The anticipated resurrection of the Bill Postmus political dynasty has come to naught, as his former chief of staff and successor in the role of county supervisor has apparently declined to seek political office in San Bernardino County despite having set 2018 as his target date for doing so nearly five years ago.
Brad Mitzelfelt, who is now widely perceived as the architect of Postmus’s meteoric rise and a controlling hand in his monopolization of power as well as a key factor in staving off and delaying his eventual ruin, had earlier given indication he would challenge fellow Republican Jay Obernolte, the incumbent in the 33rd Assembly District, in this year’s primary. Information from available sources relating to campaign financing and candidacy filing, however, indicates Mitzelfelt has abandoned the prospect of pursuing public office in California.
Mitzelfelt’s designs on the 33rd Assembly District post were less than fully realistic on a number of grounds. In 2014, Obernolte, then the mayor of Big Bear, was one of nine Republicans vying in that year’s June primary for an opportunity to compete in the November general election for Assembly. He was the top finisher among those affiliated with the GOP, garnering 18.8 percent, while John Coffey, the only Democrat in the race, polled 23.1 percent. In the November final, Obernolte polled 46,144 votes or 65.9 percent to Coffey’s 23,828 of 34.1 percent. Running for reelection in 2016 in the overwhelmingly Republican 33rd District, Obernolte safely outdistanced the only other candidate, Democrat Scott Markovich, 60.7 percent to 39.3 percent in the primary and 60.6 percent to 39.4 percent in the general election. Mitzelfelt’s hope of knocking off an entrenched Republican candidate this year represented a long shot at best.
Moreover, Mitzelfelt’s particular brand of politics, his approach to governance and his past actions both in and out of office in the public arena have created liabilities that, particularly in San Bernardino County given all of the revelations since that time, would likely prove difficult to overcome.
A Marine Corps veteran who served in the capacity of a public information officer in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, Mitzelfelt after his discharge matriculated at the University of Redlands, where he worked toward obtaining a bachelor of science degree in business and management. It was there that he met Bill Postmus, who was also a University of Redlands undergraduate. Postmus, the son of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant, was likewise working toward getting a business degree. Young Postmus confided to Mitzelfelt that his pursuit of the degree at Redlands University was a compromise he had made with his father. The elder Postmus wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in law enforcement. The young man, however, was unsure of that path, as his homosexuality and sensitivity left him somewhat disinclined to dwell and function within the machismo-oriented world of policing. What he wanted to do was become a hairdresser and open up a salon with his sister. The senior Mr. Postmus said he would support his son only if he adequately prepared himself for success in the endeavor and first obtain a business degree.
Mitzelfelt counseled his new friend that he would do better to accept rather than rebel against his father’s vision, and that Postmus should take advantage of the path open to him by virtue of his father’s immersion in the culture of Southern California’s conservative establishment. Even as a child, Bill Postmus had shown an interest in politics. As a ten-year-old, the juggernaut of Ronald Reagan’s electoral ascendancy in 1980 excited him. Together with Mitzelfelt, he rediscovered and explored the world of conservatism and Republicanism, finding out about the relatively-well-hidden and unofficial but nevertheless very active homosexual element of the GOP’s network in California, the Log Cabin Club, a group which embraced him and encourage his interest in politics. In the early-and-mid-1990s, Mitzelfelt and Postmus became more and more active in support of the Republican Party, associating themselves with those in closeted gay California Republican circles, including those surrounding officeholders such as David Dreier and Jim Brulte, and acceded to paying positions on the staffs of Republican officeholders in the High Desert/Victor Valley region of San Bernardino County and the Mojave Desert such as Kathleen Honeycutt and Keith Olberg.
