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Sentinel 03-13-20

By Mark Gutglueck
As an internal investigation into San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia is proceeding, concerns have been raised over indications the city’s legal counsel is involved in an active effort to thwart a full-fledged examination of reports and evidence that Valdivia’s depredations involved both the solicitation and acceptance of bribes.
The investigation now ongoing was prompted by the circumstance attending the January 29 resignations of two city employees, Mirna Cisneros and Karen Cervantes, who had been assigned to the mayor’s office last year.
Cisneros, who worked as a customer service representative and was assigned to Valdivia’s office in that capacity relatively shortly after he became mayor in December 2018, and Karen Cervantes, who was hired as Valdivia’s assistant in September 2019, say they were subjected to Valdivia’s sexual harassment and advances, and endured a hostile work environment along with a string of humiliations after rejecting his advances.
Cisneros and Cervantes are represented by attorney Tristan Pelayes, who guided them in their efforts during their latter stage of employment with the city to be moved into positions outside the mayor’s office. When the city demonstrated it was not amenable to placing them elsewhere, they resigned and a little more than two weeks later, on February 13, filed claims against the city.
In short order, it was revealed that Pelayes was representing three other city employees working within the mayor’s office, as well as a city commissioner who who had similarly been subjected to abusive treatment by the mayor. Those clients were two other woman, Jackie Aboud, who had served as Valdivia’s field representative for nearly ten months from last April until he fired her in January, and Alissa Payne, whom Valdivia had nominated to serve on the city’s Arts and Historical Preservation Commission and the San Bernardino Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission. The others were Don Smith, who had worked on Valdivia’s campaign for mayor and was subsequently hired by the city to serve as Valdivia’s part time field representative, and, most shockingly, Matt Brown, Valdivia’s chief of staff who has been serving in that capacity since August 2019, roughly a month after Valdivia’s original chief of staff, Bill Essayli, had resigned.
The initial revelations relating to Cisneros and Cervantes and much of what followed pertained to what appeared to be Valdivia’s genderist or sexist attitude and behavior.
According to Payne, Valdivia engaged in unwanted sexually-tinged overtures with her, including inappropriate physical contact. “He went as far as offering to provide me an apartment, would tell me how to vote and what to say or do at the commission meetings, asked me to meet him alone in the evening after hours, and promised – guaranteed –  me a seat on the city dais as the Second Ward council member,” Payne said. She recounted that Valdivia “invited me to attend a dinner event as his personal guest where he was persistently trying to get me intoxicated, which I declined. The mayor was preying on me.”
While much or perhaps even most of what Cisneros, Cervantes, Aboud and Payne were alleging related to sexual advances the mayor had made toward them, vulgar comments about women and his sexual activity, and his pressuring them to accompany him to after hours events and spend time alone with him, some of those who came forward have further suggested that Valdivia’s abuse of power did not limit itself to untoward action toward them but had crossed the line into criminal activity and violations of the public trust, including graft.
An early indication of this was most prominent in statements made in Cisneros’s claim and her public statements. She said that in his interactions with her, Valdivia either let slip or openly acknowledged that he was misusing public funds for personal use. According to Cisneros’s claim, “On January 14, 2020, Valdivia asked claimant to process a reimbursement to the airport for hotel and breakfast meal. He specifically asked her to be vague when sending the information to the airport staff about the meeting. He also said not to ‘name names’ of the individuals that he met with. Right after that conversation he stated that he had raised a lot of money on that specific trip for his campaign.” The airport alluded to is the San Bernardino International Airport, the executive board for which Valdivia is a member as a consequence of his role as mayor.
Cisneros also said that Valdivia at the very least was in violation of the gift-receiving reporting requirements that are applicable to elected and public officials and perhaps had gone further into the criminal arena of accepting bribes.
According to Cisneros’s claim, “In December 2019, Valdivia said that he can get VIP tickets for future rave events, if claimant was ever interested in attending. He also mentioned that he also went to EDC [the Electric Daisy Carnival] in Las Vegas and everything was paid for and he did not report any of the gifts.” According to Cisneros’s claim, “On December 17, 2019, Valdivia shared that he is really good friends with someone who is always offering him his private jet. He said that he will work something out where he does not have to claim it on his forms and wants to travel in the jet. He asked claimant if she would want to travel with him. He said there is always a way to get around everything. He also asked if she would like to go to New York for New Year’s Eve.” Cisneros also disclosed that “On January 15, 2020, Valdivia shared that an ambassador had gifted him a bottle of alcohol that was worth $900 and he wasn’t going to report it. He also shared that he is always receiving gifts and not reporting them.”
Cisneros said that Valdivia pressured her to work, while she was on the clock in her capacity as a city employee, on the reelection efforts for two of his allies on the city council who were up for reelection on March 3, Bessine Richard and Juan Figueroa. She said Valdivia suggested she could use vacation time to absent herself from her employment duties at City Hall if she felt uncomfortable about being paid by the city while working on the political campaigns. It was clear Valdivia was pushing her to engage in partisan activity as a city employee, she said. “He said ‘I am not pointing a gun to your head. Just asking for your help,’” according to Cisneros.
