(October12) An effort to oust Hesperia Unified School District Superintendent Mark McKinney and three of his top assistant’s has apparently fallen short, the Sentinel has learned.
With the initial backing of board members Eric Swanson and Niccole Childs, Hesperia Unified School District Board President Chris Bentley last week sought to schedule a special emergency  meeting  that was intended to take as its agenda the termination of McKinney along with three other district employees, Jovy Yankaskas, David McLaughlin and Karen Kelly.
Bentley, who is up for reelection in November, was said to have at least one other vote to fire McKinney and was on the brink of obtaining a third.  But before the meeting actually took place, it was abruptly cancelled.
Bentley is under attack by a number of district teachers as the election nears.
McKinney, who was appointed as the interim superintendent in 2007 and had the assignment of permanent superintendent conferred upon him in 2008, has rolled with a number of punches over the years. He has had a hot and cold relationship with Bentley. In March 2009, Bentley placed a discussion item on the school board’s agenda about the “potential replacement of the superintendent.” He withdrew that item before the meeting took place, however.
Last year, Bentley backed McKinney when he suspended former Hesperia Unified School District police chief Mike Graham after Graham and other district police officers objected to what they said were McKinney’s efforts to prevent the police department from investigating accounting irregularities in Sultana High School student government funds.
An investigation into the matter determined that McKinney had moved to handle the matter pertaining to the missing funds administratively but had not, as the officers alleged, sought to obstruct justice. Bentley supported McKinney in having treated the matter as a personnel issue, and said at the time that McKinney had the authority as superintendent to run the district as he saw fit.
McKinney appears to have dodged a bullet in that two of the district’s current board members, Hardy Black and Anthony Riley, have previously given indication that they would be open to discussing replacing McKinney, and together with Bentley, they would appear to have the requisite political muscle on the five member panel to hand McKinney a pink slip. At this point, however, Bentley has found himself at direct political loggerheads with Black and Riley, making any prospect that they would coalesce into a majority to terminate McKinney remote, at best.

A federal lawsuit against the Cadiz, Inc. water project has been vacated, at least temporarily.
The River Branch of the Archaeological Heritage Association filed suit against the county of San Bernardino, Cadiz, Inc., Santa Margarita Water District, the U.S. Department of the Interior, its secretary Ken Salazar, and the Bureau of Land Management over Santa Margarita’s approval of the so-called Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, which would extract an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water from the East Mojave Desert and convey it via pipeline to Orange and Los Angeles counties for use there.
San Bernardino County contemplated but ultimately elected against challenging Orange County-based Santa Margarita’s assumption of lead agency status on the project and  entered into a memorandum of understanding with that district and Cadiz, Inc. and its corporate entities over a groundwater monitoring plan to facilitate completion of the project. The Santa Margarita Water District lies some 217 miles from the Cadiz Valley.
The River Branch of the Archaeological Heritage Association suit took issue with the failure of both the county and the federal government to ensure that federal protocols with regard to the approval of the project were followed, including protection of Native American and historical artifacts on federal land the project’s pipeline will cross over which might be disturbed or destroyed as a consequence of the project.
That lawsuit, the only federal complaint filed against Cadiz Inc.’s water mining project, was withdrawn by  the River Branch of the Archaeological Heritage Association last week.
Three related lawsuits filed against the Cadiz project are active in California State courts.
The federal lawsuit filed by Ruth Musser-Lopez, on behalf of the River Branch of the Archaeological Heritage Association, sought a temporary restraining order, and an injunction, to halt the county from signing off on Santa Margarita’s approval of the project until the environmental study included a federal review under the National Historic Preservation Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
The federal court denied the requests based upon lack of jurisdiction and procedural issues. Previously, a spokesman for Cadiz, Inc. erroneously reported the court had dismissed the case.
Musser-Lopez said that report was inaccurate.
“The court did not dismiss the case,”  she said.  “The court gave instruction that the cited federal protective laws do not allow individuals the right to file a redress action prior to the exhaustion of administrative remedies,” Musser-Lopez said. “I withdrew the complaint to fully comply with that instruction. Depending on the outcome of that effort, we may refile.”
The voluntarily dismissal was without prejudice and leaves open the legal merits of issues that have arisen over the failure of the Barack Obama Administration to enforce established regulations that protect federal resources.
Salazar’s office has been non-responsive to repeated requests for information filed under the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Senator Feinstein (D-CA) has voiced concerns over the project and is considering legislation to protect the desert from the project. Cadiz has presented groundwater recharge rates that conflict with U.S. Geological Survey findings.  Cadiz’s geologists have asserted recharge rates at 5 to 25 times higher than the U.S.G.S.
According to http://CadizWater.com, the lack of Salazar’s enforcement has reportedly benefited the Cadiz project by ignoring historical and environmental concerns.
The same Browntstein law firm that is representing Cadiz, Inc. conducted Secretary Salazar’s earlier successful campaigns for Colorado Attorney General and for the U.S. Senate.
