By clicking on the blue portal below, you can download a PDF of the May 11 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 05-11-18

Daniel Panico, 73, and Mona Kirk, 51, will not be facing the felony child abuse charges that were lodged against them on March 2.
On May 2, Judge Joel Agron granted Deputy District Attorney Michelle Bergey’s motion to dismiss after hearing arguments submitted to the court by Panico’s attorney, Michael Kennedy, that the felony charges were unwarranted and unsupportable.
Upon being persuaded by Kennedy’s assertions, Bergey worked out a deal with Kennedy and Kirk’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Elizabeth Crabtree, in which three misdemeanor PC 273 A (4) child endangerment and three misdemeanor 270.1 failure to address truancy charges were filed against Panico in place of the three PC 273 felony child abuse charges that were withdrawn. Likewise Kirk was recharged, this time with three misdemeanor PC 273 A (4) child endangerment and three misdemeanor 270.1 failure to address truancy charges supplanting the vacated felony charges against her.
Overmatched and buffeted by financial circumstance while struggling to make ends meet, Kirk and Panico were arrested February 28 after they and their three children were found living within a 20-foot by 10-foot by 4-foot high plywood hovel on the couple’s forlorn property in the 7000 block of Sun Fair Road in Joshua Tree.
Deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s Morongo Basin Station on February 28 were conducting an area check related to what was believed to be an abandoned trailer off of Sun Fair Road, an unpaved trail off Highway 62. While in the area, the deputies spotted a trailer which appeared to be abandoned, and a large rectangular box made of plywood on private property. Approximately 30 to 40 cats were located inside the trailer and roaming freely. Thereafter, the deputies came across the family, which included Kirk, Panico and three of their children, aged 11, 13 and 14, subsisting in what authorities called an “unsanitary, unsafe and unsuitable environment.”
According to the sheriff’s department, “During the investigation, deputies learned the three victims have lived in the large rectangular box (approximately 20 feet long by 4 feet high by 10 ft wide) for approximately four years. The victims were found to have an inadequate amount of food and were living in an unsuitable and unsafe environment due to the conditions located on the property. [The San Bernardino County Department of] Children and Family Service responded to the location and took custody of the three victims. The property had no electricity or running water. Several large holes and mounds of trash and human feces were located throughout the property.”
Kirk and Panico were arrested and booked into the Morongo Basin Jail for Penal Code 273 (A), willful cruelty to a child in lieu of $100,000 bail.
Panico and Kirk came before Judge Bert Swift in the Joshua Tree and both pleaded not guilty to the three charges of child abuse lodged against them. Swift set bail of $300,000 each, and they were whisked away to West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga.
The property where the five lived is less than three-quarters of a mile as the crow flies from Highway 62, also known as the 29 Palms Highway. Little of the property is visible to the outside world, as it is covered in creosote and sparse desert vegetation which hides it from the few passers-by traversing the area.
Media reports that reproduced verbiage in the sheriff’s department press report generated shock and hostility toward Panico and Kirk, but within a fortnight details emerged which indicated that the sheriff’s department’s characterizations were less than completely factual.
Panico had moved with his family into an eight-foot wide, 24-foot long Prowler trailer on the property after a home he had been paying token rent on was no longer available following the death of the owner who was allowing the family to stay there. Initially, the family had been living in the trailer, but at some point left it to take up quarters in the structure Panico had constructed, using various types of plywood for its sides and tarps for a roof. Though unheated, insulation from the ground was provided by means of mattresses and blankets. At least 30 cats, which the family had adopted, were living on the property, as well. Panico had allowed the cats to live in the trailer to shelter them from marauding coyotes, feral dogs and other predators.
The report that the children were undernourished proved to be a fabrication. Panico regularly ventured into the town of Yucca Valley on a bicycle, where he purchased food for his family. Locals said they had never seen Kirk or the children with him. Moreover, though there were no utilities on their Joshua Tree property, the family had access to showers and kitchen facilities at vacation homes that Kirk and Panico were caretakers on.
Within two weeks, the couple was released but was initially prevented by Child Protective Services from having any contact with their children. The children were removed to a home nearly 150 miles distant from Joshua Tree. More recently, Panico and Kirk have been allowed to have three to four hours of contact with the children on Saturdays.
It was determined that the children were not enrolled with the Morongo Unified School District.
