(July 19) Nine candidates will face off next Tuesday in the special election to  replace Norma Torres as the legislator representing  Chino, Pomona, Montclair, Ontario and a portion of Fontana in the California Assembly, making it highly likely that a run-off will be necessary. If no single candidate captures a majority of the vote on Tuesday, then the two top vote-getters will slug it out in September. Seven of the nine candidates are Democrats. One is a Republican and the other is a newly independent who dropped his party affiliation with the Republicans just two months ago.
Four of the candidates – Ontario Mayor Paul Leon, Pomona councilman Freddie Rodriguez, Chino councilman Tom Haughey and Ontario Councilman Paul Vincent Avila – have succeeded in distinguishing themselves from the pack by means of endorsements or aggressive campaigning so far. Another,. Dorothy Pineda, the sole registered Republican in the race, is calculating she can move to capture a run-off berth on the basis of partisan appeal., even though Republicans are outnumbered in the district overall.
The race was necessitated by a chain of events, beginning with former state senator Gloria Negrete-McLeod’s unexpected victory over incumbent Congressman Joe Baca in November. Negrete-McLeod had to resign from her 32nd state Senatorial position to depart from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., with two years remaining on her term.
A vote to see who would succeed her was held in March, which attracted six candidates, including Torres, the assemblywoman in the 52nd District who had just been elected to a third term in November herself: Leon, who at that point was one of two Republicans in the race; and Avila. In March, Torres proved the frontrunner, but did not garner a majority of the vote. Leon finished second, qualifying for the May run-off against Torres. Ultimately, Torres prevailed. Like Newgrete-McLeod, she was at that point obliged to resign the position she held to take on her new elected post.
Leon carries with him into the state Senate race the momentum and name familiarity from the March and May campaigns, putting him a leg up on much of the competition. Ultimately, his electoral bid failed in May in large measure because of his party affiliation. Leon campaigned forthrightly at that time as a pro-economic development, anti-regulation Republican. This ploy proved successful in the March race. With some backing from the Republican Party – over $365,000 in political donations having made their way into his electioneering coffers – Leon was able to mount a serious campaign in a district wherein voter registration favored Democrats over Republicans  47 percent to 28 percent. Only Ken Coble of the other candidates was Republican. All four others – Torres, Avila, county treasurer Larry Walker and Rialto School Board Member Joanne Gilbert  were Democrats. Coble received no GOP support to speak of. In fact, Republicans had pressured him to get out of the race to enable Leon to maximize partisan support. As it turned out, Walker, Avila and Gilbert cut into the Democratic base Torres was relying upon, and in March she captured 13,295 votes, or 43.6 percent, not enough to win at that point outright. In May, with the Democrats united behind her, she cruised to a comfortable 19,666 votes, or 59.39 percent to 13,445, or 40.6 percent victory over Leon.
In the 52nd Assembly District, which overlaps with much of the 32nd State Senatorial District, the Democrats hold a registration advantage over the Republicans, although it is not as stark of an edge, being 16 points higher rather than 19. Nevertheless, Leon moved to reregister himself as unaffiliated with any party just before he signed on to run in the 52nd District. His strategists are hoping he can springboard off his name recognition from the last two contests, maintain his appeal with Republicans throughout the district and make sufficient inroads with Democrats through the projection of a non-partisan approach to governance in Sacramento. So far, Leon has spent over $200,000 in the 52nd District race. Nearly all of that has come from Republicans, including a $9,000 contribution from the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.
Some of the more passionate Leon supporters believe that he can win the election outright by capturing all, or nearly all of the Republican vote while drawing in as much as a third of the Democratic vote and simultaneously appealing to unaligned voters.
A weak link in this strategy is that Pineda, the only candidate officially affiliated with the Republican Party, is gunning for as many GOP votes as she can get. Moreover, Democrats are wary of Leon, and several unions, particularly the California Teachers Association, is spending money to print mailers and fliers attacking Leon.
The Democrats appear to be coalescing behind Rodriguez. One of his key endorsements is that of Torres. Before stepping up to the state legislature, Torres was Pomona mayor.
On June 11, Torres endorsed Rodriguez, calling upon her supporters in the district and all Democrats to line up behind him to prevent Leon, whom she characterized as a Republican wolf in non-partisan clothing, from utilizing his newly non-declared status to trick the district’s electorate.  Democrats should keep a collective eye on the ball, Torres said.
