(July 26) Nine San Bernardino County water agencies have obtained the backing of more than 400 of their counterparts from around the state in propounding an argument that the federal government’s expansion of the designated critical habitat of the Santa Ana Sucker Fish is unreasonable.
The Bear Valley Mutual Water Co. in Redlands; Big Bear Municipal Water District; the city of Redlands; the city of San Bernardino Municipal Water Department; the East Valley Water District in Highland; the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District; the San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District; the West Valley Water District in Rialto and the Yucaipa Valley Water District last year joined with three of their equivalents in Riverside County,  the city of Riverside; the Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District; and the Western Municipal Water District in Riverside; in making a case with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna’s approval of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan for protective measures for the Santa Ana Sucker,  a fish that dwells in the Santa Ana River and which federal  biologists say is threatened with possible extinction. The Santa Ana River, which has its headwaters at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains and then winds 96 miles through San Bernardino County into Riverside County and through Orange County to the Pacific Ocean, is the highest quality habitat available to the Santa Ana sucker.
In October 2012, Selna upheld Fish & Wildlife’s December 2010 plan to double to more than  9,000 acres the land along the Santa Ana River in San Bernardino and Riverside counties that was designated as critical Sucker habitat. The agencies sued the service in 2011 over the approval of that plan, which calls for a limit on the amount of water that water districts can draw from the river, a limitation intended to protect the typically six-inch long fish inhabiting the river.
The nine San Bernardino County agencies and three Riverside County agencies are  represented by attorney Greg Wilkinson, who maintains that the Fish & Wildlife strategy of doubling what is deemed critical habitat for the fish will significantly complicate the water agencies’ functions of drawing water for domestic consumption and agriculture, groundwater recharge and flood control measures along the river. The limitations are most acute, according to Wilkinson, at the Seven Oaks Dam, some four miles northeast of Redlands and east of Highland.
The Fish & Wildlife agency insists sufficient water must be released from Seven Oaks Dam and remain in the river to maintain a flow to stir up the riverbed and allow the fish to reproduce and sustain itself.
But purveyors of water in both counties maintain they have already made herculean efforts to safeguard the fish and that the sucker’s numbers are not threatened at present. They contend they are keeping faith with a conservation plan previously certified by Fish & Wildlife as sufficient, which reserved 400,000 acres for sucker habitat and protects 145 other species. Wilkinson said that Fish & Wildlife officials impermissibly reneged on the acceptance of that approach and the agencies are being squeezed, on one hand, by federal officials, and on the other by the California Fish and Game Commission, which has listed the Delta smelt as endangered, leading to limitations on the importation of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California.
Wilkinson drummed up the support of 440 water agencies in the state, banned together under the aegis of the Association of California Water Agencies, which filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals on June 3, highlighting the water agencies’ collective misgivings with regard to the doubling of the critical habitat area for the Santa Ana Sucker, which dines in large measure on algae. Expansion of the habitat violates provisions within the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 [NEPA], the water agencies contend, in that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan relating to the Sucker approved by Judge Selna dispensed with the cooperation of the various agencies involved. NEPA requires that federal, state and local agencies cooperate on environmental plans.
Wilkinson charged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with having purposefully avoided consultations with the agencies impacted by the plan while the plan was being drafted.
Wilkinson wants the matter heard by the entire Ninth Circuit Court Bench rather than just a three member panel thereof, as is normally the case. He intends to argue that the steps already taken to protect the Santa Ana Sucker have been extraordinary and that the additional measures the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is insisting upon  will have other equally, or even more, onerous consequences to the environment by depriving outlying areas of the watershed of water and/or entailing an expensive and potentially wasteful and damaging effort to import water from elsewhere, involving threats to endangered species at other locations  and “the entirety of the human environment, not just the protection of listed species.”
According to Wilkinson, the protective measures the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is calling for would in time result in the water agencies sustaining more than $4 billion in additional costs due to the individual and collective needs to make other arrangements to serve their customers, including but not limited to sinking wells and obtaining water elsewhere, such as from Northern California and the Colorado River.
While the Santa Ana River is the prime habitat and breeding grounds for the Sucker,  a genetically identical example of the fish is present in the Angeles National Forest’s San Gabriel River, in portions of its west, north and east forks, all of which are located in Los Angeles County.
Conservationists and environmentalists  believe the Fish & Wildlife Service’s designation is critical to the sucker fish’s prospects for long term survival in that the fish needs gravel-size rocks upon which to lay its eggs and the protection measures in the plan include areas that meet that criteria in both the perennial part of the Santa Ana River and the Santa Ana River Wash.

(July 26) Ontario Mayor Paul Leon on Tuesday outpolled all eight of his rivals in the race to succeed Norma Torres in representing Pomona, Chino, Montclair, Ontario and a portion of Fontana in the California Assembly, bringing in 25.1 percent of all of the votes cast across the district, which straddles portions of Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties.
Despite his showing, Leon cannot lay claim to a spot in the state legislature yet.  Because none of the nine running in Tuesday’s race captured a majority of the vote, a run-off between Leon and second place finisher Freddie Rodriguez will now follow.
Leon, formerly a Republican but more recently registered as an independent, bested  Rodriguez, a Pomona city councilman who is also a Democrat. In his strong showing, Rodriguez racked up 21.6 percent of the vote in both counties.