In the deal brokered between Kennedy, Crabtree and Bergey, there was no agreement that Panico and Kirk would concede guilt on the misdemeanor charges, and Kennedy and Crabtree remain purposed to exonerate their clients. Meanwhile, friends and family members have arranged for Panico and Kirk to move into a house, which is large enough and suitable to accommodate their family if the parents are reunited with their children.
Kennedy said, “I have not gone along with this reduction in the child abuse allegations as a prelude to bargaining for a plea to misdemeanor child endangerment, because there simply was none and I’m not a plea-bargain mill. Reducing the gravity of the accusation should assist in speeding up reunification, which is the sole goal the able public defender and I have in this matter. Every day of disruption in this family unit by government is an ambulating outrage by a government that pretends to care about people but which increasingly cares only about itself and its turf, which is closing in on the precincts of liberty.”
Sheriff’s Captain Trevis Newport, who heads the Morongo Valley Sheriff’s Station, attempted to justify the misrepresentations contained in the press release relating to the Panico and Kirk arrests and the investigative tactics used by the deputies who interrogated the arrestees when they falsely told them that their children had claimed not to have eaten in a week. Transcripts of what the children actually said show they truthfully told the sheriff’s deputies they had eaten that day. Newport acknowledged to Jené Estrada, a reporter with the Hi-Desert Star that the sheriff’s department prevaricated when it claimed the family was homeless, conceding Panico and his wife and children were “not necessarily a homeless family. They had a home. They had a trailer.”
Nevertheless, Newport said the department had erred on the side of protecting the children. “For us, they had a home. How they choose to live was the issue,” he told Estrada. “When we have children living in an environment like that and we’re being told certain things, it is our responsibility to protect those children.”
-Mark Gutglueck

Billy Green, a 19-year member of the department, has been promoted to Fontana police chief.
Green succeeds Bob Ramsey, who is moving into retirement after two years at the helm.
Green, 45, who grew up in nearby Ontario, is a Marine Corps veteran. He has served in several progressively more advanced positions with the department, including detective, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, special weapons and tactics team commander, school district police chief and a member of the Inland Valley Special Weapons and Tactics Team.

Billy Green

“I am humbled to follow in the footsteps of the department’s previous chiefs and extremely grateful to my mentors for taking the time to teach me,” Green said in a prepared statement on May 8, the day he was sworn in. “Chief Ramsey is leaving the Fontana Police Department in an all-around great place and I am looking forward to building on the momentum he generated.”
Green is the tenth police chief in the department’s 66-year history. He follows in the footsteps of Henry Young, Joe Uhalley, Ben Abernathy, Ed Stout, Sam Scott, Frank Scialdone, Larry Clark, Rod Jones and Ramsey.
Young was chosen to serve as Fontana’s first police chief when the department came into existence with the 1952 incorporation of Fontana. Young was a policeman with the Upland Police Department, where he had been a protégé of Eugene Mueller, who had been Upland police chief prior to being elected San Bernardino County Sheriff in 1950. Young remained as Fontana police chief for 18 years, retiring in 1970.
Young was succeeded by Joe Uhalley, who remained as chief for eleven years and is remembered as a progressive department leader who modernized the department’s function.
Ben Abernathy succeeded Uhalley in 1981, and served as chief until 1988. Many of those who worked under Abernathy, including some of the chiefs who succeeded him, consider him to be the model of an outstanding police chief. “Ben in my opinion was the best chief the department ever had,” said Scialdone. “You would have had to work for Ben to understand this. His leadership was without question.” After retiring, Abernathy served four years on the Fontana City Council.
Ed Stout succeeded Abernathy, serving from 1989 to 1993. He oversaw the department during a significant downsizing due to financial issues the city was confronted with at the time.
Sam Scott, who had come into law enforcement through his service as a military policeman during the Viet Nam War, thereafter went to work for Fontana PD and achieved the rank of lieutenant under Abernathy and captain under Stout. He was the department’s fifth chief, serving from 1994 to 1999.
Scott was followed by Scialdone, who was chief from 1999 to 2004; Clark, who was chief from 2004 to 2007; Jones, who was chief from 2008 to 2016; followed by Ramsey.
Generally, with slight deviation, the tenures of Fontana’s police chiefs, as with the chiefs of many other police departments, have grown progressively shorter over the years.
Scialdone, who after retiring served on the Fontana City Council and then a stint as mayor, offered his theory as to why modern police chiefs remain in the position for fewer years than their predecessors.
