Governor Jerry Brown appointed San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael A. Ramos to the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, a fifteen member group of city, state, educational and law enforcement officials who oversee law enforcement training guidelines.

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The board of trustees for the San Bernardino City Unified School District this week postponed until December 6 determining what protocol will be used in the hiring of a new superintendent. Former superintendent Arturo Delgado abruptly departed from the district in June to take up the position of superintendent of schools for Los Angeles County. Since then, he has been replaced on an interim basis by associate superintendent Mel Albiso, followed by journeyman school administrator Richard Bray and, since October, Yolanda Ortega, SBUSD’s assistant superintendent of employee relations.

On November 8, the district picked up three new board members and the current board, which has already had an unsuccessful go-round in trying to select a new superintendent, deferred a decision on the means of selecting a top district administrator until the three new board members, Mike Gallo, Sharon Perong and Margaret Hill, are in place.

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The county of San Bernardino and its department of agriculture have entered into an agreement with the State of California, Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to utilize pass-through federal funds to maintain two dog teams for pest infestation detection and prevention.

According to John G. Gardner, the county’s agricultural commissioner, the county will use $371,300 in federal money to be applied retroactively to July 1, 2011 for the continuation of services and funding first authorized in 2006, which, he said “consist of two dog teams to conduct surveillance inspections at parcel sectional centers to detect the presence of any unwanted pests found in unmarked parcels entering the State of California, a violation of law. Once a pest or plant is located within a package, the plants are inspected and if pests or disease symptoms are observed, the samples/specimens are submitted to the CDFA Plant Pest Diagnostic Laboratory for identification. So far, canines have been utilized with great success to detect plant materials from within unmarked agricultural parcels.”