According to Aboud, there is evidence to suggest that Valdivia was engaged in overt political patronage and using the power of his office to steer favorable treatment to those who had supported him in his successful run for mayor, and that he was similarly using that authority to punish those who did not support him. She said that Valdivia told her “that my job was not to serve the community but to serve him and meet his personal needs.” Aboud said, “The mayor doesn’t care about the community, only certain areas that supported him during his election. I was ordered to not help, support, or partner with parts of the community that didn’t support him in the election, like the 4th and 7th Ward.”
There is no apparent genderist or sexist element to the issues that Smith and Brown have with Valdivia and his treatment of them, but both men expressed concerns about the mayor’s vituperative nature.
According to Smith, Valdivia “ordered me to work extra hours, while not getting paid, promising me a promotion opportunity. He had me run personal errands like getting his car serviced while on the clock for the city. He offered to pay me for side work, then would never pay me fully after I completed the work. He routinely threatened my job as a means to bully me.”
When Brown was informed of Valdivia’s treatment of Cisneros, Cervantes and Aboud, he had reported what he had learned to the city manager’s office and the city’s personnel department. Upon learning of Brown’s action, Valdivia interpreted that as an act of disloyalty on his chief of staff’s part.
Beyond Valdivia’s treatment of them, both Smith and Brown have a window on the influence peddling going on at City Hall, and Valdivia’s place at the center of a pay-to-play ethos that Cisneros and Aboud have hinted at. Both possess, the Sentinel has learned, specific information that has criminal implications, including acts of bribery, the provision of payoffs and kickbacks and Valdivia’s activity in his capacity as mayor to influence city policy, decisions and votes to favor entities, businesses and individuals willing to convey money to him, his campaign or those of his associates.
There are indications, current and former city officials and employees have told the Sentinel, that Best Best & Krieger is seeking to steer the ongoing investigation away from an exploration of those aspects of Valdivia’s behavior falling under the criminal code such as bribery, perjury and misappropriation of public funds to instead have the inquiry concentrate on those elements of the scandal relating to his personal and personality-driven behavioral issues that relate to his treatment of city employees which have potential civil consequences but do not move into the arena of criminal violations.
Best Best & Krieger’s motivation for ignoring the criminal implication of the San Bernardino mayoral crisis is manifold.
Most basically, the scandal Valdivia has created is complicating the overall function at City Hall, and is particularly making things difficult in the offices of the city manager and city attorney. Best Best & Krieger associate Thomas Rice serves as San Bernardino’s city attorney and Best Best & Krieger partner Sonia Carvalho serves as San Bernardino’s deputy city attorney.  By containing the matter pertaining to Valdivia within limited parameters, Rice and Carvalho can perhaps prevent the crisis from feeding upon itself and mushrooming out of control.
Other litigation the city is involved in could be impacted by determinations that are made with regard to the mayor’s activity, and the more egregious his action is documented as being in the course of the investigation, the greater the chance that other plaintiffs will pick up on the investigation’s findings and use those to support their allegations if a cross reference to the facts common to the cases can be made.
A determination of criminality on Valdivia’s part would invite greater scrutiny to the matter involving him in particular and the city in general, including the manner in which Best Best & Krieger as well as Rice and Carvalho failed to act forthrightly in addressing the complaints about the mayor early on. According to Pelayes, well before the scandal went public, there were repeated efforts by Cisneros, Cervantes and Aboud to get city officials, including those in the city manager’s office and the city attorney’s office, to act. City officials at the highest echelon were remiss in not taking seriously what they had been alerted to, Pelayes said. “All of these incidents have been reported numerous times to city administrators, yet nothing was done, and they continued to be victimized by Mayor Valdivia,” Pelayes said. It was only after his office took action and moved the issues into the public spotlight that city management and the city attorney’s office made a show of responding, he said. But that was more window dressing than substance, Pelayes said, as the city and its law firm were more intent on having the publicity subside than getting to the bottom of the problem. In this way, Pelayes accused the city of conducting a sham investigation.
“Although the city has begun an internal investigation, they declined our requests to collectively work together through the process and choose an independent investigator to ensure a fair investigation, put the mayor on leave during the investigation, and provide alternate positions for my clients to return to work without losing their employment status and benefits,” Pelayes said. “They stated that our requests were unreasonable.”
