Photo by Steve Raines, National Park Service

At least three palm trees and considerable vegetation at the Oasis of Mara were consumed or sustained significant damage in a fire that was deliberately set at the historic landmark on March 26.
A 26-year-old man, believed to have been responsible for starting the blaze, was taken into custody at the scene of the fire, which was contained to 2.5 acres by responding firefighters.
The oasis, located directly behind the Joshua Tree Oasis Visitor Center and Joshua Tree National Park Headquarters, was encountered by early American survey parties in the 1850s, centuries after the indigenous people of the area had been tapping into it as a source of water.
The oasis was first settled by the Serrano, who referred to it by the word “Mara,” translated as “place of little springs and much grass.” Legend is that a medicine man recommended the spring water, which he claimed would have the effect of blessing those who drank it with “many boy babies.” Per the medicine man’s instructions, the Serrano planted a palm tree at the oasis with the birth of each boy into a nearby clan. At one point there were 29 palm trees at the site and the name “29 Palms” was given to the area, which before the turn of the 19th to the 20th century was attracting miners and cattlemen.
According to authorities, a call just after 9 p.m. on Monday summoned the San Bernardino County Fire Department, the National Park Service/Bureau of Land Management Fire Division, and National Park Service rangers and San Bernardino County sheriff’s personnel to the oasis.
The conflagration blazed spectacularly and dramatically as safety personnel arrived, with two fireballs, one half way up one palm tree and another near the apex of another palm tree illuminating the night sky.
Even before the flames were fully doused, rangers were in contact with George William Graham, who was still at the scene of the fire. Upon questioning, according to authorities, Graham acknowledged using a cigarette lighter to ignite flames at multiple spots around the oasis.
As of Tuesday morning, rangers terminated public access to the oasis. A preliminary damage assessment is that two palm trees are damaged beyond recovery and a third was substantially impacted, along with ground vegetation and some as-yet-unidentified archaeological resources at the site. No date for the reopening of the oasis to the public has been set.
Graham, who has previous convictions for arson in 2015 and burglary in 2013, was charged by federal authorities with arson on March 28.
-Mark Gutglueck

With 72 hours notice, the Upland City Council Monday night voted 3-to-1 to reduce the grounds of historic Upland Memorial Park by more than four-and-one-half acres.
After months of private discussions with the management of the San Antonio Regional Hospital, the city council on March 26 adjourned into a closed door session with city manager Bill Manis, community development director Jeff Zwack and city attorney James Markman, during which the final terms of the sale of the park property were explicated. At the council’s open public session for its regularly scheduled meeting that took place later that night, the council approved selling 4.631 acres of park property to the hospital, the primary campus of which adjoins the 38.5 acre park.
In approving the purchase and sale agreement, the council authorized Manis to execute all necessary documents to approve the sale.
According to Zwack, the city used an independent third party appraiser to reach a conclusion that the park property has a value of $893.975.38 per acre, making the 4.631 acre parcel worth $4,140,000. Zwack further reported that San Antonio Hospital agreed to a purchase price slightly above that of $906,931.55 per acre, such that the hospital is paying $4.2 million to acquire the property.

Ralph Cornell

Forty acres of property south of Route 66 intended for development as a park were acquired by the City of Upland in full in 1935, whereupon it retained the accomplished landscape architect Ralph Cornell to design what was an active park with playground and sports field amenities, a passive pleasure grounds, as well as a cultural component. Over the decades and at varying times, many but not all of the features Cornell envisaged for the park were incorporated into it, as well as some recreational elements not originally conceived.
In more recent years, significant numbers of homeless have flocked to the park grounds, taking up temporary overnight shelter there, sleeping in tents, bivouacs, out in the open and in vehicles parked in the parking lot. This led to a degree of friction with and between the traditional users of the park, those squatting there, the Upland Police Department and city officials. Ultimately, city officials used the continuing presence of homeless in the area to justify the just concluded sale of slightly more than 12 percent of the park grounds to the hospital.
Zwack referenced the homeless problem in making his presentation to the council on Monday evening.
A number of city residents weighed in with regard to the sale arrangement, most of whom were discontented with the city’s action.
Unmentioned in Zwack’s report was that this is not the first time that the city has reduced the footprint of the park grounds in favor of the hospital. During the 1974-75 expansion of San Antonio Hospital, the city likewise transferred roughly 1.5 acres of the park to the hospital, which used the property to expand its parking lot.
Cornell’s original plan for a recreational park included a baseball field, amphitheater, swimming pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, bowling green, picnic areas and a botanic garden. The central axis of the park included a central open space with two parallel oak tree-lined trails. While over time most of those amenities came to fruition, the swimming pool, botanic garden and the amphitheater elements were deferred and have yet to be achieved. Nevertheless, the baseball field nestled into the northeast corner of the park and its central axis entailing the Oak Tree row remain as a manifestation of Cornell’s original design, along with a cannon confiscated from the German Army at the end of the First World War by the U.S Army and passed along to the local National Guard, a resplendent rose garden built around a sundial that had been cultivated by the Upland Women’s Club beginning in 1959 and the remnants of what was in the 1980s a world class tot lot/playground that featured a seesaw, merry-go-round, swingset, and a playhouse combination consisting of a slide, jungle gym, chin-up bars, sandbox, spring rider, trapeze rings, suspension bridge and maze that once attracted children and their parents from throughout the region.
Other amenities include the Scheu Family YMCA and the Aquatic Center in the northwest corner of the park, a second baseball field on the east side of the park, a third baseball field located at the southwest corner of the park, the Loren and Kay Sanchez Childcare facility, the city’s animal shelter, and the skate park in the southeastern portion of the park.