Citing quarterly reports and SEC filings, Rancho Santa Margarita resident, Craig Innis is concerned that potential defaults and foreclosures on million dollar loans taken out by Cadiz, Inc., could place project liability upon ratepayers.

(October 12)  NEEDLES—A combined panel of Needles Hospital Trustees and Needles City Council members late last month accepted Community Healthcare Partner Inc.’s proof of funding for the purchase of the  Colorado River Medical Center.
Immediately after that split vote, Community Health Care Partner principal Bing Lum, Needles Mayor Ed Paget and hospital board president Terri Anderson affixed their signatures to the purchase agreement.
While hospital board members Jeff Williams, Pam Blake and Norma Jean Williams and Anderson voted to recognize Lum’s financial arrangements as adequate, Adela Owensby voting against doing so and Lana Shaw abstained. City council members Shawn Gudmundson, Terry Campbell, Pat Murch and Tony Frazier voted to accept the proof of funding.
Lum did not present a letter from a financial institution documenting the funding. Rather, he provided an uncertified roster of anticipated funding from a multiplicity of sources. He did have two of those funding sources, his brother Larry Lum and Dr. Bertha Gonzales, present to speak to the availability of the financing they would provide. Lary Lum and Gonzales provided bank statements related to accounts they controlled.
Shaw said she did not believe that the presentation of the statements sufficed as proof that the money in them would be committed to completing the project. A brief display of the statements, totaling $4.4 million, was made to the public present at the September 25 meeting.
Another issue that had some city residents requesting that the certification be held up is Bing Lum’s tardiness in qualifying Community Healthcare Partner, Inc. as a nonprofit entity. A  portion of the property upon which the Colorado River Medical Center sits in owned by the Bureau of Land Management. A federal requirement is that the purchaser of that property have full nonprofit status.
Former Needles councilwoman Rebecca Valentine, who led an effort by a qualified nonprofit, Needles Hospital, Inc, to purchase and operate the hospital  only to have that effort fail when financing could not be lined up, insisted that an application with BLM for the land purchase would have to be processed and no waiver on the tax-exempt status could be made.
Valentine said it appeared the city was bending over to accommodate Lum in a way the city had not accommodated Needles Hospital, Inc. The city entered into a previous arrangement with Needles Hospital, Inc., headed by Valentine, to sell the hospital for $3,587,002. Ultimately, that deal fell apart when Needles Hospital, Inc. was unable to close escrow by a stipulated April 26 deadline.
Another entity controlled by Lum, A.M. Pharmacy, which operates contract pharmacies within existing hospitals, had made a competing $3 million bid for the Colorado River Medical Center last year before losing out in that go-round to Needles Hospital, Inc. Lum, a doctor of pharmacology, grew up in Needles and graduated from Needles High School with the Class of 1979.
A.M. Pharmacy is a for-profit company and as such, was at a disadvantage with regard to the takeover protocol for the hospital because Needles voters in June 2010 passed Measure Q, which called for keeping the hospital open and absolving the city of the financial burden of subsidizing the facility by having a non-profit entity selected to run the hospital.
The city of Needles took on ownership of the Colorado River Medical Center in April 2008 after Brentwood, Tennessee-based Lifepoint Hospitals, a for-profit corporation, embarked on an effort to move the institution’s equipment and personnel to Valley View Hospital, another facility it owned in Arizona, roughly 12 miles from Needles.
Because of long-running inadequate billing practices, including failures to invoice Medicare and Medi-Cal as well as insurance companies and patients in a timely fashion, the hospital has lost money while under city ownership, representing a financial liability to taxpayers.  The city created the board of trustees to oversee the hospital, and that panel, together with the city council, came to a consensus that spinning the facility off to an independent operator is the best solution for ensuring that the community has adequate medical care without soaking the taxpayers.
Lum undertook to form Community Healthcare Partner as a non-profit entity to be able to make a bid in compliance with conditions of Measure Q. Lum said Community Health Care Partner is an entity entirely distinct from AM Pharmacy, although he said he would be able to call upon the resources of AM Pharmacy and the experience he has in having run that company in operating Colorado River Medical Center. Lum’s offer through Community Healthcare Partners for the hospital came in at $500,000 less than the $3 million bid AM made last year.
The hospital, together with the 5.71 acres upon which it is located, was covered under the $2.5 million purchase agreement.
While some elements of the community were sympathetic to Valentine and Needles Hospital, Inc., others were looking forward to the city facilitating Lum’s takeover of the hospital. Needles City Manager David Brownlee, who earlier sought from Lum a letter of intent from a financial institution to cover Lum’s purchase, said he now understands that the money Lum will be putting up will come from private investors.
Lum told the Sentinel he believes Community Healthcare Partner will be able to “close escrow by the first of the year.

(October 12)  YUCCA VALLEY— The Yucca Valley Town Council has approved a resolution that commits the town to assisting the Hi-Desert Water District with the financing for a sewer system that is to be constructed over the next several years.