“There are several reasons, in my opinion,” said Scialdone. “First is how long it takes someone to rise to the rank of chief, usually 25 years or more. What this means is by the time they reach the chief level they are already close to retirement. Secondly, being a chief is a hard and time-consuming job if done right. My average work week was 60-plus hours. You are always on call. And when the phone rings in the middle of the night, it is never good news. Third, it is harder today to be a chief than when I was a chief. You are always under the microscope. Everyone thinks they can do a better job than you. They think they know better than you how to run your department and about use of force. Fourth is the retirement issue. Being able to retire at 90 percent of your top pay after 30 years is attractive. At some point the chief begins losing money by continuing to work. For example, in Fontana the sworn personnel pay 10.75 percent of their salary into retirement. So if a chief continues to work after reaching the level where he will be receiving 90 percent of his salary, he is actually losing 0.75 percent of income. In other words, he is paying the city to work for it. Fifth and last is the political atmosphere. Both elected officials and police officer associations [i.e., police officer unions] can take a chief out without cause. So if you become a chief prior to age 50 and lose your job, you have no income until you reach age 50, or you have to take a significant cut in your retirement.”
-Mark Gutglueck

A full year after rerouting aircraft from the east headed to Ontario International Airport onto a flight path almost directly over Lake Arrowhead, the Federal Aviation Administration late last month adjusted its policy to alleviate the sound impacts to the community during evening hours.
On April 27, 2017, the Federal Aviation Administration initiated its Southern California Metroplex Project, which was intended to increase the efficiency of the approaches into five Southern California commercial airports and reduce fuel consumption. The revised routing, based on pre-set satellite navigation beams, diverted westbound planes formerly headed to Ontario International Airport from their previous trajectory over the San Bernardino Mountains using Heaps Peak as a pass-over locus to the airspace above 5,100 foot elevation Lake Arrowhead. With those planes flying at anywhere from an elevation of 7,200 feet to 9,600 feet on what is referred to as the EAGLZ route, those planes passed somewhere between 2,100 feet to 4,500 feet over the homes, schools and businesses of Lake Arrowhead.
Lake Arrowhead residents found the resultant engine noise to be anywhere on the scale from mildly irritating to absolutely unbearable. There were conflicting figures as to how many planes come into Ontario on the EAGLZ route daily, with the Federal Aviation Administration acknowledging an average of no fewer than 29. Anecdotal counts by residents put that number at closer to 80 per day. Furthermore, Lake Arrowhead residents said that an internet site, www.Planefinder.net documented planes flying as low as 1,640 feet above Lake Arrowhead.
In short order Lake Arrowhead residents began importuning their governmental representatives, ranging from Second District San Bernardino County Supervisor Janice Rutherford to Assemblyman Jay Obernolte to Congressman Paul Cook to U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, to seek a solution.
Lake Arrowhead resident David Caine formed the group Quiet Skies Lake Arrowhead, which redoubled those efforts and initiated a petition-gathering drive which netted 4,000 signatures on a resolution requesting the route to be changed. Some residents advocated legal action, which resulted in Rutherford and her representatives insisting that such an approach would not have a salutary effect, and might even harden the Federal Aviation Administration’s position. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) maintained that it had served public notice of the Metroplex Project and the EAGLZ route in a way that was legally adequate, had engaged in public outreach and held information workshops, all ahead of making the change.
While 365 days after the initiation of EAGLZ, planes continued to fly almost directly over Lake Arrowhead during daylight hours, Southern California’s terminal control center began vectoring Ontario Airport’s nighttime arrivals onto a path east of the EAGLZ arrival route.
The FAA in January signaled that it was working toward making just such a change in the flight path during evening hours, which it said would be forthcoming this spring. Just ahead of the change, which came upon the one-year anniversary of the April 27, 2017 switch to the EAGLZ route, the FAA through its special programs office and regional administrator, Dennis Roberts, announced the change.
The adjustment was welcomed throughout the community, but others have hastened to point out that several daytime flights at an approximate altitude of 7,700 feet pass over 5,780-foot elevation Rim of the World High School, a clearance of some 1,920 feet, on a daily basis.
San Bernardino County Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford on April 26 released a statement. “Hopefully, the new route will lessen the impacts of the FAA’s poor decision to reroute flights over Lake Arrowhead last year,” Rutherford said. “But we aren’t spiking the football yet. We have to continue working to encourage the FAA to make additional changes to fully address residents’ concerns about commercial jets buzzing their community.”
