Not all fashion trends are created equal. When it comes to men’s fashions it is officially official that the peacock is out of the cage and they are daring greatly. Men’s fashion is definitely ahead of its time, and you need look no further than what is on the streets to see what has been moving ahead. One item trending right now is the see through men’s shirts. They come in lace and mesh. I’d say it’s pretty daring, and for me, that means amazing. It’s quite the fashion statement, and pairs well with shorts, sandals, and loafers. Fashion is just that and it doesn’t really have rules. With that said, you’re free to explore and roam with different pieces and in this case men’s lace/see-through shirts are the fashion trend of the moment. Have fun with the see-through phenomenon. Until next week!.

“Remind yourself. Nobody built like you, you design yourself.” – Jay Z

By clicking on the blue portal below, you can download a PDF of the July 12 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 07-12-19

By Mark Gutglueck
It does not appear that San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia and his political team will be able to convince acting City Manager Teri Ledoux to constrain her salary and benefit demands in keeping with the austerity strategy that exists as the county seat’s best and perhaps last hope of staving off another round of bankruptcy.
In 2012, after more than a decade of the city’s expenditures outrunning its revenues and city officials tapping ever further into its dwindling reserves, with $180 million in ongoing unfunded liabilities and a $49 million annual operating deficit, San Bernardino filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection. Despite the best efforts of a succession of city managers – Fred Wilson, Mark Weinberg and Charles McNeely – the city had been unable to get a grip on its finances. A major factor was the expense represented by San Bernardino’s municipal employees, who had wrung from the city in collective bargaining session after collective bargaining session salaries and benefits that consumed virtually 90 percent of the city’s operating costs. This left the city inadequate funding to build new infrastructure and pay for the upkeep on its existing streets, bridges, curbs, sidewalks, water and sewer systems. Year upon year of deferred maintenance resulted in the crumbling of San Bernardino’s municipal groundwork, and an accompanying deterioration in the city’s appearance and its ability to deliver basic services. A consequence of that was that many of the city’s businesses took flight, taking with them the revenue they generated for the city, primarily through sales tax. This diminution of the city’s revenue base furthered the vicious cycle of decay.
The city’s mayor at the time of the bankruptcy filing was Patrick Morris. Being mayor of San Bernardino had once seemed to be the crowning achievement in a gilded career in which he had been a young prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who in 1964 and 1965 was entrusted with co-prosecuting Lucille Miller in one of the more infamous murder cases in county history, further illustrious achievements as a lead and supervising prosecutor in that office in the years thereafter, followed by his eventual elevation to the Superior Court, where he ultimately became San Bernardino County’s presiding judge before he retired. Ultimately, however, Morris’s mayoralty was undone by the financial challenges that consumed the city. San Bernardino was able to reacquire its financial footing only by the ignominy of taking refuge in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for five years, during which time Federal Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Jury consented to the city stiffing its creditors for over $350 million – an average of $70 million per year over that period. Morris chose not to seek reelection in 2013, and instead backed Carey Davis, a certified public accountant many hoped would be able to infuse the city with the fiscal discipline needed to right the city’s listing financial ship. Ultimately, however, Davis’s mayoralty proved a failed one when the city was unable to use the authority of the bankruptcy court to impose on the city’s employees, the employees’ unions and the California Public Employees Retirement System, which administers the city’s retirees’ pensions, the same terms applied to the city’s other creditors, vendors and suppliers of services. Whereas Judge Jury went along with paying certain classes of those to whom the city owed money, depending on the category, 60 cents on the dollar, 50 cents on the dollar, 40 cents on the dollar, 30 cents on the dollar, and in the case of those who had sued the city and prevailed in court, a mere single penny on the dollar for the first million dollars, lawyers for the city’s employee unions and for the state retirement system saw to it that the city’s employees and their retirement system were to be paid in full. Thus, Davis’s tenure in office would draw to a close in the same way it had begun, with the amount of money the city is paying to its employees and ex-employees in pensions exceeding the amount of money it takes in. After a single term in office that was lengthened by eight months when a new charter adopted by the city’s voters in 2016 changed the city’s election cycles from odd-numbered to even-numbered years, Davis in 2018 was defeated by Valdivia, who had been San Bernardino’s Third Ward councilman since 2012 following his 2011 election.
Though Valdivia is a Latino politician in an overwhelmingly Hispanic city, a city in which 72 percent of the population and 57 percent of those voting are Latino, he is distinctly different from the overwhelming number of Hispanic politicians in the Golden State, and one whom political analysts consider to be a contender to become the first Latino Governor of California since José María Flores shortly prior to California achieving U.S. statehood. While at present there are scores of Hispanic legislators in California and hundreds of Hispanic officeholders at the county and municipal level throughout the state, including more than two dozen with substantially greater name recognition than Valdivia who hold office in the four California counties with higher populations than San Bernardino County, nearly all of those are Democrats. Valdivia is a Republican, and one in whom a pronounced degree of momentum is accumulating.
Though historically California has leaned Republican more than Democratic, with 22 of its 40 governors since statehood being Republicans and its electoral college siding with Republicans in 23 out of 43 presidential races, since the mid-1990s the state has fallen into the ever firmer grip of the Democrats, with the lone exceptions being the governorships of Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. At present the governorship, the lieutenant governorship, the office of the state attorney general, the office of California secretary of state, insurance commissioner, and state superintendent of schools are held by Democrats, who simultaneously hold super-majorities in the California Senate and the Assembly. Nevertheless, many believe the Grand Old Party is just one charismatic Hispanic candidate away from making a vast turnaround in California. It is not unlikely that San Bernardino County, one of last bastions of Republicanism in the state, is the cauldron from which the savior of the Party of Lincoln might spring, if indeed such a savior exists. Just last year, Eric Negrete, a councilman in Victorville due to be rotated into the position of mayor of that 125,000 population city in the High Desert, was widely regarded as a potential statewide standard bearer for the GOP. But in his effort for reelection in November, a concerted push by the Democratic Party turned him out of office. Now, in San Bernardino, a city which faces numerous challenges but from which a candidate could potentially build a sterling reputation and a strong launching pad from which to rocket into higher, indeed much higher, office, Valdivia has come into ascendancy.