Zwack’s recommendation was for the city to cede the park’s third baseball field and its accompanying bleachers, scoreboard, lights, parking and restroom facility at the extreme southwestern portion of the park as it now exists to San Antonio Regional Hospital. The hospital, which last year completed a four-story patient tower and new emergency room and now has under construction a 60,000 square foot medical office building that will house among other facilities a cancer diagnostic and treatment center to be jointly run with the City of Hope, has need of land for additional parking. It is acquiring the property from the city for the purpose of building a multi-level parking structure. Accompanying the sale of the property, Zwack said, is the recording of a parking easement that will allow users of the park to park in the hospital parking lot or the yet-to-be-completed parking structure. While city officials touted the land sale as a way of bringing about improvements to the park, those protesting the sale expressed concerns that the city is moving toward selling off the park piecemeal, will sacrifice a number of mature oak trees and a well-designed and maintained baseball field, and is compromising and rendering unattainable Cornell’s original vision of the park, which has been worked toward for generations but was never fully achieved. Of issue for those against the sale, as well, was the abbreviated warning period the public was given about the contemplated action as well as the consideration that the public announcement, contained in the agenda for Monday night’s council meeting, did not delineate that the land to be sold consisted of park property. Rather, the agenda referenced “An agreement for purchase and sale and joint escrow instructions between the City of Upland and San Antonio Regional Hospital to sell approximately 4.631 acres of real property addressed as 1299 San Bernardino Road (a portion of property assigned the assessor’s parcel number 1046-183-01).”
Several individuals, including councilwoman Janice Elliott, expressed the view that if the action item on the agenda had directly or more clearly explained that the property in question was a portion of the park, far greater protest against the sale would have manifested.
John Ickes, a licensed arborist and former member of the city’s tree commission, called the effort by city officials to hide the action the city was taking and reduce the window in which those opposed to it had to marshal their forces and act “sleazy.”
Of issue was the possibility that some city resident or residents opposed to the sale of the park property might take legal action to force a citywide vote on the sale. City Attorney James Markman therefore arranged to foreclose that by having the city initiate a so-called “validation proceeding,” in which the city will invite anyone to lodge a protest, which would then be heard by a judge rather than being subjected to a vote. Councilwoman Elliott sought an assurance that San Antonio Hospital would defray the cost of the carrying out the validation procedure. Markman responded that such a change would be a substantive alteration of the agreement, requiring that further negotiations with the hospital take place. Elliott then made a motion to table, i.e., delay, the vote until April 23 “when the residents have more time to give us input and when we can iron out some of these details.” No one seconded that motion. Instead, Councilman Gino Filippi made a motion to approve the sale under the terms prepared by city staff, which was seconded by councilwoman Carol Timm. That was approved by a vote of 3-1, with the support of Mayor Debbie Stone, Filippi and Timm, councilman Sid Robinson absent and Elliott dissenting.
–Mark Gutglueck

David Perez

By Mark Gutglueck
Internal politics in a city across the county line is having a profound impact upon the future of Tres Hermanos Ranch, the primary component of a significant expanse of open space at the extreme extension of southwest San Bernardino County.
2,450-acre Tres Hermanos Ranch, consisting of rolling hillsides, canyon creeks and oak woodlands beside pastures that are verdant in spring and golden brown as summer advances, straddles the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County border. At its southern end, it abuts Tonner Canyon, lying at the mouth of Orange County.
For half of a century Tres Hermanos Ranch was the playground of three fabulously wealthy men who acquired it in the early part of the 20th Century – oil baron Tom Scott; Harry Chandler, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times; and William Rowland, the son of John Rowland, who led pioneers over the Santa Fe Trail to California and the San Gabriel Valley in the 1840s. In 1978 it was purchased from the Scott, Chandler and Rowland heirs by the City of Industry’s Redevelopment Agency for $12.1 million. For three decades there was recurrent discussion of the City of Industry utilizing the property – which lies entirely outside its city limits – as the site for a reservoir and perhaps an electrical generation facility to ensure that two commodities key to the city’s expansion of its industrial mainstays would be available in quantity and economically to the businesses choosing to locate there.
With the 2012 shuttering of redevelopment agencies statewide, the City of Industry lost control of the property to the state-created successor agency to the city’s redevelopment agency and its accompanying regional oversight board, which was entrusted with seeing the property sold, and the proceeds of that sale distributed to the other taxing agencies in the area such as the county, school districts, water districts and public safety entities.
In May 2015, Irvine-based GH America and South Coast Communities, which represented capital from mainland China, tendered a quiet $100 million offer to buy all 2,450 acres of Tres Hermanos Ranch, then adjusted the offer to $101 million in making the purchase overture public some 13 months later. When no larger offer manifested, that sale seemed certain. But things fell through based on the consideration that the maximum number of units permitted to be built on the 1,750 acres of Tres Hermanos Ranch in Chino Hills is 467, and that Diamond Bar would limit the number of dwelling units on the 700 acres within its confines to no more than 624 houses and apartment units combined, rendering a venture to develop the property residentially less than spectacularly profitable. The GH/South Coast proposal stalled, as the capital needed to make the purchase dried up. Nevertheless, there were persistent reports that GH/South Coast or another development company was intent on getting access to the property and, through applying a formula that included hefty political contributions to local politicians, changing the zoning and density allowances on the property and constructing anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 homes.
This prospect generated a state of alarm among Chino Hills and Diamond Bar residents who were already feeling the pinch of overburdened transportation infrastructure, particularly in the morning and late afternoon commute rush hours.
In August 2017, the Industry oversight board, in a 4-3 vote, consented to selling the property to the City of Industry for $41.65 million. The oversight board required in the terms of the sale a restrictive covenant that limits the use of the property to a renewable energy project, utility augmentation, open space, public use, and preservation. The City of Industry announced its intention of constructing a solar farm on the property. Then-Industry City Manager Paul Philips asserted the lowered cost on the purchase gave the city leeway toward developing the property into a renewable energy enterprise. Phillips said much of the Tres Hermanos acreage was to remain undisturbed or would otherwise be committed toward recreational and open space purposes.
