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Sentinel 01-13-17

Acquanetta Warren

By Carlos Avalos and Mark Gutglueck
FONTANA–A close-knit group of the people Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren represents is seeking to remove her from office.
Alleging the 60-year-old leader of the city council “has not performed her duties as mayor of Fontana with the best interests of her constituents in mind and continues to waste taxpayers’ money to try and further her own political interests and ambitions,” the residents gathered over fifty signatures endorsing the process for undoing the results of Warren’s 2014 election.
A mere 20 valid signatures of Fontana’s registered voters were required to initiate the recall undertaking. There are two further steps in the process, however, both of which are daunting. Warren’s removal from office can only be effectuated if a recall question is put on a citywide ballot and at least fifty percent plus one of those voting endorse her removal. But even before the recall question is put on the ballot, those seeking her ouster must clear an even higher bar by gathering the valid signatures of 11,186 of Fontana’s registered voters. By state law, a recall in a city of Fontana’s size, with a population of roughly 204,000 and 79,060 registered voters as of last week, requires that 15 percent of the jurisdiction’s registered voters endorse the petition. Because of the formidable task of gathering that number of signatures, recall efforts in California have historically had only marginal success.
Nevertheless, the core of Warren-recall advocates, calling themselves Inland Empire First, feel they have a particularly strong and convincing case to make against her. Over the years, she has made a number of questionable, indeed problematic, political alliances with figures outside the city, and has built her political machine within Fontana by engaging in political horse trading involving sponsoring and promoting candidates amenable to her political agenda and opposing others who retain favor with a sizeable percentage of the city’s population. She made an unsuccessful stab at attaining higher office a little more than six years ago, which exposed her vulnerability and brought her into close association with wealthy donors whose developmental or entrepreneurial agendas are at odds with a wide cross section of her constituents.
According to the recall proponents, “Mayor Acquanetta Warren has received political contributions totaling $100,000 to ensure that the desires of special interest groups and land developers come before the needs of Fontana residents and she has supported reckless residential and warehouse development which has downgraded the quality of life, decreased neighborhood safety, overcrowded our schools, increased traffic and increased air pollution for Fontana residents.”
Under her watch, the recall proponents say, “both violent and property crimes including arson, mailbox theft and gang-related murders have increased in our city and neighborhoods while Mayor Warren has supported subsidizing nearby cities, namely Rialto, Colton and Redlands, with Fontana public safety programs on the backs of Fontana taxpayers, putting Fontana residents in danger.”
Moreover, those who want her removed say, Warren has failed in her elected role to ensure government accountability and that “wasteful spending is out of control” in their city. Emblematic of this, the recall proponents assert, is that “Mayor Warren regularly takes expensive trips at taxpayers’ expense, costing Fontana residents $10,000 annually, with no reporting for how it benefits Fontana.”
Warren grew up in South Central Los Angeles and attended Locke High School, from which she graduated a semester early. She took her first major stride toward a political career by attending Occidental College and majoring in political science and minoring in urban studies, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1978. Her first significant job was as a product manager for Lloyds Banking Group, a position she held from April 1981 until April 1986. She then landed a job as a vice president with First Interstate Bank, remaining there from April 1986 until April 1991. Her career trajectory then plummeted what might be considered two or three steps downward, at least temporarily, when she left First Interstate to become a consultant in the City of Upland’s housing department. After languishing in that spot for two years, she transitioned into a position in the City of Gracious Living’s public works department, where she saw her career advance as a consequence of her relationship with the man who would become her patron-of-sorts in Upland, then public works director Rob Turner. She was given a low-rung management position in 1995 and then moved into the acting operations manager post in 1998, largely upon the recommendation of Turner. In 1999, Warren was named Upland’s deputy public works director.
Residentially, Warren would make a number of progressions from the time she was a high school student taking occasional college classes until she reached Fontana, starting in Compton on both Compton Avenue and 130th Street; Anaheim, in an apartment on Orangethorpe Avenue; Downey, on Bellflower Boulevard; and hence on to Fontana. In Fontana, she signed on to become a member of the Village of Heritage Citizens Landscaping Committee. Later she was a member of the City of Fontana General Plan Advisory Committee.
In 2000, while she was working for the City of Upland, two individuals who would prove key to Warren’s political advancement were elected: John Pomierski, to the position of Upland mayor, and Bill Postmus, as First District San Bernardino County supervisor.
In 2002, when a vacancy on the Fontana City Council occurred, Warren was appointed to fill the two-year gap. Able to run as an incumbent in 2004, she was elected in her own right to that position, and was then reelected in 2008. In both cases, those elections corresponded with Pomerski’s run for reelection as Upland mayor. The two endorsed each other.
In the meantime, Postmus’ political career was advancing. In 2004, he scored a political hat trick, being reelected as supervisor, being elevated by his board colleagues to the position of board chairman, and advancing to the position of chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.
Warren was a relative rarity: an African-American Republican woman who was also an office-holder. As such, she was an ideal ally to Postmus, who as the head of the Republican Party in San Bernardino County, was constantly seeking a means of warding off charges that the GOP was hostile to both minorities and women. He embraced Warren and she was equally willing to accept his enthusiastic endorsement and whatever political campaigning largesse Postmus could funnel her way. In return, she endorsed him.
Similarly, in Upland, the symbiosis that had developed early on between Warren and Pomierski, another Republican, intensified. Aligning herself politically with Pomierski, who was the ultimate boss of her boss in Upland, was an adroit move, at least initially. To a very real extent, Warren came to serve as Pomierski’s cat’s paw. In 2009, after both endorsed each other in their respective reelections the previous year, hers for city council in Fontana and his for mayor in Upland where he held off a challenge by Upland Councilman Ray Musser, Warren lent her voice, indeed became the loudest and shrillest in the chorus, denouncing Musser in the aftermath of a statement he had made regarding the crowd at the Barack Obama inaugural in January 2009 many considered patronizing and which Warren characterized, somewhat hyperbolically, as racist. While Musser hunkered down under this withering attack, Pomierski moved to further neuter him politically, stripping him of any remaining adjunct committee or governmental appointments he had as a council member.
In relatively short order, however, both Postmus and Pomierski would experience dramatic falls from political grace.
In 2008, revelations about Postmus’ drug use and abuse of his political office began; then worsened in 2009 with his arrest for possession of drugs and his resignation from the post of county assessor to which he had acceded in 2007; followed by the filing of a total of 15 criminal charges against him in 2009 and 2010 relating to bribery, conspiracy, misappropriation, conflict of interest, the illicit use of public facilities and resources for partisan purposes, perjury and narcotics possession. In 2011 he entered guilty pleas to all counts.
In June 2010, more than a dozen FBI and IRS agents descended upon Upland City Hall while a similar number served search warrants at Pomierski’s home, his construction company’s headquarters and the homes and offices of his business associates. In February 2011, Pomeirski resigned from office and in March 2012 he was indicted and charged with extorting individuals with permit or project applications pending at Upland City Hall. In April 2012, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in a federal prison.
Just as Postmus and Pomierski were spiraling down, Warren used her accumulated political capital to springboard from the city council to the Fontana mayoralty in 2010.
And while her ascendency to the mayor’s post put her into an enviable position of authority, Warren has been embattled ever since, with the constant surfacing of questions about the propriety and legality of her actions.
In Upland, Pomeierski’s demise was accompanied by the advancement of his only political rival over the previous decade, Ray Musser, whom the city council, chastened by what had befallen Pomierski, voted to designate Musser as the mayoral replacement. Musser was then elected mayor by Upland’s citizens in the 2012 election. This put Warren into a very delicate position, as her political calculations in 2004 and 2008 to endorse Pomierski over Musser and her subsequent role as Pomierski’s political attack dog had come back to haunt her. Musser, essentially, proved magnanimous in his ascension, publicly maintaining a show of cordiality toward Warren, with whom he served on several regional governmental panels. But in her Upland position and as a consequence of her dual roles as an employee in one municipality and an elected official in another, Warren repeatedly stepped into controversy and worse.
As an Upland employee serving in a capacity below that of management, Warren was considered a rank-and-file employee, and as such was a member of and represented by the San Bernardino Public Employee Association. Similarly, Fontana’s rank-and-file municipal employees were represented by the same association. Rather than recuse herself from approving the employee contracts arrived at through the collective bargaining agreement process between Fontana’s human resources/personnel division and the San Bernardino Public Employees Association, Warren voted with the rest of the city council to approve them, a highly questionable action, bordering on illegality.
As mayor of Fontana and in her 2010 run for the Assembly, Warren accepted political donations from Burrtec Industries, which held, and continues to hold, the franchise for trash hauling in both Fontana and Upland, among over a dozen other communities in San Bernardino where it also holds franchises. And while state conflict of interest law, as codified in California’s Government Code and the Political Reform Act of 1974, allows her to legally vote on or approve items relating to a project, permit or contract relating to a campaign donor, such as the franchise contract Burrtec has in Fontana while functioning as an elected member of the city council or mayor there, Warren is and was precluded from voting on or participating in a vote impacting a campaign donor when she is serving in an appointed, or non-elected, capacity. Yet Warren did just that when, as Upland’s assistant public works director, she made a recommendation to the Upland City Council, during the forum of a city finance committee meeting in 2013, to extend Burrtec’s franchise contract with the City of Upland. In 2014, the City Council followed her recommendation and approved that contract extension.
Warren’s survivability in Upland was in no small measure based upon the favorable relationship she had with Stephen Dunn, who had been an employee in the Fontana finance department beginning in the 1980s, throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. He had established a familiarity and then a friendship with Warren before he left Fontana to become Upland’s finance director. With the unfolding of the Pomierski scandal, Dunn was moved into the interim city manager’s post in January 2011 and then elevated to the position of permanent city manager in June 2011.
Dunn would serve as Warren’s protector of sorts. In Upland, only department heads are at-will employees, and all other city workers, including sub-department heads such as the deputy public works director, had civil service protection, meaning that they could not be terminated without the recitation of well-documented cause subject to a hearing process. Dunn was able to blunt any council pressure aimed at forcing Warren out of her post.