The council stated in the resolution that the town stood ready to make a “substantial financial contribution to the district, currently anticipated to be approximately $70 million.” The council’s resolution indicated the town’s financial participation will be contingent upon the shape of town finances, so that the town contribution “will not jeopardize the fiscal integrity of the town’s general fund.”
The town will structure its participation in the project through a lease arrangement with the district for the infrastructure. That lease agreement will not be executed until the project is 30 percent completed.
The resolution called upon the water district to utilize the town’s largesse to lower assessments property owners will be hit with to pay for the wastewater system.
The town’s participation will include between $4 million and $5 million that will go for road repairs that will be necessary to reinstate pavement that must be displaced to accommodate trenching for the sewer pipe to be laid.
Yucca Valley, with a population of 20,700, is entirely reliant on septic systems. In 2007, the state agency responsible for protecting water quality adopted a resolution identifying the town of Yucca Valley as one of 66 communities throughout the state with groundwater threatened by the continuing overuse of septic systems. As such, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board has imposed septic discharge prohibitions due to be triggered as of May 19, 2016. Under that mandate, phase 1 of a wastewater system must be completed or significantly on its way to completion by that date or the state will initiate enforcement action. The first phase of the project is to cover the downtown area of Yucca Valley, the area most proximate to the heart of the groundwater basin.  Similarly, phase 2 must be completed or nearly completed by May 19, 2019 and phase 3 must be completed by May 19, 2022. The last two phases lie further out where future concentrated development is most likely to occur.

(October 5)  REDLANDS—Violinist Jean Skrocki will debut as the Redlands Symphony’s new concertmaster on October 13 in a program which will showcase her own talent when she performs Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” The all strings program will also feature Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade in C Major, op. 48.”
The concert will commence at 8 p.m, with  Maestro Jon Robertson conducting, in the University of Redlands’ Memorial Chapel, with doors opening at 7 p.m. Robertson will give a brief lecture about the program’s contents at 7:15.
Tickets, starting at $15, will be available at the door.
Calling Skrocki “a musical force to be reckoned with,” Robertson said he was pleased to have her as part of the orchestra. Skrocki has stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of Pavel Farkas as the symphony’s concertmaster.
A native of Los Angeles, Skrocki is a member of the California Quartet, a string quartet that performs their own Connections Chamber Music Series in Southern California with resident composer Matthew Tommasini. A prodigy, Skrocki made her solo debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the age of 14 and three years later was awarded a full scholarship to study with Jascha Heifetz in his master classes at the University of Southern California.
Skrocki is currently the assistant concertmaster of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, under music director Carl St. Clair. She was formerly for 12 years the concertmaster of the Opera Pacific orchestra, then under the leadership of John DeMain. In addition, she has served as concertmaster of the Pacific Symphony, American Ballet Theater, Zachary National Opera Auditions orchestra and San Bernardino Symphony.
Skrocki is a member of the Los Angeles-based Angeli Ensemble, a chamber orchestra, working closely with cellist Lynn Harrell. A collaborator of jazz artist Peter Sprague in the Peter Sprague String Consort, Skrocki is also a founding member of Les Amis Musicalles, a flute, violin and viola trio that has showcased the compositions of James Self,  Bruce Broughton, Arni Egilsson, and James Hopkins.
She is now the artist teacher at the University of Redlands.
The Symphony is offering a variety of concert subscription packages for 2012-13, including a Symphony Select card for $189, providing holders with six prime seating tickets at concerts of their choice at the performances they choose and four-concert ticket passes that start at $57.  Tickets and packages are available online at RedlandsSymphony.com, at the box office behind Memorial Chapel between the hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday or by calling the box office at 909-748-8018.

(October 12)  The Grand Terrace city council must fully apprise its constituents of the precarious financial state the city is in to form a consensus for a solution, council candidate Sylvia Robles says. If the city’s residents are willing to impose a tax on themselves, the city can maintain the current level of services, she said. If there is not a collective will to use a taxing mechanism, the council then must make further reductions at City Hall, she said.
“The major issues facing Grand Terrace are fiscal solvency and rising residential crime and car thefts,” Robles said. She said the city is hamstrung in how to deal with those problems because from the outset it has faced financial challenges and the past and current city leadership has not formulated an effective strategy for overcoming those financial obstacles.  “Grand Terrace, according to a city commissioned study, was approved for cityhood by the Local Agency Formation Commission in 1978 even though the property tax projections were not solid. Property taxes are the principal source of funding for cities. The passage of Proposition 13 [which capped property tax rates on residences] further complicated matters. The city began to delve into using tax-increment financing, also known as redevelopment agency (RDA) powers to siphon property tax revenues that would have gone to other local taxing agencies and schools to augment city revenues and speculate with tax dollars ways to increase sales tax by giving financial entitlements to developers. Some have stated that schools were made whole via pass-through agreements and did not suffer from RDA tax shifts. The reality is that since schools were guaranteed financing via Proposition 98, pass-through agreements were not vigorously negotiated. The Colton Joint Unified School District is facing a substantial deficit. The local financing scheme is impaired.”