In short order, however, indeed on the same day that the oversight board voted to sell the property to the City of Industry, August 24, 2017, the City of Chino Hills dashed off a request to the California Department of Finance to undertake a 60-day review to determine if the sale of Tres Hermanos Ranch to the City of Industry was legal and reject it if any anomalies were discovered. Four days later, the City of Diamond Bar sent a similar letter to the California Department of Finance. Both cities called for the sale to be vacated, as the price – discounted by some $59 million from what GH America and South Coast offered – qualified as what both cities alleged was tantamount to a gift of public funds. Both cities maintained they would sustain a significant loss of tax dollars as a consequence of the nearly $60 million reduction in sales price. In its letter, Chino Hills maintained that the City of Industry’s intended use of the property to host a solar farm makes the property more valuable than the $101 million GH/South Coast offered.
For some Diamond Bar and Chino Hills residents, they considered the letters to be a less-than-fully-thought-through knee jerk reaction. They feared that those challenges, either intentionally or inadvertently, would if successful redound into the even more ominous eventuality of the property being converted to residential subdivisions, with tens of thousands of residents being packed and stacked onto the land, and the tens of thousands of cars those new residents drive adding to the morning and evening rush hour commuting nightmare current residents are already dealing with.
Through all of this there was a problematic opacity on the part of the City of Industry, which provided little in the way of information with regard to its solar farm project proposal, which called for rows of photovoltaic panels to be arrayed across the property to produce 450 megawatts. An analysis of the rough parameters of the project laid out by the City of Industry indicated that roughly 73.5 percent of Tres Hermanos Ranch’s 2,450 acres – 1,801.4 acres – would need to be devoted to the footprint of the solar panels, assuming the most efficient type of panels were used, in order to achieve the 450 megawatt generation goal.
Though the procedural challenges Chino Hills and Diamond Bar officials had initiated through the California Department of Finance failed to stem the project, on October 20, 2017 the City of Chino Hills filed a legal action in Sacramento Superior Court that sought to enjoin the City of Industry from proceeding with the solar project at Tres Hermanos Ranch.
Residents in Chino Hills and Diamond Bar have grown accustomed to Tres Hermanos’ pastures nestled among rolling wooded hillsides and canyons as a picturesque backdrop for their own community. Many of them have assumed that the ranch, with its proliferating bobcats, mountain lions, skunks and opossums, exists as a wildland preserve, providing a welcome respite from the expanding urbanization of the region and its accompanying commotion that encroaches on virtually all other aspects of their collective existence. In reality, the property had been subject to sale and/or development and eventual intensified use all along. For them, any development of the property is anathema, and it is merely a matter of opinion or personal preference whether blanketing the property with solar panels or residential subdivisions is the most appalling alternative.
For months, the issues with regard to Tres Hermanos Ranch remained unresolved and the legal standoff between the cities of Chino Hills and Industry has remained in suspension.
With the turn of 2017 to 2018, however, a long dormant power in the City of Industry who had begun to reassert himself more than two years previously moved to intensify his hold on the city, in so doing rearranging the political landscape there. That shift, the Sentinel is informed, is very likely to result in the developmental paradigm at Los Hermanos Ranch modulating from public use/renewable energy/utility uses/open space to large scale commercial development.
An individual who until recently had comprehensive access to the inner sanctum at Industry City Hall has confirmed to the Sentinel that former Mayor David Perez, who once bestrode the city like a political colossus, has taken the hidden reins of control there firmly in hand, and reduced the five members of the city council to figurehead status, as they cast their votes on all matters of substance in the city in keeping with Perez’s commands.
Perez is a leader of the city in the slightly varied mold of one of its founders, James Marty Stafford. Stafford, the second largest landowner in what would become the City of Industry, in league with attorney Glenn R. Watson in 1954 resisted neighboring La Puente’s effort to annex his industrial property. In 1957 Stafford was a prime mover in transitioning 12.06 square miles of unincorporated county land consisting primarily of industrial properties into a city. The model Stafford and Watson sought to use was that of another primarily industrial suburb of Los Angeles, Vernon, which incorporated as an industrial community in 1905. The City of Industry did not then have, nor has it ever had, a substantial population base, though in 2000 its population surged to an all-time high of 777. In the run-up to the City of Industry’s founding, Stafford and Vernon were nearly thwarted when their opponents pointed out that the area did not have sufficient population to incorporate under then-current California law. They got around that by claiming the 131 patients being cared for at a local insane asylum, El Encanto Sanitarium, and its 31 employees as residents to meet the inhabitation requirements.
Stafford steered clear of holding elected office, preferring to pull the strings of the puppets he installed in those positions, including the city’s first mayor, John Ferraro, who was “elected” upon the city’s creation in 1957. Stafford utilized his status in the community and his control of city officials to orchestrate a number of questionable deals enriching himself and those in his circle, influencing or outright controlling the awarding of Industry’s municipal contracts, the lion’s share of which went to his associates and business partners. The most lucrative of these was the city’s trash hauling franchise that was given to his business partner, Vicente Perez, without a bidding process or public hearings. Vicente Perez was David Perez’s uncle.
Ultimately, one of the deals Stafford manipulated to enrich himself, the construction of the 660-acre, $65-million Industry Hills and Sheraton Resort, involving kickbacks and bid-rigging, came to the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney. Stafford and five others were indicted and they all entered guilty pleas to a variety of criminal charges in 1984 and agreed to pay $4.5 million in fines. Stafford spent three years in federal prison. Miraculously, John Ferrero, who was the city’s first mayor elected after its founding in 1957 and who remained in office an astounding four decades, was never charged, despite having been installed into – and maintained in – his position by Stafford. The ground charted by Stafford and Ferrero was covered by one of Ferrero’s successors and protégés, David Perez, who would use his position on the city council and as mayor to steer more than $326 million in city contracts to his family over a period of two decades. Most notable among those contracts is the city franchise for trash hauling and refuse disposal.