Were Valdivia to turn San Bernardino around where a widely respected Superior Court judge-turned-politician and a skilled financial manager before him failed, he could punch the first major and perhaps the crucial ticket he needs to engineer the train that will take him to his desired destination, 1526 H Street in Sacramento, the governor’s mansion.
Yet all that is way more easily conceived of than executed upon. Indeed, Valdivia at this point is much closer to seeing himself and whatever hopes he might have for a political career beyond what he has already achieved undone by the same forces that laid Davis and Morris low. The simple and undeniable reality is that San Bernardino, slightly more than two years after exiting from bankruptcy after five seemingly interminable years in that humiliating state, appears headed there once again. Without the protection of the bankruptcy court, the City of San Bernardino is no longer in the position of riding for free, contracting for goods and services that it in the end either does not pay for or receives for 20 percent or 30 percent of what it initially promised to pay. Heading into the 2018-2019 fiscal year, which ran from July 1, 2018 until June 1 of this year, city officials were buoyed by a general national, state and local economy that was looking up, as well as very good news, it seemed, at the immediate local level indicating that San Bernardino itself was experiencing positive economic growth, such that in the city the unemployment rate had decreased from 12.3 percent in 2013 to 5.1 percent in March 2018. With what they believed was warranted confidence, former City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller and then-Finance Director Brent Mason presented, and the city council approved, a 2018-19 operating budget of $166,357,066, of which $126,247,699 was accounted for in the city’s general fund and $40,109,367 in other funds that include special revenue, enterprise operations, and internal services. Travis-Miller and Mason said the city could afford all elements contained in the spending plan, which entailed a five percent increase in the general fund over the previous year, based upon $168.943,334 in anticipated revenue, allowing the city to net a surplus of $2,586,268, which could be salted away it its reserves. As the fiscal year progressed, however, both Mason and Travis-Miller could see that the city was not meeting the revenue projections assumed at the outset. It does not appear that Travis-Miller apprised the city council of the ongoing shortfall after it could be seen to be manifesting last fall, perhaps out of hope that the phenomenon was a temporary one that would abate before the end of the year. By mid-winter, however, it was clear that what was happening was not a quirk or an anomaly. As winter was making its transition to spring, the council was informed of the revenue downturn, by which time the amount of money the city was taking in for 2018-19 had been recalculated based upon actual performance. The prognosis was that before fiscal 2018-19 expired at midnight on June 30 of this year, not only would the city not realize the $2,586,268 surplus, it would actually receive roughly $11.2 million less than the $166,357,066 it was going to spend. Without fanfare, Mason departed.
A bit more drama followed with regard to Travis-Miller’s fate. To Valdivia and his team, which included newly elected First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez and Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Travis-Miller, with whom Valdivia was already somewhat on the outs, seemed to have been hiding from the mayor and council crucial information. To councilmen Fred Shorett and Jim Mulvihill, who counted themselves among Travis-Miller’s supporters, the misprojection of revenue was a mistake but not a capital offense. But the full revelation of the problem was alarming enough that at that point, in early April, another member of the council aligned with Valdivia but who had been reluctant to interfere with Travis-Miller’s operation of the city, Councilwoman Bessine Richard, joined with Sanchez and Ibarra in voting during a somewhat contentious closed session to suspend Travis-Miller. That move was opposed by Mulvihill, Shorett and another member of the Valdivia coalition, Councilman Henry Nickel, who had misgivings about precipitous action that might create a leadership vacuum at City Hall on a day-to-day basis and precipitate other unrecognized crises. The tie vote, however,  opened the way for Valdivia, who as mayor does not normally possess voting power, to use his tie-breaking authority. He voted along with Sanchez, Ibarra and Richard to place Travis-Miller on paid leave.  Assistant City Manager Teri Ledoux was appointed to fill in for her during her absence from City Hall.
There ensued more than a month of uncertainty, as Travis-Miller’s fate hung in the balance. Of moment was whether what was occurring had in any way chastened Travis-Miller and demonstrated to her who was in charge in San Bernardino. The question was whether Travis-Miller would come to accept that Valdvia had replaced Davis as the top political dog in the city and whether she was willing to get on board with the direction and program Valdivia had in store for the city. Whether Valdivia was himself prepared to keep Travis-Miller in place if she were to send out an unmistakable signal that she was ready to direct city staff to carry out Valdivia’s marching orders is unknowable at this point. Travis-Miller did herself no favors in trying to leverage what little power she had left by appealing to several of the city’s department heads to leave the city in the lurch and depart with her if she were to be terminated. Meanwhile,  what was perhaps to have the most direct influence on whether Travis-Miller would stay or go was the special city council race in the Third Ward that was necessitated by Valdivia’s resignation from the council in December to take possession of the mayor’s gavel. In that race, Treasure Ortiz, a former city employee and Ward Three resident at the city’s south end was vying against Juan Figueroa. Ortiz was favorably disposed toward Travis-Miller, indeed on good terms with her. Were she to prevail in the contest which was scheduled for May 7, the votes Valdivia would need to cashier Travis-Miller would be hard to come by, though there was always the possibility that Valdivia could convince Nickel to come across and dispense with Travis-Miller’s services. Figueroa, on the other hand, a member of the San Bernardino Fire Commission, the Historic Preservation Commission, and the Community Development Citizens Advisory Committee, was a Valdivia ally. Valdivia was supporting him, using his political machine to encourage his own supporters to fund Figueroa’s campaign while transferring money from his own political war chest into that of Figueroa.
On May 7, Figueroa prevailed over Ortiz, and upon Figueroa’s swearing in, the city council featured four candidates believed to be solidly behind Valdivia – Ibarra, Richard, Sanchez and Figueroa – giving the mayor a virtual lock on policy decisions going forward. Nickel, faced with political irrelevancy by remaining as something of a counterbalance to Valdivia, returned to the fold, giving Valdivia unquestioned dominion over the city. The most immediate manifestation of Valdivia’s newfound grip on the political situation in San Bernardino was a vote by the council majority – Ibarra, Sanchez, Richard, Nickel and Figueroa – to hand Travis-Miller a pink slip. In taking that action, the council justified unloading Travis-Miller because of her ineffectual handling of the city’s finances.