Robles said the city’s past reliance on redevelopment funding has complicated things.
“Redevelopment agencies were abolished by Assembly Bill 26x and Assembly Bill 27x last year,” she noted. “Grand Terrace has enough fund balance to wind down its RDA projects and to help pay for staff. The city also floated $20 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements in the southwest section of the city zoned for commercial development. However, ongoing economic malaise and the fact that the state denied any land assembly funding makes it highly unlikely in the near term that the city will be able to generate investment in that area. The city owes the redevelopment agency $3.1 million dollars. We only have a general fund of roughly $3.5 million, when you include all other sources of revenues, such as other funds of $3.4 million, capital projects of $2.6 million and residual RDA funding for the operational budget of $4.5 million, for a total is $13.9 million through all funds.  That number does not account for instances like child care and wastewater accounts, in which fees collected are almost equal to expenses. Out of the general fund we pay for public safety, public works, park maintenance and a full-time city manager, finance director, public works director, city clerk and city attorney and other administrative staff. We have only about two years fund balance to support this level of city government.
We have an estimated Fund Balance of $810,000 and that may be cut to $510,000 depending on a state ruling on residual receipts for low-income housing. “To explain what I would do for Grand Terrace and how I can distinguish myself from the other candidates, I would say that I fully understand that Grand Terrace cannot grow itself out of this fiscal crisis,” Robles said. “Time is not on our side. New retail, including the Town Center, which is anchored by Stater Bros and includes a new Miguel’s Drive Thru, has generated in aggregate less than $90,000.
I have experience balancing budgets during recessionary times. I worked for San Bernardino County’s special districts department, when the state, which was unable to meet its obligation to fund schools, took back state support from many of our districts including fire. In government a budget analyst recognizes that salaries and benefits typically make up 85% of the budget. Any meaningful savings must come from cuts in staff. The city has incrementally cut staff and is in balance for now. But structural change must be implemented.”
Robles said the current city council is courting disaster by failing to make clear to the city’s residents what is at stake in the effort to put the city’s financial house in order. Hiding the problem from those who will be asked to carry the financial burden will not solve the problem and likely create anger at City Hall that will render the problem even harder to deal with, she said.
“The City Council has been meeting in closed session since at least last December to discuss a utility tax, declaring a fiscal emergency and meeting with unrepresented staff,” she said. “It is my experience that the voter must be in on the crisis, a part of the dialogue and a partner in seeking alternatives and solutions. If this council expects to weather this election cycle and then unveil a ‘fiscal crisis’ and proposed utility tax, I expect that trust with the voters will be the hardest asset to regain.”
Robles said Grand Terrace’s fiscal condition will require an increase in revenue in the form of taxation or drastic cuts. “All redevelopment-like legislation was vetoed by the governor,” she said. “Unless, voters are quick to approve a utility tax, Grand Terrace must live within its means. I propose via attrition to transfer those savings to restoring the traffic officer position cut from our law enforcement contract. We can do this immediately by not filling the $173,000 redevelopment agency director position. It is my preference to replace current top managers with less expensive positions as natural attrition occurs. The timeline is short. But, the reality is we are a city of only 12,000 residents and core municipal services must be funded. To me that is public safety, park maintenance and support of youth sport leagues.”
The council should not delude itself that everything will just naturally take care of itself, Robles said, and should prepare to bite the bullet and ready itself for the worst. “If the City Council fails to convince voters to approve a new tax, we must have a plan,” she said.
Born and raised in San Bernardino, Robles has a BA degree in business management from the University of Redlands and a Master’s Degree in public administration from Cal State University, San Bernardino.
She is a 35-year resident of Grand Terrace. Married, she has three adult children.
Robles is retired from a 25-year career with the county of San Bernardino, having spent five years in social services, seven  as a field representative for former Supervisor Barbara Riordan and 13 years as a staff budget analyst and supervisor of the budget section.

(October 5)  In an action of historic proportion, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors on October 1 voted 4-1 to allow a water extraction project in the east Mojave Desert to proceed, removing the last procedural obstacle to a Los Angeles-based company’s plan to profit from the exportation of billions of gallons of San Bernardino County’s water up to 230  miles westward for sale and use in Orange, Los Angeles and  Riverside counties.
Notably, San Bernardino County was not  the lead agency on the project. Rather, Monday’s hearing was a formality required under the terms of a memorandum of understanding between the company undertaking the project, Cadiz, Inc., and Orange County-based Santa Margarita Water District, which served as the agency-of-record for the approval of the project and its environmental certification, and the Fenner Valley Mutual Water Company, an entity owned by Cadiz, Inc. The county by its action signed off on the Santa Margarita Water District’s approval of the project and certification of the environmental impact report, and it approved a groundwater management, monitoring, and mitigation plan to facilitate it.