Today, the city boasts just 219 residents. At the same time, there are 2,607 businesses in the city employing some 81,000 people, over 99 percent of them commuters.
David Perez possesses immediate or direct influence over roughly a third of the town’s registered voters, who are either his relatives or people who live in homes or on property he or his family’s investment company owns. Another 50 percent of the city’s residences are owned by the city itself, over which Perez exerts control. Of the city’s 131 registered voters, 16, or 12 percent, are members of the Perez family.
In June 2012, citing health concerns and a desire to spend more time with his wife, David Perez resigned from the city council.
In Perez’s absence, something of a reform movement materialized. Without his presence on the council dais and absent his loyalists monitoring the day-to-day operations at City Hall, most particularly after the 2013 election, moves were undertaken to counteract the fashion in which the Perez family was able to monopolize municipal contracts and dominate other city activities and decisions.
An indication that Perez had lost his grip on City Hall came in 2014, when the city filed suit against him, alleging his companies had utilized city-owned land as a refuse holding grounds without prior arrangement or permission, and that his companies accordingly owed the city $9.6 million. While that matter was pending, the city brought in the international accounting firm KPMG to go over the city’s books with an eye on the city’s contracts with Perez’s operations going back two decades. KPMG was able to progress a considerable way toward the completion of that survey without alerting Perez or his family by not requesting parallel documentation from any of the companies affiliated with Perez.
Despite that strategy, the Perez forces caught wind of the ongoing audit, and picked up on as well the change of attitude, indeed the growing hostility, toward them pervading City Hall. The Perez family and the remnants of its political machine regrouped and rallied in late 2014 and early 2015, and put together a slate of candidates for city council they could count on to reverse the situation – Cory Moss, Newell Ruggles and Mark Radecki, who was at odds with his brother, city manager Kevin Radecki.
In April 2015, KPMG delivered its audit, having concluded that Industry paid Perez’s various companies, including Zerep Management Corp, City of Industry Disposal Co., Valley Vista Services, Inc., Vincent’s General Services and Grand Central Recycling & Transfer Station Inc., $326 million over a 20-year period. Pointedly, according to KPMG, roughly $219 million of the money paid out to Perez’s companies appeared to have been made pursuant to non-existent, uncontested or rigged bids, conflicts of interest, graft, misappropriation of public funds or “corrupt conduct.” According to KPMG, Zerep grossly overbilled on several of the services it rendered, such as charging on the order of six times what other contractors did for monthly citywide street sweeping and parking lot maintenance.
The following month, with the clock ticking down toward the June 2015 election, the city, under the guidance of city attorney Michele Vadon, filed a contract fraud suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Perez, four of his nephews and their affiliated companies doing business in the City of Industry, alleging “public corruption and personal profiteering, all at the city’s expense.”
Named in the suit were Perez, his nephew David M. Perez, Vincent M. Perez, Christopher Perez and Peter D. Perez, Zerep Management Corp, Valley Vista Services, Inc., City of Industry Disposal Co., Vincent’s General Services and Grand Central Recycling & Transfer Station Inc.
As a city official and mayor, David Perez, the suit asserted “enriched himself and the companies he controlled at the expense of the city and its citizens to whom he assumed an obligation to faithfully serve.”
The suit focused on $219 million of the $326 million the Perez family companies realized as the result of their contractual dealings with the City of Industry between 1995 and 2014, “which went to the benefit of the former mayor, his brother and his brother’s sons.” In doing so, according to the suit, the defendants “submitted or conspired to submit claims for money for the provision of general maintenance and miscellaneous services under the Zerep contract to the city that were never authorized or provided, or were inflated.”
The lawsuit further alleged that after he left office, David Perez “continued his corrupt practices to profit personally at the expense of the city.” The suit made note that Perez was “attempting to regain control over the city by supporting candidates for city council,” and with a degree of prescience predicted he would thereby obtain “undue influence and control” over the city once more.
Indeed, Moss, Ruggles and Radecki were elected on June 2, 2015. On June 9, the newly composed council voted to repeal that section of an existing city ordinance that barred the council from firing the city attorney within 180 days of a municipal election. On June 10, the council voted to sack city attorney Michele Vadon. The council then repealed that element of the ordinance likewise restricting it from firing the city manager within 180 days of an election, and less than two weeks later gave Kevin Radecki a pink slip.
The city council, which had replaced Vadon with Jamie Casso, hired Paul Philips shortly thereafter to replace Radecki. For a number of reasons, the council was not able to act with as much dispatch as Perez wanted in dismissing the lawsuits that had been filed against him and his companies and associates. Casso, did, however, arrange to put them on hold on the pretense that probes of the city by both the state controller and district attorney prompted by the lawsuits should run their course before the city either proceeded with the suits or dropped them altogether.
