All three of the members of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors up for reelection next year will face challengers, that is, assuming all three will run.
Fifth District Supervisor Josie Gonzales, first elected to the board in 2004, must stand for reelection in 2016 to remain in office. So too must Robert Lovingood and James Ramos, First District and Third District supervisors respectively, both of whom were first elected in 2012.
Gonzales appears likely to seek reelection in that she currently has over $600,000 in her campaign war chest, a formidable advantage over any challengers. Despite the upper hand she has financially, Clifford Odell Young, Sr., whom she succeeded as supervisor, has indicated he will throw down the gauntlet against her in the Fifth District, which encompasses the eastern half of Fontana, all of Rialto, Colton and Bloomington, as well as the western half of San Bernardino.
Young, born in Texas in 1946 and a 1969 graduate of California Baptist College in Riverside, was an organizer of the Riverside Young Democrats. He was hired as a district manager trainee by the Shell Oil Company and was ordained a minister in 1974 after achieving a masters in divinity from the California Seminary of the West in Covina.
Young switched to the Republican Party and obtained the GOP nomination for Congress in the 32nd Congressional District in 1976. He served as the executive director of the Greater Watts Economic Development Corporation. In 1980, he was appointed by the Reagan Administration to the position of deputy director of minority business in the United States Department of Commerce.
He was later the pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church and then attended USC to earn his masters and doctorate degrees in public administration. He then taught public administration at California State University San Bernardino, advancing to the department chair for the College of Public Administration and Business.
On February 4, 2004, he was appointed the first African American member of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, replacing replace Jerry Eaves after Eaves was forced to resign as the result of a public corruption scandal that had resulted in his indictment. Young had agreed not to seek election as Fifth District Supervisor in taking the position.
He honored that commitment and Gonzales assumed the position from him after the November 2004 election. After eleven years, Young has resolved to run again, vowing to take on Gonzales.
In the county’s First District, which counts Hesperia, Victorville, Apple Valley, and Adelanto as its major population centers but also includes Lucerne Valley, Silverlake, Daggett, Newberry Springs, Trona, Ludlow and Needles as part of its jurisdiction, former Apple Valley mayor/councilman Rick Roelle, who narrowly lost the November 2012 election to Lovingood, and current Hesperia Councilman Bill Holland are looking to unseat Lovingood next year.
Holland is an Army veteran who was a military policeman, former deputy who retired from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in 2008 after 22 years with that agency and later a school district police officer with the Hesperia Unified School District. Holland describes himself as business friendly.
Roelle, worked for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for 32 years, nearly a decade of which he functioned as a narcotics unit detective and nine years at the end of his career as a mid-level manager at the rank of sergeant and lieutenant. He was a member of the Apple Valley Town Council for 12 years and was known for his adherence to maintaining the town’s half-acre minimum lot standard for single family residences. He outpolled seven other candidates in the crowded race for First District Supervisor in June 2012, ending up in a runoff against Lovingood that November, which he lost. In 2014, he was among ten candidates for Assembly in the 33rd District, a contest eventually one by Jay Obernolte.
Donna Muñoz is the first opponent to emerge against James Ramos, who defeated incumbent Third District supervisor Neil Derry in 2012.
San Bernardino County’s Third District covers a large span of territory, extending all the way from Barstow at the district’s northwest extreme, through the eastern portion of the San Bernardino Mountains, the Morongo Basin and the most populated portion of the district, which involves Highland, Yucaipa, Redlands, Mentone, Loma Linda, Grand Terrace and the eastern portion of the city of San Bernardino.
Muñoz began her participation in governmental affairs nearly three decades ago when she was a field representative for Marsha Turoci, the First District county supervisor from 1988 to 1996, when the Morongo Valley was contained within the First District. She was later a field representative for Third District Supervisor Barbara Cram Riordan, after the Morongo Valley was moved into the Third District as a consequence of redistricting. She worked in the county assessor’s office, rising to the position of assistant assessor under former assessor Don Williamson. She is also a longtime member of the Morongo Unified School District Board of Trustees. After his election to the board in 2012, James Ramos hired Muñoz as a field representative. In February 2014, she resigned from that post when she was hired as the Morongo Valley Community Services District’s general manager.