“Freddie has already built an impressive coalition behind his campaign that includes the California Democratic Party, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and scores of local leaders, state legislators, small business owners, and community leaders — a testament to the strong and deep support behind his campaign,” Torres said. She then made a pitch to the voters in Pomona.
“Like me, Freddie has deep roots in our community, is a public safety professional, and has an outstanding track record of building coalitions to deliver results for the people he serves as a city council member,” Torres said.
In the span of just four days, the California Democratic Party last month pumped $52,000 into the Rodriguez  campaign.
The dark horse in the race is Avila, who has been a perennial candidate for state and local offices for the last two decades, garnering name recognition as he has gone on, along with election to two positions, first as a school board member in the Ontario-Montclair School District and then to the Ontario City Council last year. He is actually making his second run in the 52nd. Last year, he ran in the primary, managing to capture 3,417 votes, or 13.2%. During the 32nd Senatorial District run, he turned strategy on its head, announcing more than a month before the election and after his name was committed to appearing on the ballot that he was supporting Leon. This prompted expulsion threats from the Democratic Party. Immediately upon Torres’ victory in May, Avila announced that he would seek Torres’ newly vacant Assembly seat. He threw in a caveat, however, saying he would withdraw if Leon stepped up to run.  Avila has not withdrawn, though, and is actually running one of the more spirited sign campaigns in the race, effective and visible red and yellow placards and yard postings that tout him as a “Valiant Vietnam Veteran.”
Haughey has parlayed his position on the Chino City Council into what he hopes will be a viable appeal to voters. He has picked up the endorsements of both the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and the Chino Champion, two of the widest circulating publications in the 52nd District.
Others beside Leon, Rodriquez, Avila, Haughey and Pineda in the race are Jason Rothman, a school board member and the son of the Pomona mayor, Manuel Saucedo, a consultant who has garnered the endorsement of Joe Baca; Danielle Soto a a public information specialist who has been endorsed by Gloria Negrete-McLeod and Doris Louise Wallace, a union organizer.

(July 19) San Bernardino County is on the verge of settling a case brought against it, Sheriff John McMahon, the sheriff’s department and several sheriff’s department command staff by sheriff’s deputy Travis Bauer  over accusation that he was harassed, intimidated and wrongfully disciplined for seeking to exercise his rights under the Family Medical Leave Act in order to care for his ill mother.
At issue in the case were several steps Bauer’s superiors took to at first dissuade him from utilizing family medical leave, followed by accusations that he had falsified his claim. The effort to fire him involved violations of his privacy, including tapping his phone without first obtaining a court warrant to do so.
Of crucial significance in the case, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Riverside in April 2012, were emails and other communications between Bauer’s supervisors and other members of the department which demonstrated that department higher-ups believed Bauer had made misrepresentations with regard to his requests for time off, the animus they had toward Bauer, the lengths they went to in order to make a case against him, the misrepresentations made in the effort to make that case and, perhaps most damaging of all, efforts by members of the department at the highest level to hide evidence of the campaign that had been carried out against Bauer when it was ultimately determined that his request for leave was legitimate.
According to documents filed with the court by Bauer’s attorney, Michael McGill, key evidence in support of Bauer’s case included a copy of an email between sheriff’s captain Mark Marnati and Sheriff John McMahon in which “pinging” Bauer’s cell phone to monitor his whereabouts is discussed; documentation of an effort to have Bauer fired over failure to properly register a vehicle he owned even though registration on the vehicle was current; disciplining him for writing “warning” traffic citations, though that practice was one commonly used by other deputies who were not so disciplined; falsifications made about Bauer’s mother’s medical condition after sheriff’s investigators contacted her and determined her illness was genuine; the adjusting of Bauer’s schedule by his supervisors without informing him of the changes followed with designating  Bauer as absent without leave for missing shifts he did not know he was expected to cover; Bauer’s supervisors placing him on conflicting shifts and hours; Bauer’s placement on a work performance improvement plan and his deliberate reassignment to another immediate supervisor when his supervisor gave indication Bauer was meeting department expectations; and the use of a falsified finding that Bauer was fraudulently using family medical leave to terminate him.