-Mark Gutglueck

San Bernardino County’s two incorporated communities lying along California State Route 62 have become the latest to move to adopt electoral ward representation systems. Both the City of Twentynine Palms and the Town of Yucca Valley have divided themselves into five separate districts, from each of which a member of the city or town council will be elected.
Though Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley were forced into making the change from their historical policy of electing their political leadership in at-large elections by threats of legal action from activist groups and law firms which said they were seeking the change to empower the Latino population within each of the jurisdictions, the end result is that neither has created electoral maps that are likely to ensure that so-called protected minorities will be enfranchised in the political process. Rather, the change effectuated enhances the prospect that the current set of incumbents will be reelected during forseeable upcoming election cycles.
Both Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley were included in the rash of San Bernardino County’s cities being threatened with legal action if demands that future city council elections be changed from at-large to district-based are not met. While officials with both municipalities made a display of knuckling under to that pressure, they simultaneously manipulated the circumstance to benefit themselves.
Previously, Chino Hills, Chino, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, Highland and Redlands moved to change their election systems to create wards which can only be represented by those living within them. By the same token each ward carries with it a residency requirement by which only those living within the ward can vote for that particular confine’s leadership.
Highland was the first San Bernardino County city served with a demand that it alter the way it elects its council members. A subsequent lawsuit was filed July 18, 2014 in San Bernardino Superior Court by a Lancaster-based lawyer, R. Rex Parris, the Malibu-based law firm Shenkman & Hughes and the Los Angeles-based Law Office of Milton C. Grimes on behalf of Lisa Garrett, a Latina resident of Highland. In response, the city put an initiative on the November 2014 ballot, Measure T, asking if the city’s residents were in favor of a ward system. Measure T went down to defeat, with 2,862 votes, or 43.01 percent, in favor and 3,793, or 56.99 percent, opposed. The lawsuit proceeded. 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 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 December 2015 Kevin Shenkman, using the letterhead of his firm, Shenkman & Hughes, sent boilerplate letters to the cities of Chino, Upland and Rancho Cucamonga, among nearly a dozen others in Southern California, noting the cities “rel[ied] upon at-large election system[s] for electing candidates to [their] city council[s]” and charged that “voting within [those cities] is racially polarized, resulting in minority vote dilution, and therefore [those cities’] at large elections are violative of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. It is our belief [those cities’] at-large system[s] dilute the ability of minority residents – particularly Latinos (a “protected class”) – to elect candidates of their choice or otherwise influence the outcome of [those cities’] council elections.” In those letters, Shenkman threatened to sue the cities “on behalf of residents” if those cities’ at-large council systems were not replaced by ones based on district representation.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, known by its acronym MALDEF, also got in on the act, sending a letter to the Chino Hills City Council in August 2016 informing that body’s members that unspecified Hispanic residents of Chino Hills had complained of polarized voting in the community.
MALDEF attorney Matthew Barragen demanded that Chino Hills dispense with its at-large election system that had been in place since the city’s inception in 1991. Barragan maintained the at-large election system in Chino Hills interfered with Latino voters electing candidates that they favor. Barragan called upon the city council to adopt a resolution converting Chino Hills’ election process into one involving wards, threatening forthcoming legal action if the city council did not do just that.
The California Voter Rights Act confers a significant advantage upon plaintiffs using it to allege what is termed racially-polarized voting, such that even if the challenge does not succeed a plaintiff is not required to pay the prevailing city’s legal fees. Conversely, a city which fails to vindicate itself in the face of such a challenge must pay the legal fees of the prevailing party.
While many city officials and residents in cities where racially polarized voting has been alleged have denied those charges and expressed umbrage at the suggestion that there is systemic or institutionalized racial bias built into their political establishments, in recent years most have not resisted being forced into adopting ward systems. That is because a handful of California cities that resisted challenges made to their election systems under the California Voting Rights Act were unsuccessful in their legal defenses and were forced by the courts to pay substantial amounts to cover those legal fees.
While city after city – Highland, Chino Hills, Chino, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and Redlands – have complied with the demands for shifts to ward systems, with each succeeding capitulation public officials are getting more sophisticated and creatively resistant.