Best Best & Krieger is an establishment law firm, having originated in 1891. It or its lawyers serve in the capacity of city attorney for 32 municipalities in California. As such, the firm has a reputation for enabling the mayors and members of the city and town councils it represents, pursuing a philosophy that the mayors and members of those councils are duly elected and speak for the body politic at large, thus making Best Best & Krieger the legal representatives of not just the cities as entities but the personal attorneys of the various members of the councils and mayors where the firm has been retained, requiring of them loyalty to those elected officials as clients. In this way, Best Best & Krieger is committed to constructing a legal/criminal defense of those clients, as in this case Valdivia, which in practical terms translates into heading off any criminal prosecution before it occurs.
Were Best Best & Krieger or any of its attorneys to abandon Valdivia and throw him to the legal wolves, as it were, that action would be considered by the firm’s other clients – elected council members and mayors – who might consider such an act of abandonment in determining whether they want their city or town to continue to be represented by the firm.
Valdivia stands accused of engaging in influence peddling and functioning within a pay-to-play culture. Best Best & Krieger or its attorneys currently serve as the city or town attorney in four other San Bernardino County cities – Big Bear, where Best Best & Krieger Partner Steve Deitsch holds that position; Fontana where Best Best & Krieger partner Jeff Ballinger is city attorney; Colton where Best Best & Krieger partner Carlos Campos is city attorney and Carvalho was previously city attorney; and Apple Valley, where Rice is town attorney.
Until recently, Best Best & Krieger Partner John Brown was city attorney in Ontario and Best Best & Krieger partner Ruben Duran was city attorney in Adelanto.
In Adelanto, during Duran’s tenure there, outright bribery of public officials was ongoing. During Brown’s tenure as city attorney in Ontario and Ballinger’s tenure as city attorney in Fontana, a pay-to-play ethos has prevailed. Early in Carvalho’s tenure as city attorney in Colton, Mayor Karl Gaytan and councilmen Don Sanders and James Grimsby were caught up in a bribery scheme, indicted, prosecuted and convicted. It is not in Best Best & Krieger’s interest for an intensive round of inquiry into political influence trading to occur, one which could be triggered countywide were such a probe to be undertaken in San Bernardino.
On February 5, Carvalho made a statement during the course of that evening’s city council meeting intended to offer reassurance that the matter pertaining to Valdivia was being properly looked into. At the same time, her statement seemed angled toward preventing the matter from being opened any further, to a point beyond which a criminal inquiry would become inevitable. “Mayor and council members, I wanted to assure you and also especially members of the public that the city manager and director of human resources have taken immediate action to address the recent claims that have been referred to in a newspaper article,” Carvalho said. “The city has outside legal counsel that advises the city on all employment matters, and this firm is advising staff on its legal obligations to strictly comply and follow with all of your personnel rules, and to conduct a thorough investigation. We ask for your patience, knowing that staff needs to comply with these policies and state and federal law. The public should know that all of you have been advised of your legal responsibilities and your fiduciary duties, and your obligation not to disclose confidential personnel information, and this may be why some of you cannot speak to the press or members of the public.”
More than a month has elapsed since that point. Word has reached the Sentinel that witnesses who would logically be called in the course of a thorough investigation into the issues relating to the mayor, his behavior and activities have not been contacted. One of those is former City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller, whose tenure as the city’s top administrator ended six months after Valdivia became mayor. Travis-Miller was put on paid administrative leave in early April 2019. Almost immediately after Valdivia was sworn in as mayor in December 2018, he sought to have his then-allies on the council sack Travis-Miller. There ensued three months of tension, during which there were several sharp exchanges between the mayor and city manager in private, many of which related to Valdivia seeking to exercise authority he did not legally possess under the city charter put in place by a vote of the city’s voters in 2016. There are indications that Travis-Miller has either direct or indirect information relating to illegal acts engaged in by Valdivia. She is pursuing a lawsuit against the city over her termination. To date, investigators with the city have not contacted her or her lawyer.
Beginning early in his tenure as mayor, Valdivia, without citing a reason, would leave the council dais when any issue relating to the licensing of a cannabis-related business came before the council. Reports were that he was acting as an agent for several businesses dealing in marijuana or marijuana-based products seeking operating permits. More recently, he has remained in place to officiate over matters pertaining to some of those businesses’ applications, including a controversial one involving a company Valdivia is said to be connected to, Nibble This LLC, which was granted a right to proceed toward becoming operational though it did not have a properly executed lease for the property upon which the concern was to carry out its function, as is required for cannabis-related businesses under city regulations. This brought recurrent charges from Nibble This LLC’s competitors that the city was conferring favorable treatment on Nibble This and its principal, Raquel Origel. Best Best & Krieger is resisting having the investigation focus on reports that Nibble This LLC provided money directly to Valdivia in an effort to influence the city’s licensing of its operation.
For some time a report has been circulating that Valdivia was provided with $10,000 by the city’s franchised trash hauler, Burrtec Industries. Best Best & Krieger has discouraged an examination of those reports.