Even as Bauer’s legal team was documenting an effort to retaliate against him had taken place, lawyers for the county and the sheriff’s department made three separate motions to have the case dismissed. U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips denied all three motions. A notice of settlement in the case was filed June 28, obviating the initiation of a trial that was to commence on July 2 and calling for San Bernardino County Supervisors to approve a settlement as early as its July 23 meeting and no later than August 1. Indications were, however, that the board of supervisors would delay a vote on the matter at least until August 6.

(July 19) The widely heralded and equally maligned recall attempt of nine San Bernardino city officials by the group Citizens for Responsible Government has taken a partisan turn, with recall organizers giving indication they would dispense with efforts against three council members and the mayor in an effort to intensify the effort against five others.
According to Citizens for Responsible Government, the group will drop the signature gathering campaign with regard to the recall of Mayor Pat Morris and council members Virginia Marquez, Robert Jenkins and Fred Shorett in favor of focusing on the move to oust City Attorney Jim Penman and council members John Valdivia, Chas Kelley, Rikke Van Johnson and Wendy McCammack.
The leader of the group, Scott Beard, said the group is changing tactics in advance of the August 1 deadline for submitting the signature-containing recall petitions because Morris’s term is up as of next March  and he is not seeking reelection in November, while Marquez, Jenkins, Shorett must face the voters in November to remain in office after March 2014. Valdivia, Kelley, Johnson and McCammack would otherwise remain in office until March 2016.
The change in tactics fueled further charges that the recall is a thinly-disguised ploy by Democrats to seize control of the mayorship and council. Morris, a former Superior Court judge, is a Democrat and considered to be the leader of the Democrats at the municipal level. While formerly he enjoyed the support of a bipartisan coalition of three Democrats and two Republicans on the council, over the last year he has been on the down side of 4-3 votes that involved the consistent domination of the Republican-affiliated coalition of McCammack, Kelley, Valdivia and Jenkins, who are aligned with Penman, also a Republican. Penman twice lost to Morris in the 2005 and 2009 mayoral races. While registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the city of San Bernardino, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats at present on the city council.
Beard is the prime mover in Citizens for Responsible Government’s recall movement. He is a longtime associate of Democrat Jerry Eaves, a former Rialto mayor, California Assemblyman and county supervisor.
When Citizens for Responsible Government originated the recall in late April, its spokesmen insisted the membership was  intent on making a clean sweep of all city officials, maintaining the city had been mismanaged in total. They targeted all seven members of the city council, the mayor and city attorney, though they did not launch an effort against the city treasurer or city clerk. The recall effort referenced the negligence or irresponsibility of the council, mayor and city attorney, especially with regard to the city’s financial deterioration that culminated in a bankruptcy filing last August.
City Clerk Gigi Hannah was subsequently targeted for recall by another individual.
In announcing that the group was dropping the efforts against Morris, Jenkins, Marquez and Shorett, Citizens for Responsible Government said the effort against Morris was unnecessary, the efforts against the other three redundant in that they must stand for reelection anyway and the change would streamline the recall effort and save taxpayers resources and money.
But the announcement encouraged already enunciated accusations that Citizens for Responsible Government’s members were not truly interested in recalling Shorett, Marquez and Johnson and naming them as recall targets along with Morris was merely a smokescreen.
Meanwhile, Hanna has made a finding that the petitioners failed to validate the petitions against Penman, McCammack, Jenkins and Kelley when they omitted providing the four with the opportunity to submit a response to the recall proponents’ charges for inclusion on the recall petition.

(July 19) The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has dropped tentative plans to expand the California Institution for Men in Chino’s capacity by nearly 800 inmates.
The Chino Institution for Men (CIM) had been one of seven state prisons under  review by the state for the proposed construction of up to three, 792-bed Level II Correctional Housing Facilities and related support buildings.
A notification from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation stated that CIM was eliminated as a potential low-level facility expansion site because there is insufficient time to complete engineering studies pertaining to water at the site.
Data with regard to water availability and wastewater treatment capability is lacking, according to state officials. The prison is proximate to the Chino Agricultural Preserve, where sodium and nitrate concentrations in the soil have proven to be an ongoing environmental issue.
The state is looking to expand its prisoner holding capability, and in particular wanted to build as many as three new Level II facilities, intended as repositories of  lower-level offenders, such as those  who have committed white collar or financial crimes or were involved in drugs or property offenses.
In addition to CIM, other state prisons at Sacramento, Folsom, Solano, Vacaville, Ione and San Diego were under consideration for the Level II augmentation.