The City of Chino Hills, which currently and formerly had Hispanics on its city council, responded to MALDEF and Barragan by adopting an electoral map that meets the letter of the California Voting Rights Act but which created districts that actually make it less likely that a Latino or Latina will be elected to the city council. That is because Hispanics do not comprise anything approaching a plurality in Chino Hills. Moreover, the demographic distribution of the population in Chino Hills is such that constructing a Latino majority or plurality district would require an extraordinary feat of gerrymandering. While Hispanics in Chino Hills significantly outnumber the black population, 28.9 percent to 4.2 percent, Latinos are simultaneously outnumbered by both the white and Asian population in the city. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in Chino Hills in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the Asian descent population stands at 31.8 percent and the white population at 50.7 percent. The district map drawn up and ratified by the city council in June provides for five districts, in all of which there is either a white or Asian-extraction plurality.
After Twentynine Palms last year was served with a letter from attorney Kevin Shenkman saying it was in violation of the California Voters Rights Act and that if it did not comply with a notice of intent to form electoral districts within 90 days that legal action would ensue, it took its cue from Chino Hills and went through the motions. The city hired a demographer to determine its racial/ethnic mix. Based upon that study and the guidance of City Attorney A. Patrick Munoz, who is himself Hispanic, the city finessed the issue, settling on a map dividing Twentynine Palms and the Marine base into five districts on February 27. The new political divisions did not create a Hispanic ward, as 20.8 percent of the city’s population is Hispanic, which is more or less evenly distributed throughout the city geographically. The map does, however, ensure that the incumbent members of the council will not need to run against one another. In November, the council positions held by Dan Mintz, John Cole and McArthur Wright will be up for election in separate contests.
Ultimately, Shenkman accepted the city’s map, but filed a $33,000 demand letter that the city cover his expenses. For many, this was seen as an illustration that Shenkman’s goal was not to achieve political empowerment for minorities or Hispanics in particular but was rather a mercenary one.
Last month, the Town of Yucca Valley’s electoral map was approved by the town council, dividing the city into five districts. That districting effort, however, did not result in the creation of a Latino-majority ward. In its ultimate response to Shenkman’s demands, the town took more care in gerrymandering all of the five existing council members into their own districts than in ensuring that one of the districts would be heavily Latino, which in any event would have been difficult to do, since according to the 2010 census, the Hispanic population in Yucca Valley was 3,679 persons, or 17.8 percent of its 20,700 total residents. The best the demographers and mapmakers could do was to create one district in which 29 percent of the residents are Hispanic.
While the challenge of protecting the incumbent council members under the new voting system was a daunting one given that three of the members live relatively close together in what is considered to be the town’s most affluent section, a bit of creative map drawing cured that problem. What appears to be a completely gratuities zigzag in the map bifurcates the area known as Sky Harbor, putting the town’s current mayor, Rick Denison, and current councilman and former Mayor Robert Lombardo in separate districts. Had the uneven line not been laid into the map, Denison, whose term ends this year, would have very likely been challenged by Lombardo, whose term does not end until 2020. If Lombardo were in Denison’s district and did not run against him this year, then he would have been allowed to remain on the council until 2020, but would have not been eligible to run again until the seat Denison will run for later this year is up for reelection again in 2020.
Indeed, each of the districts approved host one incumbent member of the council.
Shenkman made some rumbling to the effect that the city’s drawing of the ward map so that the future candidacies of the current crop of city officeholders did not threaten the candidacies of their colleagues violated the California Constitution, which maintains that incumbency cannot be used as a criterion in drawing political jurisdictions.
But to ward off Shenkman, the city retained another attorney, Marguerite Leoni. According to Leoni, the portion of the state Constitution Shenkman cited applies only to state and federal legislative districts and not city council districts or those for other local office.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken [and] repeated over and over again that … avoiding contests between incumbents is a classic, well-recognized district[ing] consideration,” she said. She said the local electorate has already expressed a preference for those holding office and that it is the council’s purview to honor the electorate’s past choice. “Your community elected you and this process is not intended to put you out of office,” she asserted.
One rather unique feature of the Yucca Valley electoral map is that each of the districts, in addition to encompassing an area in which roughly one fifth of the city’s current 21,800 residents live, contains a portion of Highway 62, also known as the 29 Palms Highway, the town’s main drag and most commercialized area. Thus, each ward contains a fair portion of the town’s business entities.
–Mark Gutglueck

By Amanda Frye and Mark Gutglueck
The county’s public works department is gravitating toward using an organic process to remediate the polluting of the local water supply that has manifested at the eastern end of the Central Inland Valley.