Nevertheless, in relieving Travis-Miller of her command over city staff, the city council had yet to take any action toward averting the financial Waterloo that awaits the City of San Bernardino as surely as the Duke of Wellington awaited Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. When the city council voted to finalize its 2018-19 budget in June 2018, Travis-Miller and Mason informed its members that while it appeared that San Bernardino would function under a balanced budget in what was then the immediately upcoming year, the financial modeling the city was doing showed that the projected revenues for 2019-20 set against the city’s projected expenditures would result in a $4.3 million deficit for that year; and that the modeling showed that the projected revenue to expenditure gap would continue to grow over the next three years until by 2022-23 the city was projected to run a $7 million deficit that year. Moreover, according to Travis-Miller and Mason, the city was on a collision course with its unfunded pension liability issue, such that the city, which was required to put up $20 million as part of its contribution to the California Public Employees Retirement System in 2018-19, would see that payment zoom to $40 million by 2028-29.
Prognostications, based on the best figures available, now indicate that the city, which ran an $11.2 million deficit in just concluded 2018-19, will see that annual deficit jump to $16 million by the end of 2019-20, $18 million to $19 million by 2020-21, $23 million to $24 million by the end of 2021-22 and $30 million to $33 million by the end of 2022-23. While those numbers are somewhat short of the $49 million operating deficit the city was faced with in 2012 just prior to its Chapter 9 filing, the city at present has reserves of less than $22 million. The only question at this point is whether, if the current trend continues, Valdivia will be able to stave off the city’s second bankruptcy filing until after his term ends in December 2022, after which he can have effectuated his exit as mayor so the bankruptcy filing does not occur on his direct watch.
Still, an even more dire reading of the leaves at the bottom of the teacup are that the city might not be allowed to get away with a second bankruptcy. Though Judge Jury indulged the city in the last go-round in federal bankruptcy court by allowing it to slide out from underneath more than $350 million it owed to all order of its creditors, Judge Jury or whatever judge who hears the next bankruptcy petition by the city may come to a determination that the city has demonstrated an inability to make the necessary financial reforms to maintain itself as a going concern, at which point the city’s only viable option will be to disincorporate.
With personnel costs in the city entailing in excess of 91 percent of the city’s budget and the prospect for a significant enough enhancement in revenue coming into the city to fill the void between the money it takes in and its actual expenditures being practically nil, Valdivia’s only hope for avoiding falling into the pit of political irrelevancy that swallowed Davis and Morris before him is to find a way to reduce those overall personnel costs by 25 percent. In recent weeks and months, the mayor, his former chief of staff, Bilal Essayli, and the rest of his political team have been seeking to set the stage for across-the-board 25 percent pay cuts within the San Bernardino municipal workforce. Last month, before Essayli’s departure, they did a test run, seizing upon the opportunity that the 2016 passage of a revamped charter, which Valdvia at that time opposed, presented them. In addition to a host of other reforms, the charter revision eliminated the city attorney and city clerk positions as elected offices. Using its authority at a specially-called meeting on June 11, the council voted 4-to-2, with Councilman Jim Mulvihill absent, to reduce City Attorney Gary Saenz’s pay rate over the final nine months he will occupy the elected city attorney’s position by 45.8 percent and to reduce City Clerk Georgeann Hanna’s pay during the same period by 59.2 percent. Thus Saenz, who formerly made $246,266 in total annual compensation as city attorney, has seen the amount of remuneration he is to receive between July 1, 2019 and March 31, 2020 reduced from $184,700 to $100,000. Hanna, who was receiving $171,466 in total annual compensation as city clerk, including salary, benefits and add-ons, is now seeing her compensation over the same nine-month span reduced from $128,600 to $52,500,
A critical element of Valdivia’s strategy was to get Teri Ledoux, who had been the assistant city manager under Travis-Miller and who was elevated to the post of acting city manager when Travis-Miller was suspended, to agree to accept a salary and benefit package that is roughly two-thirds of what Travis-Miller was provided.
Travis-Miller pulled down $307,941.56 in total compensation on a yearly basis, consisting of her $262,542.50 annual salary and $45,399.06 in annual benefits.  Ledoux, who in October 2017  was working as assistant to the city manager in La Verne at an annual salary of $120.268.73, was hired at that time by Travis-Miller to serve as assistant city manager in San Bernardino. The pay range for assistant city manager in San Bernardino ran from $172,000 to $213,000.  Travis-Miller arranged for Ledoux to be hired at a significantly higher salary step than was normally provided to a newly-hired city manager, such that Ledoux’s hiring in San Bernardino represented a salary boost for her in excess of $60,000 annually. Upon Travis-Miller’s suspension and Ledoux’s selection to serve as her interim replacement, Ledoux has been provided with a temporary salary increase to $212,000. Afoot was en effort to have Ledoux accept, as city manager, pay that was roughly equivalent to what a beginning assistant city manager would receive, $175,028.34 in annual salary, coupled with $30,770.61 in benefits. Such an arrangement, it was felt, would leave her with the situational and moral authority to ask the rest of the city’s workforce to voluntarily take 25 percent pay cuts needed for the city to structure its way toward solvency by which it could avoid a future bankruptcy.  On July 17, a closed-door negotiating session between the council and Ledoux is scheduled to take place.
Word now comes that Ledoux is in no way amenable to signing onto the strategy of uniformly scaling back wages at City Hall, particularly if it entails her accepting less than 99 percent of what Travis-Miller was making.
“Teri won’t accept a salary before benefits that’s a dime less than $260,000,” the Sentinel was told by an individual close to the situation, meaning that her expectation is that with her benefits, she will be provided with a total compensation package exceeding $300,000 per year. Her intention at this point is to take the city manager’s position for 18 months, giving her an expected retirement date at the end of January 2021.