According to elements of the political infrastructure around Valdivia, the political consultant who managed Valdivia’s successful 2018 campaign, Chris Jones, has a comprehensive knowledge of the donors to Valdivia’s campaign, those being a substantial cross section of the business community, many of which have interests that would be impacted by decisions of and actions by the San Bernardino City Council. In this way, Jones is said to be able to provide a road map of the influence trading that has been ongoing at City Hall since Valdivia became mayor. Reliable reports are that Valdivia hired Brown to serve as his chief of staff at Jones’ suggestion.
The Sentinel is informed that the investigators have not nor will they question Brown with regard to his knowledge pertaining to influence trading involving Valdivia’s administration, and they will not seek any input from Jones on the subject.
Valdivia’s former campaign treasurer, Robert Rego, possesses a wealth of information with regard to where Valdivia has obtained the funding to sustain his political career, and Rego can outline the convergence of the money provided to the mayor and his campaign war chest and the action taken by the city council both while Valdivia was a councilman and when he was mayor which had an impact on the fortunes of his campaign donors and personal benefactors. Investigators have not been cleared to speak with Rego.
It will be difficult for the investigators to get around dealing with Don Smith, who as of this week was still employed by the city as Valdivia’s field representative and who is represented by Pelayes.
In conjunction with another lawsuit pending against the city in which the owner of Pepe’s Towing, Manny Acosta, contends the city has unlawfully prevented his company from achieving a position on the San Bernardino Police Department’s towing rotation despite his company having met all of the city’s regulations and criteria to be franchised, Smith has made a sworn declaration that he personally witnessed Valdivia accept a bribe.
That affidavit states: “In either October or November of 2018, I was asked by Mayor John Valdivia to accompany him to a meeting. The mayor informed me it was a secret meeting, and it would occur at approximately 1 a.m. at the Denny’s restaurant located on or near Hospitality Lane in San Bernardino. I met Mayor Valdivia at the Denny’s between midnight and 1 a.m. We proceeded to enter the restaurant and the mayor requested a private booth away from any other customers. Once we were seated, we were soon joined by Danny Alcarez, who I knew to be the owner of Danny’s 24 Hour Towing, Inc. Danny’s Towing is a tow carrier with a tow services agreement with the City of San Bernardino.  After Mr. Alcarez sat down in our booth, he handed Mayor Valdivia a thick white envelope that appeared to contain a large amount of money. Mr. Alcarez told Mayor Valdivia that this money was from the tow carriers with existing tow services agreements with the City of San Bernardino, and that the money was intended to thank the mayor for all his help in supporting the existing tow carriers. I do not believe that this money was ever reported by Mayor Valdivia as a campaign contribution.”
Efforts by the Sentinel to obtain input from Rice relating to the limitations being placed on the Valdivia investigation were unsuccessful. An email sent to him for that purpose, which was electronically carbon copied to Carvalho, Ballinger, Campos, Duran and Deitsch elicited no response.
San Bernardino City Councilman Henry Nickel told the Sentinel, “Many of us realized in the aftermath of the 2018 election the voters created an environment once again rife with dysfunction. There were a lot of people who had concerns. In the days following the election, my phone was burning up from many concerned about the direction we were headed. Many of us believed that at some point John would likely self-detonate and that this would take a toll on the city when he did. Some of us felt it was thus best to reach that point as soon as possible rather than delay the inevitable. I hoped it might happen sooner rather than later. I hoped we would be at this point around this time last year. However, due in significant part to the election of three new council members, there were certain people who supported him and others who felt it best to delay the likely outcome or simply resist his efforts who didn’t perhaps understand that at some point we would get to where we are today. Unfortunately, this situation is likely to cost the city a lot of money. Many voters within long neglected wards of the city didn’t understand who and what they were voting for in 2018, but they certainly understand now. You can’t tell people how to vote, but if they elect lemons you best learn quickly how to make lemonade. I’m not saying Carey Davis [Valdivia’s predecessor as mayor, whom Valdivia defeated in the 2018 election] was the greatest mayor the city ever had, but we appear far more unstable under the current mayor. I am hopeful we will be a better, more civil and wiser city once this is resolved. We have come so far over the past six years already. The voters alone hold the key to whether or not this city survives and prospers. I believe we will.”

The long-running and thinly-veiled enmity between Ontario Mayor Paul Leon and Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner is in the process of bursting to the surface, prompted by the catalyst of the sharply intensifying differences between Los Angeles County transportation officials and San Bernardino County transportation officials over the most efficient means of moving travelers into and away from Ontario International Airport when they are on the ground.
For over a decade there had been a consensus, or seemingly so, that the Gold Line, a light rail commuter system that originates at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and which has so far been extended to Azusa and is on course to reach Pomona, offered the best eventual option for bypassing freeway gridlock and linking the communities in Los Angeles County with those in San Bernardino County.  Indeed, San Bernardino County’s transportation agency, once known by the acronym SANBAG for San Bernardino Associated Governments but now known by the more direct moniker of the San Benardino County Transportation Authority, was in lockstep with the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board in Los Angeles County over the plan to proceed with the progressive expansion of the light rail line across the Los Angeles County border between Claremont and Montclair and then all the way to Ontario Airport at least, and perhaps further east once that milestone was reached.