By 2014, Dunn had fallen into disfavor with a majority of the Upland City Council and departed in June of that year under mutually acceptable terms, including a full year’s severance pay conferred upon him. Without Dunn’s protection, Warren found herself in an increasingly untenable position in Upland. She remained in place the remaining six months of 2014, but just eight days into the following year, on Thursday January 8, 2015, without any pre-announcement, she abruptly resigned as deputy public works director.
It would eventually be revealed that Warren deleted all of the data from the computer at her work station before she abruptly resigned as the City of Upland’s assistant public works director. The purging of that data took place without the consent of then-Upland City Manager Rod Butler or Upland’s director of public works. City officials initially offered no comment on the erasure, but in early 2016 at last acknowledged it had taken place. Warren had, city officials said, “wiped clean” her computer’s hard drive of all of the data it contained with the assistance of one of the city’s information technology division employees but without the knowledge, consent or permission of the information technology division’s director. Warren’s action had criminal implication in that destruction, theft or alteration of public records, including emails, is subject to statutory penalties including imprisonment and fines. Public officers with custody of records, maps, books, or court papers or proceedings who willfully steal, remove, secrete, destroy, mutilate, deface, alter or falsify any part of such records or permit any other person to do so are subject to imprisonment pursuant to section 1170(h) of the Penal Code for two, three or four years. Upland officials, however, said they had not asked the police department to carry out an investigation into the matter nor would they seek criminal review by the district attorney’s office.
In Fontana, Warren was able to retain a firm hold on the scepter she wielded. Her power does not seem to extend beyond the jurisdiction in which she holds primacy, however. In 2010, prior to her run for mayor, Warren sought higher office, vying for the Republican nomination against seven others in the District 63 Assembly race. She placed fourth among the seven candidates.
A demonstration of her security within the realm of her incumbency came in the 2014 election. For that contest, Warren pulled down $173,622 in donations for her reelection bid. That included $10,000 from Hae Park, the owner of the Bel Air Swap Meet, $50,000 from Reggie King, $10,000 from YKA Development Group President Yoon Kim, $2,500 from Lewis Investment Company of Upland, $5,000 from Frontier Finance Company of Rancho Cucamonga, $3,000 from Burrtec Waste Systems, $5,000 from the San Bernardino Professional Firefighters Association, $15,000 from F.F. Gomez, Inc. of Whittier, $10,000 from Richland Management of Irvine,  $10,000 from David Wiener, and $2,500 from Kirk Jensen of Upland.
In the 2014 Fontana mayoral contest, Warren demonstrated her primacy, handily turning back a challenge against her by former Congressman Joe Baca and three others. She outpolled Baca, 10,773 votes, or 60.57 percent, to 3,364 votes, or 18.91 percent.
A veneer of cooperation has long existed among the members of the Fontana City Council, with more than ninety percent of the council’s votes on routine items and even ones of minor controversy passing 5-0. Nonetheless, Warren has sought to consolidate her hold on the city and its politics. Previously, she had engaged in a certain degree of political networking, including facilitating candidacies for the Fontana School Board. This year, she put on a more energetic effort toward becoming Fontana’s political queenpin, actively supporting candidates not only for the school board, but promoting the candidacy of Jesse Armendarez for city council. Warren was instrumental in getting many of the well-heeled campaign donors who had supported her in the past to contribute to Armendarez’s effort. Armendarez was able to fashion a relatively narrow victory – 15,095 votes or 18.4 percent to 14,133 votes or 17.23 percent – over incumbent councilwoman Lydia Salazar-Wibert in the November election featuring ten candidates vying for two open positions. The other incumbent in the race, Jesus Sandoval, gained reelection. Armendarez’s victory gives Warren, who can count on the steadfast support of councilman John Roberts, command over the city council.
The election consigned Salazar-Wibert, the closest thing Fontana had to a dissident council member, to outsider status. The defeat of Salazar-Wibert, however, may have come at a price for Warren. Salazar-Wibert had a pronounced and faithful core of supporters in Fontana, most or perhaps all of whom have been galvanized by Warren’s militating against their candidate. Some of Salazar-Wibert’s supporters are now active in the recall effort against Warren.
The Sentinel’s repeated efforts to obtain from Warren comment on the recall effort against her, consisting of phone calls to her home and her City Hall office elicited no response by press time.
This is not the first effort by Fontana residents to remove Warren from office. In 2011, a recall attempt targeted the entire city council, including Warren. The committee supporting the recall fell far short of gathering the necessary number of signatures.
Karen Coleman, one of the prime movers in the current Warren recall effort, told the Sentinel that she recognized the recall proponents have a daunting task before them to meet the threshold of citizen support to trigger the recall question against the mayor. She said she and others are “committed to seeing this through because we still believe in transparency and integrity.”
According to Inland Empire First, “Mayor Warren is not willing to have the hard conversations that a mayor must have with people in the community. She lacks the integrity needed to be a mayor because she does not work well with those on the right or the left of the political spectrum. If she is opposed she is right and who ever opposes her is wrong. She is unfit to be in any type of governmental role.”

By Mark Gutglueck
More than four decades after San Bernardino County’s largest ambulance company established a political hammerlock on the region, the San Bernardino County Professional Firefighters Union has taken a step toward inspiring possible reform by calling attention to a monopolistic system that has long endangered public safety.
The firefighters union, known as Local 935, has called for action to remedy shortages in the High Desert’s ambulance transport system.
Over much of San Bernardino County including the High Desert, American Medical Response, known by its acronym AMR, holds a virtual monopoly on the provision of ambulance service. AMR is only the latest ambulance company to come into a position of dominance in San Bernardino County. To get into its enviable position, it applied the same formula of the companies that preceded it.
That formula involves plying the county’s political leaders with hefty campaign donations to encourage them to lock in for the company an operational advantage that essentially limits or eliminates competition.
In the 1960s and before, the emergency medical transportation business was wide open in San Bernardino County. Those seeking to get into the business would merely purchase an ambulance or adapt a vehicle to serve as one, outfit it with a minimal amount of life support equipment, obtain a business license in whatever city or area they chose, inform the local police and fire departments and hospitals of their existence, and acquire a police/fire department radio scanner. They would then respond to the location of accidents, fires or medical emergencies.
As more and more ambulance companies sprouted up, the competition increased. This had, for the public, two salutary impacts: one, it drove down prices; and two, it pretty much ensured adequate coverage to the county’s 20,105 square mile area. It had, for the ambulance operations, two negative impacts; one, it limited profitability; and two, it resulted in haphazard, overlapping, and inefficient dispatch and response practices and protocols in which, for example, a first ambulance stationed on the east side of a city having driven nearly the entire distance across the municipality west to pick up a patient before heading back to a hospital in the center of the city would encounter another ambulance that originated at the west end of the city racing east to load up a patient at an accident or emergency scene very near to the point from which the first ambulance had been dispatched. On occasion, two ambulances would arrive at an emergency situation location almost simultaneously and physical hostility or something near it would break out as the ambulance drivers and their accompanying emergency medical technicians or paramedics would have to joust over who would make the transport to the emergency room.
In the 1970s, Terry Russ, Homer Aerts, Steve Dickmeyer and Don Reed, all of whom operated ambulance companies on the west and central portion of San Bernardino’s Inland Valley and had been competing against one another for years, smoked a peace pipe and resolved to merge their operations into one, consolidating and streamlining their dispatch service and better coordinating it with the local fire and police departments. Through efficiencies and the sharing of resources, they were able to overwhelm the other ambulance operators they were in competition with, lower their prices, and induce most of those competitors to either go out of business, merge with them or sell out to them. Functioning under the name Mercy Ambulance, Russ, Aerts, Dickmeyer and Reed pooled their money and began making substantial political contributions to local politicians at both the city and county level. They then used this newfound political clout and influence to have both the county board of supervisors and various city councils “regulate” the ambulance industry, which included essentially adopting the vehicle, equipment and employee training standards Mercy had in place as the minimum requisites for an ambulance operation within their jurisdictions. The politicians were able to do so by asserting that this enhanced public safety.
As Mercy solidified and expanded its domination of the local ambulance industry and it grew to become preeminent among the county’s campaign donors, the county and many of its cities moved to create franchises in which a single ambulance company was allowed to operate and from which any other companies were prohibited from operating. Not surprisingly, in San Bernardino County Mercy was granted the lion’s share of these exclusive franchises.
When protests were registered, politicians were ready with the talking points provided to them by Mercy Ambulance, its lawyers or lobbyists, which held that ambulance service is such an important and crucial function, literally a matter of life and death, that the personnel and equipment utilized in the provision of the service had to be top notch. Because of the expense of ensuring this level of quality, the ambulance companies could not be put into a circumstance in which they had to compete because doing so would so reduce the ambulance companies’ profitability, such that they would be forced to either cut corners on the quality of service they offered or go out of business, which in either case would be contrary to public safety. In this way, monopolies in the realm of ambulance service generally, and in the case of Mercy Ambulance specifically, were justified and perpetuated.
In 1984, a brief-lived scandal relating to Mercy Ambulance’s trend toward the domination of its industry occurred when, in Rancho Cucamonga, which had at that point resisted the push for the creation of an ambulance franchise within its 49-square mile confines, submitted to an overture that originated with then-Second District San Bernardino County Supervisor Cal McElwain to have the city regulate its ambulance service. Mercy Ambulance was a major campaign donor to McElwain, as it was to two of his political allies on the Rancho Cucamonga City Council, Dick Dahl and Chuck Buquet. Dahl and Buquet moved for the city to adopt such an ordinance regulating ambulance service and the full council accommodated that request, directing city attorney Robert Dougherty to draft the ordinance. Upon Dougherty’s preparation of the ambulance regulation ordinance and its presentation to the council, it was voted upon and was given a 5 to 0 vote of passage, and needed only a second reading, or vote, by the council to become law. In the two week interim before the next council meeting, however, it was publicly revealed that Dougherty’s law firm represented Mercy Ambulance and that the standards outlined in the ordinance matched precisely the equipment used by Mercy Ambulance and the certification levels achieved by Mercy Ambulance’s employees. This revelation led three of the council’s members, including then-mayor Jon Mikels, to conclude that the ordinance had been intended to further perpetuate Mercy Ambulance’s crushing hold on the ambulance industry. The trio opposed it at the second reading, with only Dahl and Buquet supporting it. The ordinance failed to pass and the ensuing controversy resulted in the council terminating Dougherty as city attorney. Mikels latched onto the issue as one of a series of pay-to-play scandals dogging McElwain he used in successfully challenging McElwain in the following year’s election for Second District supervisor.