The special election was held on Tuesday, July 23 to replace Torres as assemblywoman after she was elected 32nd District State Senator in May. The May special election came about because Gloria Negrete-McLeod had to leave the State Senate when she was elected to Congress in November.
Though Leon prevailed this week, his work in beating Rodriguez in the run-off is cut out for him. Despite his being newly registered as an independent, Leon has long been identified as a Republican and in fact ran as a Republican in March and May against Torres in the race to succeed Negrete-McLeod. In that Senate race as in the-yet-to-be decided assembly race, Republicans are at a disadvantage because of the overwhelming registration lead Democrats have in both the 32nd State Senate and 52nd Assembly districts. In the 32nd, 48 percent of those registered to vote are Democrats and 28 percent are Republicans. In the 52nd, 46 percent are registered as Democrats and 29 percent are registered as Republicans.
On Tuesday, seven of the nine candidates were Democrats – Rodriguez, Jason Rothman, Danielle Soto, Doris Wallace, Manuel Saucedo, Tom Haughey, and Paul Avila. One, Dorothy Peneda, was a Republican.
For Leon to prevail in the September rematch against Rodriguez, he will need to make a convincing appeal to independent-minded Democrats, while maintaining his residual appeal as a former Republican to convert to his cause the voters Pineda picked up. Pineda placed third in the polling, capturing 2,211 votes in both counties, or nearly 14.5 percent.
The assumption of many political observers and strategists is that nearly all of the votes that this week went to Democrats Rothman, Soto, Wallace, Saucedo, Haughey and Avila – totaling 38.8 percent of the ballots cast – will fall to Rodriguez in the run-off. Prior to Tuesday, the Democratic Party heavily invested in Rodriguez, providing him with over $60,000 in direct contributions and facilitating independent expenditures that bankrolled mailers attacking Leon as a Republican wolf in an independent sheep’s clothing.
Leon did particularly well on Tuesday in San Bernardino County, capturing 3,041 votes, or 28.66 percent there. In Los Angeles County, he tied for second with Rothman, the son of Pomona’s mayor. Both pulled 787 votes or 18.99 percent. Rodriguez won in his native county, taking in 1,470 votes for an impressive 31.73 percent. In San Bernardino County, Rodriguez polled 1,822 votes, or 17.17 percent.

(July 26) The Needles City Council this week offered controversial Desert Hot Springs City Manager Rick Daniels a contract as its new city manager, though Daniels’ acceptance of that offer had not been made by press time.
Daniels, if he is hired, will replace David Brownlee, whose contract is not set to expire until next May.
Daniels will not be able to take on the helm in Needles, San Bernardino County’s smallest city population-wise at 4,844, until he resolves loose ends in Desert Hot Springs, a municipality of 25,938 in adjoining Riverside County.
Daniels’ pending departure from Desert Hot Springs comes in the midst of an increasingly rocky tenure there. While he appeared to maintain the support of three-fifths of the city council in the Riverside County City, two of that panel’s members have grown increasingly hostile toward him in recent months.
Daniels gravitated into the municipal management field in a somewhat unorthodox fashion after having been an executive with Waste Management, Inc. He came to Desert Hot Springs officials’ attention after he founded a company in the late 1990s, Mine Reclamation Corporation, with which he proposed to operate a landfill within the abandoned Eagle Mountain Mine next to Joshua Tree National Park, into which he proposed depositing millions of tons of trash from Los Angeles transported to the site by train. The venture was dropped when the Supreme Court ruled against the environmental certification for the plan. Along the way Daniels had assumed the position of president and CEO of the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership, a consortium of business owners, financiers and developers. From that position he obtained the post of top administrator with the Salton Sea Authority. It was his experience in this public sector position that he used to leverage obtaining the Desert Hot Springs city manager position.
While with Desert Hot Springs, one of the poorest cities in the state, Daniels pulled a seeming rabbit out of his hat, undertaking infrastructure improvements that previously seemed beyond the city’s means, including paving 34 miles of city streets. He then undertook to build a municipal Health and Wellness and Aquatic Center. The cost of that project ran to $20 million, however. Daniels’ spending spree has ultimately left Desert Hot Springs with an intractable debt in the form of more than $30 million in delinquent bonds  and an ongoing yearly operation cost at the health center of more than $1 million.
In 2010, Daniels ventured $250,000 in taxpayer funds to lay the ground for and promote a music festival that never came off. Though he initially said the city would recover the money from the concert series’ promoter, the city never did so.
Also in 2010, Daniels narrowly averted being consumed by a scandal after he had a falling out with Linda Green, a woman he had brought to work in Desert Hot Springs first as a media liaison and later as community services director. At a conference in San Diego, an inebriated Daniels groped the married Green, resulting in a claim against the city which was ultimately resolved with Green departing from the city with $99,328.16 in severance pay and Daniels completing a two month stint in an alcohol rebab clinic while assistant city manager Jason Simpson filled in for him.
After  councilman Karl Baker was replaced by Adam Sanchez, Daniels’ support on the council began to erode. More aggressive questioning of Daniels’ policies took place, prompting Daniels to file a claim against Sanchez and councilman Russell Betts in which he claimed they were harassing him with emails and phone calls after official city business hours. The city’s insurance company formally rejected Daniels’ claim.