But with the rise of land prices for the project’s right-of-way as well as that of steel for the rails and other inflationary factors, San Bernardino County transportation officials, led by Ray Wolfe, the executive director of the San Bernardino County Transportation Rail Authority, have rethought that support and concluded that the cost of building the system on the eastern side of the Los Angeles County/San Benrdino County divide, entailing, just as in Los Angeles County, two rail lines, one east bound and one west bound, is prohibitively expensive. In September, Wolfe suggested that the authority “throw in the towel” on the Gold Line extension into San Bernardino County and instead utilize the existing rail line already used for passenger and freight trains to provide rail service from the county line to the airport. He asserted that alternative would cost far less and would be achievable on a way faster timeline, in the relatively near term, as much as a decade or even a decade-and a-half sooner than the Gold Line would reach Ontario Airport. Wolfe’s change of plan was adopted by a vote of the authority’s 11-member transit committee in October, with all eight of those members of that committee hailing from east of Ontario voting to kill the concept of the Gold Line reaching the airport, and support for the light rail line manifesting only among the three members of the committee from the cities of Chino Hills, Montclair and Ontario at the west end of the county.
Supporters of the Gold Line see the San Benrardino County Transportation Authority’s action as penny-wise and pound-foolish. They point out that the already existing commuting line using the traditional freight/passenger line running from Los Angeles County through San Bernardino County, the MetroLink system, suffers from multiple interrelated drawbacks which include relatively poor ridership growing out of its inconvenient schedule. While MetroLink features departures roughly every 30 to 35 minutes during peak traveling hours and every hour during portions of the day when there is lesser demand, the Gold Line runs with significantly greater frequency, with departures and arrivals every five to seven minutes during peak commuting hours and every 12 to 15 minutes during off-peak hours. The Gold Line features fares that are one-quarter to one-third the cost of riding MetroLink, which invites greater ridership as well. Advocates point out that the Gold Line cars are brimming with passengers because commuters have learned of the light rail system’s reliability and convenience, while commuters are shunning MetroLink, leaving its passenger compartments one third to two-thirds empty with every run. Gold Line supporters concede that the cost of completing the line to Ontario Airport is escalating, but they insist that is a reason to proceed at once, for doing so now will curtail the ever greater expense that moving ahead with the project will entail in the coming decades if officials don’t bite the bullet and do it now.
In January, Assemblyman Chris Holden (D-41st District), dismayed at what he perceives to be wrongheaded intransigence to regional cooperation intended to provide the foundation of what is to become the commuting methodology of the future, introduced Assembly Bill 2011, which would create the West San Bernardino County Rail Construction Authority, an entity to be dedicated to designing and building the six-mile span of track linking Montclair to Ontario Airport.
That temporarily gave Wolfe and the controlling majority of the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency pause, as they considered the prospect of the state moving in to commandeer control over the formulation of a part of local transportation policy, and there was some thought that the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency might relent and avail itself of funding the state might be willing to provide to push the Gold Line through to the airport. But after a period of consideration, the majority of the authority’s members hardened into a position of resistance, fueled by their resentment toward Holden, who represents a district in which only one-fifth of his constituents are in San Bernardino County as opposed to 80 percent residing in Los Angeles County, seeking to impose the will of Los Angeles County transportation officials on them. Last last month, State Senator Anthony J. Portantino, whose 25th District like Holden’s straddles both Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties,  introduced Senate Bill 1390, which also called for creating the Montclair-to-Ontario Airport Gold Line Construction Authority. Some perceived Portantino’s bill to be a refinement of Holden’s proposed legislation, one which would be more likely to achieve passage in the full legislature. The rail line extension authority Portantino proposes would have full autonomy over the effort, with the power to award and oversee all design and construction contracts for completion of the extension of the Metro Gold Line light rail project from the Montclair/Claremont border right up to Ontario International Airport.
For well over a decade, Mayor Leon and Councilman Wapner have had an intense dislike of each other. They eye each other warily, and have each found a way to politely and politicly deal with one another in public such as at council meetings, but in truth despise one another. The hostility between them has not been apparent, indeed has been masked by the consideration that the electoral cycle for the council position Wapner holds corresponds to that of mayor in Ontario. Consequently, every four years, both campaign making identical assertions that the City of Ontario has been in good hands over the last four years – tantamount to an endorsement of each other – and that the voters should stay the course and maintain the municipality’s incumbents in office. That, however, belies the actuality, which is that each wishes he did not have to deal with the other.