While the failure of the Rancho Cucamonga ambulance regulation ordinance was a minor setback for Mercy Ambulance, the implications of that scandal proved more serious for McElwain and Dougherty than the company, which overcame that minor bump in the road and remained the largest ambulance operator in Southern California outside of Los Angeles County. Its expansion included the creation of Mercy Air Ambulance in 1989, utilizing medical transport helicopters flying from Rialto Municipal Airport.
In 1995, the company sold its helicopter ambulance division to Air Methods, Corp., a Colorado-based company, at tremendous profit on its investment. Air Methods adopted the formula used by Russ, Aerts, Dickmeyer and Reed of providing local politicians with hefty campaign contributions, maintaining the company’s monopoly. As Russ, Aerts, Dickmeyer and Reed reached retirement age, they faded into the sunset. Consequently, their corporate successors did not continue to use the same methodology they had, and the reserve of political capital and goodwill Mercy ambulance had accumulated dissipated. Other companies leapt into the breach. In this way, Mercy Air Ambulance, owned by Air Methods, kept its primacy in the air, with a monopoly on air ambulance service in San Bernardino County. AMR has essentially replaced Mercy as the dominant ground ambulance service provider. Like Mercy before it, it has utilized heavy political donations to establish its position of dominance.
In 2005, the San Bernardino County Grand Jury issued a report stating that campaign contributions by Mercy Air were a factor in the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors having consistently made decisions to keep Mercy Air as the sole air ambulance provider authorized to operate in the county. Both the company and county officials denied that was the case.
For close to 15 years, American Medical Response, or AMR, has enjoyed, if not an absolute monopoly, domination of the San Bernardino County ambulance market. That status has been conferred on it by both the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, individual city councils throughout the county and ICEMA, the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency. ICEMA oversees emergency service provision issues in San Bernardino, Mono and Inyo counties. Its governing board consists of the five members of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.
Earlier this month, the San Bernardino County Professional Firefighters Union, or Local 935, using social media posts indicated there is a problem with ambulance response times in the desert. What was suggested is that AMR has spread and dispersed its resources throughout the county, such that on certain occasions when there has been a glut of accidents or emergencies in the High Desert, there are not enough units to handle all of the calls. Such a circumstance, in public safety agency jargon, is referred to as “Level Zero.”
According to one of the posts, “The issue of Level Zero is a growing problem and AMR is consistently not staffing enough ambulances for the areas they are responsible for. This has been a problem for several months in the High Desert.”
Because the county board of supervisors and ICEMA have in essence conferred a monopoly on AMR in the desert, no private sector ambulances are immediately available to respond to incidents in the High Desert. For the most part, but not always, paramedic units from city, county or state fire agencies are available to respond, but on occasion, there have been substantial delays in ambulance response when the nearest governmental agency paramedic units were on a call elsewhere and the closest AMR units were located as far away as San Bernardino or Redlands, at least 35 minutes driving time away. On other occasions, county or city units have responded in a timely manner, but that has resulted in those units being tied up at that scene, leaving other areas of that agency’s responsibility uncovered, and in some cases resulting in treatment or response delays there.
Moreover, the government agency firefighters that respond in place of an AMR unit must remain engaged there until a tardily arriving AMR vehicle shows up. This can delay the response of those firefighters to other emergencies, medically related, fire related, or otherwise.
A posting the union provided included a dispatch audio recording from New Year’s Eve in which two pedestrians were struck by a vehicle on Mojave Drive. Clearly audible in the recording is one and then a second firefighter requesting ambulances at the scene. They are informed that no units are available in the High Desert and that a unit from San Bernardino will respond. As it turned out, the ambulance from San Bernardino was recalled after an AMR unit in the area was freed up and was able to speed to the Mojave Drive location.
On other occasions, the union claims, no such nearby relief arrived on a timely basis, and ambulances from San Bernardino, Colton and Redlands had to make the trip to Victorville, Hesperia or other locations on or off the 15 Freeway.
“When ambulances are dispatched to 911 calls in the High Desert from as far away as 40 miles in San Bernardino, we believe there is a problem that needs to be addressed,” one of the union posts states.
An issue, according to the union, is that AMR does not disclose to the local fire departments, either ahead of time or in real time, how many of its ambulances are assigned to a given area. On average, a “Level Zero” incident occurs in the High Desert daily, firefighters reported.
Under the contract the county has with American Medical Response, the company is supposed to respond to 90 percent of emergency calls within 9 minutes and 59 seconds in all but the most remote ends of the county. If the company does not meet that standard, it is supposed to be subject to fines by the county. Some firefighters have suggested the company has failed to meet that standard and the county has not disclosed whether any of the monetary penalties against the AMR have been triggered.
The firefighters said the ball is in ICEMA’s court to take corrective action. That the political leadership of ICEMA – the board of supervisors – individually and collectively are recipients of substantial contributions from AMR leaves the institution’s staff reluctant to engage in any disciplinary action against the company.

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on January 10 to elevate Robert Lovingood to the position of board chairman, replacing James Ramos, who has served the last two years in that capacity. The board further voted to appoint Curt Hagman to replace Lovingood as vice chairman.
It is anticipated that Lovingood and Hagman will remain in those positions for the next two years.
“I want to thank my colleagues on the board of supervisors for their support in electing me as chairman,” Lovingood said. “We have a strong board of supervisors and I look forward to building on that cooperation with the board, the chief executive officer and county staff.”
Lovingood said he looks forward to partnering with Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford on land use services issues to reduce unnecessary hurdles and spur construction. He also plans to focus on best practices, reducing liability and lost-time work-place injuries.
“When we are following best practices, we protect the health and safety of our County workforce, reduce costs and save taxpayer money,” Lovingood said.
Lovingood said that vice chairman Hagman, who also serves on the Ontario International Airport Authority Commission, will focus on bringing international business opportunities to San Bernardino County.
Supervisors Josie Gonzales and James Ramos will partner together to continue addressing homeless and mental health services in the county.
Chairman Lovingood began his second four-year term on the board in December and vice chairman Hagman is midway through his first term on the board. Chairman Lovingood represents the First District, which takes in most of the High Desert, including the cities of Apple Valley, Hesperia, Victorville, Adelanto, and Needles. Vice Chairman Hagman represents the Fourth District, which includes Chino Hills, Chino, Ontario, Montclair, and a portion of Upland.
“I commend the board for selecting Supervisor Lovingood to serve as chairman,” Hagman said. “Like me, Robert has made job creation a chief priority for strengthening San Bernardino County’s economy. Supervisor Lovingood’s leadership and our shared vision for success and greater opportunities will greatly benefit the Fourth District as we move forward in attracting investment, enhancing public safety, and improving our overall quality of life. I am excited about working with chairman Lovingood to make our plans a reality.”
“I am truly honored to have been unanimously selected by my colleagues to serve as vice chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors. We have accomplished much during my tenure but there is still much more to be done to ensure San Bernardino County reaches its full potential for all its residents,” Hagman continued. “In recent years, San Bernardino County and the Inland Empire region have made great strides in attracting jobs, reducing unemployment, and creating more affordable housing. Together, this board will partner with all community leaders as we  continue to make San Bernardino County a shining example for all Southern California.”
The board also thanked outgoing Chairman Ramos for his service at the Board’s helm.
“For two years, I have had the honor to serve the County of San Bernardino as the chairman of the board of supervisors,” Ramos said. “The county is in a better position than it has been in the past. I feel proud to have chaired a board that has led with integrity. I wish the very best for our next chairman, supervisor Robert Lovingood. I look forward to working with him and the rest of the board to build upon the progress we have made together.”
The voter-approved county charter requires the board to elect a chairman at its first meeting in January following an election of supervisors. According to the charter, the chairman serves as the board’s general executive agent by presiding over meetings of the board, signing contracts approved by the board, and working with the chief executive officer to set the board’s agenda.
Covering more than 20,000 square miles and serving more than 2 million residents, the County of San Bernardino is the largest county in the United States in terms of area and the fifth largest in California in terms of population. The county’s 39 departments provide a wide range of vital public services to residents, visitors, and businesses in the areas of public safety, health care, land planning, recreation and culture, elections, airports, economic development, and aid to children, the elderly, veterans, and the poor.
County Government worked closely with San Bernardino Council of Governments (formerly San Bernardino Associated Governments, or SANBAG,), the county’s 24 cities and towns, residents, and community leaders to create a Countywide Vision, www.sbcounty.gov/vision. Elected leaders and other stakeholders are now focused on achieving the vision by setting and working toward regional goals.

The transition in the make-up of San Bernardino County Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman’s office has continued, with Chino Hills Councilman Ed Graham having quietly retired last month as district director for the Fourth District. Meanwhile, a good number of Republican activists and public pension reformers expressed dismay with the office’s restaffing.
Graham’s departure came less than a month after the official departure of Mike Spence, who had been Hagman’s chief of staff from the time he had become supervisor in 2014 and was Hagman’s chief of staff when he was assemblyman prior to that.
Four days after Graham, who had reached the age of 65, retired on December 2, Hagman hired Graham’s Chino Hills City Council colleague, Councilman Peter Rogers as the Fourth District’s senior field representative.
Like Spence, Graham worked for Hagman from the outset of his time as supervisor and for the six years, from 2008 to 2014, when Hagman was in the Assembly.
That Hagman has turned to Rogers to fill the senior field representative position is not surprising. Before he was in the state legislature, Hagman was himself on the Chino Hills City Council, as both a councilman and as mayor. The Fourth District encompasses Chino Hills, Chino, Montclair, Ontario and the southernmost portion of Upland.