In the meantime, California State Senator Ed Hernandez had likewise taken a cue from the filing of the lawsuits and was looking into whether legislation could be brought to bear with specific regard to Industry and its situation. As Hernandez’ efforts were progressing, California Controller Betty Yee undertook and concluded an audit that found “the potential for fraud, waste, and abuse of public resources was extremely high” in the city’s methods of operation and that the city overpaid employees while allowing elected officials to use city credit cards to purchase personal items and services. Yee indicated the ethos of the city was shot through with “conflicts of interest and favoritism” and that high-ranking city officials such as the city manager were provided with “broad authority” to approve contracts and authorize payments without detailed documentation. Yee confirmed elements contained in the May 2015 lawsuit against David Perez, documenting that in the two years between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2014, $12.26 million was paid to Zerep Management Corporation, with much of that disbursed without adequate invoices and without proper authorization. Yee said this was part of a wider pattern in which the city paid its contractors millions of dollars without clear explanation of work being done,
As Senator Hernandez’ proposed legislation touching on the City of Industry was about to advance to the committee stage, a compromise was struck by which Hernandez agreed to withhold or kill the bill in exchange for the city hiring Bill Lockyer, a former assemblyman, state senator, state treasurer and California attorney general as the city’s reform advisor and watchdog in 2016.
While Lockyer was in place there remained a check upon the fashion in which the Perez political machine could proceed with the exploitation of Industry’s governance.
It was at this juncture that the successor to Industry’s redevelopment agency and the Industry oversight agency, over which Industry officials had some sway, were entertaining the $100 million and then the $101 million bid proposals on the Tres Hermanos property put forth by GH America and South Coast Communities. Despite the GH America offer, Industry city officials were revisiting the long dormant idea of using the Tres Hermanos Property for utility purposes. Quietly, Industry leased La Jolla-based San Gabriel Valley Water and Power, headed by William Barkett, the entire 2,450 acres at Tres Hermanos Ranch for $1 per year as an encouragement to develop a proposal to construct a 450-megawatt solar farm on the property. Additionally, the City of Industry gave San Gabriel Valley Water and Power a 65-year option on continuing the lease of the property and provided Barkett with loans and other funding for feasibility studies and preparations relating to the solar project. The deal with San Gabriel Valley Water and Power called for an annual payment of $4 million to the city for the use of the property along with the sale of the energy to be produced there to the city and City of Industry-based businesses at bargain basement rates.
For City of Industry officials, however, the fate of Tres Hermanos Ranch was but a minor issue involving land outside of the city. The real action at Industry City Hall in 2016 was taking place inside the city attorney’s office, where Casso was taking his marching orders from the Perez political machine. With the investigation into the City of Industry by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office sputtering or languishing without definitive conclusion, Casso acted to begin winding the lawsuits against Perez down. In November, 2016, Casso on behalf of the city filed a legal malpractice suit against his predecessor as city attorney, Michele Vadon, based on her involvement in filing the May 2015 lawsuit against Perez, his associates and companies, which the lawsuit characterized as ill-advised and politically motivated, as well as ineffective counsel Casso alleged Vadon had provided in defending the city against a sexual harassment suit filed by a woman against David Perez, which resulted in a the city paying a $1.2 million settlement.
In April 2017 the City of Industry dismissed the contract fraud suit against David Perez, his family members and their companies.
With the 2017 election cycle, Catherine Marcucci replaced Roy Haber on the city council in June.
Despite the Perez political machine’s control of the city council, there were yet reformist elements afoot in the city. One issue reformers were concerned with was the consideration that the Perez family controlled much of the housing stock in the city, making them landlords to a significant percentage of the electorate. The other major owner of residential property in the Industry is the city itself. More than 20 of the homes the city owns are rented to four of the members of the city council, their family members, or their associates at significantly discounted rates of $600 to $700 a month. Two of those council members live in three-bedroom houses overlooking a golf course in the Industry Hills.
In the face of criticism of the Perez family’s domination of the town and its politics, the concept of expanding the city’s housing stock was floated, thereby increasing the city population and diluting the Perez family’s political hold with the introduction of voters who were not beholden to the family. That approach, championed by Lockyer, had found support from city manager Philips and city clerk William Morrow, who is also an attorney and was serving as the general counsel to the city’s housing board.
In seeking to implement the housing expansion plan, the city, the city council and the city’s housing board entertained various proposals, the most serious of which appeared to be one put forth by National Community Renaissance to construct up to 54 homes on two properties, including 17 two- to three-bedroom, single-family attached garage homes on a five acre property the city owns on East Walnut Drive, south of the 60 Freeway. Lockyer expressed concerns that having the city retain title to the homes to be built which would then be rented to the anticipated influx of new residents would be problematic, as city officials would remain in the role of these new voters’ landlord, yet wielding political influence over them. He called for formulating a “de-politicized” application process for those applying to get into city-owned housing.
The plans to expand the number of city residential properties by more than a third and conceivably doubling the number of voters in the city, representing a threat to the Perez family’s continuing domination of the city, were not well-received by David Perez and some of his nephews. They utilized their influence over the city’s planning commission to block the first installment of that plan, and the planning commissioners delayed and then balked at voting on a proposal to build 25 new homes near Industry’s borders with Diamond Bar and Hacienda Heights.
Lockyer expressed irritation with the delay, saying the Perez family power block had acted to prevent new voters independent from the city’s political status quo from being able to move into the city. On January 9, Lockyer said of the Perez family, “They control the voting pool and they don’t want that changed. The town can’t survive ethically unless they expand the number of voters in the community to not have one interest be dominant.”
In a closed-session meeting on January 11, 2018, the Perez family-dominated council voted 3-2 to end Lockyer’s contract. When asked to disclose the grounds for the termination, Casso declined to do so, saying confidentiality applied to the proceedings because the city reasonably foresaw “anticipated litigation” growing out of the matter.
Two weeks later, the city council again adjourned into closed session and took up a discussion of firing city manager Paul Philips, city clerk William Morrow and Anthony Bouza, an attorney the city was employing with regard to the solar farm development issues at Tres Hermanos Ranch. Sufficient support to sack Morrow and Bouza manifested. Nevertheless, the council fell short of a necessary third vote to pull the trigger on Philips, as Mayor Mark Radecki and councilmembers Abraham Cruz and Catherine Marcucci were unwilling at that point to join with Cory Moss and Newell Ruggles in handing Philips his walking papers.