While there are a host of routine items with regard to the city’s operation which both Leon and Wapner uniformly support, they have differences over certain things. One has been the Gold Line. Leon has been a consistent advocate of the ultimate Gold Line extension to Ontario Airport, ever since the concept materialized more than a dozen years ago. Indeed, Leon is more enthusiastically outspoken about the Gold Line than the Gold Line’s Los Angeles County-based politicians and supporters. Leon earnestly considers the Gold Line to be a key feature in what will make Ontario International Airport achieve its potential by mid-century. Though Wapner ostensibly has been a Gold Line supporter and is a designee to the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board, true Gold Line extension supporters have detected for some time that Wapner is a lukewarm extension supporter at best, and was even perhaps a Trojan horse on the board, one who was secretly militating against the project extension. Los Angeles officials had noted that Wapner lacked passion with regard to the extension, and certainly had none of the enthusiasm that Leon evinced. There had long been a suspicion that elements within what was then San Bernardino Associated Governments and now the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency were looking for the maturation of circumstance to create an opportunity for San Bernardino County to defect from the rail line extension cooperative. That suspicion was vindicated when Wolfe made his “throw in the towel” remark in September, followed up by the authority’s transit committee vote in October. This week, at the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board meeting on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, Wapner’s true attitude with regard to the extension was thrown into stark relief.
It is widely assumed that the board members are each in favor of what the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority is chartered to do, which is to build the Gold Line and extend it as far as it is logically and practically apt to go. So at Wednesday’s meeting when the subject of the pending legislation to create the Montclair-to-Ontario Airport Gold Line Extension Authority came up, the grounds for the discussion were which version of the legislation – Holden’s Assembly Bill 2011 or Portantino’s Senate Bill 1390 – offered the best route for achieving everyone’s shared goal. There was no suggestion afoot, or so everyone assumed, that the goal both of those pieces of legislation shared was not worth pursuing. As it would turn out, however, Wapner was not on the same page as everyone else in the room. Portantino’s bill would require the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency to transfer all the money it had earlier committed or obtained for the project to the new agency including a percentage of the future money it is to receive through Measure I sales tax proceeds. Measure I is a half-cent sales tax override to pay for transportation improvments first approved by San Bernardino County’s voters in 1989. Portantino’s bill would further transfer any property the authority has accumulated toward right-of-way for the line extension to the new agency. That, Wapner suggested, was an usurpation of the San Bernardino Transportation Authority’s autonomy, and a blow to San Bernardino County’s right to self determination. He said he was strongly opposed to Portantino’s bill. Previously, to assist in funding the extension, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority had obtained a $41 million State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant. Wolfe had suggested that the authority simply relinquish that grant when he recommended that the extension of the Gold Line to the airport not be pursued. Wapner said that pursuing the Gold Line extension was simply too expensive, even if money such as the State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant or federal funding subsidies could be obtained. The price tag of the extension from Montclair to the Ontario International Airport would run to at least $1 billion, Wapner said, and perhaps as much as $1.5 billion, which by all reckoning is beyond San Bernardino County’s means. Pursuing the project would tie up funds that were needed for projects elsewhere in San Bernardino County, the Ontario Councilman said.
“From a policy perspective, it will cause the bankruptcy of SBCTA [the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency]. We just don’t have that kind of money,” Wapner said.
Though Wapner is provided a position on the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority Board, his is a non-voting position. Leon, however, has voting rights and a full board position. By his remarks, the Ontario mayor made clear he is at a 180-degree variance from Wapner. He was less than charitable in assessing the intellectual integrity of Wapner’s opposition to the extension. “This is a no-brainer,” Leon said of the decision to push the Gold Line all the way to the airport. He said he has had enough shilly-shallying around by obstructionists such as Wapner.
“I’m tired of talking,” Leon said. “Let’s just get it done. I say we get it down now.”
Leon and Wapner yet have to live with one another back in Ontario. With Wapner having demonstrated his true colors when it comes to the Gold Line extension and Leon having thrown down the gauntlet, it will be interesting to see if Ontario is a big enough town for the both of them.
-Mark Gutglueck

Even as high ranking San Bernardino County Republican Party members and local GOP insiders were basking in the afterglow of multiple victories in last week’s Presidential Primary election which ensure the Party of Lincoln’s domination of San Bernardino County’s governmental structure for the next two years and potentially for the next four years, the county Republican Central Committee sustained a blow of unknown but significant magnitude with the resignation of a key member who has engaged in considerable and effective behind-the-scenes party promotion over the last dozen years.
For four decades beginning in the mid-1960s, the Republican Party had been in ascendancy in San Bernardino County by virtue of the larger numbers of registered Republicans among its voters, combined with the tendency of Republicans to turn out in greater numbers than Democrats. In 2009, the number of registered Democrats in San Bernardino County eclipsed the number of registered Republicans in the county, but the Republicans have continued to outhustle their Democratic counterparts locally by outraising them in terms of electioneering funds, more effective and targeted campaigning, better coordination in reducing redundancies of Republican candidates in races where Democrats run a multitude of hopefuls who ultimately split the Democratic vote and expend money attempting to beat one another, and more effective efforts in driving greater numbers of Republicans to vote while the Democrats show up in fewer numbers at the polls despite their overall registration advantage.