Still the same, Hagman is a Republican, one who in 2014 used his image of fiscal conservatism and advocacy of governmental fiscal reform to galvanize the members of the GOP in the Fourth District. He was able to succeed in the election, even though Republicans are significantly outnumbered by Democrats in the district. Republicans turned out out in sufficient numbers to defeat what many saw as a formidable opponent – Democrat Gloria Negrete-McLeod, who at that time was an incumbent congresswoman. Since the California Assembly is universally considered to be lower down on the political food chain than the U.S. Congress, and because the Fourth District’s status as a jurisdiction in which registered Democrats overwhelmingly – by a margin of 73,278 or 42.9 percent to 48,465 or 28.4 percent – outnumber registered Republicans, Hagman is particularly beholden to the members of his party for showing an enthusiasm for his supervisorial candidacy in 2014. What is more, in 2013 Hagman lead the charge in the makeover of the GOP locally and statewide. As a subset of a larger strategy for the Republican Party involving former state senator and assemblyman Jim Brulte’s ultimately successful quest to capture the leadership of the state Republican Party, Hagman displaced Robert Rego as San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee Chairman. The 2013 remaking of the party, both statewide where the party is woefully outgunned by the Democrats and in areas such as San Bernardino County, where the GOP still has something of a political toehold despite growing Democratic numbers, was intended to stanch the political bleeding in the Golden State in the wake of the 2012 November election, which stands as the most resounding electoral defeat the GOP had ever sustained in California.
The Republicans, historically and more recently, particularly in California, represent a bulwark against what they have characterized as a trend toward socialism, including the growth of government. A roiling issue in this regard is the degree to which public employees, through their unions, have exhibited control over the electoral process. By pooling their money, oftentimes in the form of union dues, and using that cash to back candidates of their choice, particularly ones willing to raise public employee salaries and benefits, in particular public employee pensions, public employees have come to exercise an influence over government in greater proportion than their actual numbers. Overwhelmingly, the candidates the public unions support, in California and nearly everywhere else in the United States, are Democrats.
Hagman’s recently departed chief of staff, Spence, in many ways was considered Hagman’s alter ego, offering a reflection of their shared pro-business, pro-economic development ethos favoring the private sector over excessive public sector superimposition of excessive regulation and bureaucracy. Spence is an anti-tax advocate who has long crusaded for cutting government red tape and alleviating the financial burden on taxpayers. Among his bona fides is that at the age of 32 in 1998, he was so spirited in his efforts to prevent the City of West Covina from imposing several hundred dollar-per year assessments on homeowners that City Hall sued him over that opposition. Ultimately, the city was unsuccessful with that lawsuit and, inspired by his example at fighting City Hall, the city’s voters rejected the proposed tax increase. Spence was also for four years the taxpayer representative on the Mount San Antonio Community College Bond Oversight Committee.
Spence and Hagman share a hard-edged Republican streak, which was evident in the bare knuckled campaign waged against Gloria Negrete-McLeod for supervisor in 2014. Negrete-McLeod, an incumbent Democratic congresswoman, was portrayed in hit pieces originating with the Hagman campaign as soft on crime and an advocate of policies that are unfavorable to business interests. Spence served as the chief strategist for Hagman in the campaign.
Spence has long crusaded for paring back the bureaucracy of government and alleviating the financial burden on taxpayers. He was the youngest person ever elected to be a vice chairman of the California Republican Party. He has served on the executive board at the state and county level of the GOP.
Nevertheless, Spence is a creature of the government. Spence was student body president at Edgewood High School and he then attended and graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science. He had a quarter century experience in various political roles in the state capital, including serving as the chief of staff for then-assemblyman Joel Anderson (R- El Cajon) and for Hagman. He was elected six times to the West Covina Unified School District Board of Education. He was elected to the West Covina City Council in 2013.
As a government employee for a quarter of a century, Spence is a participant in various governmental pensions systems, including the California Public Employees Retirement System and the San Bernardino County Employee Retirement, and thus feeds at the very trough reformist Republicans are battling to eliminate or curtail.
In the same way, Graham, who had a 34-year career as public employee as a teacher and vice-principal, participates in the public employee retirement system. In the six years he was with Hagman while Hagman was in the Assembly, Graham participated in the California Public Employees Retirement System. During the last two years working as Hagman’s county representative, Graham received $83,000 in annual salary for a 30-hour per week job, while participated as a member in the San Bernardino County Employees’ Retirement Association (SBCERA).
Since Graham’s departure, Hagman has not filled the position Graham occupied.
He did, however, hire Rogers and in one fell swoop advanced him to the position of senior field representative. Rogers will work 25 hours a week for a salary of $44,300. He will participate in SBCERA. Unlike Graham, Rogers has worked in the private sector most of his life. But he is now experiencing the benefit of a public sector job, which provides benefits that are generally superior to those provided in the private sector and which many reformers believe are too generous and should be targeted for being brought into line with those in the private sector, even as the commitments to current and future public sector pensioners have created what governments refer to as an unfunded liability that has the prospect of pushing local and state governments to the brink of seeing as much as a quarter of their operating budgets committed to paying pensions to retirees.
In 2015, Hagman hired Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner as his office’s policy adviser. Wapner is a former Ontario police sergeant who retired on full disability as a result of an injury to his hip from constantly wearing a gun holster on the job.
Hagman’s penchant for choosing retired government employees collecting substantial public pensions to man key positions in his office overseeing local governmental operations such as Spence, Graham, Wapner and now Rogers is seen by some Republican advocates of government reform and particularly government-pension and benefit reform as running contrary to the conservative, anti-big government principle Hagman has ostensibly built his political career around.
Hagman contested that view.
Hagman said that he valued Spence, Graham, Wapner and Rogers because “they are local elected officials. They are basically paid very little, in terms of and as far as their experience goes. On a grander scale, I’m buying all that time they served in local positions and the knowledge that comes with that. I’m getting a full spectrum of work out of people with both short term and long term experience. Peter and I have been working together and he is up to speed with what the city and county are doing and he understands my goals. He could get that started immediately. It would take years to build up that kind of a relationship with someone completely new or unknowledgeable. He did not make a living off government before this.”
Hagman said he was very much alive to the need for pension reform at every level of government in California. “I agree there is a need for change,” he said. “When I was in the legislature, I wrote bills to stop the abuse and protect the taxpayers. The Democrats, who had complete control, did not support that, and those bills did not pass.”
In his current position as supervisor, Hagman said, he is being frugal with taxpayer money in terms of his staffing. “As far as my office staff goes, my people are making less, on average, than those for the other supervisors,” he said. And his people are not receiving perks, either, he said. “I made sure reforms were enacted so that our staff is not double dipping and not getting any extra benefits that are enhancing their pensions like cell phone allowances and car allowances. I believe I’m getting the most bang for the taxpayer’s buck with my staff for my district’s residents.”

Jeff Burum

The prosecution and the defense this week gave diametrically opposite descriptions of the developer at the center of the ongoing Colonies Lawsuit Settlement Public Corruption Prosecution. According to Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope, Jeff Burum is a mendacious businessman who would stop at nothing to enrich himself, including extorting and then bribing several of the county’s top ranking elected and appointed officials. Burum’s lawyer, former assistant U.S. Attorney and Federal District Judge Stephen Larson, conversely maintains Burum is a bighearted humanitarian who overcame poverty and familial disadvantage as a youth to transform himself into a successful real estate developer who never lost his feel for the downtrodden. Through a politically motivated prosecution brought by a corrupt band of public officials, Burum has been hounded out of operating a semi-charitable construction concern he founded dedicated to reclaiming blighted property in economically challenged communities to provide moderate-income and transitional housing to those more unfortunate than himself, Larson asserted.

By Ruth Musser-Lopez and Mark Gutglueck
The Colonies Lawsuit Settlement Public Corruption Prosecution headed into its second week of trial on Monday January 9.
Following last week’s opening statements by both the prosecution and the defense with regard to that portion of the case involving Jim Erwin, the matter this week turned to opening statements against the three remaining defendants whose fate is to be determined by a different jury.
Those charged in the criminal case are Rancho Cucamonga-based developer Jeff Burum, former San Bernardino Second District Supervisor Paul Biane, former sheriff’s deputy union president and assistant assessor Jim Erwin and Mark Kirk, who was the chief of staff to former Fourth District Supervisor Gary Ovitt.
Prosecutors allege those four along with former San Bernardino County First District Supervisor and one-time San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus were caught up in an extortion and bribery plot relating to the 2006 settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Colonies Partners LLC against San Bernardino County and its flood control district over drainage issues at the Colonies at San Antonio residential and Colonies Crossroads commercial subdivisions in northeast Upland.
Erwin is being tried separately because the prosecution wants to use certain statements he made as evidence against him but are illegally inadmissible against his codefendents.
On Monday, January 9, 2017, Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope reiterated in large measure the assertions he made last week in his opening statement regarding Erwin. His presentation this week focused more on the prosecution team’s theory of guilt relating to Burum, Biane and Kirk. Based on the responding opening statement made by Erwin’s attorney, Raj Maline, last week, Cope refined his approach, spelling out with great specificity and detail the elements of the criminal enterprise he claims Burum engaged in to induce a majority of the board of supervisors in November 2006 to confer upon his company, the Colonies Partners, LLC, a $102 million payout to settle the lawsuit his company had lodged against the county.
To a certain extent, Cope’s presentation this week benefited by his gauging of Maline’s response last week in the latter’s opening statement on behalf of Erwin. The 63-year-old prosecutor, with his soft spoken voice and even-keeled and methodical manner, endeavored to fill in the gaps and provide greater context to his narrative. Maline last week had attempted to exploit the elements of Cope’s narrative that were not given explicit contexting and background, perhaps successfully it seemed based upon the body language of the jurors, who had appeared to react positively to the more energetic and boyish-mannered, 51-year-old defense attorney.
A key player in the matter, though he is not a defendant, is one who has previously pled guilty and turned state evidence against the others in a plea bargain, former San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Bill Postmus. Last week, Cope traced out how Burum, intent on achieving the settlement, with Erwin’s assistance utilized elements of Postmus’ lifestyle to threaten and extort him to settle the lawsuit on terms favorable to Burum’s company and then reward him with two separate fifty thousand dollar donations to two political action committees (PACs) Postmus controlled.