On the morning of February 27, however, the council convened into a specially called closed session meeting at which the only topic of discussion agendized was “public employee discipline/dismissal/release.” At that point, the entirety of the council voted to terminate Philips.
Within a week of Philip’s departure it was revealed that the City of Industry was beginning to rethink its tentative commitment toward the Tres Hermanos solar project, for which Philips had been the primary public advocate. By December 2017, Barkett and his cohorts with San Gabriel Water and Power had burned through some $14 million in carrying out preliminary planning on the project and had spent another $6 million in legal fees and other nondescript expenses, and had yet to produce anything tangible in terms of physical assets on the ranch grounds or anything indeed beyond conceptual plans. Barkett and San Gabriel Water and Power have submitted invoices for services relating to the solar farm proposal exceeding $1.5 million over the last three months that the city is refusing, at least so far, to pay. Some have interpreted that as an indication the City of Industry has given up on the solar farm concept at Tres Hermanos Ranch.
Over the last month, it has appeared that there is a leadership vacuum at Industry City Hall. No one was brought in to replace Philips, and on March 15, the closest thing approximating an acting city manager, Industry’s director of administrative services, Alex Gonzalez, tendered his resignation. Gonzales, who was brought in by Philips to assist him in taking corrective action in response to state controller Betty Yee’s audit findings, in writing charged the city with multiple violations that were both criminal and administrative in nature, and failing to live up to promises of reform. He said the firings of both Philips and Lockyer were indications that the nepotism and cronyism besetting the city have not abated.
The reality is that while the City of Industry does not currently have a city manager, the Perez family political machine is in control.
A recently departed City of Industry official, who agreed to speak to the Sentinel only under the color of anonymity, said, “There is no mistaking that David Perez and the Perez family are back in charge again. They have been for some time. You can see it in the [city contractor] procurement votes. Paul [Philips] was attempting to set up guidelines and create some discipline with regard to contractor services. He was doing analyses of performance, etcetera, and trying to enter into contracts along those lines, based on that type of criteria. CNC [a civil engineering firm with an office in the City of Industry] did not score well, and he went out to other firms. The council initially went along with Paul, but CNC had connections to the Perezes and the council voted to rescind and give the contracts back to CNC.”
The incestuousness and cronyism besetting Industry City Hall is overwhelming, the former official said, stifling any efforts at dissent or reform. “You have members of the city council who have jobs dependent on city contracts,” he said. “Four of them live in city subsidized housing and could be kicked out and so on. That was a motivating factor of at least two of the dissenters in the January vote who had opposed firing Paul but then went along with the 5-0 vote the last time.”
Philips was also undone by the housing stock increase issue, the former official indicated. It was significant, he said, that the vote was done unanimously. “I happen to know they had a majority willing to fire Paul Philips in January, which came around after a subsequent vote on procurements,” he said. “They waited until the vote was unanimous and that shows David Perez has a complete grip on the council and the Perez family has reasserted itself.”
Asked about what impact the recent staff changes at Industry City Hall would have on the development of Tres Hermanos Ranch, the official said, “It is hard to know exactly what that means for Tres Hermanos, ultimately. In the past, there was discussion about using the property for a reservoir. Last year, there was unanimous city council support of the solar project as well as trails and other public uses. That support seemed to be unanimous the whole time I was associated with the city. I don’t know if that has changed on the council. There was public criticism from the other two cities – Chino Hills and Diamond Bar – relating to what the footprint of the solar component of the development would be, the visual impacts on other neighborhoods and process disputes such as when does the city or the developer have to make greater disclosure of the details of the proposal. So, there were some council member sensitive to the public criticism, but they were generally in favor of the project, while Paul was there.”
At this point, the powers that be in the City of Industry are not on board with San Gabriel Water and Power, he indicated.
“Paul’s gone now,” he said. “What I have heard, purely in the realm of gossip, what is essentially going around the city, is that the Perezes are back in charge and they are against, or have scrapped, the procurement for that project. Whether the Perez family has alternate ideas is not clear. There was gossip that when the development of the property as housing was discussed, their ears pricked up because they have an interest in a road paving material concern, and laying miles of the fabric or whatever material that was to be used for those roads could make them some money.”
The former official continued, “I’m not there anymore. I can only say what it looks like. It looks like the solar project is off the table. That is because the project presents problems and they will also have to contend with the legal challenges, the lawsuits from the other two cities [Chino Hills and Grand Terrace].”
At the same time, resurrecting plans to develop the property residentially presents a problem, he said.
“My recollection is that when that process evolved the price was lowered for the city acquiring the land, and there was a restriction requiring public use of it rather than private development,” he said. “So some order of commitment was made to keep at least some of the property for public use. The use of the land probably could be changed, but they would have to go back to the oversight board. That would be another obstacle to doing that, to changing the plan again. They might do that, but I doubt they would go to that level of effort to turn it into housing, especially since the two cities [Chino Hills and Diamond Bar] have limitations on the number of units. The Perezes want to make money. Commercial is where the real money would be.”
Stephen Larson, an attorney representing the Perez family, told the Sentinel, “Although they are active and concerned citizens of the City of Industry, Mr. Perez and his family do not and cannot speak for the city. To find out ‘the City of Industry’s intent with regard to Tres Hermanos Ranch,’ you need to speak to members of the city council or its city manager.

Lawyers for San Bernardino County and its flood control district have rejected outright the assertions of the Colonies Partners development consortium in that company’s civil rights, conspiracy, retaliation and breach of contract lawsuit filed March 1 against a multitude of government officials and prosecutors.