On July 31, the Santa Margarita Water District, which lies 217 miles from the Cadiz Valley and serves the affluent communities of Rancho Santa Margarita, Mission Viejo, Coto de Caza, Las Flores, Ladera Ranch and Talega, approved the project, officially known as the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation and Recovery Project, certified the environmental impact report for the project and agreed to purchase 20 percent of the water Cadiz, Inc. drafts as a consequence of that approval. The environmental impact report states that Cadiz, Inc. can draw an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year from the desert aquifer for the next century.
The controversial plan was given go-ahead over the strident objections of desert residents and landowners, who said they viewed the project as an unprincipled theft of the desert’s water resource by Cadiz, Inc. and the water district. Environmentalists registered opposition to the project, asserting the amount of water to be extracted from the desert will exceed the natural recharge rate of the region’s groundwater basins, that springs within the immediate area of the project’s well field will dry up, and  near-lying aquifers that are linked to the Cadiz Valley and Fenner Valley’s water tables will be depleted.
While Scott Slater, the president and general counsel for the Cadiz Land Company, and Christian Marsh, an attorney representing the county of San Bernardino, asserted that the October 1 hearing fulfills all of the procedural requirements for the project to proceed, John Goss, a former assistant administrative officer with San Bernardino County who had worked for 18 months drafting the county’s desert groundwater management ordinance before it was adopted in 2002, said that ordinance was violated when the memorandum of understanding between the county, Cadiz, Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District had been entered into before a groundwater management plan for the Cadiz project was adopted. There were also suggestions that the county had failed to live up to its own procedural requirements when it failed to provide a ten-day public review of the documentation considered by the board on October 1.  That documentation, consisting of the groundwater management, monitoring, and mitigation plan, was not made available until September 26.
The board of supervisors would have normally been the lead agency responsible for approving the project and granting it environmental certification. After Cadiz, Inc. arranged for the Santa Margarita Water District to commandeer that process, San Bernardino County officials initially contemplated filing an appeal with the California Office of Planning and Research to wrest from Santa Margarita authority over the project and its application for approval. The county, however, did not file such an appeal and acceded to the Santa Margarita Water District’s assumption of lead agency authority over the project application and environmental certification. Earlier this year, the county upon a vote by the board of supervisors entered into a memorandum of understanding with Cadiz, Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District that gave the county limited power to second-guess the district’s decision on the environmental certification and compliance with its own ground water management ordinance as well as requiring that Cadiz, Inc. defray the cost of any legal action taken by parties against the project or in reaction to its impacts.
The project still faces four legal challenges.
A brine mining operation in the desert, Tetra Technologies, has already filed a lawsuit against San Bernardino County over the memorandum of understanding. Tetra alleges the monopolization of water in the area will harm its operation.
Four environmental groups – the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Parks Conservation Association, the San Gorgonio chapter of the Sierra Club and the San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society – filed a suit in San Bernardino County Superior Court, naming both the county of San Bernardino and the Santa Margarita Water District. That suit asserts the county should not have allowed the environmental review of the project to be carried out by the Mission Viejo-based Santa Margarita Water District. The suit challenges the county for allowing Santa Margarita to assume lead agency status and calls into question as well the water district’s approval of the environmental impact report.
The Colorado River branch of the Archaeological Heritage Association filed suit in federal court against Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and San Bernardino County, further naming the Santa Margarita Water District, project proponent Cadiz, Inc. and the Cadiz, Inc. corporate offshoot  Fenner Valley Mutual Water Company, as real parties in interest. That suit cited the failure of Salazar and the Department of the Interior to invoke the protocols and requirements of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, as well as the National Environmental Protection Act, which the association maintains should have been done because part of the project will involve a 42-mile right-of-way for the aqueduct on federal land. The suit further alleges the county failed  to live up to its obligation to comply with federal law in reviewing the impact a permitted project might have on federal public resources in transferring the authority for environmental certification of the project to the Santa Margarita Water District.
A group of Orange County residents calling itself  Citizens and Ratepayers Opposing Water Nonsense have sued the Santa Margarita Water District over its approval of the environmental impact report and the water purchase agreement it entered into with Cadiz, Inc.
In addition, Senator Dianne Feinstein has signaled continuing opposition to the project, which is consistent with the stance she took when Cadiz, Inc. floated a similar water mining operation more than a decade ago. In an October 1 letter to board chairwoman Josie Gonzales, Feinsten reiterated that opposition, urging Gonzales and her board colleagues to deny the project endorsement if the amount of groundwater to be extracted from the aquifers exceeds the natural annual recharge rate of the local desert basins, which was determined by the United States Geological Survey in 2001 to be 5,000 acre feet per year.
Only supervisor Neil Derry, whose Third District includes a portion of the East Mojave, voted against the project.
Project proponents asserted the project represented no harm to the desert and its environment, and they said the county should embrace it because it represented economic development and employment opportunities. Opponents retorted that the jobs to be created would be temporary and that the monopolization of the region’s water by areas outside of the county would inhibit or outright prevent future economic growth and development in the Eastern Mojave.