Cope last week also laid out how Burum utilized similar blackmail and bribery tactics to gain Biane’s support for the settlement. The third vote to approve the settlement, Cope last week said, came from Gary Ovitt, whose vote Cope said was delivered by Mark Kirk, his chief of staff. Like Biane, according to Cope, Kirk received a $100,000 donation to a political action committee (PAC) he had set up and controlled.
Last week Maline sought to counter Cope’s version of events and blunt his assertion that extortion and graft were central components driving the $102 million settlement, offering a more benign interpretation of Burum’s provision of political donations to Postmus, Biane and Kirk. He downplayed the suggestion that both Burum and Erwin had engaged in threats and veiled blackmail in the weeks and months prior to the vote, and strongly asserted that the settlement relieved the county of escalating costs resulting from damages caused by a flood control district manager, Ken Miller, who the defense asserted had attempted through deceit to defraud the Colonies Partners of their property and rightful income by draining excessive amounts of flood water onto their otherwise developable land.
This week, Cope marshaled his most convincing display yet when he told the jurors that just prior to the November 28, 2006 vote to confer the $102 million settlement on the Colonies Partners, Postmus confided to his board colleague, Fifth District Supervisor Josie Gonzales, that he was being blackmailed in the period prior to the settlement being reached.
An agitated, disheveled, distraught and nervous Postmus came to Gonzales, Cope said, and “threw himself into a chair in her office and said to her, ‘They’re bastards. Don’t let them do anything to you.’”
Cope emphasized, “Mr. Postmus was going to cast his vote in favor of this settlement. He knew this deal was wrong. He knew that his vote was cast in favor of a deal that he should not vote for. He also knew that because the developer involved in this case, Mr. Burum, told him that if this settlement were done, Mr. Postmus would be taken care of by him and he would be supported in office, and if he would leave office he would be taken care of in business and given a job. Mr. Postmus was under a lot of pressure because he knew that the vote he was going to cast was wrong.”
Ultimately, Gonzales, along with Supervisor Dennis Hansberger, voted against the settlement, but the provision of the $102 million to the Colonies Partners was approved on a 3-2 vote with Postmus, Biane and Supervisor Gary Ovitt prevailing.
By providing the backdrop to the scene just before this critical event, Cope was attempting to offer jurors an illustration of the hardball tactics that were being employed by both Erwin and Burum to exact from the supervisors a settlement, tactics which Cope said concluded with bribes in the form of payoffs into the defendants’ political action committees but which were preceded by threats, extortion and blackmail. Cope asked the jury to listen to the witnesses who would stand before them to learn how each of these methods were used to pressure the three supervisors to vote in favor of the settlement.
In addition to recounting the November 2006 encounter between Postmus and Gonzales, Cope told the jury, “The settlement was so wrong that none of the county’s attorneys were willing to endorse or sign the settlement. What you will be asked to decide is whether or not there was bribery involved and an unlawful taking of county funds that was eventually taken into the pockets of some of the defendants that we have here. You will learn of the efforts to conceal the things [done] to get this vote. You will learn how the efforts to conceal these activities were revealed by an investigation done by the district attorney and the FBI. You will learn how politics as usual turned into a quid pro quo. You will learn many things about our county and its politics that will surprise you and you will not like, but what you need to pay attention to is the effort to extract the settlement and how that money was wrongfully diverted into the pockets of some of the defendants.”
Cope then sized up the defendants for the jury. He said “Mr. Burum is a developer, an extremely successful developer and an extremely smart man. He is one of two managing partners of a group of investors called the Colonies Partners. He is sought after by politicians in the county. Many politicians seek him out for contributions, endorsements, advice. Politicians fear him because if they cross him he has the ability and resources to ensure that they will not be able to remain in office after the next election.”
Cope continued, “Paul Biane is also a real estate person. He knew Mr. Burum for a very long time. Mr. Burum identified him as a talent. He colluded with him in an election many years ago after Mr. Burum had begun the Colonies development and wanted the county to pay for the work that he was doing on the development. There was a member of the board of supervisors by the name of Jon Mikels who was adamantly against any kind of settlement. Mr. Burum recruited Mr. Biane to run against Mr. Mikels. Mr. Burum and the Colonies Partners put up a lot of money to assist Mr. Biane in that election. Mr. Biane was successful.”
The board of supervisors is at the very apex of power and authority in county government, Cope said, with each of its five members representing and overseeing a different geographical jurisdiction. He identified Biane as being the supervisor for the Second District, in which the Colonies development took place. Using the Latin term “quid pro quo,” which means “this for that,” and which in a legal context implies an illegal arrangement by which a public official agrees to do something in exchange for money or favors, Cope said a quid pro quo arrangement between the Colonies Partners began very early.
“Mr. Biane prior to his election met with Mr. Burum and Mr. [Dan] Richards [the other managing principal in the Colonies Partners] and talked about the Colonies and need for settlement. And it was made known to him that he was going to be elected to that position with the help of the Colonies for the purpose of finding a solution that would result in a settlement of the Colonies lawsuit. As I indicated, Mr. Biane was successful. This case will also tell you Mr. Biane’s involvement began very early on. Money was given to him through entities that he controlled, campaign funds, PACs [political action committees]. You will learn about the pressure that was put on him to ultimately arrive at the settlement.”
Cope said, “Mr. Burum is an individual who likes to win. So during the course of this Colonies lawsuit, you will learn that he has many assets that he brought to bear. Many would be what you would expect, attorneys, overtures to the media, advisors telling him how to deal with the media, how to get his message out to the public. As he perceived progress or non-progress, he changed his approach, so after the course of this case you will see how he went about influencing the members of the board of supervisors to get this settlement. Many things were not out in the public. Some were intended to be private, secret, as he would have people approach the supervisors and more than encourage them to arrive at the settlement. He would threaten them, raise things that were personal to them so that this settlement could be arrived at.”
Cope said, “Mr. Kirk happens to be very close, very knowledgeable about the board of supervisors. He was chief of staff to Gary Ovitt. Mr. Ovitt was a member of the board of supervisors, an important member, one of the three votes that eventually accomplished this settlement. Mr. Kirk is known to be a very strong-willed person, very capable. He had great influence over Mr. Ovitt. He was the person, you will learn, who managed just about everything that Mr. Ovitt did. You will learn that you had to go through Mr. Kirk to get to Mr. Ovitt. Mr. Ovitt will come in and tell you that from the very beginning he thought that the settlement was right, and he planned to vote on it. But Mr. Kirk said that he would deliver a settlement, and he knew that there was a reward in it.”
Cope then moved on to Jim Erwin, who, he said, “for many years had been the president of a police union of this county, the San Bernardino County Safety Officers Association. It is known by everyone as SEBA. When I refer to SEBA, I am speaking of the members of all county law enforcement who belong to this union. Mr. Erwin was the president of that union for many, many years, and as the president held a position that was important politically and in a way that yielded influence.”
Cope said SEBA was used to launder money originating with the Colonies Partners which went to politicians, including Postmus, Biane and Ovitt. “Money was donated to this organization, SEBA, that he was president of and went to important politicians, including Mr. Ovitt, Mr. Biane and Mr. Postmus, and this was a way to get money to important people on the board of supervisors from Mr. Burum, but in a way where he wouldn’t be identified as being directly connected and directly contributing to them,” Cope said, “because they were getting large sums of money at this time, more than ever before, through this police union. Mr. Erwin had great ability to get money to the politicians that were favorable to the Colonies. Mr. Erwin enjoyed the power that this money gave to him.”
Erwin ceased being SEBA president in “about 2005,” Cope said, but remained in substantial control of the police union in the role as its chief administrator from “2005 to a point in time when he joined the assessor’s office.”
Cope said Erwin subsequently left the assessor’s office and used the money Burum had donated to his political action committee to help former San Bernardino City Councilman Neil Derry in the 2008 Third District supervisorial race run against and defeat Dennis Hansberger, who had voted against the Colonies settlement. Derry then hired Erwin as his chief of staff, Cope said. “The position of chief of staff is significant,” Cope said. “It allows you to do a lot behind the scene. Both Mr. Kirk and Mr. Erwin used those positions of chief of staff and both used their positions in ways that enhanced their power.”
Following the prosecution’s opening statement, the legal counsel for each of the defendants had the opportunity to offer opening statements or wait until after the conclusion of the prosecution’s case. While Mark McDonald, the attorney for Biane, and Michael Scaffidi, the attorney for Mark Kirk, elected to defer making their statements until later, Stephen Larson, representing Burum, offered his opening statements beginning Tuesday morning, January 10.
Cope, Larson told the jury, had put “blinders” on them so that they were able to see only what he wanted them to see. He invited them to remove those blinders and see the entirety of the picture and come to understand “the rest of the story.”
The remainder of the story, Larson said, the jury would find disturbing because it does not implicate his client or the remainder of the defendants, but rather the county government itself and particularly the county’s flood control district and its lawyers.
The 52-year-old Larson was obliquely critical of Cope to the jury, saying that Cope had told them about the evidence but that he would show them the evidence, which vindicates his client. “He told you what the evidence is going to show,” Larson said. “I am actually going to show it to you.”
Referring to all of the criminal defendants, Larson said, “These men believe in the system and that this criminal justice system will vindicate them. You are going to hear what they have gone through. After hearing the entire story and all of the exhibits, we will prove and you will find that they are not just not guilty, these men are innocent. This is not going to be one of those criminal cases where there is a question as to whether the prosecutor proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is going to prove that they are innocent.”
Intimating the likelihood that Burum and the others would take the stand in their own defense and brave whatever Cope or other members of the prosecution team would throw at them, Larson said, “These four men are not thrilled to be here but are relieved that they will now have the opportunity to tell their side of the story.”
“At the end, you will not just know what our theory or speculations are, but what the evidence is,” Larson said.
Larson proceeded with a biographical sketch of his client, saying that “the only adjective Mr. Cope used that I agree with was that he is brilliant.” Burum persisted through, Larson said, “a tough childhood” living apart from his father “with his mom in Maryland,” an existence steeped, Larson said, “in poverty.” During this time he was very close with his brother, Phil, Larson said. “Phil Burum works with Jeff to this day,” Larson said. As a teenager, Larson said, “Jeff moved to live with his father in Phoneix,” but, Larson said, Burum’s “father died a couple years later.”