In June, city finance director Terrence Beaman resigned after a lengthy dispute with Daniels with regard to Daniels’ proposal to utilize $4 million in city reserves to cover a $4 million deficit. After the municipal and financial management consulting firm Urban Futures assessed Desert Hot Springs’ economic condition, it concluded the city was in a deteriorating financial state that would lead to insolvency within 12 to 24 months.
In April, Daniels, one of the highest-paid city managers in California with a total annual compensation package exceeding $300,000, sought to leave Desert Hot Springs, applying for the position of county administrator position in Clackamas County in Oregon. He was selected as one of three finalists in the competition for that position and as the interview process advanced, Daniels maintained a cover story to the effect that he was merely vacationing in Oregon, where he was raised and attended college. At the final stages of the Clackamas County selection process at the end of June, it appeared that Daniels had the job and it then became publicly known that he was gearing up to leave Desert Hot Springs. Daniels’ move to Oregon fell through, however, when Donald Krupp, one of the other two finalists, was given the county administrator’s post last week.
According to Needles City Clerk Dale Jones, Daniels was offered the position of Needles city manager but the terms of the hiring were not fully specified. Jones said negotiations between the Needles  city manager search committee, consisting of council members Linda Kidd, Jim Lopez and Tom Darcy were yet ongoing and that she anticipated a contract would be ready for the full council to vote on at its August 13 meeting.
It would appear that Daniels will be taking a substantial pay cut if he comes to Needles. The budgeted range for the city manager in Needles is $129,000 to $132,000 per year. Brownlee, who was elevated into a caretaker city manager post in 2010 when previous city manager Bill Way’s contract was not extended, is not paid according to that schedule, however, and receives $50.47 per hour based on furlough-truncated annual hours of 1,976. All employees in Needles are required to take furloughs. Brownlee’s annual salary is therefore $99,728.72. If the furloughs were to be discontinued and he were to work a full 2080-hour work year, he would be earning $104,977.60 per annum.
Brownlee was the city’s assistant city manager and utilities service manager at the time he was upgraded to acting city manager.
Brownlee’s current contract runs from June 1 of this year through May 31, 2014. The terms of that contract give him retreat rights to return to being a city employee with the title of assistant city manager/utilities general manager.
Multiple attempts to reach Daniels at his Desert Hot Springs office were unsuccessful.

(July 26) YUCCA VALLEY — While advocates of the recall of two Yucca Valley town council members have yet to achieve their stated goal of having councilmen Robert Lombardo and George Huntington removed from office, their petition gathering effort to qualify a vote on the Lombardo and Huntington recall is progressing, with nearly a third of the 2,356 signatures needed to endorse the petitions having been collected.
Moreover, the effort has been accompanied by some town policy changes which supporters of the recall say are a direct result of their undertaking.
Among the issues fueling the recall attempt was the town council’s vote in February to extend town manager Mark Nuami’s employment contract another three years and up his total compensation package to over $300,000 annually. Nuaimi’s contract and salary enhancements were accompanied by the announcements that the town would do away with or severely curtail four popular municipal programs – the operation of the town’s pool during summer months, the Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular, the town museum and Yucca Valley’s Concerts in the Park.
Lombardo and Huntington, along with their colleagues Dawn Rowe and Mayor Merle Abel, found themselves at the center of a firestorm following those votes. Bob Leone, elected to the council in March during a special election to replace Isaac Hagerman, who departed last year, was not subjected to the enmity nor obloquy reserved for the rest of the  Yucca Valley town  council. Leone, in fact, had been critical of the raise provided to Nuaimi and advocated against the closure of the pool and museum and the discontinuation of the firework and concert events.
Lombardo and Huntington’s supporters, as well as those of Rowe and Abel, have denounced the recall attempt as misguided, saying Lombardo and Huntington have done nothing meriting the attempt to remove them and had merely taken prudent steps to ensure the town’s solvency.  Nevertheless, the cancelation of town recreation and cultural programs while the council was rerouting money that would have paid for their maintenance into the town manager’s pocket was resonating around the community, making the task of signature gathering for the petitions much more easy.  Significantly, the pool has not been closed, at least entirely. It remains open in the morning, when swim lessons are offered and lap swimming and exercising activity is allowed. At 11:30 a.m. it is open for general public use and remains open until 1:30 p.m.
Likewise, the threatened cancellation of the fireworks show did not materialize. That display was again put on after sundown on Independence Day. The museum remains open three days a week. Concerts in the park are being put on through August.
While Lombardo and Huntington supporters deny the continuation of the programs were in no way an outgrowth of the recall campaign, certain elements of the community have a different perception.

(July 26) HINKLEY—Scores of Hinkley residents have signed onto a class action lawsuit representing them against Pacific Gas and Electric, one that seeks compensation for their losses as a consequence of hexavalent chromium contamination that blights the San Bernardino County Mojave Desert community northwest of Barstow.The Hinkley hexavalent chromium contamination came about as a consequence of Pacific Gas and Electric’s operation of a compressor station there beginning in 1952. The compressor station was a facility located on a pipeline that ran between Texas and Canada and delivered in excess of three billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. The compressor station in Hinkley was one of eight such stations along the line in California. Natural gas available in the line was used to fuel compressors which repressurized the gas to push it through the pipeline. At Hinkley, the compressed gas was cooled with water circulating through two cooling towers. From 1952 until 1966, hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, was added to the cooling water to prevent corrosion to the cooling towers and the water circulation system. Wastewater from the cooling system was disposed of in unlined ponds at the Hinkley site. Beginning in 1964, after the danger of chromium 6 was recognized, the cooling water was treated to remove the chromium before it was disposed in the pools and a non-chromium-based additive was substituted into the cooling system in 1966. As of 1972 the cooling water was pumped into lined evaporation ponds.