(October 5)  The recent Congressional testimony provided by a San Bernardino County-based economist which laid the blame for declining passenger traffic at Ontario International Airport at the feet of the city of Los Angeles and the division it uses to run four airports that city owns came under severe criticism this week.
On September 27 at Ontario City Hall during a specially-convened session of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation, John Husing said the outfit managing Ontario Airport  –  Los Angeles World Airports  –  is responsible for a 41 percent drop in passengers flying into and out of the aerodrome since 2007.
Husing said the severe economic downturn that has gripped the nation, the state and the region since 2007 does not account for that decline.
The hearing was called to vector attention on the future of the airport, which is classified by the Federal Aviation Agency as a medium hub facility. For nearly two years, Ontario city officials have been undertaking an intensive effort to convince Los Angeles to return ownership of the airport to Ontario.
Los Angeles took over management of Ontario Airport in 1967 as part of a strategy to increase flights out of the airfield. That ploy worked, as Los Angeles was able to use its control of gate positions and other considerations at Los Angeles International Airport to induce airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. Just under 200,000 passengers enplaned at Ontario Airport in 1966. Under Los Angeles’s management, over $550 million in improvements were made to the facility. In 1985, Ontario deeded the airport to Los Angeles for no consideration. In 2007, usage of the airport peaked, with 7.2 million passengers moving through the airport’s gates.
Since that time, passenger traffic through Ontario International has dropped dramatically, with 4.2 million passengers using the airport in 2011, and further declines registering this year.
Ontario city officials have repeatedly asserted that Los Angeles World Airports is purposefully mismanaging Ontario Airport’s operations to increase passenger traffic at Los Angeles International Airport, which has undergone significant renovations in recent years.
Los Angeles World Airport officials reject those claims, maintaining that the drop in passenger traffic through Ontario is a function of the sputtering economy and the doldrums in the airline industry generally.
But at the hearing before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation, led by Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wisconsin and including senior member  Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, Husing repeatedly asserted that Ontario Airport was suffering under the yoke of Los Angeles’s mismanagement. He called, along with others in attendance, for a change in airport administration, asserting that transferring ownership and control of the facility to Ontario will turn operations there around.
Husing was playing to a highly partisan crowd of about 120, nearly all of whom were there to support the proposition that Los Angeles should surrender control over the airport.
Miller, who indicated he was in favor of transferring management of the airport to Ontario, was still somewhat taken aback at the hostility and vitriol evinced toward Los Angeles and the hyperbole evident in elements of the case made against the megalopolis’s administration of Ontario Airport.
At one point the congressman reminded Husing that the purpose of the hearing was not to “beat up on Los Angeles.” Miller said that he came away from discussions he had with Gina Marie Lindsey, the executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, convinced that Los Angeles officials were committed to working through challenges that beset the airport to reestablish it as a successful aviation hub.
In the aftermath of Husing’s presentation, Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airport officials were questioning the validity of many of Husing’s conclusions and observations, most notably his maintaining that the foundering economy has not had a tremendous impact on the downturn at Ontario Airport.
In particular, it was suggested that Husing, the proprietor of Redlands-based Economics & Politics, Inc., which has contracts with several local governmental entities, was coloring his testimony to favor local sentiment and pander to local politicians.
They cited a Department of Transportation study of performance all across the aviation industry, which was authored by Calvin L. Scovel III, the Transportation Department’s inspector general.
According to Scovel, airlines in general are still reeling from the recession that set in more than four years ago. Airlines are scrambling to adopt new strategies and change their operational models, the report states, that include factoring in rising fuel costs, which account for 35 percent of airline operational expenses,  and raising ticket prices. Consequently, airlines have reduced flights. Los Angeles officials said the report, which covers the same 2007-to-2011 period that corresponds to Ontario’s decline, directly reflects conditions at Ontario Airport.
And, according to the report, Ontario will continue to wrestle with downward moving passenger traffic, no matter who runs the airport.
“Ultimately, the trends presented in this report suggest that the changes in the number of airlines controlling the industry, fare increases, and capacity reductions that began in 2008 are not a brief phase, but rather are signs of a greater shift in the industry that will remain for years to come,” the report states.
Ontario and San Bernardino County have formed a joint powers authority intended to oversee the transition of the airport to local control and thereafter assist in the management of operations there.
On October 1, Husing spoke with the Sentinel, defending his statements before the House panel. He said that passenger traffic at Ontario Airport has receded to the level the airport was functioning at when the city of Ontario deeded it to Los Angeles 27 years ago.