That pollution is emanating from the long-defunct Yucaipa landfill, which was closed in 1980. The landfill, located on the southeastern slope of the Crafton Hills, was shuttered after sources of readily available soil to cover the contents of the landfill grew difficult or too expensive to obtain, and the nearby San Timoteo Landfill, which presented a more economically expedient alternative, opened. The Yucaipa landfill was unlined, consisting of approximately 25 acres where refuse was deposited within a surrounding 560-acre parcel along the 34200 block of Oak Glen Road, approximately one mile northeast of the intersection of Oak Glen Road and Yucaipa Boulevard in the city of Yucaipa. It was owned by the County of San Bernardino and operated by the county or a series of its contractors as a Class III municipal solid waste landfill from 1963 to 1980. During its operation, the landfill accepted inert, nonhazardous, municipal, construction/demolition, and agricultural wastes.
In 1981, a two-foot-to-four-foot-thick soil cover was placed over the site, and efforts were made to control surface water runoff and erosion in the area through grading.
Subsequent to the closing of the Yucaipa landfill, new standards relating to phasing refuse facilities out of operation and capping them were introduced by the State of California. At least some of the issues plaguing the site now, 38 years after its closure, stem from the haphazard methods used in shuttering the facility.
Efforts to monitor potential contamination migrating from the site began in earnest eight years after the landfill’ closure with the sinking of four test wells on and around the site. Another more strategically located well was sunk the following year, in 1989. Nothing alarming showed up in the samples drawn from those wells over a nearly-six-year-long period. In March 1994, two further groundwater monitoring wells were installed, along with four soil-pore gas monitoring probes. In October 1994 volatile organic compounds turned up in samples obtained from downgradient groundwater monitoring wells and the county notified the California Regional Water Quality Control Board of a potential contaminant release.
Further efforts to control water runoff were made with the creation of a network of concrete-lined drainage swales and an approximately 1.5-acre sediment retention basin in 1997, together with the construction of a surface-water diversion channel in 2005. The county’s solid waste management district also constructed a landfill gas collection system that began operation in February 2008.
Over the years, 17 additional groundwater monitoring wells were installed to augment the first seven within and in proximity to the site. It was determined that groundwater flow and contaminant transport was being directed to the southwest.
The Yucaipa landfill site is located near the northeastern limits of the Yucaipa Hydro Subarea. Surface water is carried by several drainages in the vicinity of the Yucaipa subbasin, including Oak Glen Creek, Wilson Creek and Gateway Wash. The ground water in that area is utilized for municipal and domestic supply, agricultural supply, industrial service supply, and industrial process supply.
According to Harold Zamora, the chief engineer with San Bernardino County’s Public Works Department, contaminants for the Yucaipa landfill are leaking into the water table, representing a significant risk to the nearby population.
“Groundwater investigations completed by the county’s solid waste management district indicate volatile organic compounds in groundwater are migrating away from areas adjacent to the Yucaipa disposal site. These investigations have included evaluation monitoring program studies to determine the nature and extent of impacts to groundwater, engineering feasibility studies to evaluate and select the most appropriate remedial response to groundwater impacts, and a pilot study to demonstrate the suitability and practical application of the selected corrective action.”
According to Zamora, a study completed by an engineering outfit based in San Bernardino, Geo-Logic Associates, identified chlorinated ethenes, including the solvent tetrachloroethene (PCE) and its breakdown products [trichloroethene (TCE), cis-1,2-dichloroethene (cDCE), and vinyl chloride (VC)] as present in groundwater samples collected downgradient of the Yucaipa landfill. “The measured concentrations at some monitoring wells exceed both the United States Environmental Protection Agency and California Department of Health Services maximum contaminant levels that have been established for these compounds,” the Geo-Logic study states. “These chemicals are suspected human carcinogens that can affect (and damage) several body organs and systems such as the central nervous system, respiratory system, liver, kidneys, and heart, and may cause contact dermatitis of the skin.”
According to Zamora and Geo-Logic, the chemical contamination can be redressed by stimulating the growth of existing bacteria in the groundwater that will feed upon the substances and through the metabolic process neutralize them, rendering the water safe. The effectiveness of that approach was demonstrated in a small scale application of the technology, according to Geo-Logic. “Based on the feasibility analyses and results of the pilot study for corrective action, it is concluded that project objectives could best be met by installing a network of groundwater injection wells to permit delivery of nutrients to naturally-occurring bacteria residing in the subsurface,” according to Geo-Logic. “When stimulated, these bacteria consume and sequentially destroy tetrachloroethene and its daughter products until only the inert compounds of ethene and ethane remain. The pilot study concluded aquifer inoculation with additional bacteria colonies was required to fully mitigate chlorinated ethene impacts to groundwater downgradient of the Yucaipa landfill.”