These improvements to the system, however, did not undo the ecological havoc that had occurred up until 1972.
In 1988, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees water quality issues in that portion of the desert, issued a cleanup and abatement order to PG&E to investigate a plume of chromium 6 in the water table. In 1991, the water board issued permits to treat the contaminated groundwater using land treatment units.
In 1993, attorney Ed Masry, with whom Erin Brockovich, a Hinkley resident, was working, filed a multi-plaintiff direct action suit against PG&E, alleging contamination of the town’s drinking water and untoward consequences of that pollution. In 1996, the case was settled for $333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit until that time. In 2000, the matter became an international cause célèbre, with the release of the blockbuster movie Erin Brockovich, which related a substantially accurate version of events in Hinkley. Contrary to widespread public assumptions, Pacific Gas & Electric’s payment of the $333 million did not redress the underlying problem. Masry and his law firm netted over $100 million in legal fees. Only a few of the plaintiffs received more than $100,000. No physical solution to the contamination problem was effectuated.
In 1997 and 2004, the water board reissued follow-up permits to PG&E for the use of land treatment units in the treatment of the contaminated groundwater around Hinkley. In 2006, with the Hinkley groundwater contamination issue fading from public consciousness, the water board gave permits for two subterranean remediation systems to clean up the source and central areas of the plume. In 2008, however, the issue was resurrected as one of regional and local concern when, amidst the water board’s provision of a permit for Pacific Gas & Electric to apply additional cleanup measures, it issued redrafted cleanup and abatement orders. Steadily over the last five years, the condition of the lingering contamination in Hinkley has grown into a larger and larger public issue as evidence of how the underground plume of chromium 6 continues to migrate through the water table into the area from which local wells draw water used for household purposes has emerged.
The best hydrological data now available indicates the plume is more than six miles long and two miles wide and gradually expanding.
Chromium is the 21st most abundant element in the earth’s crust and as such naturally occurs in rocks, soil, ground water and plants.
Under current guidelines, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency specifies 100 micrograms per liter as the maximum acceptable total chromium contaminant level acceptable in water to be consumed by humans. The California state standard is half that at 50 micrograms per liter. But that standard applies to the most benign form of chromium, and not hexavalent chromium or chromium 6.
Trivalent chromium – chromium 3 – is the dominant form of chromium in nature, and is virtually insoluble in water and stable and immobile in soil. Hexavalent chromium – chromium six – is not abundant in nature, is soluble in water and is a potential carcinogen if inhaled.
Pacific Gas and Electric has been wrestling with the contamination issue and has applied a number of experimental cures to the problem which have proven inadequate, including pumping groundwater through a subsurface drip irrigation system and organic matter in the soil around plant root zones to create conditions, which Pacific Gas & Electric hoped  would “chemically reduce the level of chromium 6 in the water [reducing] the hexavalent chromium  to insoluble trivalent chromium.” Pacific Gas & Electric sought ways of keeping the contaminated water from migrating to other areas of the aquifer and tainting the water there. One effort Pacific Gas & Electric made to prevent the spreading of the plume entailed drawing up to 80 gallons of water per minute from supply wells south of the compression station, pumping it north through new underground pipes and injecting the water outside the northwestern plume boundary. This strategy, Pacific Gas and Electric claimed, was intended to “create a hydraulic barrier designed to prevent spreading of the plume.” While partially effective, that measure did not achieve the goal of reducing the chromium 6 in the water supply to an acceptable level.
As a practical means of ensuring that the tainted water does not end up in the drinking glasses, cooking utensils, showers, baths, toilets and garden hoses of Hinkley residents, PG&E offered to provide every household and business in Hinkley with either a filtration/treatment system to capture the chromium before it would be dispensed at the tap or in the alternative, commercial bottled drinking water.
But with no certain, final and comprehensive cure of the problem in sight, Pacific Gas & Electric in April 2012 began surveying homeowners with regard to their willingness to sell their property and move elsewhere. When roughly two-thirds of those surveyed indicated their readiness to depart the community, PG&E began making offers to individual property owners and undertook appraisals of their properties.  As soon as mutually acceptable terms between PG&E and the individual homeowners were arrived at, purchases were made. Since February, houses in Hinkley are being sold to PG&E at a rate of two to four per week.  Once the houses are empty, Pacific Gas & Electric has not spared time in having those homes razed, foreclosing any possibility that squatters or anyone else will be tempted to take up residence therein ever again.
Last week, the Santa Ana-based law firm Callahan & Blaine filed suit against PG&E in San Bernardino County Superior Court on behalf of a substantial number of Hinkley residents who were not a part of the litigation brought by Masry. Callahan & Blaine are seeking that the plaintiffs be recompensed for the damages they have sustained as a consequence of the continuing contamination and the ongoing expansion of the toxic plume and its threat to the area’s groundwater.