“To say the economy has shoved us back to where we were in 1985 does not hold up, particularly when you consider that the overall decline in air travel in the Southern California market is 6 percent, not 42 percent,” Husing said. “We’re at the same level of passenger traffic we had in 1985. Since 1985 the Inland Empire has added well over 2 million people and 500,000 jobs. The downward trend started with the change of management LAWA [Los Angeles World Airports] instituted five years ago. Before that, we were 8 percent of the market. We are down to 5 percent now. They say the economy caused this to happen and the data contradicts that. There is no way what has occurred in the local economy pushed us back to the 1985 level of passenger traffic. There has been a 102 percent growth in jobs despite the recession. The number of companies is up by two-thirds. What our analysis shows is that the airlines’ costs per passenger in using Ontario was by far the most of any airport in Southern California, far beyond the costs of any regional airport anywhere. The cost for the airlines at Ontario is $18 per head. Compare that to Long Beach, where the cost is $2. That is just completely out of line. LA’s numbers in terms of what people are paid at Ontario are completely out of line with local pay scales. Ontario Airport used to have a full time manager. It now has a part time manager, who is shared with another facility. There is no way you can look at what they have done with the airport and feel anything other than dismay.”
Husing continued, “If you look at Southern California, at the harbors, the transportation authorities, the Southern California and South Coast air quality management districts, all the various cities, everyone has been striving to reduce vehicle miles driven, to facilitate ease of travel and lower congestion and improve air quality. Only one agency is out of sync with that, which is LAWA. LAWA has caused a million more passengers to be travelling on the roads to get to Los Angeles International instead of flying out of Ontario. What they are doing is indefensible.”

(October 5)  BARSTOW—Considerable detail emerged late last week with regard to the events that led up to the June resignation of former Barstow police chief Dianne Burns, the first woman in San Bernardino County history to serve as the chief of a municipal police department.
Burns voluntarily retired on June 29, three days before her five-year contract with the city was set to expire, just about a year after the first public indications of dissension and difficulty attending her trailblazing tenure on behalf of her gender within the ranks of southern California law enforcement.
The actual nature of the contretemps involving Burns and certain elements of the Barstow community was heretofore only partially publicly known. It was revealed early this year, just as Burns was returning from a nearly seven-month extended paid hiatus that a majority of the police department’s members were chaffing under her leadership and were opposed to her coming back. It is now known that Burns was also out of favor with at least one member of the city council, Tim Saenz, who accused her of having wrongfully used her authority as police chief to threaten him personally and politically.
After a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Police Department during which she served in the capacities of a patrol officer, homicide detective, sergeant and lieutenant of a gang suppression unit,  Burns in 2007 was the choice of then-Barstow city  manager Hector Rodriguez to replace former police chief Lee Gibson. Rodriguez selected Burns, who also possessed a law degree, within four weeks of Gibson’s May 1, 2007 departure. It took a majority of the city council another month to set aside some of its members’ concerns about having a woman take on a leadership role within the oftentimes machismo-driven ethos of a law enforcement agency, and  achieve a consensus about Burns’ suitability to serve as the commander of the department’s officers.
The department was 11 short of its authorized strength of 38 officers when Burns arrived. It gained five officers over the next 21 months and then went to full staffing in May 2009 when six officers were sworn in. Burns’ tenure as chief suffered a first noticeable blow in November 2007 when Rodriguez, her primary supporter at City Hall, departed Barstow.
Burns worked  through a number of challenges besetting the department, instituting  several of what were hailed as positive changes by the community, including establishing a shooting and tactical training school just outside of Hinkley and mandating that officers take target practice at least once every two months; her rewriting of the department’s policies and procedures manual, which had not been updated since 1983; and her authorship of an until-then non-existent internal affairs manual for the department. She simultaneously sought to improve the interdepartmental relationship with the sheriff’s station in Barstow and encouraged officers in the department to become actively involved in community programs such as Cops for Kids, Neighborhood Watch,  Cook and Serve for the Homeless, and local neighborhood street fairs. She further sought and obtained $100,000 per year in “Cops’ Grant” money to update equipment, buy new computers, and provide officers with protective vests.
Outside the department, Burns’ efforts did not go unnoticed and the 2009-2010 grand jury in its yearly report took the uncommon step of commending her “for the changes, improvements, and upgrades she has made since becoming chief of police.” The grand jury waxed praiseful in the commendation, stating “It is hoped that the citizens of Barstow and the surrounding area appreciate her fine work.”
Despite those external accolades, internally there were problems brewing as her command of the department was tested by some officers resentful of her leadership who perceived her as an outsider who had vaulted into the top position in the department without working up through the ranks in Barstow. This was exacerbated by what some officers saw as her formalized big city approach, deemed in some quarters as inappropriate for a desert city with a population of less than 23,000. In response, Burns on occasion lashed out at officers in ways some caricatured as hysterical.
In July 2011, Burns went on vacation and did not return at the end of her holiday, which was not anticipated to last for more than two weeks. Shortly after that it was acknowledged that city manager Curt Mitchell had placed her on administrative leave. She remained absent from the department for more than six months while Mitchell and the council conducted a review of an unspecified issue relating to her job performance.