Throughout the country, as in California, party affiliation has a direct bearing on the election of the president, senators, congress members, governors and state legislators. In California, local offices such as those of county supervisor, sheriff, district attorney, town council member or city council member are officially considered non-partisan, and the party of a candidate for one of those offices does not appear on the ballot when election for those posts is being conducted. Nevertheless, in San Bernardino County party affiliation is a de facto primary consideration in the election of officeholders at all levels.
San Bernardino County is divided into five supervisorial districts, the intention being that each district comprises one-fifth of the county population. In recent decades, the Republicans have held sway, with only a few exceptions, over the offices of sheriff and district attorney countywide and supervisor in the First, Second, Third and Fourth districts. The lone exception in this pattern has been the county’s Fifth Supervisorial District, covering the east half of Fontana, all of Rialto and Bloomington and Colton as well as the western half of San Bernardino. That predominantly blue collar area has traditionally been saturated with union members and an overwhelming number of Democrats. That reality is reflected today in the consideration that of the five current members of the board of supervisors, four are Republicans and the only Democrat on the panel is Josie Gonzales, the Fifth District supervisor.
So extensive were the Democratic numbers in the Fifth District that beginning in 1992 – when Republican Fifth District Supervisor Robert Hammock had left that seat in what turned out to be a failed attempt to run for Congress – the Republicans pretty much wrote off the Fifth District, resigning themselves to the reality that it was Democratic territory. Indeed, by midway in the first decade of the Third Millennium, while a multitude of candidates were competing for positions on the Republican Central Committee in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Districts, there was often no race for positions on the Republican Central Committee in the Fifth District because fewer candidates than the number of those positions up for election would even turn out to run. This meant that one could become an elected member of the Republican Central Committee in the Fifth District by simply meeting the residency requirement and signing up. No election was held for the Republican Central Committee Fifth District positions over several years running in the early 2000s.
In 2008, Greg Young, an earnest young Republican, expressed an interest in advancing his party’s fortunes. A resident of Bloomington, and thus of the Fifth District, he was given almost immediate entrée to the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, gaining an appointment as an alternate to the county party organization. Appreciative of the opportunity and the faith expressed in him, Young endeavored not to disappoint his fellow party members nor squander the chance his presence on the central committee provided him to further the Republicans’ efforts to outmaneuver the Democrats. Party officials could not help but be impressed with Young’s energy and intensity, even though some felt that he was being a little bit unrealistic in seeking to make any inroads in untightening the Democrats’ grip that gave them such a stranglehold on the Fifth District. Remarkably, though not overnight, Young’s dogged persistence in what most others considered to be a hopeless circumstance began to show results. Through both suggestion and willingness to get out into the trenches himself and engage with voters, whom he approached not as an advocate of the Republican party but as someone selling a particular candidate who, if anyone checked, just happened to be a Republican, Young involved himself in or served as a major or prime mover in successful election after election in which the Republicans began to erode the Democrats’ base in the Fifth District. In 2013, Young supported Republican Dr. Clifford Young [no blood relation to Greg Young] in his successful race for a position on the West Valley Water District Board of Directors. In that race, Clifford Young displaced a longtime Democratic board member. Two years later, Greg Young, in what would be his maiden run for political office other than his position on the central committee, ran for a position on the West Valley Water District himself, placing first. Two years later, in 2017, Greg Young again assisted Dr. Clifford Young, this time in his reelection effort, which proved successful. In that same contest, Greg Young assisted Dr. Young, one of San Bernardino County’s most prominent African-American Republicans, in getting two other Republicans – Dr. Michael Taylor and Kyle Crowther – elected to the West Valley Water Board. At that point, as is yet the case, four out of five of the members of the West Valley Water Board were and are Republicans. Lying at what is essentially the heart of the Fifth Supervisorial District, the West Valley Water District has an electorate that is overwhelmingly Democratic in terms of voter registration. As of this week, according to the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office, 20,266 or 49.4 percent of the West Valley Water District’s 41,024 voters are registered as Democrats. Those registered as Republicans – 8,817 or 20 percent – are outnumbered by the 10,100 voters or 24.4 percent in the district who are unaffiliated with any political party whatsoever. The remaining 5.8 percent of the district’s voters are registered with the Green, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom and other more obscure political parties.