Potentially impacted by the contamination is the 2,200 household Chapman Heights subdivision and nearby golf course that were constructed after the landfill was shuttered. The City of Redlands also has a water well downstream on Yucaipa Boulevard. There is a public trail and soccer park proximate to the former landfill location. Recently, county workers or contractors have been drilling new vaporizing wells at the site.
At this point, the county public works department and the solid waste management department have put together a remedial action plan to support mitigation of volatile organic compound impacts to groundwater downgradient of the former Yucaipa landfill. The county is making the document available for public inspection at:
https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/esi/uploads/geo_report/5728637933/L10002935365.pdf
Members of the public can attempt to provide comment on the remediation plan by calling Geo-Logic Associates at (909) 383-8728, or Chris Saed with the county’s public works department at (909) 386-8761, Sharon Bishop with the county’s public works division at (909) 386-8629 or Kevin Blakeslee, who is the county’s director of public works, at (909) 387-7906.

Local residents are mourning the death of Kathy Binks, a longtime Fontana resident who went from being an outsider and dissident at the Fontana Unified School District, transforming from one of the most vociferous critics of its operations and the status quo and politics embodied by its governing board, to becoming herself a member of the establishment that ran the district and controlled its direction for approaching two-and-a-half decades. She passed away on May 3.
Binks with her husband, Dean Binks, took at-risk children into their family-owned Ettie Lee Home for Boys in north Fontana, assuming the responsibility of being guardians to hundreds of school-age charges over a succession of decades. As a consequence, she became actively involved in educational issues within the school district, and in time came to loggerheads with several then-members of the school board, in particular Bill Tunney, John Piazza, and Timon Covert, and occasionally with then-superintendent Elton Etheridge, against whom allegations of nepotism were sounded because his wife Patsy had risen to the position of a school principal. Over the course of several years, Binks and her sidekick, Linda Scialdone, established themselves as persona non grata with board’s ruling coalition. In 1987, Binks garnered support from enough of the parents in the district to get elected to the board herself, and she remained as a board member for nearly a quarter century, serving multiple stints as board president.

Kathy Binks

In time, she grew into an institution with the district, as much or more of an establishment and status quo figure than those she had railed against in the 1980s. So invested in and identified with the district had she become that when a succeeding generation of dissidents who like her two and three decades previously had differences with how the district was being managed and its students educated, she became their target. Ironically, she suffered the arrow wounds from the same types of charges, including nepotism, that she had once slung at Etheridge, over some of her family members as well as some of the foster children she had raised achieving positions of responsibility with the district. She took those shots with grace.
She was so highly thought of among her peers that in 2007, the district named Kathy Binks Elementary School after her.
Linda Scialdone, her sister dissident from the 1980s, said, “I feel blessed to have known Kathy for more than 40 years. Her giant personality attracted me to her immediately. She had the ability to relate to almost everyone and work with them to accomplish positive things for the school district and city. Kathy had the knack of being able to have people see her vision and become part of it. Even if you disagreed about something with her, she had the type of personality where you could never be mad at her. Our families grew up together and it saddens our hearts to know that Kathy is no longer with us. While I am saddened at the loss of Kathy, I am happy to know that the values and knowledge that Kathy and Dean instilled in their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will have a long lasting positive effect on our community.”
Linda’s husband, Frank, another Fontana establishment figure whose tenure as a police officer, police captain, police chief, city councilman and mayor overlapped with Binks’ activism and later presence on the school board, said, “Kathy was one of a kind, loving, caring, passionate, giving and most of all committed to the children of our community. She and Dean spent more than 40 years operating a group home for boys in Fontana. The positive effects of this can be seen in the many cases of boys who were in her home going on to become well-rounded adults. Their love for Kathy and Dean did not go away when they left their home. Every holiday they were either visited or called by former boys who just want to check in and say thanks.”
Frank Scialdone continued, “Kathy gave more than 40 years of her life to the Fontana Unified School District as a parent volunteer, PTA president and 24 years as a school board member. Kathy knew kids better than anyone I have known. That is why in my opinion she was the best school board member the Fontana Unified School District has ever had. Her love for all kids was always her driving principle.”
Binks’ service to the community went beyond her efforts with the school district, Frank Scialdone said.