There are two factors to Ledoux’s salary demands, the Sentinel was told. The first is that under the California Public Retirement System, pensions are calculated on the highest annual salary a retiree received while working. By closing the deal with the city for $260,000 before the end of this month, Ledoux will qualify for a 3.5 percent raise next month,  boosting her pay to $269,100 annually. Upon retirement, she will then be eligible to receive a pension equal to her number of years as a public employee (25) times 2.7% times $269,100, or $181,642.50 per year for the remainder of her life. The second factor is that the police chief in San Bernardino is provided with a $250,000 per year salary. Ledoux is insistent that she receive as city manager, the Sentinel is told, at least $10,000 more per year than the police chief.
Ledoux has not consented to speak to the Sentinel. One of her contacts at City Hall said she referred to past Sentinel articles as “bullshit.”
Ledoux’s unwillingness to play the lead role in an effort to get city employees to voluntarily take across-the-board 25 percent salary reductions means that the 25 percent reduction in payroll costs will very likely need to be effectuated in some other way, the most likely of which is massive layoffs. At present, the city’s work force stands at 722, which is under 55 percent of the city’s peak level of 1,319 employees in 2007-08. Assuming the layoff option is what is applied and that it can be effectuated uniformly across all levels of employees in terms of pay grade, the city’s workforce will need to be reduced to 541, meaning lay offs of 181 municipal workers would likely need to be initiated within the next 18 months.
City Councilman Henry Nickel said the city is already in an unforgivingly complicated predicament that could mean utter ruin for the city. He said city officials do not have the luxury of temporizing.
“We have only a very limited time in which to act and I have this overwhelming sense of doom if we do not,” he said.

Just as it did more than a decade-and-a-half ago, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week risked a substantial amount of taxpayer money on an electronic voting system, the continued viability of which is subject to the capricious continuing approval of the California Secretary of State’s office.
In 2004, that gamble ended in chaos and the essential squandering of $13.9 million. After the Sequoia Touchscreen Voting System was acquired by the county at the end of 2003, it was utilized in one election cycle. Thereafter, at the insistence of the state, which had previously approved it, the computerized voting system was virtually discontinued, and for a decade-and-a-half the county’s voters returned to using a primitive but relatively foolproof and verifiable manual voting system. That faux pas with the Sequoia system was attributable to the indecision and misdirection from the California Secretary of State’s office, then headed by Kevin Shelley, after Shelley and other state officials made conflicting, confusing and ultimately contradictory demands that county election offices up and down the state adopt direct recording electronic voting machines. Nevertheless, blame for what occurred was locally laid at the feet of then-San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Scott Konopasek and his second-in-command, Assistant Registrar of Voters Steve Trout, who were scapegoated by the board of supervisors and fired less than a month after the 2004 election.
In the current go-round, San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Bob Page, the principal management analyst in County Chief Executive Officer Gary McBride’s office who was abruptly saddled with what was then considered to be the temporary assignment of heading the county’s elections office when the board of supervisors last summer without any explanation of its action 109 days before the November 2018 election terminated Mike Scarpello as registrar, has now found himself in the unenviable quandary that was visited upon Konopasek in 1983 and 1984. In this case, however, Page, without any more assurance than Konopasek had, is gambling not with $14 million but rather more than twice that, just under $32 million.
On February 27 of this year, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, in a fashion that was reminiscent of Shelley’s 2003 mandate, issued an edict calling for voting officials throughout the state to transition to voting systems that are in compliance with the California Voting System Standards adopted in 2015, and that they do so in time to conduct polling in conjunction with the March 3, 2020 California Primary election. Padilla insisted that the revamping take place in order “to strengthen the security of California’s election infrastructure,” which was again virtually indistinguishable from the rationale that Shelley had used in strong-arming counties to abide by his order. Further emulating Shelley’s action, Padilla initiated the process for withdrawing certification or conditional approval of voting systems that were not tested or certified under the most recent state security standards.
Padilla tentatively signaled that three systems would be acceptable: Dominion Voting Inc.’s Democracy Suite 5.2, the County of Los Angeles’ Voting Solutions for All People Tally 1.0 and Hart Intercivic’s Verity Voting 3.0.1. At the same time other companies were working toward getting their systems qualified. Padilla also gave indication he would consider granting waivers on the requirement until December 2020 to those counties which could show they are unable to meet the earlier 2020 deadline if they were to request an extension by April 5, 2019, conditional upon them then making a bona fide hardship demonstration. San Bernardino County applied for such an extension.
Nevertheless, perhaps self conscious that San Bernardino County is yet using a paper ballot system considered by many to be the most antiquated system in the state as well as concerned that Padilla might not grant San Bernardino County the extension, Page damned the torpedoes and pushed ahead with finding a system the county could work with.
In a report to the board of supervisors dated July 9, Page said that his department received proposals from Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. Dominion said its system would be available for an upfront purchase price of $9,575,829, together with an ongoing maintenance cost of $814,670 annually, according to Page, while Hart InterCivic’s system was available for $10,792,279 and an annual upkeep charge of $1,126,598.
“An evaluation team facilitated by the purchasing department, including staff from the department and the information services department evaluated the proposals based on qualifications and experience, technical review, cost, references, and system demonstration,” Page wrote. “The evaluation committee recommended Dominion for a contract based on the overall best value to the county. Hart InterCivic, Inc. was notified of the recommended award to Dominion by e-mail on May 23, 2019, and did not appeal the recommended award. The [registrar of voters] department and [the] purchasing [department] negotiated a contract with Dominion that resulted in a higher initial purchase cost than Dominion’s cost proposal amount of $9,575,829. During the evaluation process, the committee reviewed the cost of Dominion and Hart equipment with similar functionality. Once the committee recommended [making the] award to Dominion, the department requested the purchase of an additional type of proposed equipment and increased quantities of evaluated equipment to better meet the department’s needs. The department recommends the purchase of eight Dominion high speed ballot scanners; Hart InterCivic did not offer a comparable scanner. The recommended contract also increases the not-to-exceed amount of system servers, polling place ballot scanners, and workstations for processing ballots, as well as adds costs for delivery, taxes and a contingency. The recommended contract includes a non-standard provision that limits Dominion’s liability, in the aggregate, to the total dollar amount of the contract excluding Dominion’s indemnification obligations. The county standard contract terms do not include a limitation of liability. This liability cap provision is commonly requested by software vendors.”