The city of Chino was not supportive of the concept of expanding CIM and the announcement by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was hailed as good news.
“Although CIM has been a part of our growing community for many years, the council and I cannot support the placement of new facilities that would house additional prisoners at CIM until the population and on-going and deferred maintenance issues have been properly addressed,” said Chino Mayor Dennis Yates. “We are pleased to have received this news and thankful for our many community partners, who supported our position on this project.”

(July 12) The California Public Utilities Commission yesterday voted narrowly in favor of requiring Southern California Edison to underground high-voltage power lines for the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project for 3.5 miles of the five miles they will run through Chino Hills.
The vote of three of the boards five commissioners – Michael Peevey, Mark  Ferron and Catherine Sandoval – effectively undid a four-year old vote of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that gave Edison go-ahead to string 500 kilovolt cables from 197-foot high towers running through the heart of upscale Chino Hills. Peevey, Ferron and Sandoval’s votes represented the bare minimum needed to overcome the votes of their fellow commissioners Michel Florio and Carla Peterman, who voted against deviating from the commission’s 2009 decision. The vote also overcame a tentative ruling by Administrative Law Judge Jean Vieth which denied the appeal lodged by the city of Chino Hills and the grassroots group Hope For The Hills of the commission’s 2009 permit allowing Southern California Edison to erect the towers.
After the California Public Utilities Commission granted  Southern California Edison that permit four years ago, the Chino Hills City Council authorized what has to date resulted in the expenditure of $4.4 million to employ attorneys and make other efforts to contest the Public Utility Commission’s action, including filing suit against Southern California Edison, alleging the company had “overburdened” the 150-foot wide power line easements. That legal effort failed when West Valley Superior Court Judge Keith D. Davis ruled the California Public Utilities Commission has exclusive jurisdiction regarding the route used by Edison, and the suit was thrown out. An appeal of Davis’s ruling was denied by the 4th District Court of Appeal. In a last-ditch gambit, Chino Hills directly appealed in 2011 to the Public Utilities Commission, which at that point had shed four of its five members who had voted to approve the line in 2009. By inviting first Peevey and then the other four members of the commission to Chino Hills to actually examine the towers, 18 of which had been erected, undergrounding advocates were able to convince Peevey, who prior to his appointment to the PUC had been a senior executive and president of Southern California Edison, to issue  in November 2011  a stay on further construction while undergrounding alternatives were considered.
At one point Edison asserted the cost of  undergrounding a double-circuit line to be $703 million to $1 billion. Edison claims it could erect the towers along the same span and string the cables between them for an estimated $172 million.
By January 2012, the PUC acceded to Southern California Edison’s insistence that it could not prepare economical plans to underground that portion of the Tehachapi Renewable Energy Project power line through a 1.5 mile section of the city known as Oak Tree Downs along the north side of Carbon Canyon at the west extension of Chino Hills, given the undulations of the area’s rolling hills and other peculiarities in the contour of the land. Constrained to determining the cost of undergrounding a single cable for the remaining 3.5 miles of the span through Chino Hills, Southern California Edison indicated the burial could be done for no less than $270 million, not considering the company’s cost of having erected the 18 towers and the future cost of bringing them down.
Four members of the Chino Hills City Council and city manager Mike Fleager were in San Francisco on Thursday to attend the PUC hearing. Approaching 200 members of the Chino Hills community were present at Chino Hills City Hall to witness a real-time broadcast of those proceedings. Prior to the hearing, Peevey had rendered a proposed decision calling for the 3.5 mile undergrounding of the line. In their pre-vote remarks at the hearing, Ferron, Sandoval, Florio and Peterman offered their analysis of the factors in their respective decisions. When Ferron indicated that he felt the towers presented an intolerable burden on the city of Chino Hills, the city council chambers, more than 300 miles distant

(July 12) Pacific Gas & Electric is moving forward in earnest with its strategy of converting Hinkley into a ghost town to overcome the liability of dealing with a spreading plume of hexavalent chromium that has rendered the area’s water supply unfit for human consumption.
Indeed, the community of Hinkley was already trending toward extinction as growing numbers of its residents over the last few years have elected to pack up and leave in the face of what appears to be the ineradicable hexavalent chromium contamination problem. For the last ten or eleven months, that exodus has been hastened by the willingness of Pacific Gas and Electric, (PG&E), the entity responsible for the contamination, to essentially buy them out as part of a plan to render the rustic desert hamlet completely uninhabited.