At that point, Larson said, young Burum was listless and idling but was reclaimed through the efforts of a mentor, Michael McLean, the stepson of the actor James Stewart. Thanks to McLean’s intervention, Larson said, Burum “went from being an average to an ‘A’ student. He graduated with honors. He proved to be a talented athlete and was on the tennis team. He lived with his tennis coach and received emancipation.”
It was during this time that Burum gave an early demonstration of his character and determination, Larson said. When the local school district sought to close down his high school, Burum, Larson said, “staged a peaceful sit-in. Some students were violent. Jeff was instrumental in making the protest peaceful and organized. Jeff always followed the rules. He obtained a scholarship and went to college at Claremont McKenna in Claremont. There he studied Mandarin.” Larson said Burum’s senior thesis pertained to “the reunification of China and Taiwan.”
Burum had developed an interest in politics and after professionally committing himself to a career in real estate, got his license “and became a successful real estate developer.”
Despite that success, Larson said, Burum “never forgot where he came from” and, drawing from the rough go of it he and his family had when he was a youth, concluded one of “the important things truly was affordable housing.”
Consequently, Larson said, Burum began a company that was dedicated to providing housing for moderate and low income buyers. “Eventually that company went national and is known as CORE, National Community Renaissance. This is not just about housing, but about community services, so to provide an integrated, approachable solution to housing, not just social services, but to give people a real chance to own their own home.”
National Core was changing people’s lives positively, Larson said, “in hundreds of communities across the country.” But because of the indictment, Burum “resigned from being the chairman of this non-profit that he had become the chairman of,” Larson said. “You will hear about the impact on him and his wife, and his ability to be in politics and do what he has done. The one thing that you should take away from all of this is that Jeff has been a fighter, whether for his family, or his partners in business. But he is honest, and he has followed the rules. He is kind and generous. He is always law abiding.”
As for the prosecution’s theory of his clients guilt, Larson said “The truth is often more complicated than that. No one will dispute that bribery is wrong and is criminal. Anyone who commits such a crime should be put in prison. None of these men would have been involved in any bribe. Jeff Burum has been actively involved in politics and elections. He has gone out of his way to know the law and comply with the law. He has been involved in city races and national campaigns. He has been a co-chair for presidential campaigns. He knows what is legal and what is not legal. He never crosses that line.”
Bypassing the elements of extortion contained in Cope’s theory of criminality, Larson addressed the issue of bribery, asserting, “There has to be a bribe in all of this for any of this to be true, any of the prosecution to be true,” going on to point out that the prosecution was using tortured language to leave the jury with the impression that bribery had occurred without actually saying so directly. He said there were “legal problems with the odd way in which these charges were brought. Jeff Burum was not charged with bribery. Instead, prosecutors are alleging he engaged in helping them [Postmus, Biane and Kirk] receive a bribe, which is the bribe that he is said to have made. Mr. Cope has already said that the critical issue is all of the five charges, not whether they had authority to approve the settlement or whether it was compromised. He has to prove that the settlement agreement was somehow corrupted. There are two big problems that the prosecution is not going to be able to overcome. The reason for these problems belies the rest of the story. There is no reliable or believable evidence that any of the supervisors were promised any kind of bribe in exchange for their vote. Mr. Postmus [denied there was] a quid pro quo. Only one person – Adam Aleman – the tipster or snitch, said it. You are going to find out that Adam Aleman is a liar and a crook, not someone you can believe. By the time this trial is over you are going to know all about Adam Aleman.”
Larson continued, “The question is ‘Where is the reliable evidence that any of the supervisors received a bribe?’ You have heard about the charges, contributions, meetings with and without lawyers, a whole lot of stuff, but if you strip it all way, you will find out that it is all legal. This is not evidence of a bribe. The prosecution will say that this is the evidence, that you heard about the tips and that bribery negotiations were going on for a three year period, but you are not going to hear anywhere where there was a bribe. The evidence is they voted for the settlement agreement because they knew it was best for the county, a good idea. Mr. Biane and Mr. Ovitt thought it was a good idea.”
Trying to determine what Postmus thought at that point will prove futile and is irrelevant, Larson said, because his reasoning at the time was so severely impacted by his drug use, and his recollection at this point has been compromised by the same.
“Bill Postmus used meth and not just once in awhile,” Larson said. “He signed, he would have done, anything. He was at the height of his addiction. He was not off meth until 2012, a year after the indictment. He was on meth when he was interviewed, when he testified to the grand jury. We do not know what Bill Postmus was thinking. But we do know what Paul Biane and Gary Ovitt were thinking. Together they are the ones who voted for it.”
Of that deal, Larson told the jury, “The prosecutor said it was rotten and wrong. You are going to find that they had to settle.” Larson said the law firms Munger, Tolles & Olsen and then Jones Day were taking the county on a very expensive ride.
“This was malpractice, what these lawyers were doing,” he said.
Larson said his client’s company was in the strong position legally, such that the prosecutions theory of a motive was utterly disprovable.
“There was no need for a bribe,” Larson said. “We will show you all of the reasons why there was no bribe, no motive. This was a good deal. The county knows it now. The county has come around on the issue. It turns out what the supervisors did was right.”
As for the political action committee contributions, Larson pointed out that, technically, what the prosecution refers to as PACs are “not PACs. Federal committees are PACs. These are recipient committees.”
Larson said that donors of all stripes are free to donate money to politicians and that those donations are not bribes unless there is some agreement ahead of time that the contribution is being made to influence a vote.
“The line that cannot be crossed is quid pro quo,” Larson said. Burum, he said, “gave them money with no strings attached. There is not a single shred of evidence that those contributions were made with strings attached.” That Postmus and Biane and Ovitt supported the settlement is incidental, Larson implied, citing as proof that $40,000 of the money given to the committee allegedly controlled by Biane, the “Young Republicans, went to support Dennis Hansberger, the guy who voted no on the settlement. The money was given no matter what, not quid pro quo, with no strings attached,” he said.
Larson took issue with labeling the donations bribes, given that they came after the vote rather than before it.
“Keep in mind that what Judge [Michael] Smith [before whom the case is being tried] said, in order to prove this bribery occurred that you will need to find that when the public official agreed to take a bribe, he represented that he would vote that way,” Larson said. “You will hear from the prosecution that those contributions in 2007 would influence a vote in 2006. The politicians that received the money did not know about the contributions until after they settled.”
Larson acknowledged that money has made its way into the political process and that his client and the Colonies Partners were participating in the political process. But that participation is entirely legal, he said, and singling his client out because of that participation is a perversion of the law. Moreover, he said, there were other issues involving county government and land use issues Burum was involved with at the time for which he had reason to be seeking political goodwill through providing political donations.
“There was the stuff going on in 2007 that had nothing to do with the settlement that was all over by then,” Larson said. “Mr. Burum came together with others to form the Rancho Alliance in 2007. They were going to purchase land for development in Rancho Cucamonga. That did not work out. That was a huge focus in 2007.” Larson said Burum and his associates had to create goodwill for that undertaking and others, including one to build an NFL stadium in Ontario “in order to go forward.”
By the time the contributions were made, the settlement was a done deal, Larson insisted, pointing out that $102 million payout had been submitted for validation through the courts and that the court signed off on the validation in March of 2007, prior to the provision of the first of the contributions to the PACs.
“It was submitted to a validation process where notice is given to the world,” Larson said. “It went to a judge. If there are no proper challenges and it is accepted, that prevents it from being challenged or overturned in any way. After that nothing could have been done to break the settlement. There were no strings attached by the Colonies to these contributions. No one but Adam Aleman said they were made as part of a quid pro quo. Those contributions were made for legitimate purposes. Take the blinders off,” Larson told the jury, “so that you will see all.”
Larson said the county flood control district had constructed the 20th Street Storm Drain, an appurtenance that collected water from the below ground level Foothill Freeway and a three square mile area above the freeway which was constructed during the same time frame and deposited that water on the Colonies property. The Colonies property formerly had on it a roughly 31 acre basin used for water retention purposes and the county had easements recorded in 1933, 1934 and 1939 which related to using the Colonies property for drainage, but that there were limitations to that use, Larson insisted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s constructed a flood control channel designed to take storm water southward to the Prado Dam, he said, rendering the basin on the Colonies property and any other flood control facilities on the Colonies land obsolete. He said the county’s insistence on vectoring the water onto the Colonies property was an unjustifiable act on the county flood control district’s part that the court had determined damaged the Colonies Partners by interfering with their development plans and ability to complete and market the homes being built there. This was the gist of the lawsuit against the county, Larson said, which the Colonies Partners had prevailed upon during a trial in the courtroom of Judge Christopher Warner. Judge Warner ruled against the county in that lawsuit and a judgment against it was pending that could have reached more than $300 million, Larson said. Thus, Burum had no motive to bribe Postmus, Biane and Kirk, he asserted.
After Larson concluded, Cope called as the first prosecution witness former San Bernardino County Third District Supervisor Dennis Hansberger. Hansberger served on the board of supervisors in two temporal installments. His first two four-year terms on the board ran from 1972 until 1980, at the beginning of which he had been the youngest man before Postmus to serve on the board of supervisors in county history. He returned to the board in 1996, serving three consecutive terms until 2008.
Cope led off with Hansberger for a multitude of reasons. He has a historical comprehension of the county, operations within its governmental structure, the function of the board of supervisors, specific knowledge about what occurred in the time frame in question under focus in the prosecution, and he was the strongest voice on the board of supervisors in favor of the county’s position in the lawsuit brought by the Colonies Partners and he was the board member most opposed to a settlement of the lawsuit. Additionally, Hansberger, because of his professional affiliations, has expertise with regard to sand and gravel mining operations and properties associated with them. A major historic use of the Colonies property was a similar mining operation.
Hansberger voted with Supervisor Josie Gonzales in opposition to the settling of the lawsuit for $102 million in November 2006.
In response to Cope’s questions, Hansberger said he had voted against every settlement proposal during the nearly five years of civil litigation that preceded the final settlement, and he offered his rational for doing so.
He said it seemed to him the Colonies Partners “just had a desire to get money out of the property.”