Of issue is that PG&E, in offering “fair market value” for the properties, is benefiting by its deliberate efforts to convert Hinkley to a ghost town. Under various theories, PG&E should be required to pay more for the homes than they are currently offering, since the company is responsible for the depression in Hinkley’s land values. In early 2012,  Hinkley’s population stood at 1,900. Today it has dwindled to an estimated 1,300, as residents continue their exodus. Earlier this year, the Barstow Unified School District moved to shutter Hinkley School at the end of the 2012-13 school year last month. The town is down to one market, a post office and a tavern.

(July 26) The county fire department on Saturday took over operation of the Crest Forest Fire Protection District.
In a relatively seamless transition, the firefighters who had previously been employed by the Crest Forest Fire Protection District were laid off and immediately rehired by the San Bernardino County Fire Department. The district, which has been in existence since 1929, remains as a corporate entity contracting with the county, though it is likely that in a relatively short period of time it will be subsumed by the county. The district’s board remains in place.
While county officials assert that there will be no diminution in fire protection or service levels, the county will keep just two-thirds of the firemen it absorbed on July 20 at the two stations within the boundaries of the Crest Forest Fire Protection District, Station 25 in Crestline and Station 26 in Twin Peaks.
According to battalion chief John McLinn, the county fire division will now station an ambulance and its two-person crew at Station 26. That ambulance was previously staged out of Station 94 in Lake Arrowhead.
“By moving that ambulance to Station 26, it will be placed in a more centrally located position and will provide improved response time to its area of operations,” McLinn said.
Previously, the Crest Forest Fire District had two firefighter paramedics on a paramedic engine functioning out of Station 26 in Twin Peaks.  In addition to the ambulance at Station 26, County Fire will stage a three-person paramedic engine out of that site.
Previously, at Station 25 in Crestline, the Crest Forest Fire District had a medical fire engine with two men manning it. Under the new County Fire arrangement, according to McLinn, there will be a two-person crew manning the medical engine and a paramedic ambulance, also manned by two paramedic firefighters at Station 25.
The total staff for the department will consist of six captains, six engineers, six firefighter-paramedics and six  ambulance operators-medics.

(July 26) VICTORVILLE—Finding a replacement for Michael Krause on the Victor Valley Community College District Board of Trustees has been put on a back burner, as the four remaining members of the board are at odds over how to fill the vacancy.
There does not appear to be sufficient support among the board’s members to appoint former board member Joe Range to serve out the remainder of Krause’s term.
Krause tendered his resignation in May effective last month because he has changed his primary residence to Orange County. In the months prior to his departure, Krause’s infrequent attendance at board meetings had become the subject of criticism by his board colleague, Joseph Brady, and American Federation of Teachers local president John Reid. Also in June, Reid and a part-time member of the Victor Valley Community College faculty, Lynne Glickstein, filed a libel suit against Krause when he posted on a website that they were “ungrateful, greedy and domestic terrorists” because of their efforts to keep former VVC President Dr. Christopher O’Hearn from being retained.
Following Krause’s departure, the board considered its options for replacing him, including making an appointment of someone to serve out his term, which ends in 2014, or hold an election, which would entail a cost of at least $80,000.
Trustee Dennis Henderson has proposed reappointing Range, who was on the board for eight years before he was defeated for reelection last year. Henderson said Range is up to speed on the issues facing the district and had a proven track record that recommended him to the post, calling Range “a fine member who didn’t get re-elected.”
Board member John Pinkerton was supportive of Henderson’s suggestion of Range.
Board president Lorrie Denson, however, wants a more expansive application pool and interview process. She proposes taking nominations and applications, examining resumés, then interviewing candidates and appointing the new member during a special meeting on August 8.  — the same way the board has appointed trustees in the past. Denson did not rule out eventually settling on Range, but indicated she wanted other qualified candidates to be considered.
Board member Joseph Brady was therefore the crucial third vote needed to return Range to the board. Brady, however, balked. Brady’s reluctance comes more than two years after a somewhat similar situation in reverse. In 2011, Range had been one of three members of the board who had approved Brady’s appointment to the board, when a vacancy ensued after the election of then-board member Angela Valles to the Victorville City Council. After the board had failed to come to an agreement over the appointment of several considered candidates, Range backed Brady, who was then elected in his own right in 2012, during the same election in which Range placed third in the race for two positions.
The board faces several critical issues, including returning from accreditation probation and finding a replacement for O’Hearn. Some members of the High Desert community expressed the belief that the electorate’s decision last year to remove Range from the board should be respected. Brady’s unwillingness to appoint the same board member who had voted for his appointment reflected at least some of that attitude.
Relations between Range and Brady while both men were on the board had been cordial. Those between Krause and Brady, however, had not. Krause did not support Brady’s appointment. And Krause had opposed Brady’s efforts to have the district board meetings televised.
The board has not come to a consensus on how Krause’s replacement will be found. Denson scheduled a special meeting for Monday July 22 to discuss the protocol for an appointment, but the meeting was canceled due to the lack of a quorum when Pinkerton and Henderson were no-shows.