In a poetic stroke of irony or coincidence, the contract with Dominion is to last for 15 years, which is equal to the amount of time that San Bernardino County went without a computerized voting system as a consequence of the fiasco with Sequoia and the California Secretary of State’s office.
“The total not-to-exceed cost of the recommended contract with Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. consists of $15,880,164 in one-time costs in Year 1 and ongoing costs totaling $16,058,881 over the term of the Contract, which reflects $1.1 million annually, subject to a 3% increase per year beginning in year 8,” according to Page’s report.
The $31.93 million cited does not represent the total cost of making the transition.
“Ongoing contract costs consist of annual licensing, extended warranties, and support services for the new voting system, including an allowable inflation increase of costs of no more [than] 3% each year beginning year 8,” Page’s report states. “Additionally, the department and the information services department will determine the level of information services department support required to assist the department with maintenance of the Dominion system and develop an ongoing cost estimate for information services department support. The total Dominion contract cost constitutes a significant portion of the voting system replacement project, but not the entire project. The approved one-time funding for the project will also be expended on additional implementation costs, including those incurred to purchase new ballot-on-demand printers, mail ballot sorters/scanners, electronic poll books, supporting workstation hardware, and furniture/fixtures for workstations and voting equipment storage and delivery. Execution of the Dominion contract will also result in additional ongoing costs that will have to be accounted for in future recommended department budgets, including lease and utility costs for new warehouse space to store and stage the voting equipment.”
Page indicated the State of California was amenable to covering a portion, roughly 18.4 percent, of the cost of acquiring and maintaining the Dominion Voting System hardware and software. There was no state guarantee of the replacement cost if the system proved inadequate, however.
“The county entered into a revenue agreement with the Secretary of State [on] March 19, 2019 that will reimburse the county up to $5.9 million in one-time expenditures related to the purchase and implementation of the new voting system,” Page’s report states. A further state subsidy is possible but not assured, Page said. “The adopted 2019-20 state budget includes more funding for counties to update voting systems, which could provide an additional $2.95 million to the county for one-time costs of this voting system replacement project,” according to the report. “A potential amendment to the revenue agreement with the Secretary of State would be presented to the board at a future date.”
Neither Page nor anyone at the county, however, was willing to joust with Padilla to get an ironclad assurance that the Secretary of State’s office would not withdraw its approval of Dominion’s Democracy Suite system. Page and those officials know such an eventuality is possible, and that without an agreement in writing containing an indemnification clause, the county is putting the $32 million at risk. In this way, Page is following in Konopasek’s footsteps.
In 2003, Konopasek was faced with a mandate, articulated by both the State of California and then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, that San Bernardino County upgrade its voting system. Shelley said any of three systems available on the market at that time, touchscreen systems manufactured by Maximus and Hart Intercivic, Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold Voting Systems, would meet his requirements. After carrying out his own analysis, Konopasek recommended that the county purchase, at what ultimately turned out to be a cost of $13.9 million, a touchscreen voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. The county had committed to using that system in the 2004 Primary, which was held that year in California in March. Prior to that election, however, Shelley withdrew his certification of electronic voting machines throughout the state because, he said, they had uncertified software upgrades which could be vulnerable to tampering. Konopasek confidently went ahead with using the newly-purchased machines in that year’s elections, asserting they had been previously certified. The county backed Konopasek, going to court to get a ruling that the county could use the Sequoia machines. Nevertheless, less than two weeks after the November 2004 election, Konopasek and Steve Trout, Konopasek’s right-hand man, were relieved of their positions as the county’s registrar of voters and assistant registrar of voters, respectively.
It is of historic note that Shelley did not serve out his entire four-year term as California Secretary of State, announcing his resignation after two-years and one month in office in February 2005, with his resignation becoming effective the following month.
Page in March told the Sentinel he would not venture a guess as to whether or not Secretary of State Padilla can be counted upon to stand by his current certifications of the voting machines he has deemed acceptable for use in California elections.
“Questions about Padilla and his goals should be directed to the Secretary of State,” said Page.
Efforts by the Sentinel to get a statement from Padilla to the effect that he would not renege on his certification of voting machines once they were given were unsuccessful.
If Padilla does go crosswise on the county, the outcome for Page, one of the foremost up-and-coming prospects in county government’s executive suite, would not be good. On May 3, the board of supervisors appointed Page to the position of registrar of voters, removing the qualifiers acting or interim from his title. The title, however, will afford Page no more protection than the lines of crosswalk provide to a pedestrian about to be leveled by an oncoming bus. Members of the board of supervisors over the last two decades have proven very sensitive about any problems whatsoever surfacing at the county’s elections office and have shown no hesitancy to hold the registrar of voters responsible for any snafus, even when there has been a suggestion that some level of responsibility for those foul-ups might lie with the board itself.
In the odd-year election held in November 2001, a programming error with the computer used to scan and record the votes on the punch card ballots then in use resulted in the county initially declaring as winners 13 candidates who were ultimately later determined to have lost in that year’s election. An election office worker was initially being blamed for that miscue, but ultimately, the then-registrar, Ingrid Gonzales, was let go by the board of supervisors, amid calls for ending the county’s use of paper ballots. The board eventually settled on hiring as her replacement Konopasek, who had held an election office post in Washington State. Konopasek’s unfortunate experience with the Sequoia touch screen voting system doomed him after two years in the position. Subsequently, Konopasek, who has now gone on to become the assistant registrar of voters in Contra Costa County, said that ballot stuffing was taking place in San Bernardino County.