He said his familiarity with sand and gravel operations and their attendant property drove him to the conclusion that the Colonies property was of minimal value, and that the Colonies Partners’ claim of damages, which steadily rose from several million dollars to eventually reach in excess of $300 million was not supportable. Hansberger, in his testimony which began on Wednesday January 11 and continued on Thursday morning, included statements that he consistently voted against settlement because there was no foundation based upon real estate value that justified payment to the Colonies Partners. Hansberger testified that in his opinion the property the county was using for flood control purposes was worthless for development purposes of the kind the Colonies Partners envisaged for a number of reasons, one of which was the cost of filling in a deep pit that had been a gravel quarry. Redressing the property would have been prohibitively expensive, he said, because of the large amount of fill that would be required. He cited the land’s zoning as open space and the flood control easements existing on the property as the grounds for his conclusion that the land was undevelopable as it then existed. Further, he said, the homeowners who purchased the sites surrounding the large excavated area believed that it would continue to be used for flood control and open space and would likely have protested and objected to the developers using it for anything but a natural wash area.
Hansberger testified that the back and forth between the Colonies and the county during settlement negotiations pertaining to monetary value of settlement would have ended if the matter had gone up on appeal and the court would have made a decision based upon a reasonable value.
In response to Hansberger’s first reference to the Colonies property being at that time “zoned as open space,” Larson raised an objection. Signaling, perhaps, that acknowledgement of the property being limited by open space zoning might prove problematic for his client during trial or on appeal, Larson objected a second time when the open space zoning was referenced and he appeared purposed to prevent references to the Colonies property as being so zoned. A side bar, that is a private conference involving the attorneys out of the earshot of the jurors or others in the courtroom, ensued, at Larson’s request. Nevertheless, further references to the property being zoned as open space made it into Hansberger’s testimony and onto the record.
Hansberger said the law firms of Munger, Tolles & Olsen and Jones Day had “strong reputations” and were “competent counsel.” He said that he valued the opinion of those firms and their lawyers, who shared his view that the Colonies Partners were seeking from the county, by both litigation and other means, something to which they were not entitled.
Hansberger said that Biane and later Postmus had inserted themselves into trying to negotiate one their own the terms of a settlement with the Colonies Partners and that this was not from his viewpoint desirable because their interaction did not include the counsel or supervision of lawyers who would “protect the integrity of the process.”
Biane early on was stampeding the board toward settling the case, Hansberger said, including having outside communications with Burum on potential settlement figures. At first he attributed this to the Colonies property lying within Biane’s Second District, but he soon recognized that there was more to it than that. Hansberger said he told Biane that it was “not proper to be doing this, particularly with constituents with whom you are so close.”
He said negotiating with the Colonies Partners was best left to county counsel or the county’s retained attorneys.
“It became his cause to get this done, and it was ever present in our discussions,” Hansberger said of Biane. Hansberger said he felt the county should not have paid the Colonies Partners anything but that at one point he was resolved to settle the matter if it could be done for no more than $7 million or $8 million, just to put an end to the suit. But the Colonies Partners continually escalated their asking price, he said. “I think in every case when the numbers came in higher, it was him (Biane) who was presenting them to us,” said Hansberger.
Initially, Postmus was also in favor of a settlement and occasionally “scolded legal counsel and other staff if they did not move forward,” but was less intense in his demands than Biane. But by late 2006, Postmus transitioned into being the board member making the hardest push toward a settlement with the Colonies, Hansberger said.
“He began to show some real emotion about this case,” Hansberger testified. “I did see a general change in him. It became an urgent matter with him after he was elected assessor. He was more aggressive in his approach toward a settlement. It built up over the weeks until we finally voted on a settlement.”
Hansberger testified that Kirk had a degree of sway over Ovitt. “Mr. Kirk had a role, it seemed to us, in the decision-making process with Mr. Ovitt,” Hansberger said. “Mr. Ovitt was very reserved. He (Kirk) became the surrogate for his boss on many subjects.”
Cope asked Hansberger about a settlement discussion involving Postmus, Biane, former state senator Jim Brulte, Jeff Burum, Dan Richards and the attorneys for both the Colonies Partners and the county in March 2005.
Hansberger said that Brulte participated as “an unexpected third party” who later turned out to not be an uninterested mediator but actually an agent of the Colonies Partners. At some point, Postmus ordered all of the attorneys to leave the room and a tentative settlement was reached with the five remaining individuals in the room to close out the litigation with a $77.5 million payout by the county. Hansberger said he had objected to the meeting in general and that he was never informed ahead of time it would take place outside the presence of the attorneys.
Nor was he informed, Hansberger said, that Brulte was employed by the Colonies Partners. “I didn’t know Mr. Brulte would be at the meeting,” he said, and did not learn the Colonies Partners employed him “until sometime later.”
Hansberger said, “In-house counsel strongly objected” to the deal on the grounds that “they had laid no foundation for it. No one had documented what that property was worth. They just wanted to settle it for money. Mr. [Paul] Watford [an attorney with Munger, Tolles & Olsen] was particularly vocal on the subject. He felt we were way off base in trying to settle it in that manner. They [Munger, Tolles & Olsen] were committed to the notion that we already had a favorable ruling from the appellate court and we would act upon that and if we lost in the Superior Court we would go back to the appellate court. He pointed out that the flood control district had done this work [the 20th Street Storm Drain] at the behest of the city of Upland, Caltrans and SANBAG [the county’s transportation agency], and indeed, if there was liability, it rested with them because they were the ones that funded and planned the activities that were ongoing.”
Munger, Tolles & Olsen resigned as the county’s attorneys after this incident. Negative publicity about the backroom deal resulted in the $77.5 million settlement worked out among Postmus, Biane, Brulet, Burum and Richards being rejected at that point.
Hansberger said that in the months just prior to the November 2006 $102 million settlement, Postmus, as the board chairman, on his own initiative hired an attorney, Dennis Wagner, as interim county counsel, the county’s top in-house attorney. Hansberger said he did not consider Wagner to be qualified for the position. Wagner had been Postmus’ personal attorney and through a series of questions by Cope which invited continual defense objections Hansberger suggested that Wagner’s hiring was a ploy to push the county into a settlement. “We were just told Mr. Wagner was going to represent us,” Hansberger said. “I knew Mr. Wagner well enough to tell him I didn’t think he should be representing us.”
Nonetheless, Wagner remained in the post. Yet even Wagner would not countenance the $102 million deal, Hansberger said. As the county was moving toward the settlement a few weeks later, Hansberger said, the board spoke with Wagner about the proposed settlement.
“He told us what he thought of it,” Hansberger said. “He didn’t agree with it. He said, ‘Having studied this and looked at the case, I don’t think you can settle this. I don’t want to be present for this settlement nor put my name on it. I would be risking my license.”
There was no county lawyer in-house or outside attorney representing the county who supported the settlement and none signed the documentation memorializing it, Hansberger said. He is set to return to the witness stand on Tuesday January 17.

The case that grew out of the August 17, 2014 murder of Robert Limon late last week rebounded to where it began, with his widow now being charged as an accomplice in her husband’s death.
Robert Limon’s body was found that day at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway industrial complex at 1528 Goodrick Drive in Tehachapi. The 38-year-old had been last seen by coworkers after leaving fieldwork about 5 p.m. He had been shot twice in the head.
Video surveillance of the railroad yard captured the images of a man later identified as Jonathan Michael Hearn, a 24-year-old firefighter with the Redlands Fire Department, fleeing the building in the minutes after the shooting of the 38-year-old Limon. Shortly thereafter, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Limon’s killer.
In relatively short order, suspicion with regard to Hearn’s involvement in the death evolved. Even before Limon was killed, another couple, Jason and Kelly Bernatene, who were quite close to Robert Limon and his wife Sabrina, had noted the presence of Hearn in the Limons’ lives, and after Robert Limon’s death told investigators they felt “creepy” about him.
Despite being fourteen years younger than Robert Limon and 11 years younger than Sabrina Limon, Hearn had befriended the couple, who had a son and a daughter.
As a teenager, Hearn was precocious, taking firefighting and emergency medical technician courses at Victor Valley College while he was yet a student at Arrow Christian High School in Hesperia. Even before he reached the age of majority Hearn had signed on as a
San Bernardino County Fire Department explorer in Hesperia. Having received his national emergency medical technician certification and diploma from a firefighter academy, Hearn was hired as a firefighter with the Redlands Fire Department when he was 21.
It is not clear how the Limons, who lived in Helendale, first came into contact with Hearn, who lived in Hesperia, although based upon some evidence presented to the court, it appears Hearn may have been introduced to the Limons by Jason Bernatene. Jason Bernatene was impressed with young Hearn’s relatively advanced professional progress, saying he considered Hearn to be one of the smartest people he knew. But something about his relationship with the Limons bothered him, and he confided to his wife, who was close to Sabrina Limon that the entire circumstance gave him “a weird feeling.” In time, his suspicions solidified and he confronted Hearn on two occasions about his relationship with Sabrina, either implying, or directly questioning whether, the two were having an affair. Hearn became angered at Bernatene’s intrusion. When Bernatene stated that Hearn should end the affair with Bernatene’s best friend’s wife, Hearn, Bernatene said, “ranted” but went no further than acknowledging that he had once kissed Sabrina.
Several weeks after Robert’s death, Sabrina Limon posted onto her Facebook page a remembrance of her husband, stating he was “an amazing man” who would “never be forgotten. Through this pain and unbelievable tragedy, Rob’s love continues on. God blessed us with Rob for the time he did, and the love he gave was more than some ever will feel or show. I will carry it with me where ever I go, and remind our children of it daily as they grow. It’s a feeling of joy, yet I’m totally numb to the fact that I’m left on earth now without him.”
During that interim, however, Kern County investigators were intently focusing on the apparent relationship between Hearn and Sabrina, which apparently was going on without Robert’s knowledge or consent. Detectives would tally a number of text messages that passed between them numbering over 2,000. Jason Bernatene also provided the investigators with a letter in which Hearn essentially expressed remorse to Bernatene for having manipulated him to get close to Sabrina. In the letter, Hearn refers to “my mistakes… having such horrible and dangerous consequences.”