Hinkley, which a little more than a year ago boasted a population of something over 1,900 but has since diminished to an estimated 1,300, is an unincorporated zone in San Bernardino County’s Mojave Desert just north of State Highway 58, 14 miles northwest of Barstow, 59 miles east of Mojave, and 47 miles north of Victorville.
The town came to international prominence in 2000 with the release of the blockbuster movie Erin Brokovich, in which Pacific Gas and Electric was portrayed as a corporate villain that had recklessly endangered the lives and health of Hinkley’s residents. The movie was a substantially accurate version of what had actually occurred.
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. Beginning in 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 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 plume is more than six miles long and two miles wide and gradually expanding.
Pacific Gas and Electric has been 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.
Essentially, all or nearly all of those strategies have been deemed ineffective or inadequate to the task of preventing human consumption of or contact with hexavalent chromium, which is a known carcinogen that is harmful in even the most minute of quantities.
Among those strategies was one championed by Pacific Gas & Electric that called for “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.
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 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 six – 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. Pacific Gas & Electric has never been able to execute upon that theory in actuality, however.
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.
Pacific Gas & Electric was hamstrung in its undertaking by a multitude of challenges and obstacles that included low background chromium levels in the Hinkley area, 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.
Pacific Gas and Electric, in an assertion disputed by many environmentalists and local activists, claims that there are average chromium background levels of 1.2 micrograms per liter in the Hinkley area and maximum chromium background levels of 3.1 microgram per liter in certain areas around Hinkley.
That assertion was attacked by critics as an attempt by Pacific Gas and Electric to lower the degree of clean-up work it should have been required to do.
With the continuing migration of the plume, Pacific Gas & Electric offered to provide every household and business in Hinkley with a filtration/treatment system to capture the chromium before it would be dispensed at the tap. Last year it began supplying all homes and businesses in the area with commercial drinking water.
But with no certain, final and comprehensive cure of the problem in sight, Pacific Gas & Electric eventually arrived at a way out of the dilemma that consisted of simply buying up the entire town of Hinkley and shutting it down. In April 2012, PG&E sampled the attitude of the 300 Hinkley homeowners most impacted by chromium 6 groundwater contamination. They offered them, essentially, three options. Under option one, the company offered to continue to supply them, into perpetuity, with bottled water. Option two consisted of the company replacing in its entirely each home’s water hook-up and piping and plumbing arrangements, and providing each with a state of the art filtration, purification and treatment system. The third option was that Pacific Gas & Electricity would purchase their property at fair market value, providing them with enough money to move elsewhere. Two-thirds of the households surveyed – 200 – accepted Pacific Gas & Electric’s offer to buy out their property. Appraisals on those properties were initiated. As soon as mutually acceptable terms between PG&E and the individual homeowners have been arrived at, the purchases have been made. Since January, more than 40 homes have been sold. 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.
Pacific Gas and Electric has made no bones about wanting to empty the town of all residents. In February, Barstow Unified School District Superintendent Jeff Malan approached PG&E hat in hand, requesting that the company, in a gesture of good will, provide the district with financial assistance to further his efforts to keep Hinkley School open in the face of mounting pressure to shut the school as a consequence of dwindling enrollment. PG&E corporate officers turned Malan down flat. On February 26, the Barstow Unified School District Board of Trustees, with board member Barbara Rose dissenting, voted 4-1 to close down Hinkley School as of the beginning of the 2013-14 school year.
The town’s loss of the school has only served to encourage more residents to bail on the community. In the meantime, PG&E has widened its offer to other town and area residents beyond the 300 most directly impacted by the contamination to more than 200 other homeowners whose homes lie beyond the advance of the known plume as well as another 100 or so property owners who do not currently reside on their properties.
With its population having diminished by nearly 30 percent in the last year and many of those remaining lining up to make their exodus, Hinkley appears to be on the cusp of oblivion. Accompanying its death gasps is the unreal spectacle of a PG&E campaign aimed at persuading hangers-on to follow suit and themselves leave. While it would not seem to be in the company’s interest to perpetuate any further horror stories about the ecological havoc done to Hinkley by PG&E, the company is not discouraging the circulation of anecdotes suggesting just that. A recently published report held that four family members residing on a single property within Hinkley had succumbed to cancer in the last year. Such adverse publicity encourages further departures. Amid the negative publicity, property values in the area have declined, setting back even further that segment of the population burdened with underwater mortgages.