That lawsuit alleges the failed prosecution of Colonies Partners principal Jeff Burum and three former San Bernardino County officials on conspiracy, extortion, bribery, misappropriation of public funds and conflict of interest charges involved the falsification of evidence, the disregarding of exonerating evidence, the withholding of exonerating evidence, and the manipulation of witnesses and testimony. The lawsuit further alleges that San Bernardino County failed to make good on its agreement to indemnify and hold harmless the Colonies Partners from any claims arising out of a $102 million legal settlement conferred upon the Colonies Partners in 2006. The criminal charges revolved around allegations that illegal inducements had been made by the Colonies Partners to obtain that settlement.
“The defendants allege that plaintiff cannot establish that it has been deprived of a constitutional or statutory right,” Charles E. Slyngstad, the lead attorney representing the county stated in an answer filed with the U.S. Federal Court in Riverside on March 26.
The $80 million suit was filed on behalf of the Colonies Partners by former federal judge Stephen Larson and his law partner, Jonathan Phillips, both of whom represented Burum during an eight month-duration criminal trial before two juries last year in which Burum and his codefendants Paul Biane and Mark Kirk were found not guilty of all charges brought against them by the panel hearing the case against them. The other jury deadlocked on all of the charges brought against Jim Erwin. Thereafter, on a motion by the prosecution, the charges against Erwin were dismissed.
Despite the exonerations, Slyngstad maintains the prosecution, composed of members of both the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and the California Attorney General’s Office, was justified in pursuing a criminal case against Burum, Biane, Kirk and Erwin. “The fact that Mr. Burum and others were found not guilty is not a vindication of their conduct and does not make the county and the district responsible for the cost of a criminal defense or other costs allegedly paid for by Colonies Partners,” Slyngstad stated in publicly announcing the answer to the lawsuit.
In a 29-count indictment handed down by a grand jury in May 2011, prosecutors alleged that Burum blackmailed and extorted former supervisors Bill Postmus and Paul Biane to vote in support of the county providing the $102 million payout to settle a lawsuit the Colonies Partners filed against the county over flood control issues at the Colonies at San Antonio residential and the Colonies Crossroads commercial subdivisions in Upland. The indictment further alleged that Burum then kicked back four separate $100,000 bribe payments to Postmus and Biane, to Jim Erwin, a former sheriff’s union president and Postmus political associate, and to Mark Kirk, the chief-of-staff to former supervisor Gary Ovitt, who had provided the third crucial vote in favor of the $102 million settlement.
Postmus in 2011 entered guilty pleas to conspiracy, bribery, conflict of interest, fraud, perjury and tax evasion charges relating to the 2006 vote to settle the case and his reception of $100,000 from Burum and the Colonies Partners the following year. He then turned state’s evidence and in April 2011 was the star witness before the grand jury that returned the indictment of Burum, Biane, Kirk and Erwin.
The case went to trial in January 2017. In May 2017, Postmus testified, offering during his direct examination by the prosecution a version of events that supported the charges. Subsequently, however, under the withering cross-examination of defense attorneys, he fell apart, supporting their suggestions that both the prosecutors and the investigators working for the district attorney’s office had exploited his vulnerable state brought on by his extensive use of methamphetamine and the legal charges against him, together with the terms of his plea arrangement which called for leniency in his sentencing in return for his cooperation. In this way, the suit alleges, the prosecution team planted false memories in Postmus’s mind and induced him to offer false testimony implicating the defendants. “Most egregiously, they [prosecutors and investigators] coerced Mr. Postmus into giving false testimony and leveraged his drug addiction to manipulate his memory,” the suit states.
Named in the lawsuit are San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos, former California Attorney General and current Governor Jerry Brown, former California Attorney General and current U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope, Deputy California Attorney General Melissa Mandel, former assistant district attorney Jim Hackleman, former deputy attorney general Gary Schons, district attorney investigators Hollis “Bud” Randles and Robert Schreiber, county supervisor Josie Gonzales, former county counsel Ruth Stringer, and former assistant assessor Adam Aleman.
According to the lawsuit, the prosecutors and their investigators “refused to accept Mr. Postmus’s repeated denials of a corrupt quid pro quo agreement to exchange his vote for the 2007 campaign contributions. Mr. Postmus explicitly and repeatedly denied that he had ever accepted a bribe in exchange for his pro-settlement vote. Defendants refused to accept this truth because it did not further their retribution campaign against [the] Colonies [Partners]. So, over the course of several interviews, defendants Randles and Schreiber, supervised by defendants Ramos, Cope, Hackleman, Harris, Mandel, and/or Schons convinced Mr. Postmus that he had committed various felony offenses related to the settlement, and coerced him into pleading guilty and testifying to those supposed offenses before the indicting grand jury.”
In the county’s answer, Slyngstad wrote, “Defendants deny the allegations.”
Similarly, Slyngstad also dismissed the lawsuit’s allegation that district attorney’s office investigators Schreiber and Randles “planted smaller deceptions for the purpose of manipulating Mr. Postmus into telling larger lies. Mr. Postmus later recognized and admitted that his contradictory and nonsensical ‘memories’ of these events had been planted by an unscrupulous and coercive prosecution team.”
“Defendants deny the allegations,” Slyngstad wrote.
The answer dismisses the suggestion in the lawsuit that the county engaged in breach of contract by not funding Burum’s legal defense in the face of the criminal charges lodged against him.
According to the lawsuit, “in their zeal to exact this punishment, defendants county and [the county flood control] district ignored their contractual obligations under the settlement agreement, as fulfilling them would have undermined the multi-pronged strategy of retaliation. The county and district were undoubtedly thrilled that [the] Colonies [Partners] was being forced to spend millions of dollars defending itself from the bogus investigation and prosecution, which various county and district employees vigorously encouraged and assisted. Defendants county and district thus breached the settlement agreement and violated the covenant of good faith and fair dealing by failing to defend and indemnify [the] Colonies [Partners] in two subsequent legal actions, failing to defend the validity of the settlement agreement, and assisting the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and California Attorney General’s Office in their efforts to invalidate the settlement agreement through the criminal prosecution of Mr. Burum.”