One piece of evidence suggestive of Hearn’s guilt consisted of recorded phone conversations and text messages between Sabrina Limon and Hearn. At one point in one of the exchanges, Hearn stated, “You and I will be in eternity together and all this will seem like nothing. And hopefully in two or three years all of this will be done and over with…”
In another exchange between Hearn and Sabrina Limon, Hearn told Limon they could live together once her husband was out of the picture.
The final critical element that led investigators to conclude that Hearn and Sabrina Limon were involved in killing Robert Limon consisted of communication between the two in which Sabrina provided Hearn with information about where her husband was working and his schedule on August 17, 2014, the day of the killing. Detectives put all of that information in a probable cause declaration and obtained an arrest warrant for both.
On November 18, 2014, Hearn was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in Robert Limon’s killing and Sabrina Limon was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder and being an accessory to murder.
The Kern County District Attorney’s Office backed the sheriff’s department on the Hearn arrest, and at his arraignment two days later, were able to convince the judge hearing the case to hold him without bail. Penultimately, however, prosecutors at that time were unwilling to file charges against Sabrina Limon, due to insufficient evidence. They asked detectives working the case to conduct a further investigation that might turn up evidence that would lead to the filing of charges against her. In the meantime, she was released.
At Hearn’s preliminary hearing on July 23 & 24, 2015, Kern County Deputy District Attorney David McKillop plied Bakersfield Superior Court Judge Charles Brehmer with 40 separate pieces of evidence to support his theory that Hearn and Sabrina Limon were having an affair, which created the motive for Hearn to kill Robert Limon. McKillop’s evidence in part consisted of photos of Sabrina Limon found at Hearn’s home, videos, recorded phone conversations and text messages, letters, guns found at Hearn’s home, a nylon case found in Hearn’s truck containing ammunition and money, and a motorcycle McKillop suggested Hearn rode to the railroad yard to partake in Limon’s killing. McKillop said Hearn disposed of evidence, which investigators were able to recover. Noting that the case against Hearn was largely circumstantial, Brehmer, nonetheless bound Hearn over for trial the following month. The trial was delayed 17 months, during which time, McKillop was no longer handling the case. The matter was scheduled to go to trial this week, on January 9.
Quietly, Hearn last week arrived at the terms of a plea arrangement with the deputy district attorney handling the matter, Eric Smith. Under the terms of that deal, Hearn, now 26, agreed to testify against Sabrina Limon, who is now being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, being an accessory to murder and poisoning her husband prior to his death. In exchange for his testimony, the district attorney’s office vacated the charge of first degree murder against him and he agreed to enter a plea of voluntary manslaughter, attempted murder and poisoning, for which he would be given a 25 year and four month prison sentence.
On Friday, January 6, Sabrina Limon was rearrested with regard to the death of her husband at her residence in the 3300 block of Ivy Garden Court in Camarillo and was charged with murder, attempted murder, solicitation to commit murder, accessory, conspiring to commit a crime and poisoning her husband. She was held on $3 million bail.
Based on elliptical statements made by both prosecutors and Judge Charles R. Brehmer, and the charges filed against her, there are indications investigators and prosecutors have grounds to believe Sabrina Limon poisoned her husband in March 2014 in what was an unsuccessful attempt on his life.
On Monday, January 9, Hearn came before Judge Brehmer, and entered his plea in accordance with the deal worked out with Smith.
Limon was arraigned on January 9, at which time she entered a not guilty plea. Her bail remains at $3 million.

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
As a member of the media, I’m supposed to be informing others. I must confess, though, that I am really in need of some informing myself. This sudden phenomenon of what is called “Fake News” has thrown me into a tizzy. I’m a little bit behind the times and am not so computer literate, but my butler, Hudson, is quite conversant with those newfangled contraptions of the cybernetic era. One of his duties is to troll the World Wide Web for these tidbits he thinks will interest me. He prints them out and leaves them for me to peruse over breakfast…
So, imagine, if you will, me sitting in the dining room of my Lake Arrowhead chalet, a glass of orange juice or grapefruit juice in hand, fresh from a slumber and the unreal world of my dreams, confronted by these reports that, in some cases, are further fetched than my recently concluded somnolent excursions…
So, dear readers, can any of you inform me as to which of the following are true?
Mike Pompeo, the Republican congressman from Kansas who was recently nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to head the CIA, told Congress that the intelligence community has made an assessment that Russian intelligence agencies undermined or at least attempted to undermine the recently-concluded presidential election and elect Donald Trump was an “analytical product that is sound…”
Indisputable proof has surfaced that our current president was indeed born in Kenya…
That the Russians have some really embarrassing and compromising information involving our president-elect in a St. Petersburg hotel room cavorting with some micturating ladies of the evening…
Pope Francis issued an edict before the election threatening to excommunicate anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton…
Fox News has been substituting the footage of well attended rallies in the nation’s capital for footage of other lesser attended rallies to make it appear that there is a groundswell of support for ending the Affordable Care Act…
Abe Vigoda, a star of both the big screen and the small screen perhaps most famous for his role in the Godfather who was supposed to have died just about a year ago, is actually still alive…

By Ruth Musser-Lopez
Statues are not plenteous in San Bernardino County but we do have a few.
Perhaps the most famous and prominent historic statue is the “Madonna of the Trail” on the corner of Euclid and Foothill Ave.(RT66/National Old Trails Road) in Upland placed there by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1928. The west end competed with the City of San Bernardino, and ultimately came up with the money first with May Hart Smith of Ontario playing a predominate role in pushing the effort. That statue honors women, specifically pioneer women of the old west—like these women, the statue is strong and lovely, sturdy, resilient and significant…my personal favorite, but is not unique since 12 of them were reproduced and installed in 12 states along the National Old Trails Road, ours in 1928.
The most controversial historic statues, of course are the series of 12 staged life size nativity scene murals behind statues representing New Testament Bible figures and depicting the life and times of Jesus Christ. Traditionally displayed during the Christmas season in the large median of Euclid Ave. in Ontario, the first three were erected around 1959, followed by nine more in subsequent years, the last one in 1976, by the Chamber of Commerce, which had commissioned Los Angeles sculptor Rudolph Vargas to produce them. Their placement on public property was the subject of heated debate in the 1990s when a local atheist challenged the City based upon separation of church and state. The problem was resolved by the Assemblyman Neil Soto who arranged for the space to be rented for $1 during the season and private storage in off seasons.
A historic statue dedicated in 1916 and erected by a group of some of the last survivors of the Civil War includes a Civil War soldier standing at parade rest, mounted atop a large marble monument. On each of its four sides is a memorial to the soldiers and sailors who lost their lives in four different wars: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Mexican War of 1847 when California became a part of the United States.” It is located at Pioneer Park on 6th and E streets in the City of San Bernardino.
Not yet historic, is the very moving, life-like, bronze “Officer Down” statue that was placed in the corridor of the San Bernardino County government building just outside the meeting chambers. It depicts a deputy who gave his life in the line of duty and on the four sides of its platform are the names of officers who worked and died in the line of duty in San Bernardino County—gone but not forgotten.
The civil rights movement 50 years ago had an impact all over the country including in San Bernardino County. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered to be the leader of that movement in the 1960s and our county is not without its own tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose birthday we celebrate on Monday with a national holiday. In memory of this important figure in American history, a full-length statue figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stands on a square base with sloped sides in the City of San Bernardino. It is located in front of the city hall and is approximately 11 feet tall and weighs one ton.
Dr. King wears a suit and tie and his left hand is on his chest, but look close, on his wrist there is a wound that symbolizes the sacrifice for the civil rights movement and in place of the shirt cuff on his right wrist, the artist placed a slave shackle.
The statue’s creator was Mexico’s late Julian Martinez Soto, the sculptor of statues commemorating Mexican movie stars, of John F. Kennedy, and Mexican revolutionist Emilano Zapata. It is said that the photos Soto worked off of did not represent all of King’s angles so he rendered what he envisioned King’s spirit to be where he lacked knowledge of form. Reportedly, Soto died a pauper in Mexico, two weeks after completing the King statue.

The cactus mouse, known by its scientific name Peromyscus eremicus is a species of rodents in the family Cricetidae. They are one species of a closely related group of common mice often called deer mice.
Cactus mice are found in dry desert habitats such as the Mojave Desert and elsewhere in southwestern United States and northern Mexico, as well as islands off the coast of the Baja California peninsula and in the Gulf of Mexico. Low average temperatures and lack of mesquite (Prosopis juliflora) might limit northern expansion. The cactus mouse occurs sympatrically with four other mice species, including the California mouse, canyon mouse, Eva’s desert mouse and the mesquite mouse.
Cactus mice are small, between 18 and 40 g in weight. Females weigh slightly more than males and are significantly larger in body length, ear length, length of mandible and bullar width of skull. An average cactus mice is 3 inches in length. Cactus mice can be identified by having naked soles on their hind feet, and almost naked tails which are usually the same length or longer than the animal’s body length. Its ears are nearly hairless, large, and membranous. Their fur is long and soft; coloration varies between subspecies, as well as between different populations. Color of fur varies from ochre to cinnamon, with a white stomach, and the sides and top of head slightly grayish. Females tend to be slightly paler in color than males, while juveniles appear more gray than their parents.
Cactus mice have adapted to the desert and have less need water compared to other non-desert mice. Among the cactus mouse’s adaptation to the desert is its lowered metabolism, which carries with it a lesser demand for both food and water. This characteristic, while serving to allow these creatures to live in a harsh climate, carries with it the consequence that females rarely if ever bear more than three offspring. Because of her lowered metabolism and water intake, the female is not able to produce milk very quickly or in great quantity.
In the event they cannot find sufficient water and food to stay active, cactus mice can enter into a state of torpor, sleeping or hibernating through a bout of scarcity.
Nocturnal creatures, cactus mice are opportunistic feeders, and will devour seeds, mesquite beans, hackberry nutlets, insects, green vegetation and leaves, grain, fuit or anything they can find.
Their predators include owls, snakes, foxes and other hungry carnivores in their area.
Species from Southern California have tested positive for hantavirus
Current population levels for the Cactus Mouse are stable in their range.