Postmus and Mitzelfelt formed a group, High Desert Young Republicans, intended to promote the Republican Party generally and lay the groundwork for their own future political aspirations. Taking the pulse of the Republican Party, particularly in San Bernardino County and its mountain and desert regions, they ascertained that hewing as far to the right as they could go offered the best formula for success at the ballot box. By the 1990s, the High Desert had moved to the forefront of the Republican Party’s efforts to remain relevant and in command within the context of remaining faithful to conservative ideals in the nation’s most progressive state. Kathleen Honeycutt, who was elected to the Assembly in 1992, was an example of the new brand of Republican politicians – a woman who was determined she could be as conservative, reactionary and as tough as any Republican man and on the order of 100 times so as any Democrat. Predating Honeycutt’s trip to the statehouse, Marsha Turoci had been representing the San Bernardino County’s First District – entailing virtually the entirety of the county’s desert expanse – as a supervisor. Turoci was a no-nonsense Republican. In 1996, she was challenged and beaten by Apple Valley Mayor Kathy Davis, another Republican who gained victory by convincing voters she was even more conservative than Turoci.
Once on the board of supervisors, Kathy Davis began spending two and three days a week away from the High Desert at her office in the county seat, and over time formed an alliance of political convenience with the other much more experienced members of the board. One, in particular, was Jon Mikels, a progressive Republican who had been on the board of supervisors since 1986, had been the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga prior to that and who smoked pot in private. Another was Jerry Eaves, the one-time mayor of Rialto and eight-year member of the California Assembly who in 1992, tiring of being a middle-sized fish in the large-sized political pond of Sacramento, chose to move down the political food chain and become a large-sized fish in the medium-sized political pond of San Bernardino by running successfully for Fifth District Supervisor. Eaves, as a former member of the state legislature, was able to cash in political chits he had accumulated for votes he had made and favors he had done for others in California’s capital. He could call on those indebted to him to support his allies, such as Davis. Soon she was receiving political donations from individuals and companies far beyond the High Desert or even San Bernardino County, such as from Sacramento, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego and even outside of California or the United States. Though he was able to fatten Davis’ political coffers, Eaves had the drawback of being a Democrat. This presented Postmus and Mitzelfelt with an opportunity.
In 2000, they exploited the opening Davis had provided them. Painting Davis as a liberal who cavorted with Democrats and who had fallen out of touch with her constituents in the desert, they promoted Bill Postmus as the conservative Republican alternative. There seems to have been no question that it would be Postmus rather than Mitzelfelt who would serve as the candidate. With his chiseled visage and clean-cut good looks, Postmus looked the part of the grandson that every Republican grandmother wanted to have. He and Mitzelfelt used the High Desert Young Republicans to build bridges to other GOP support groups and pressed forth. They used Postmus’s father’s law enforcement credentials to capture the early support of law enforcement groups and police unions. Postmus mastered the right wing rhetoric de jure, and with Mitzelfelt choreographing his every move, outpolled Davis in the November 2000 election 44,986 votes or 52.5 percent to 40,630 votes or 47.4 percent. At the age of 29, Postmus was the second youngest elected member of the board of supervisors after Robert McCoy in 1861, and the third youngest member of the board of supervisors after McCoy and Gus Skropos, who was appointed at the age of 28 in 1985.
Postmus appointed Mitzelfelt to serve as his chief of staff. In relatively short order, Postmus went from being a neophyte on the board of supervisors to its most dynamic member. At that point, the county was yet dominated by the Republican Party. Postmus, already a member, as was Mitzelfelt, of the Republican Central Committee, eventually became chairman of that organization. In 2002, Paul Biane, a former member of the Rancho Cucamonga City Council, was elected Second District supervisor, replacing Jon Mikels. Postmus and Biane, another Republican, became firm and fast political allies. In 2004, Postmus was reelected to the board of supervisors and was elevated by his colleagues to the position of board chairman. Biane was made vice chairman. Simultaneously over the next two years, both were chairman and vice-chairman, respectively, of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. The following year, in a power play engineered by Mitzelfelt, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, using the pretext that the sheer size of 20,105-square mile San Bernardino County was so far flung that it was difficult for a quorum of the central committee’s members to make it to the committee meetings consistently, empowered a subset of the committee, its executive board, to act with the full authority of the central committee. Postmus, as the chairman, and Biane as the vice chairman, then installed onto the executive board themselves and other members of their supervisorial staffs who were also members of the central committee. The net effect was that the members of the central committee’s executive board, with the exception of one member, were either Postmus or Biane or their employees, among whom was Mitzelfelt. At that point, Postmus bestrode San Bernardino County like a political colossus.