According to Slyngstad, however, any governmental contract tainted by a conflict of interest is rendered null and void and is not enforceable. California Government Code Section 1090 applies to conflicts of interest involving public officials. Thus, Postmus’ guilty plea to a violation of Government Code Section 1090 as pertained to his approval of the $102 million lawsuit settlement excused the county from having to abide by its indemnity guarantee, Slyngstand maintained.
“Plaintiff is not entitled to indemnity and/or defense for any matters that relate to plaintiff’s and/or its agents’, confederates’, or alleged indemnitees’ actions in violation of Government Code Section 1090 and other provisions of California law pertaining to conflicts of interest,” the answer reads. “Defendants allege that they have fully performed all terms, conditions and obligations that were theirs to perform under the agreement that is the subject of those claims. [W]ithout admitting that defendants engaged in any of the acts or conduct attributed to them in the complaint, any breach of the agreement sued upon was excused by plaintiff’s prior breach.”
In a statement separate from the answer, Slyngstad said, “The county and the district deny they are liable to Colonies in any amount whatsoever.”
In the answer, Slyngstad asserted, “Defendants affirmatively allege that plaintiff’s allegation that ‘the prosecution’s case was marred by repeated use of fabricated evidence and perjured testimony’ is made without a good faith belief that it is true.”
Slyngstad said the Colonies Partners had already received more money than the company was entitled to with the $102 million settlement and that Burum is now seeking to extort more money from the county. Slyngstad called the suit filed March 1 “another attempt by a multimillionaire to take more taxpayer money. Mr. Burum is treating this case like a bargaining chip in a business deal. The defendants in this case were unjustly sued.” Slyngstad said county officials “are looking forward to an opportunity to show in this civil case that Colonies and Mr. Burum acted inappropriately and continue to act inappropriately in influencing politics for their own financial gain and windfall.”

Daily Trans-Pacific flights to and from Ontario Airport began this week.
China Airlines’ maiden flight landing in Ontario and originating at Taiwan Toyuan International Airport was the first ever regularly scheduled flight across the Pacific into Ontario Airport, which began operations as a municipal/small regional airport at its present location in 1929.
China Airlines Flight #CI24 touched down shortly before 1 p.m. on Sunday, March 25.
In October, Ontario International Airport and China Airlines made a joint announcement that regular flights would commence this spring. At the time, it was stated the intention was for there to be four reciprocal flights linking Toyuan and Ontario per week. In January, anticipating greater demand based upon reservations, China Airlines expanded that schedule to seven days a week.
On Sunday, less than three hours after the arrival of Flight #CI24, the refueled plane, loaded with passengers bound for Taiwan, departed, the first China Airlines flight from Ontario going west across the Pacific.
According to the airline, regular flights from Taiwan will arrive in Ontario daily at 1:20 p.m. Return flights will depart at 3:45 p.m.
While Ontario Airport, which has the longest runway among all commercial airports in Southern California, has been the destination for international flights in the past, as when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived by special plane at Ontario International Airport on June 6, 2013 for a summit with then-U.S. President Barack Obama that was held later that day in Rancho Mirage, it has never been a destination nor departure site for regular Trans-Pacific flights.
The initiation of the China Air flights is a significant breakthrough for Ontario Airport, which beginning in 1967 was operated by the corporate entity, Los Angeles World Airports, that operated and managed Los Angeles International Airport, Burbank Airport and Van Nuys Airport, under a joint operating agreement between the City of Ontario and the City of Los Angeles. In 1985, after all of the criteria and milestones in the arrangement between Ontario and Los Angeles had been met, the Ontario City Council deeded the airport to Los Angeles in a 4-0 vote of the city council during the absence of then-mayor Robert Ellingwood, who was opposed to the transfer.
Ridership at Ontario Airport increased dramatically under Los Angeles’s stewardship, going from less than 200,000 in 1967 to 7.2 million in 2007. A downturn in passenger traffic in the years thereafter resulted in hard feelings between the two cities, and in 2011, at the prompting of Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner, Ontario initiated an increasingly acrimonious campaign to regain ownership and control of the airport. In 2012, Ontario created the Ontario International Airport Authority as an entity to manage the airport, and in 2013, filed suit against Los Angeles, seeking the airport’s return.
Just prior to the lawsuit going to trial in August 2015, Los Angeles agreed to return the airport to the Ontario International Airport Authority, in accordance with Ontario putting up $150 million for the airport, providing $60 million to purchase assets technically belonging to Los Angeles World Airports that were in place at Ontario Airport and which are crucial or indispensable to its operations, and agreeing to assume roughly $60 million in bonded indebtedness relating to the airport.
On November 2, 2016 Los Angeles transferred ownership and management authority over Ontario Airport to the Ontario-dominated airport authority. Under Ontario’s management, higher ticket prices for flights originating at Ontario Airport for comparable flights to domestic destinations than those charged for flights from Los Angeles International Airport did not decrease, despite the rhetoric put out by Ontario officials during their effort to wrest control of the airport back from Los Angeles that they would lower ticket prices. This betrayed Ontario officials’ accusations that Los Angles was mismanaging Ontario Airport as inaccurate. Rather, it illustrated that Ontario officials have less leverage in dealing with airline management and corporate officials than do their counterparts in Los Angeles.
Thus, the deal with China Airlines for daily flights to Taiwan represents a rare show of success for Ontario and Ontario International Airport Authority officials, primarily Wapner, who is the chairman of the authority.
He was present at the ceremonies celebrating the arrival of the first China Airlines flight on Sunday.
He predicted the regular flights were to have a “huge economic impact… on the region.”