Throughout the ordeal, city officials steadfastly refused to say what was at the basis of Burns’ suspension. Last week, light was shed on what had occurred when word reached the public that the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing responded to a complaint and a request for leave to sue the city filed  on April 25 by councilman Tim Saenz. In that filing, Saenz related that Burns began evincing hostility toward him in June 2011, specifically engaging in “threatening, harassing and discriminating” behavior, which Saenz informed city manager Curt Mitchell about in an email on June 12, 2011. The strained relationship between Saenz and Burns did not subside. During a community event held at Quigley’s Restaurant on June 30, 2011, according to Saenz, Burns made a series of deprecating statements about the councilman to assistant city manager Oliver Chi, using profanity when she referred to Saenz and speaking in a tone and volume that was audible to others.  She said she wanted to initiate an investigation into Saenz related to his “sleeping with every woman in Barstow.”
Saenz sent further emails to Mitchell about Burns that day and again on July 1 and July 2, 2011, the following two days. During a conference with Mitchell and Chi over the matter, Saenz said Chi advised him to avoid Burns because she was out to get him.
Saenz alleged in his filing that Burns’ action had resulted in “anxiety, stress, family issues, professional issues, work related issues, sleepless nights [and] a total change of my and my family’s lives.”
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing provided Saenz with a right-to-sue notice, stating that Saenz had met the minimum evidentiary threshold of showing that discrimination might have occurred. He had sought the right to sue under the assertion that as a councilmember, he is technically an employee of the city. The Barstow Desert Dispatch reported on the existence of the right to sue letter last week.
The state agency provided the right to sue notice despite an eventual finding by Mitchell that Burns had not violated the city’s policy on harassment. That determination was made just before Burns returned to work on February 27. Mitchell, to whom the police chief is answerable within the city’s chain of command, did determine after an unprecedented six month suspension of the police chief that Burns had made negative remarks about Saenz in public, though Mitchell turned up no evidence to show she had actually initiated the investigation of  Saenz as she had threatened in her June 30, 2011 remarks to Chi.  Saenz told the Desert Dispatch he does not intend to sue the city but felt he had to obtain the  right-to-sue notice to protect himself from retaliation by Burns after she was reinstated as police chief.
Just prior to Burns’ return from her extended leave, after Mitchell had signaled that she was about to resume command of the department, the Barstow Police Officers Association, representing 30 officers, corporals and detectives, and the Barstow Police Management Association, representing six sergeants and lieutenants, provided on February 24 a vote of “no confidence” in Burns’ ability to continue to lead the department. The groups then sent a letter to Mitchell referencing the votes and excoriating Burns for “poor performance” and “extreme favoritism,” as well as a “hostile work environment” that the unions said were the product of her oversight of the department.  The letter upbraided Mitchell for “failing to adequately address all concerns” the department’s officers had expressed about Burns. “She has demonstrated a lack of leadership and she has displayed severe instability in her emotions while in an official capacity,” the letter stated.
Despite the insurrection, Mitchell restored Burns to her position, mindful that her contract was up on July 2 and that she would be due for another review before it would be renewed on July 2, if indeed it was to be renewed.
Mitchell had not yet completed his review nor arrived at a decision about whether he would recommend to the city council that Burns be retained when she tendered her resignation.

(October 5)  The Fontana Unified School District has committed to using an extremely expensive method of financing several ongoing and upcoming construction projects that will entail interest payments roughly eight times the principal of the loan it will take out.
Next week, the district will sell $108 million in capital appreciation bonds the school board recently voted to issue. To pay off that bonded indebtedness in full, the district will make payments of close to $840 million over the next 40 years.
Normally, public agency bonds are structured to provide interest payments on the face value of the bond  over a 20-year, 25-year or 30-year period, at which time the bonds reach their date of maturity, and the issuer repays the principal, which is equal to the original amount of the investment. Typical interest payments on bonds run from 3.5 percent per year to six percent per year, such that a bondholder normally receives a total of 180 percent to 220 percent of the investment back over the life of the bonds.
The $108 million in improvement bonds most recently authorized for issuance by the Fontana Unified School District’s board, however, are not typical bonds but rather capital appreciation bonds, ones that carry a longer term of financing – 40 years – and are structured to provide a far greater overall return to their buyers. That rate of return will be 707 percent.
There has been considerable focus on capital appreciation bonds lately, with articles and reports in the New York Times and by the public interest group CalWatch, which have pointed out the exorbitant long term cost of that form of financing.
Fontana Unified issued the capital appreciation bonds to cover the principal and interest on a short-term “bridge” loan the district took out in 2009 to undertake several construction projects, including Jurupa Hills High School and Citrus High School.
San Bernardino County Treasurer/Tax Collector Larry Walker said the bonding arrangement the district entered into will push repayment on the loans well into the 21st Century, encumbering future district officials and taxpayers with debt they will have had no part in creating. Walker said the district’s reliance on capital appreciation bonds “represents a generational transfer of debt created by a financing mistake, and is clearly not in the interest of the taxpayers.”
District officials asserted that their financial affairs have declined to such a state that there was no realistic alternative to relying on the controversial instruments.