(July 26) The Upper Santa Ana River Management and Habitat Conservation Plan Task Force has given tentative go-ahead to what appears to be the final draft of the protection plan for the Upper Santa Ana River Wash.
State, federal and local government representatives on the task force last week met at the conference room of the San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District in Redlands to make a last time review of the plan, with its estimated $787,500 cost.
The Bureau of Land Management, the state and federal departments of Fish and Game, the cities of Redlands and Highland, the San Bernardino County Flood Control District, and San Bernardino County are all public sector participants in the undertaking, with the San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District acting as the lead agency. Two major private sector entities, Cemex and Robertsons, are participants as well.
There  now appears to be general agreement on the cost sharing for the plan, which has Cemex and Robertson bearing the lion’s share, with each putting up $182,251 or 23.27 percent each. The San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District and San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District are being counted upon to put up $182,306 or 23.15 percent each toward the total. The city of Highland would cover 6.06 percent of the cost, or $47,722; The East Valley Water District would pay 3.03 percent, or $23,861.
The plan, which dictates permitted uses, the location where those uses can take place and intensities of use within the wash, has as its goal protecting native plants and the habitat of certain species of wildlife such as the wooly star and the kangaroo rat.
For their participation in the plan, Cemex and Robertson are given certain priorities of use with regard to their mining interests at the site, allowing them to extract limestone within a 330 acres portion, which accounts for 28 percent of the wash. Water conservation limits pertain to 300 acres, which translates to 26 percent. Habitat preservation is applicable to 43 percent of the wash for a total of 505 acres.
An environmental impact report for the plan has been completed and its filing and acceptance is pending. The costs quoted above relate to implementation and initiation of the plan. Once in place, it will require half a million per year to maintain it.

(July 19) NEEDLES — Lately, and for the past two decades, the hexavalent chromium contamination problem in Hinkley has garnered local, regional, state, national and international attention, heightened by the 2000 release of the blockbuster movie Erin Brockovich.  But at another location in the Mojave Desert within San Bernardino County, a chromium six contamination problem has been festering equally as long and the company that perpetuated it, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, has only recently gone public with details relating to what is believed to be the next stage of its remediation effort.
The plan now being mapped out will be applied only to contamination emanating directly from that company’s local plant site and will not redress soil and aquifer pollution that resulted when hexavalent chromium-laced soil was dumped elsewhere around the community.
Pacific Gas and Electric, known by its acronym PG&E, now acknowledges that its past practices led to the monumental environmental problems now dogging different portions of the far-flung Mojave Desert. It is ironic that the hexavalent chromium contamination has manifested in the environs of two San Bernardino County cities that today are in eclipse but once were considered among the county’s major cities and populated areas. Hinkley lies on the extended outskirts of Barstow. Both Needles and Barstow are railroad towns, ones that were key locations along the Southern Pacific Railroad when it was established before the turn of the 20th Century as an alternate transcontinental route to the northlying Union Pacific. At one point  in the late 19th Century, Needles, where the railroad tracks came across the Colorado River on what was then a state-of-the art bridge, and Barstow, which would become the home of the biggest railroad yard in the world, were the third and fourth largest cities in San Bernardino County. Today they rank as the smallest and sixth smallest, in terms of population, of the county’s 24 incorporated municipalities.
It was midway in the 20th Century that Pacific Gas and Electric, in tapping into the vast natural gas reserves of west Texas and east New Mexico, would come to build a pipeline that spanned from Texas across New Mexico, Arizona, and then west and northward through California to Oregon, Washington and into Canada, leading to the dilemma now facing Hinkley and Needles, and indeed several other communities where the hexavalent chromium problem is less publicized, today.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Pacific Gas and Electric undertook the construction of the pipeline, initiating its operation in 1952. Located along the gas line were compressor stations which utilized the natural gas available in the line as fuel for compressors which pressurized and thus pushed the gas through the pipeline to a multitude of destinations, delivering in excess of three billion cubic feet of natural gas to customers per day. Compressor stations in Needles and Hinkley were two of eight such stations along the line in California. The compressed gas was cooled with water circulating through cooling towers located at the compressor stations. From 1952 until 1966, hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, was added to the cooling water to prevent corrosion to the cooling towers and the water circulation system. Wastewater from the cooling system was disposed of in unlined ponds at the PG&E compressor sites.
It had been known for years that hexavalent chromium was toxic. By 1963, evidence had accumulated to show that it was not only lethally toxic in certain quantities, but highly damaging to biological systems in minute quantities, as well as a persistent contaminant resistant to molecular breakdown. After these dangers were realized, beginning in 1964, the cooling water in PG&E’s gas pressurizing systems was treated to remove the chromium before it was disposed in the pools. A non-chromium-based additive was substituted into the cooling system in 1966. Beginning in 1972 the cooling water was pumped into lined evaporation ponds.
Those changes, however, did not undo the ecological havoc that had occurred up until 1972.
While the problems existed at or near cooling stations all along the pipeline from Texas to Canada, it was in Hinkley, an unincorporated zone in San Bernardino County just north of State Highway 58, 14 miles northwest of Barstow, 59 miles east of Mojave, and 47 miles north of Victorville, where the contamination crisis would loom largest into public view.
In 1988, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees water quality issues in that portion of the desert, issued a cleanup and abatement order to PG&E to investigate a plume of chromium 6 in the water table.