“She was co-founder of the Fontana Boys and Girls Club with former Fontana Police Chief Ed Stout,” he said. “She was a lifelong member of the board of directors for the club. She loved the Fontana community. She helped raise money for the American Red Cross and had been involved in the Fontana Days Parade as an announcer for decades. She was a volunteer and advocate for the annual Black History Parade. She never forgot her friends and each Christmas would gather a group to go from house to house to sing Christmas carols. This really meant a lot to those who had no family.”
Frank Scialdone said, “I will miss Kathy for her advice, love and most of all for what she has done for the children of our community. She was truly one of a kind. There is no doubt in my mind that she is in Heaven giving God an earful about what needs to be done in this world to help our kids.”
Visitation for her is to be held on Friday, May 18, 2018 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Ingold Funeral Home 8277 Juniper Avenue in Fontana. Her funeral service is to take place on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at 12:30 p.m. at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at 7526 Alder Avenue in Fontana. She is to be interred at Green Acres Memorial Park at 11715 Cedar Avenue in Bloomington.
-Mark Gutglueck

The round-tailed ground squirrel, known scientifically as Xerospermophilus tereticaudus and referred to in Spanish as the “ardillón cola redonda,” lives in the desert of the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. They are also called ground squirrels because they burrow in loose soil, often under mesquite trees and creosote bushes.
Extremely small and light, round-tailed ground squirrels usually weigh little more than 4 grams (0.1409 ounce). Adults weigh around 125 grams (4.4 ounces), slightly over one quarter pound. All sport long round tails. They have hairy hind feet. The external top sides of their bodies are sandy in color with no fur markings, matching the soil they burrow into. The underside of their bodies are usually a lighter shade. Round-tailed squirrels average eight to 11 inches in length, including a 2.4 inch to 4.4 inch tail.
This species occurs in sandy desert in low, flat areas, commonly in communities dominated by mesquite and creosotebush; it avoids rocky hills. The squirrels nevertheless have a tolerance of a broad range of habitats. They are found in urban areas and parks. Ground squirrels are well-adapted to desert life. They can stay active even on the hottest of days, although they do tend to limit their activity during the heat of the afternoon sun. They live underground in the winter, typically from late August or September until January or February. They go into torpor, but do not hibernate.
They have a semicolonial social structure, and will alert others of impending danger with a high-pitched alarm call. But they will chase away other ground squirrels that get too close to their own burrow. The males are dominant during the breeding season, which lasts from January through to the beginning of March. The females dominate during raising of the young, in the months of March and April.
The gestation period for round-tailed squirrels is 28 days. Five to six pups are typically born in each litter. They reach sexual maturity at 325 days. There is little information on the longevity of these animals, but one wild-born specimen lived to approximately 8.9 years in captivity. These rodents are prey animals for coyotes, badgers, hawks and snakes.
Omnivorous, the bulk of their diet is green vegetation, especially in the summer. They also eat seeds and insects (ants, termites, and grasshoppers). Most of their foods are chosen for high water content because of the shortage of available water in their environment. The average water content of the food they eat is 80 percent.
This species is common to very common, and does not appear to be threatened with extinction because of its numbers and dispersion. For this species, densities vary with stage-of-life-cycle, with reported numbers ranging from a January low of 160 individuals per ten acres to a high of 840 individuals per ten acres in early May when juveniles emerge from burrows. At a less crowded study site, density of a resident summer population averaged 21 individuals per ten acres.
From Wikipedia, Xerospermophilus tereticaudus by T. Lacher, R Timm, R. & S.T. Álvarez-Castañeda, and iucnredlist.org, the website for The International Union for Conservation of Nature

Mother’s Day is just a few days away, and choosing what to wear can be challenging. When May 13 arrives, what are you wearing for brunch, gathering etc.? Will you be cute, colorful, or dressed to impress? Or are you feeling that a basic spring outfit that is cool enough to wear whenever still impresses mum when you roll up to her house? Many of us keep our gatherings casual while others are all for a formal event. But there’s always at least one option that fits Mother’s Day’s fashion requirement. There are a few outfit ideas to help get you on your way. Pink is an appropriate Mum’s Day choice, and paired with a printed skirt, making the look festive and not too over-the-top, If jeans are your thing, wear them with a floaty dress on top. If your gathering is a casual get-together, try a pair of laidback overalls. Finally, if you are going to dress to impress, try the suiting theme. With that said, all you need is a gift to celebrate the number one mother in your life.

“Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.” -Robert Browning