The signs of the community’s death are omnipresent – abandoned alfalfa farms, neglected windmills that no longer suck the water from the earth, dilapidated, weatherbeaten and empty farmhouses and the rubble of homes that have been recently demolished. Despite those outward signs, fully one third of town’s remaining property owners or homeowners say they are at present committed to staying, either because they do not view living in solitude in a negative light or because they believe that Pacific Gas & Electric might be induced to up its offers to achieve complete ownership and autonomy over the area. It is an unanswered question at this point whether the inevitable closure of Hinkley’s lone market and its post office will break the will of the remaining hardy locals to carry on.
Whatever expense doing so may in the end entail, Pacific Gas & Electric appears to be prepared to make a de facto purchase of the town. That purchase would, until the plume migrates to another populated area, stanch the flow of money being spent to redress the local hexavalent chromium contamination problem.

(July 12) TWENTYNINE PALMS — A move is now afoot to once again seek voter approval from residents within the boundaries of the Twentynine Palms Water District for an increase in the special fire service tax that funds the Twentynine Palms Fire Department.
Since 1958, the fire department in 29 Palms has been overseen by the water district. The department has grown to include two fire stations and seven firefighters to cover the 59 square miles within the Twentynine Palms City Limits and the 29 square miles of unincorporated county area that also falls under the water district/fire department’s 88-square mile jurisdiction. The city does not contribute to, participate in or subsidize the fire department’s operational budget.
In 2012, water district voters rejected a tax increase measure and the water district explored  surrendering authority over the fire department to the county fire department. County Fire Chief Mark Hartwig said that working within the confines of the $1.244 million in available special tax funding for local fire service, he would need to close down one of the fire stations and reduce the department to no more than four firefighters.  Several local residents have lobbied officials to have the water district keep control of the fire department and maintain current service levels, and the merger proposal with county fire has been withdrawn.
A citizens’ committee to develop a ballot measure  has formed and met this week, discussing efforts to stabilize fire department finances and the placement of a ballot measure before the water district’s voters that would generate sufficient revenue to increase the fire department to an eight-man force.

(July 12) SAN BERNARDINO –The city of San Bernardino, which last year filed for bankruptcy protection but has since had to fend off persistent requests by city employee unions and the state pension system to which those employees belong that the city remain current on payments to them, has made a motion before the bankruptcy court for summary judgment on its bankruptcy case.
Attorneys for the California Public Employee Retirement System and the middle managers represented by the San Bernardino Public Employees Association have lodged objections to the city’s pendency plan, which defers payments to the city’s creditors while the city is working to restore solvency. For a full year, the city suspended payments it was contractually committed to make into the state employees’ retirement system, withholding over $14 million.
On no fewer than six occasions since the bankruptcy filing in August 2012, the city attorney’s office and its hired team of bankruptcy law specialists have had to respond to objections by the lawyers for both the California Public Employee Retirement System and the San Bernardino Public Employees Association.
One recurrent theme in the protests is that the city’s financial responsibility to the pension fund and its employees trumps the claims of all other creditors. Another theme is that the city’s financial position is not as dire as city officials, the city attorney’s office and the city’s bankruptcy attorneys maintain.
City attorney Jim Penman, however, insists that the city is truly foundering and that it has no choice but to adhere to a meticulously laid out operating and spending plan if it is to map its way out of the economic abyss it has fallen into.
The city’s legal team has accordingly made a motion for summary judgment which requests that Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Jury determine that the city is eligible for blanket  bankruptcy protection, rejecting further requests by the California Public Employee Retirement System, the San Bernardino Public Employees Association and any others that the city be forced to deviate from its pendency plan, which entails the payment deferrals.
Penman asserts that the cost of responding to the legal objections to the bankruptcy plan is unduly expensive and is hurting the city’s effort to get back on its feet.
Judge Meredith Jury is due to rule on the motion August 28.

(July 12) Retraining San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies in the proper use of tasers is called for in the wake of the deaths of three people deputies employed the pain compliance devices against over the last five years, according to the county grand jury.