In 1991, the water board issued permits to PG&E to treat the contaminated groundwater using land treatment units.
In 1993, attorney Ed Masry, with whom Erin Brockovich, a Hinkley resident, was working, filed a multi-plaintiff direct action suit against PG&E, alleging contamination of the town’s drinking water and untoward consequences of that pollution. In 1996, the case was settled for $333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit until that time.
Contrary to widespread public assumptions, Pacific Gas & Electric’s payment of the $333 million did not redress the underlying problem.
In 1997 and 2004, the water board reissued follow-up permits to PG&E for the use of land treatment units in the treatment of the contaminated groundwater around Hinkley.
In 2006, with the Hinkley groundwater contamination issue fading from public consciousness, the water board gave permits for two subterranean remediation systems to clean up the source and central areas of the plume. In 2008, however, the issue was resurrected as one of regional and local concern when, amidst the water board’s provision of a permit for Pacific Gas & Electric to apply additional cleanup measures, it issued redrafted cleanup and abatement orders. Steadily over the last five years, the condition of the lingering contamination in Hinkley has grown into a larger and larger public issue as evidence of how the underground plume of chromium 6 continues to migrate through the water table into the area from which local wells draw water used for household purposes has emerged.
The best hydrological data now available indicates the Hinkley plume is more than six miles long and two miles wide and gradually expanding.
Mandated and tasked to take a number of steps to ensure that the tainted water does not end up in the drinking glasses, cooking utensils, showers, baths, toilets and garden hoses of Hinkley residents, Pacific Gas and Electric has tested and applied a variety of strategies in the Hinkley area, including “irrigating crops as an effective means of providing both hydraulic control and treatment of extracted hexavalent chromium tainted water.” That process entailed pumping groundwater through a subsurface drip irrigation system and organic matter in the soil around plant root zones to create conditions, Pacific Gas & Electric claimed, would “chemically reduce the level of chromium 6 in the water. Hexavalent chromium is naturally reduced to insoluble trivalent chromium. Trivalent chromium joins and becomes bound with the trivalent chromium naturally occurring in the subsurface soil.” Using this method, Pacific Gas and Electric maintained in 2009 that “Total hexavalent chromium concentrations in extracted groundwater have decreased from approximately 60 micrograms per liter in 2004 to approximately 20 micrograms per liter today.”
The effectiveness of that approach was questioned by others, including the water board and residents of the area.
In addition to treating the water within the water table, Pacific Gas & Electric sought ways of keeping the contaminated water from migrating to other areas of the aquifer and tainting the water there. One effort Pacific Gas & Electric made to prevent the spreading of the plume entailed drawing up to 80 gallons of water per minute from supply wells south of the compression station, pumping it north through new underground pipes and injecting the water outside the northwestern plume boundary. This strategy, Pacific Gas and Electric claimed, was intended to “create a hydraulic barrier designed to prevent spreading of the plume.” While partially effective, that measure did not achieve the goal of reducing the chromium 6 in the water supply to an acceptable level.
At a practical level in Hinkley, PG&E found its immediate options to consist of installing comprehensive water treatment systems at each residence or supplying each household with bottled water while efforts to deal with the aquifer progressed. More recently, the company has settled upon a strategy of simply buying out the town’s residents, that is, purchasing their homes and then demolishing them in an effort to convert Hinkley to a ghost town. That effort appears to be succeeding. The town’s population stood at 1,900 in early 2012. Today it is down to an estimated 1,300. The company is purchasing and razing houses at a rate of two to three each week. The Barstow Unified School District this year elected to shut down Hinkley School. With the anticipated demise of Hinkley’s last three remaining major institutions of civilization – the local market, the post office and the local bar – the town at the current rate will be entirely depopulated sometime in 2016.
Across the county, in Needles, PG&E’s dealing with the Chromium 6 contamination has received far less public scrutiny.
In Needles, the plume originated at what PG&E refers to as the Topock Compressor Station.
Clean up at Topock has been going on for well over a decade. PG&E constructed a  treatment plant that utilizes copious amounts of water. In addition, tanker trucks have been hauling off earth, water and  waste to a hazardous material disposal site near Bakersfield.  Only recently, within the last five months, has PG&E gone public with references to its cleanup efforts. All previous hearings relating to the chromium 6 contamination were not easily accessible to those from the Needles community, being held before the Colorado River Water Quality Control Board, which meets in La Quinta in Riverside County. In this way, the local community has remained in the dark about  the situation,
At this point, Pacific Gas and Electric believes, or at least hopes, that it will be able to apply a different and far less expensive fix to the problem in Needles than was the case in Hinkley.
Indeed, PG&E has a few advantages, at present, with regard to the original source of contamination it did not and does not have in Hinkley. Conversely, an even larger problem hangs like a specter over Needles: the proximity of the Colorado River and the possibility the contamination plume will reach  or has already reached the drinking supply for millions of people in California, Arizona and Mexico. And there is also the consideration that two decades ago some chromium 6 contaminated soil or sludge was moved away from its site of origin to at least two other spots around the Needles community, greatly complicating the remediation challenge.
Under current guidelines, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency specifies 100 micrograms per liter as the maximum acceptable total chromium contaminant level acceptable in water to be consumed by humans. The California state standard is half that at 50 micrograms per liter. But that standard applies to the most beneficent form of chromium, and not hexavalent chromium or chromium 6.