Unbeknownst to virtually everyone outside of his innermost circle, Postmus had two closely guarded secrets. One was that he was a homosexual, indeed a particularly promiscuous one who had frequent trysts with men he would arrange encounters with over the internet. Secondly, he had cultivated a pernicious drug habit, consuming massive doses of methamphetamine on a daily basis.
As Postmus’s control of the scepter of power was key to Mitzelfelt’s continuing exercise of authority and his own status, he found himself in a constant and desperate campaign to keep Postmus’s secrets – the exposure of either one of which would have destroyed his political career – under wraps. This involved multiple layers of deceit and the involvement and collusion of several others, including some high ranking county officials, in carrying out a multi-dimensional and wide-ranging cover-up. As others became aware of the actual circumstance, Postmus and those in his circle found themselves increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, extortion and blackmail.
In 2006, two years after he had been reelected supervisor, Postmus, who was yet the chairman of both the board of supervisors and the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, opted to run for county assessor. That electoral effort, in which Postmus was challenging incumbent Don Williamson, set a record that yet stands as the most expensive political campaign in county history. Postmus spent over $3 million in eking out a 158,571 or 52.62 percent to 141,621 or 47 percent victory over Williamson.
Throughout that campaign, Postmus, Mitzelfelt, campaign manager Adam Aleman and others in Postmus’s circle narrowly avoided exposure of Postmus’s deepening drug addiction, as he vacillated between a state of being non compos mentis in which he was completely unpresentable to the public and occasions where he was more lucid. At one point, during the summer of 2016, Postmus was in absentia for six weeks, during part of which he was undergoing drug rehabilitation out of state. As inquiries about Postmus’s whereabouts mounted, Mitzelfelt, Aleman and other top officials made repeated misrepresentations about the actuality of the circumstance.
After Postmus’s election as assessor, attention turned to who would succeed him as supervisor. In a backroom power play that was replete with vicious undercurrents that involved control Postmus and Mitzelfelt still exercised over the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, it was arranged to have the county forego an election to choose Postmus’s immediate successor and instead have the board vote to elevate Mitzelfelt.
From his position as supervisor, Mitzelfelt at once tapped into the same set of donors that Postmus had access to. He built his own campaign war chest to ready himself for what was to be his first election campaign in 2008. As he had arranged for previously when he was Postmus’ chief of staff, Mitzelfelt traded favors for campaign cash, and then used that wellspring of money to fund his campaign, buying handbills, mailers, billboard advertisements, radio ads and television spots which touted himself as a caring politicians dedicated to Republican principles and looking after the voters’ and taxpayers’ best interests.