In particular, according to the grand jury, deputies need to alter their taser policy to avoid redundant use of the stun guns on subjects who do not outwardly display indications that they have been incapacitated.
One of the 2012-13 San Bernardino County Grand Jury’s three ad hoc committees took up the subject of the sheriff’s department’s taser-use policy in response to reports detailing the deaths associated with taser gun use within the county – the July 2008 death of an Apple Valley man who was shocked three times, the 2009 death of an inmate at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga after deputies used a taser on him twice and the May 2011 death of a Lake Arrowhead man died who was shocked at least 17 times by taser-wielding sheriff’s deputies after a traffic stop – along with a February 2012 Amnesty International report indicating at least 500 people have died nationwide since 2001 after being electrically stunned.
While the district attorney’s office made a finding that all three of the referenced county taser-related deaths were legally justified and involved appropriate use of the devices, the grand jury expressed concern that officers are often incapable of knowing if the tasers are effective in those cases where the subject or suspect has no outward signs of incapacitation, resulting in over application of electrical shock.
Moreover, according to the grand jury, the sheriff’s department’s policy as laid out in its taser training manual does not call for on-scene tracking of their use by deputies. This can result, the grand jury found, in deputies who arrive at an arrest or custody situation that is already in progress using their tasers without knowing if their colleagues have already employed tasers on the subject in question.
The Sheriff’s Department’s taser training manual does not specify a limit on the number of times a taser can be safely discharged against a single suspect, leaving that for an on-scene determination by the involved deputies.
The Justice Department has issued an advisal with regard to employing tasers indiscriminately or redundantly, urging agencies to incorporate policies and training guidelines that include consideration of the age, body mass, gender. and physical condition of those upon whom tasers are to be used.
The grand jury also delivered an understated warning that recklessly allowing tasers to be employed could prove extremely costly for the county’s taxpayers.
“Two Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cases illustrate law enforcement officers are not immune from liability when they subject a suspect to multiple taser exposures,” the report states. “In Bryan v. MacPherson, the court ruled a taser had been used in a way which constituted excessive force and was, therefore, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In the case of Mattos v. Agarano, the Court held in two situations involving taser use officers had used excessive force causing the death of the individual. There are more cases throughout the United States wherein the courts have decided against law enforcement agencies when multiple and repeated tasering has occurred.”
The grand jury recommended that the sheriff’s office “implement enhanced officer training to situations where the target does not exhibit neuromuscular incapacitation symptoms or compliance, amend the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Taser Training Academy Manual to require greater communication among on-scene officers regarding the number of discharges of the taser against the target to avoid multiple, repeated or continuous exposures; increase hands-on training with tasers, focusing on the issue of identifying when a taser discharge is effective; formulate training to address the problem of knowing whether the taser is operating properly to avoid continuous, repeated and prolonged use of the taser; [and] when multiple deputies are using tasers, the highest ranking deputy at the scene be required to keep track of the cumulative number of taser exposures.”

(July 12) On a 4-0 vote, the San Bernardino County school board on July 8 moved to officially seek to remove board member Gil Navarro from office.
The current circumstance grew out of Navarro having  outdistanced George Aguilar in last November’s race for a position on the San Bernardino Municipal Water District representing that entity’s  Division 2, with Navarro capturing  11,643 votes or 56.21 percent to Aguilar’s  9,070 votes or 43.79 percent. At that point, Navarro still had two years remaining on his term as a school board member.
Navarro’s victory prompted county superintendent of schools Gary Thomas to seek a legal opinion from San Bernardino County’s in-house lawyers, known as county counsel, as to whether holding both positions would represent a conflict. Thomas, who is independently elected to his post and has had a few run-ins with Navarro over the last several years on issues pertaining to education, said he was prompted to obtain the opinion because of concerns expressed by members of the public about possible conflicts that might arise if Navarro is called to vote on specific matters over which both the county division of schools and the water district might have competing interests.
On December 7, head county counsel Jean-Rene Basle authored a letter in which he and his staff summarized published opinions from the California Attorney General’s Office which they said indicated Navarro’s circumstance entailed a potential conflict of interest.
The San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District has overarching authority with regard to water issues in the central portion of the county, dictating policy with regard to water availability and setting wholesale water rates for smaller water retailers and other public water agencies, including those that provide water to several school districts.