Konopasek was replaced on a temporary basis by Donna Manning, a top tier assistant in the registrar’s office. Manning, perhaps wary of what had happened to the two previous registrars, balked at moving into the role of the full-fledged registrar. In 2007, Kari Verjil, who had been the registrar of voters in Riverside County, came to San Bernardino County to serve as registrar of voters. She was in place four years. Sensing displeasure from the board over her suggestion that the Sequoia system could be augmented with software patches to eliminate its vulnerability and transition the county to a digitized voting system, Verjil elected to return to Riverside County in 2011 rather than raise further hackles with the board of supervisors and risk getting fired. Scarpello was brought in to replace her.
Like Verjil, Scarpello recognized that the State of California was not likely to long tolerate the county’s use of the simpler methodology for voting the county had adopted, which involved oversized cardboard ballots, which voters mark with a black ink pen. Scarpello, remarking that the California Secretary of State eventually recertified the Sequoia system conditional upon the incorporation of software patches intended to enhance its security and protect it from cyber attacks and hacking, had suggested that the county explore such a solution. The board, however, was unwilling to make the $2 million investment to bring that about, and had consented to the Sequoia touch screen machines in San Bernardino County being used only in the context of having one at each polling place for use by handicapped individuals.
Based upon Scarpello’s effort to usher the county toward use of a digital system, which now in the light of Padilla’s February 27 mandate appears prescient, and some other issues the board has not disclosed, Scarpello was shown the door last summer, a year ago next week.
Though it is now clear that Page is being pressured, if not outright stampeded, by the board of supervisors to just hurry up and get it over with and comply with Padilla’s mandate, that consideration will cut him no slack if Padilla reverses course and decertifies the Dominion system. It goes without saying that in the face of such an eventuality Page is to fall on his own sword so the board members are not seen as having been cavalier with the expenditure of tax dollars, and County Chief Executive Officer Gary McBride will send Assistant County Administrative Officer Leonard Hernandez to Page’s office at 777 East Rialto Avenue in San Bernardino to personally hand him his pink slip.
David Wert, the county’s official spokesman, this week said of the decision to go with the Dominion system, “The contract requires Dominion to provide the county with a fully certified voting system throughout the term of the contract. If during the term of the contract any portion of Dominion’s voting system were to become decertified, there are provisions for dispute resolution. Additionally, the contract requires Dominion to provide their most current certified system software; updates do not cost extra. The contract also requires Dominion to refresh computer hardware at the county’s request one time during the contract period at no additional cost to the county. Finally, the contract includes a provision for the county to sell back and swap out equipment used at voting sites during the first five years for a percentage of the original purchase price.”
Wert further said, “You should note that the agreement with Dominion is a not-to-exceed contract; Dominion is not guaranteed $31,939,045. The potential maximum amount that could be spent in the first year for hardware, software, training, support, shipping and sales tax is $15,880,164, which includes a contingency amount of $2,903,550 (10% of the contract) that might never be spent. The registrar of voters team will meet with Dominion over the next two weeks to determine the quantity of equipment that will be ordered for delivery prior to the March 2020 Presidential Primary Election.”
As to the county not pinning Padilla down to prevent a recurrence of what happened when Kevin Shelley was California Secretary of State, Wert said, “I don’t believe secretaries of state would be able to make such a guarantee. It seems that would put them in the position of allowing use of a system they have determined to be unsuitable. Perhaps you saw in the agenda item that the Secretary of State is reimbursing the county $5.9 million and may provide an additional $2.95 million.”
Wert added, “Also, I have no idea where you got the idea that Konopasek and Trout’s departures had anything to do with the Sequoia decertification. There would have been no conceivable need or motive to ‘scapegoat’ anyone over the Sequoia equipment situation as it was very clear to everyone what had happened, as you outlined.”
-Mark Gutglueck

San Bernardino Mayor Pro Tem and lifelong Westside resident Bessine Littlefield Richard this week announced her intent to seek re-election fto the city council representing the 6th Ward.
“San Bernardino’s working class neighborhoods and communities of color have finally achieved a majority on the city council,” declared Richard, who was recently chosen to serve as San Bernardino’s mayor pro tem. “I am seeking re-election to continue moving our city forward as a more inclusive, diverse and successful community for all residents.”
Citing the achievement of a local police substation to improve emergency response in the 6th Ward, Richard stated, “For years, the concerns of West Side residents were ignored by city leaders. Today, our community’s increased clout at City Hall gives the people of the Westside a real opportunity to correct these past wrongs and get our fair share of city services.”
Born and raised on San Bernardino’s Westside, Richard says she is “dedicated to providing new job opportunities and affordable homes to help local residents build a brighter future for their families. “I’m fighting to end the injustices which have kept so many of our people from achieving their dreams of a better life,” she said.
Community leaders throughout San Bernardino County expressed support for  Councilwoman Richard’s re-election in the March 2020 election.
“I’m proud to endorse Councilwoman Bessine Richard,” declared Assemblyman James Ramos.  “Her leadership is truly making a difference in empowering the people of  San Bernardino.”
“Westside residents couldn’t ask for a more dedicated advocate at City Hall than Councilwoman Bessine Richard,” stated San Bernardino School Board Trustee Danny Tillman.
“Councilwoman Bessine Richard has earned my support because of her passion for helping others,” said San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia.  “During her first term on the city council, she has been instrumental in ushering in a new era of leadership for San Bernardino.”
Other well known community leaders endorsing Richard’s re-election include San Bernardino County Supervisor Josie Gonzales, San Bernardino County Board of Education Trustee Joseph Williams, Former State Assemblymember Cheryl Brown, San Bernardino city councilmembers Juan Figueroa and Theodore Sanchez; Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson; and Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren.
Bessine Littlefield Richard is the youngest of eight children. She graduated from San Bernardino High School and received her degree from San Bernardino Valley College.  Bessine’s four children were all born, raised and attended school in the 6th Ward.  She is a member of Ecclesia Christian Fellowship Church.
Professionally, Bessine has 40 years of public service with the County of San Bernardino, including working for the public health, economic development, social services, sheriff’s child support, probation and county workforce development departments.