That campaign was necessary to offset the negative publicity threatening his candidacy that manifested with the initial stages of Bill Postmus’s implosion in 2008. At that point, having moved into the post of assessor and with Mitzelfelt engaged in the role of supervisor, Postmus no longer had his former chief of staff to provide him cover and deflect the challenges coming his way. Having sunk even further into the morass of drug use, Postmus became ever more disengaged from the demands and responsibilities of his position as a public official. He was again encouraged and then forced by his remaining associates to check himself once more into drug rehab. This time, however, without Mitzelfelt to shield him and prevaricate for him, Postmus was exposed as being a patient at a drug recovery clinic. Initially, misrepresentations were made about his having gotten addicted to painkillers because of a back injury. It was during that episode that the 2008 election was taking place. Fortunately for Mitzelfelt, it had not yet been revealed that Postmus was actually using an illegal street drug, and Mitzelfelt was able to gain reelection. In January 2009, however, as investigators with the district attorney’s office were looking into charges that Postmus had allowed the assessor’s office, county equipment, facilities and personnel to be used by Republican operatives to carry out political campaigns, a search warrant was served at Postmus’s condominium in Rancho Cucamonga where methamphetamine and syringes to inject it were found. A month later, Postmus resigned as assessor. Over the next two years, the degree of his drug addiction would be further revealed, including an incident when he showed up for a court appearance under the influence, triggering the search of his vehicle in the court parking lot, which turned up more drugs and drug paraphernalia. Revelation upon revelation tumbled forth thereafter, including ones related to Postmus’s sexual orientation and the lengths to which Postmus, Mitzelfelt and others had gone to hide the facts from the county’s residents, taxpayers and voters.
While he was a member of the board of supervisors, Mitzelfelt involved himself in a number of activities that further damaged his reputation or brought his status as a public official into disrepute.
One of those was the formation and subsequent management of the Adelanto Charter Academy, which was chartered by the Adelanto School District on August 19, 2009. Involved in that undertaking were Charles Steven Cox, Bill Postmus, Brad Mitzelfelt, Dino DeFazio, Jesse Flores, Helene Harris and her husband Hendon Harris, Adam Aleman and Anthony Riley. Once the charter school had been set up, those involved in its operation funneled money to themselves or the companies they controlled. In the roughly 15 months the academy was running without any oversight, they managed to loot the operation of a little more than $2 million that should otherwise have gone toward the education of students but instead was diverted to activities, purchases and disbursements having no conceivable academic application. Those disbursements included payments to a limousine service run by Flores, real estate purchases or mortgage payments, lease payments for property unaffiliated with the school, and spending on services or goods that were never delivered or rendered or which had nothing to do with scholastics. In November 2010, a state audit cataloging significant shortcomings in the school’s operations was released, and on May 17, 2011, the Adelanto School District revoked the charter it had granted to the Adelanto Charter Academy. The Adelanto Charter Academy immediately appealed the decision to the San Bernardino County superintendent of schools, who upheld the Adelanto School District’s decision on August 1, 2011. The Adelanto Charter Academy appealed the decision to the California Department of Education and continued to operate until notified on April 17, 2012, that “your administrative remedies are exhausted” and “any further appeal of revocation must be sought in a court of local jurisdiction.”
Recognizing that moving the matter into such a forum might well lead to indictments, those behind the operation threw in the towel, having diverted somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.1 million to their own pockets and bank accounts.
In 2008, Cadiz, Inc., formerly known as the Cadiz Land Company, proposed to obtain water from sources feeding the East Mojave Desert area’s dry lakes that it claimed are subject to evaporation. The project, which was to cost $536.25 million as first proposed, was to entail the sinking of 34 wells into the Cadiz and Fenner valleys near Cadiz and the construction of a 44-mile pipeline to meet up with the aqueduct carrying Colorado River water to the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas. Cadiz, Inc. first arranged to find potential buyers of the water, lining up the Santa Margarita Water District in Orange County and four others serving Los Angeles and Riverside counties. Then, to obtain environmental certification of the project, Cadiz, Inc. turned not to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, but to the Santa Margarita Water District, which was to be the largest recipient of the water. The Santa Margarita Water District is the second largest water district in Orange County, serving the affluent communities of Rancho Santa Margarita, Mission Viejo, Coto de Caza, Las Flores, Ladera Ranch and Talega.
