The remaining three districts would have been subject to the 2018 election, according to the terms of the measure. Two of those districts would have contained a majority of Hispanic voters, and a third ward would have been populated by residents, more than 40 percent of whom were Latino. On election day in 2014 and by absentee ballot, 6,655 of the city’s voters participated, with 43.01 percent, or 2,862 voting in favor of Measure T and 3,793 or 56.99 percent rejecting it.
Following that vote, Garrett’s lawsuit proceeded and the city sought to assuage the demand by proposing to allow cumulative voting, in which each voter is given one vote for each contested position and is allowed to cast any or all of those votes for any one candidate, or spread the votes among the candidates. When the matter went to trial, despite making a finding that the socioeconomic based rationale presented by the plaintiff’s attorneys to support the need for ward elections was irrelevant and that the plaintiff’s assertion that district voting was the only way to cure the alleged violation of the Voting Rights Act was false, San Bernardino Superior Court Judge David Cohn mandated that Highland adopt a ward system.
In this way, the 2016 election marked a major departure from the way things had been done previously in Highland. Up to that point, the City of Highland had evinced a substantial degree of stability in its politics, with its incumbents being consistently reelected.
In the 2016 election, two of the city’s longtime incumbents, Jody Scott and San Racadio, opted out of running. In the four contested contests under the newly implemented ward system, incumbents Larry McCallon and John Timmer did run.
Timmer, who had been zoned into the city’s Fourth District, found himself beset with three challengers, Russell “Rusty” Rutland, Frank Adomitis and Christy Marin. McCallon, whose residency put him in the Fifth District, invited a single challenger, Jerry Martin. No one challenged Penny Lilburn, a resident of the Third District. The First and Second district races featured no incumbents, and a field of newcomers – Jorge Osvaldo Heredia, Raymond Hilfer and Jesus “Jesse” Chavez in the First District and Anaeli Solano and Tony Collins Cifuentes in the Second District – threw their hats in the ring.
Curiously, City Hall facilitated a public forum for candidates that featured Timmer and McCallon in the Fourth and Fifth Districts but somehow excluded their challengers. That forum also involved Heredia, HIlfer and Chavez from the First District and Solano and Cifuentes from the Second District. That event was held in a city facility, known as the community room, which also doubled as the Highland Police Department’s training room. Highland contracts with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement services. In this way, the Highland sheriff’s substation is the Highland Police Department.
When Adomitis requested that the city allow the community room be utilized for a more inclusive candidate forum that would allow for a debate that included him, Rutland and Marin to participate, captain Tony DeCecio, the Highland sheriff’s substation commander and by extension Highland’s police chief, refused. DeCecio vetoed allowing the community room to be used for the forum because he did not want the department’s training facility tied up, notwithstanding that he had raised no objections to a similar event when the request had originated with the city.
Undeterred, Adomitis arranged to rent the events center owned by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians to hold the candidates forum. In his case, Adomitis invited all of the other candidates, including McCallon and Timmer, to participate. As it turned out, neither McCallon nor Timmer, nor any of their political allies participated in the forum at the San Manuel Reservation.
It remained an open question as to whether the city’s action in keeping McCallon’s and Timmer’s challengers at bay by not having them participate in a city-sponsored forum was a calculated effort to benefit the incumbents. As it turned out, the incumbents prevailed in the election.
Timmer, with 1,998 votes or 44.69 percent in District 4 outdistanced his closest competitor, Marin, who captured 1,190 votes, or 26.62 percent. Rutland came in third with 714 votes or 15.97 percent and Adomitis trailed the others with 569 votes or 12.73 percent.
McCallon, running head to head against Martin, won with 2,655 or 58.69 percent of the District 5 vote to Martin’s 1,869 votes or 41.31 percent.
In District 1, Chavez, with 649 votes or 39.99 percent, emerged victorious over Heredia, with 569 votes or 35.06 percent, and Hilfer, who drew 405 votes or 24.95 percent.
In District Two, Solano’s 895 votes or 59 percent beat Cifiuentes’ total of 622 votes or 41 percent.
Over the last part of 2016 and the first six months of 2017, what had occurred percolated with Adomitis, who developed the belief that the institution of Highland’s city government had indeed played favorites and purposefully disadvantaged the political outsiders challenging incumbents Timmer and McCallon.
In July Adomitis filed a legal action in San Bernardino County Superior Court against the city and county.
So open and shut was the matter that neither the City of Highland nor the County of San Bernardino deigned to have an attorney – either one from the Highland city attorney’s office nor the county’s stable of in-house lawyers known as the office of county counsel – contest that matter. Rather, the city sent Nancy Wayne, its administrative representative, to represent it. The county employed one of its risk management personnel, Rick Castanon, to appear for it.
Adomitis gave Wayne and Highland and Castanon and the county a shellacking in court. Judge David Williams ordered the county and the city to pay Adomitis the $2,690 he had to spend putting on the public forum, along with $90 in litigation costs.
-Mark Gutglueck