Fontana resident Randy Scott, now known by his professional moniker Reckless Randy, has teamed up with Dr. Danger in the performance of cutting edge don’t-even-think-about-trying-this-at-home daredevilry.
Dr Danger, whose actual name is Gregory Carpenter, has now spent three decades as a stuntman performing all order of death-defying feats, coming through all of it barely any worse for the wear. Now Scott, 40, who is 17 years Dr Danger’s junior, is seeking to emulate him, learning from the master how to keep his body placed correctly and properly insulated to resist the destructive potential of speed, gravity, fire, explosions, contortions and sheer force.
In recent weeks and months, Scott has grown accustomed to scenes of mechanical mayhem, car jumps, conflagration and explosions.
Shortly after an exposition at the Irwindale Speedway last month, Scott told the Sentinel, “I’m getting acclimated to coexisting amidst the pyrotechnics. Seriously, the grounds at the speedway looked like a movie set, with a lot of burning wreckage and smoke. They blow a lot of stuff up around me. What Dr Danger has me doing are Evel Knievel-type stunts that usually pan out and a few that don’t. Dr Danger is a stunt expert who has been doing these radical things most of his life.”
Carpenter, who was born in Sacramento, describes himself as “a true stunt gypsy road dog” who spends most of his time on the road “living life in the trenches and getting as much out of each and every day as I can.” He says that “at the ripe age of ten, with nothing but a lighter, an abandoned car, a love of fire and some incurable inquisitiveness, I unknowingly set out to create the man that would become Dr Danger.”
Carpenter added,  “I’m not really sure why I became this guy. For some reason it was me, and I just became it. It’s something that mystifies me, even. I only do cars because I don’t have that good of balance. I’ve fallen off horses. I’ve fallen off motorcycles. When I was a kid, my dad told me, ‘Son, stay away from motorcycles. They’re dangerous.’ So, I started crashing cars instead.”
Along the way, he acknowledges, he’s doubled, tripled, quadrupled and quintupled “as a father, a songwriter, a mechanic, a bus driver, and a dishwasher.” It hasn’t hurt, he said, that he is “a believer and an eternal optimist.” Dr Danger has spent the last 30 years performing live daredevil stunts at racetracks, speedways, and monster truck shows across the country.
He became enthralled with Evel Knievel at the age of 11 after seeing the George Hamilton movie three times in one afternoon. He spent his early years of stunt work in Hollywood before realizing, he said, he could not be just another anonymous stuntman. He wanted an audience of his own that recognized his face and his name. The way to achieve that was on the open road, he figured. As Dr Danger, Carpenter has enthralled spectators in the six figures, performing live daredevil stunts at racetracks, speedways, and monster truck shows across the country.
“I am the best live show fire guy in the country,” Carpenter said. “I’ve probably stunted more people in live shows than anyone else in history.”
Carpenter’s signature stunts include a Dr Danger original, the “Suicide Car Explosion,” which entails two pounds of explosives and twenty gallons of gasoline being placed on a car. Dr Danger gets in, flips a switch and kaboom! Thereafter comes the challenge of getting out. After perfecting this stunt and performing it a few times, it became routine, so he added some flair to it by coming out of the car on fire.
The ‘Suicide Car Jump’ is another Dr Danger original. It is sometimes referred to as ‘The Steel Wall Crash.’ Early on in his career, he tempted fate by taking this stunt one step closer to suicide by using no roll bars. He has since chosen safety over sensationalism. In 1993 at the Portland Speedway, Dr Danger became the only person to ever jump a full size school bus off a ramp with a kicker, landing it 100 feet away upside down. He has jumped and crashed hundreds of cars, trucks, and buses in many unique ways, including head-on collisions, rollovers, T-bones, and chases.
Carpenter talked about mitigating the force of several tons of steel and the effects of gravity.
“At first, I used roll bars, but we were doing this every week and it was just easier to take my chances,” he said. “There was a period of about ten years when I used absolutely nothing but the stock seat belt because it was fast and easy. I had a special way of dealing with it. I would break the back of the seat so it was leaning way back. It was still connected, but it was kind of just hanging there. I would put on the seat belt, the factory belt, and if I flipped over and the roof came down, I was already leaning back far enough to where it wouldn’t smash me down. Well, it would smash me down flat, but it wouldn’t break me in half. That worked for me.”
Carpenter acknowledged, “There were some really close calls. I was trapped in one car for 45 minutes. I was trapped in another car for an hour-and-a-half.  When the roof folds in, it pushes you way down in the car. The doors are smashed shut. Those two times when they had to cut me out, I kind of remember bits of it. Even though I was alert and talking to the paramedics, I don’t really recall it. I would go to my happy place. One time I woke up under the light in the trauma room. I was lying there naked and the nurse was telling the doctor my temperature was 105.7, I had been trapped in the car so long. I don’t know what air I was breathing. There wasn’t much air.”
As everyone at some point must, Carpenter has compromised with reality. “Now that I’m putting others’ lives in jeopardy, we use safety pods,” he said. “It takes a little bit of work to put them in, but it’s like being in a funny car cage, like being in a dragster cage. That makes a big difference. It’s like a mini-roll cage that’s built right around the driver and you take out the driver’s seat and you put it in place and just bolt it down. The car can crush down around you and it keeps you pretty safe. It keeps the car off of you, away from you. If the car gets mangled, you cut the roof off to take the pod out. The jumps are getting bigger and more dangerous, and it just makes sense to do that now.”
Pyrotechnics are a large part of any Dr Danger event. From fire pots to fire tricks, including fire eating, he does it all. He holds the record for the longest run on fire, at over 300 feet, as well as the longest burn time.
And so how does Dr Danger deal with fire hazards?
“It’s a specialized routine that I’ve developed over the years that is a trade secret, in a way,” Carpenter said. “It’s not really high tech. It’s redneck high tech, how’s that?” Carpenter shared the method with the Sentinel, conditional upon an agreement of nondisclosure. Indeed, the technique involves a fairly simple, logical and clever augmentation of a standard means of insulation.