A contingent of San Bernardino County residents protested the Santa Margarita Water District’s assumption of lead agency status on the plan, officially known as the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation and Recovery Project, based on the consideration that the district lies 217 miles from the Cadiz Valley across the county line from San Bernardino County. San Bernardino County could have contested that arrangement in court, but Cadiz, Inc. effectively muted that by providing Mitzelfelt, in whose First District the Cadiz and Fenner valleys and much of the East Mojave were located, with $48,100 in political donations as he attempted to vault from his position as county supervisor to Congress. In the June 2012 primary, Mitzelfelt proved unsuccessful in his effort to get into the 8th Congressional District race runoff in November 2012, placing a distant fifth among thirteen candidates, in no small part because his support of the Cadiz Project was so unpopular with his constituents that the hefty political contributions from Cadiz, Inc. proved to be of no avail to him. In seeking to transition into Congress in 2012, Mitzelfelt had to forgo seeking reelection as supervisor that same year. Thus, he was consigned to leave office later that year. He was still in office as a lame duck when on July 31, 2012, the Santa Margarita Water District’s board of directors certified the environmental impact report for the Cadiz Water Project, clearing the way for Cadiz, Inc. to extract an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year – more than 16 billion gallons of groundwater annually – for the next century from the eastern Mojave Desert and send it via pipeline westward to Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties. Mitzelfelt’s most lasting legacy thereby became the diversion of the desert’s most precious resource to interests outside San Bernardino County.
Once out of office, Mitzelfelt, who had married former Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reporter Megan Blaney, considered running for assemblyman in the 33rd District. He formed an exploratory committee for that purpose in 2013 called the Mitzelfelt for Assembly Committee 2014. In 2013, however, he abruptly ended that effort and moved with his family to Kentucky to work as a public affairs contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy.
At that point he had over $100,000 in his political war chest. Despite his change of plans away from running in 2014, he appeared to be keeping his options open and was looking to stay on good terms with local politicians.
On February 5, 2013 he transferred $9,000 from his campaign fund to the Robert Lovingood For Supervisor campaign fund. On March 29, 2013, he made a contribution of $1,000 from his fund to the James Ramos For Supervisor 2012 fund. On April 12, 2013 he provided $250 to the Kevin Jeffries For County Supervisor 2012 fund. Jeffries was running in Riverside County. He made a $150 contribution to the Joseph Brady For Victor Valley College Board 2012 fund on February 19, 2013 and a $100 contribution to the Russ Blewett For Hesperia City Council 2014 fund on May 29, 2014. He made eight payments of $1,100 and one of $750 to Betty Presley & Associates in 2013 and 2014.
On March 14, 2014 he transferred $95,200 from Mitzelfelt for Assembly 2014 to Mitzelfelt for Assembly 2018, signaling he was looking to make his comeback in California this year after working for the government in Kentucky for a while.
While Mitzelfelt’s Mitzelfelt for Assembly 2018 committee is still listed as active by the California Secretary of State’s office and it appeared he was ready to embark on a campaign against Obernolte with $82,725.46 in his campaign account as of January 1 of this year, on February 13, Mitzelfelt donated $70,000 to the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association. The same day, he made a donation of $11,500 to the Academy For Grassroots Organizations. It is also indicated that he paid the Campaign Compliance Group, Inc. $575 on January 15, 2018, $500 on February 13, 2018 and $1,145 backdated to April 4, 2017, another $550 backdated to October 15 2017, $545 backdated to July 17, 2017, $302.84 to Bell McAndrews Hiltachk for professional services backdated to December 29, 2017, $119.70 to Emotiv Marketing Inc. for information technology costs backdated to September 18, 2017, $119.70 to Emotiv Marketing Inc. for information technology costs backdated to March 22, 2017, $56.93 to American Express for postage, delivery and messenger service on February 13, 2018 and $43.53 to American Express for postage, delivery and messenger services on January 31, 2018.
Mitzelfelt indicated Jen Slater of the Campaign Compliance Group, at (949) 858-7448, was his spokesperson with regard to his political activity. Slater did not return repeated phone calls seeking information.
–Mark Gutglueck