Such a circumstance creates a conflict under California law that might preclude Navarro from voting with regard to, on one hand, the water district making water available to school districts or determining the price of that water, or, on the other hand, the county’s schools and school districts purchasing that water. Basle said this would lead to a conflict that Navarro and both the water district and the county superintendent of schools office should avoid. An attorney general’s opinion from 2002 opines, Basle said, that “A significant clash of duties and loyalties may arise in such matters as the water district setting the wholesale water rate that will be passed on to the school district by the retail water agencies involved” and could further occur when the water board votes on “determining the need for restrictions on water usage during times of water shortage.”
Navarro, however, maintains that no such conflict exists at the present time and that he can sidestep any conflicts that do arise by abstaining if and when such conflicts materialize. He has refused to surrender either position.
The matter was referred to the California Attorney General’s Office, which made a determination that there would be sufficient grounds for the board to undertake a lawsuit to seek Navarro’s removal from the county school board, on which Navarro has been a member since 2006.
“There is substantial issue as to the incompatibility of the two offices Mr. Navarro currently holds, because we have found similar offices incompatible,” a letter from the attorney general’s office dated June 11 states. The attorney general’s office stopped short of asserting Navarro could be removed, indicating that the matter would need to go to trial for that determination.
Thus, the vote by the board this week sets up the likelihood that just such an effort, known as a “quo warranto” proceeding, which involves the attorney general acting to remove “any person who usurps, intrudes into, or unlawfully holds or exercises any public office”  and involving the expense of a trial, will be undertaken.
In making his stand, Navarro will be hanging his hat on the legal precedent involved in the case of  Blanca Estella Rubio, a board member with the Baldwin Park Unified School District, who in 2004 was challenged by another member of the Baldwin Park Unified School District Board, Anthony J. Bejarano, because he claimed Rubio’s school board position and that of board member or director of the Valley County Water District, to which Rubio had previously also been elected, constituted the holding of “incompatible offices.”
Bejarano related the matter to the California Attorney General, who at that time was Bill Lockyer. The State Attorney General’s Office concluded Bejarano’s    question was valid, requiring judicial resolution.
In Rubio’s case, she was a water district board member before she was elected to the school board and under the provisions of the case that Bejarano and the school district were allowed to bring to trial by the State Attorney General, Rubio would have been, if the trial court had held against her, removed as a water board member and would have been allowed to retain the office to which she was most recently elected, that of school board member. The matter went to civil trial and in October 2005, a jury ruled in a 9-3 decision that Rubio could keep her seats on both the school board and the water board.
“After a jury trial, Blanca Rubio was not found to be in conflict and was able to maintain two elected positions,” Navarro said.
Certain legal authorities, while conceding there are direct parallels between the Rubio and Navarro cases, point out that there is superseding law which will undercut Navarro’s position.
The issue is not whether there is a direct conflict of interest, according to legal authorities, but whether there is the possibility that there could be a divided loyalty.  The issue is whether the offices are incompatible because the duties might possibly conflict at some time.
Previously, the doctrine of incompatible offices that had been developed by common law precedent, i.e., rulings of the courts, over the years in California allowed a favorable outcome for Rubio in her case.  In 2005, however, the California State Legislature acted to make the doctrine black letter law by the adoption of Government Code Section 1099.   This was after the jury verdict in the Rubio matter. At present, the statutory law now provides:
“(a) A public officer, including, but not limited to, an appointed or elected member of a governmental board, commission, committee, or other body, shall not simultaneously hold two public offices that are incompatible. Offices are incompatible when any of the following circumstances are present, unless simultaneous holding of the particular offices is compelled or expressly authorized by law:
(2) Based on the powers and jurisdiction of the offices, there is a possibility of a significant clash of duties or loyalties between the offices.
(3) Public policy considerations make it improper for one person to hold both offices.
(b) When two public offices are incompatible, a public officer shall be deemed to have forfeited the first office upon acceding to the second. This provision is enforceable pursuant to Section 803 of the Code of Civil Procedure.
(f) This section codifies the common law rule prohibiting an individual from holding incompatible public offices.”
Navarro, an outspoken Latino activist who has pushed for the political and professional empowerment of Hispanics, insists he has encountered opposition because of that activity. He maintains the voters have approved him for both roles he is currently fulfilling and said he will require that the district be put through its legal paces if it is to proceed against him. It is anticipated the trial will entail a cost of over $100,000.