“It’s a gimmick, but it only lasts for a short while,” Carpenter said. “At first you don’t even feel the fire, and then all of a sudden it’s just hot. You’ve got a little window to work in there. The difference between twenty and thirty seconds is quite a bit. There’s different factors involved, but it goes from being you don’t even notice it to you are at the end of the envelope.”
Of his record for remaining on fire and emerging unscathed, Carpenter said, “Well, I ran 300 feet, the length of a football field, on fire.” Because of being bound up with protective gear, Carpenter was not exactly sprinting. “It probably took close to 40 seconds,” he said. “When you’re on fire, you have superhuman powers. If you are running into the wind, you can keep the fire behind you and you can be on fire for a minute before you start to panic too badly. With some extra-special set up, you could probably go a bit longer, but a minute’s doing pretty good.  You have to special prepare for that, though.”
Over the years, Carpenter’s talent for the spectacular caught the fleeting attention of such television shows as CBS Sunday Morning, MTV Nitro Circus, National Geographic, and Fuel TV. It was in an out-of-the-way town, Wichita Falls, Texas, where Carpenter had what might have otherwise been just another passing encounter with a videographer. Happenstance, or fate or whatever it was, in the form of mechanical failure, boosted Dr Danger into the national and international consciousness.
“As it would turn out, I met Kelly Lipscomb through a camera lens at a race track,” Carpenter said. “He used some footage of me he shot in Wichita Falls in a commercial for this local car dealership. My truck had broken down, so I wasn’t able to leave that town, and so three weeks later I was still there and I saw the commercial on TV. So, then I went on a quest to find him to make some more commercials, and we did.  It started with making car dealership commercials and quickly evolved into a documentary, what we were calling “Chasing Danger.”  During what turned out to be a nearly three year-long shooting of Chasing Danger, which Lipscomb originally conceived as a paean to the eclipse of the daredevil profession, virtually every one of Dr Danger’s professional moves was recorded on camera for posterity. Lipscomb found himself immersed in Carpenter’s world, which included other adrenaline rush junkies inhabiting the stunt profession. During Lipscomb’s discussion with the History Channel to see if it would be interested in airing Chasing Danger, the concept of a documentary soon gave way to a television series prospect, and then actually making and broadcasting, to a national and international audience,  the 16-episode television series “American Daredevils.”
Dr Danger and his crew, as well as the affiliated all-female Danger’s Angels, the stunts of which he coordinated, made their way onto America’s Got Talent. Both were included as performers in that show’s top ten-year highlights.
On five occasions, Carpenter took life flights and on five occasions he had five custom-made suits either burned off or cut off of him. “There were a good ten other times when I should have been dead but I barely squeaked by,” Carpenter said. “All of those five very very much life threatening.”
Asked if all of the money he makes is eaten up by insurance premiums, Carpenter laughed. “I don’t have to pay for insurance,” he said. “I can’t get it. There’s nobody who wants to insure somebody like me.  I have health insurance but I definitely don’t have a life insurance plan.”
The best insurance, Carpenter said, is skill and knowing what you are doing.
“You’re living on the edge,” the Sentinel said.
“You can say that, yes,” said Carpenter.
At the age of 57, he has begun to phase his way out of performing and is passing the torch along to several other younger and hungrier stuntmen and stuntwomen. Still, he isn’t fully out of the game yet. “I’m in the middle of my 30th anniversary tour right now,” he said. “I’ve done several jumps in the last couple of weeks. I’ll hand the big jumps off to the younger guys. I still have some big jumps in me. I’ll pick and choose those accordingly, depending on several different things. If it’s the beginning of the tour, I don’t want to go and get hurt right away. There’s going to be some of these jobs where they expect me to do it. I can still put the car on the ramp.”
“Will you still be jumping when you’re 70?” the Sentinel asked him.
“I’d like to be 70 and still teaching others,” he said “I’ve achieved the level of stunt coordinator. My record for people getting hurt around me is nearly zero. Out of the hundreds of times there have been less than a half dozen people who have gotten some type of minor injury.”
Randy Scott, or rather Randy Reckless as he is now coming to be known, is one of those members of Team Danger Carpenter has decided to pass the torch on to. In addition to Reckless, Team Danger  consists of several other daring performers, top-notch professional drivers, stuntmen and stuntwomen and experts in showmanship who showcase their skills. Those include Wayne “The Ox” Dunmire; Stephanie Wallenda-Davis, a cousin of Nick Wallenda, who recently tightrope-walked across the Grand Canyon; Samantha Weaver; Mike “Mini-Mad” Cook; Texas Trash; and Bobby Washington, the foremost Native American Daredevil working today, who goes by his stunt name “Bobby Sixkiller.”
Scott told the Sentinel that as a young man he met Dr. Danger about twenty years ago, and by chance was working in Ontario at an auto salvage yard more recently when he saw several wrecked vehicles that were marked in black marker with “Dr Danger.” He remarked to the yard owner that he knew Carpenter, and that led to his being reintroduced to him. It was after the reintroduction that Danger mentioned that he was looking for daring talent. Scott was game.
Scott recently performed the “Suicide Car Explosion” at Irwindale Speedway.
“Here is this opportunity to learn from the best in the business,” said Scott. “How am I going to pass that up? You have the challenge of doing some very intricate planning, preparation and then execution, and then the satisfaction of seeing it work. There’s excitement, attention and the chance of being seen on television. I’m down for that. And besides, doing these absolutely crazy things makes me feel like I’m young again.”
Scott called the Suicide Car Explosion “intense.” He is interested in learning another part of Dr. Danger’s repertoire, the “Suicide Car Jump,” as well. Asked if there was anything Carpenter did that he wasn’t ready to try, Scott said he was a little bit leery of what is perhaps Carpenter’s most spectacular feet, the “Triple Flip Cannonball.” Scott said he felt confident in working with fire and said, “I have no problem driving a car up a ramp and leaving the ground. I’m not really all that gung ho about doing three backward flips before trying to land, though.”
To which, Dr Danger said, “What could possibly go wrong?” He then responded to his own question, “The answer is, ‘Everything.’ Just be ready.”
-Mark Gutglueck