Trivalent chromium – chromium 3 – is the dominant form of chromium in nature, and is virtually insoluble in water and stable and immobile in soil. Hexavalent chromium – chromium 6 – is not abundant in nature, is soluble in water and is a potential carcinogen if inhaled.
For that reason, Pacific Gas and Electric believes that a strategy of converting the hexavalent chromium to trivalent chromium is an acceptable method of treatment. Pacific Gas & Electric has never been able to execute upon that theory in actuality, however.
In the Hinkley area, Pacific Gas & Electric was hamstrung in its undertaking by a multitude of challenges and obstacles that included low background chromium levels, a legacy of extensive agricultural use in the area that introduced other contaminants unrelated to chromium 6 into the water table, ongoing active use of the aquifer, potential revisions of the chromium standard and difficulty in accessing all portions of the plume.
According to PG&E, in Needles the plume is north and west of the compressor station and has yet to reach the Colorado River, remaining for the time being, according to PG&E, stationary. One advantage the company has in Needles that it does not have in Hinkley, according to PG&E, is that there is no active pumping out of the aquifer, leaving the subsurface body of water relatively immobile.
There is evidence, however, that hexavalent chromium-containing sludge was removed from the Topock site and dumped directly into Bat Cave Wash, where surface runoff releases directly to the Colorado River. There is a substantial natural dike underground between the wash and the river which holds heavy metals back from the river, and there are reports that this area is saturated with Chromium 6.
In the early 1990s, there had been some agitation within the community with regard to hexavalent chromium contamination. This came to a crisis point in 1993 when residents alleged that contaminated soil tainted with chromium 6 had been brought up Highway 95 from the PG&E plant and was deposited in the Needles landfill just south of the southernmost residential area in Needles. The Bureau of Land Management owns the land upon which the landfill is located and had leased it to the county of San Bernardino, which in turn subleased it to the city of Needles. A dispute ensued among the three agencies over which was responsible for allowing the contaminated soil to be disposed at the landfill. From the landfill, the contamination could potentially migrate to the river. The problem was exacerbated by a partial operational failure at the Needles sewer plant at that time, resulting in untreated sewer sludge being deposited in the landfill, reportedly on top of the hexavalent chromium-laden soil.
In Needles today, PG&E’s remediation effort is focused solely on the Topock site and currently makes no reference to the landfill. Pacific Gas and Electric’s game plan is to use a so-called in-situ reduction process, by which a filter will be laid into the ground and the water in the aquifer drawn through it. The filter is to be built by the introduction of organic matter in the form of ethanol into the water simultaneous to the oxygenating of the water. Naturally present bacteria will consume the ethanol and process the oxygen into carbon dioxide, in time consuming the oxygen. Before all of the oxygen is consumed, however, a sizable colony of bacteria will be created. When all of the oxygen is depleted, this will leave an anaerobic zone within which hexavalent chromium will be converted to trivalent chromium, PG&E postulates. Since trivalent chromium is insoluble in water, it can be removed.
If the process passes muster with lawyers, hydrologists, biologists, physicists and engineers with the California Water Resources Board, the Department of Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, it will be given approval. A combination of state and federal agencies and the tribe have ownership or jurisdiction over Topock.
At issue in the approval of the proposed filtration process is minimization or elimination of the possibility that the subsurface disturbances of the water table will result in the plume migrating any further toward the river. While at present the plume is significantly smaller than the plume in Hinkley, the concentration of hexavalent chromium within it is much higher.
PG&E has projected that it can begin the treatment process by Fall 2014 if it can obtain all of the required permits in a timely manner. If the process works as envisioned, the cleanup could be completed as early as 2034, PGE has optimistically suggested. More realistically, the remediation would likely not be complete until 2050 or beyond.

(July 19) FONTANA – In a contest marked by extremely low voter turnout, Fontana Unified School District board members Leticia Garcia and Sophia Green were ousted as a consequence of Tuesday’s specially-called recall election.
While voters in the district number 57,084, 3,851 turned out to vote on whether Green should be recalled and 3,919 weighed in with regard to Garcia.
In both cases, the verdict against them was overwhelming. 2,714, or 69.25 percent voted to remove Garcia from office. 2,697 or 70.03 percent voted to recall Green.
Simultaneous to the voting on the recall questions, voters were offered alternatives as to Garcia and Green’s replacements.
Shannon O’Brien and Socorro Enriquez sought Garcia’s post. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Jason O’Brien and Olivia Lopez sought to succeed Green.
Voters chose Shannon O’Brien to move into the seat held by Garcia. She captured 1,936 votes or 61.95 percent to turn back Enriquez’s bid.
Blackmon-Balogun pulled in 1,343 or 42.61 percent votes to overcome Jason O’Brien and Lopez.
Observers found something of concern in the results. Shannon O’Brien’s ascendency rises out of a circumstance in which Green and Garcia found themselves at the center of controversy over their run-ins with teacher union members, district administration and opposition to the district police department’s purchase of assault weapons. O’Brien owns a non-profit business that contracts with local school districts, a circumstance representing a potential future conflict of interest, some said, that could perpetuate the controversy surrounding the district.