Similarly, Greg Young was involved in promoting Republicans elsewhere in the Fifth District. One area in which the Republicans enjoyed uncommon success was in Fontana, where another of the county’s more prominent African-American Republicans, Acquanetta Warren, is mayor and heads up a Republican ruling coalition on the city council. In Fontana, the voter registration numbers are lopsidedly in favor of the Democrats. As of this week, 45,833 or 49.4 percent of that city’s 92,869 voters are registered Democrats, while 17,366 voters or 18.7 percent are registered Republicans. In Fontana, Republicans are significantly outnumbered by the 24,123 voters or 26 percent with no political affiliation at all. American Independent, Green Libertarian, peace and Freedom and other smaller parties account for the remaining 5.9 percent of Fontana’s voters. Nevertheless, four of Fontana’s city council members – Warren and councilmen John Roberts, Jesse Armendarez and Phil Cothran, Jr. – are all Republicans. Greg Young has been a close supporter and key advisor to Warren since she successfully ran for mayor in Fontana in 2010.
Most politically active Republicans in San Bernardino County, either readily or reluctantly, acknowledge that Young has been a valuable asset to the San Bernardino County Republican Party from more than one standpoint, but most particularly because of the way in which he demonstrated that the party did not have to give up on the Fifth District as a lost cause. By sheer will, and in defiance of the odds, he pushed the party and several of its standard bearers to enter the political fray in what looked to be the very Republican-hostile Fifth District, and emerge victorious.
As a consequence of that, and because it is recognized that Young possesses an unrivaled command of the political lay of the land in the Fifth District, the central committee previously designated Young the chairman of the Fifth District Republican Caucus.
Last year, however, when Young was due to run for reelection to the West Valley Water District Board, the Republican Central Committee, or at least some controlling elements within it, inexplicably moved to undercut him. More remarkable than the county party’s move to double-cross Young was the way it went about doing so.
Traditionally, the Republican Party in San Bernardino County gives special deference to incumbents. While by no means prohibiting party members from challenging incumbent Republicans or discouraging such challenges, per se, the central committee has a policy of endorsing an incumbent Republican candidate unless there is a sufficient tide of sentiment within the central committee against doing so. The rationale for that policy is that an incumbent is a known quantity who has demonstrated an ability to win, such that the incumbent represents the party’s best shot at maintaining its political reach. The threshold for withdrawing the party endorsement of an incumbent party member is 60 percent. That is, if 60 percent of the central committee votes to endorse an incumbent’s challenger, then the central committee will withdraw its endorsement of the incumbent and instead endorse the challenger. Such occurrences are rare.
As Young was putting everything in place and gearing up for his reelection bid last summer, Fontana resident Angel Ramirez, who had done some work on the city council campaigns for Jesse Armendarez  and Phil Cothran, suddenly emerged as a potential candidate in the West Valley Division 5 contest, the one in which Young was seeking to return to the board for four more years. Another candidate in the Division 5 race was Jackie Cox, a former board member and a Democrat. Ramirez, who was a recent addition to the Republican Central Committee, did not meet the residency requirements to run in Division 5. Shortly before the filing period for the November election opened in July, however, Ramirez rented a room in Bloomington, reregistering as a voter there. He then entered the race. At that point, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee considered the field of candidates in the odd-year election to be held in November. Going into those discussions, it was widely assumed Young would land the endorsement, as he was an incumbent, Cox was a Democrat and Ramirez was a relative political neophyte, with nowhere near the electioneering experience under his belt as Young had. Unaccountably however, when the voting to hand out the endorsements were made, Ramirez emerged with the Republican endorsement.
Young was dumbfounded by what had occurred. Rocked back on his heels, he proceeded, nonetheless toward the election, redoubling and then retrippling his electioneering efforts. Simultaneously, Ramirez, banked $18,163.70 toward his election effort, $17,964.70 of which was money transferred to him by Dr. Michael Taylor, the Republican member of the West Valley Water Board whom Young had worked to put into office in 2017. During the election, third party expenditure committees also supported Ramirez in terms of funding political “hit pieces” against Young.
Despite the setback of the party endorsement going to Ramirez and his disappointment, not to mention the sniping at him from the tall grass, Young did not allow the distractions to de-intensify his focus on the job at hand. He soldiered on, walking precincts, sending out mailers and propounding his name as widely and as hard as he could within the water district’s Division 5. After all of the votes were counted following the November 2019 race, Young had collected a majority of the votes – 340 or 52.63 percent – to outdistance Ramirez, with 230 votes or 35.6 percent, and Cox, with 76 votes or 11.76 percent, combined.
This week, four months after his reelection to the West Valley Water Board and eight days after the March 3 Presidential Primary Election for which he had been actively involved in promoting Republican candidates, Young on Wednesday March 11 sent an email to the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.
In that missive, Young said that since his reelection he had “pondered on my time in this body and whether I should continue to expend valuable time and resources in it.”
After delineating his efforts early in his tenure on the central committee in overcoming the difficulties that had shaken the San Bernardino County Republican Party after former Central Committee Chairman/County Supervisor/County Assessor Bill Postmus had enmeshed himself in a bribery scandal, Young emphasized his work as chairman of a precinct captain training program, which led to his successful mastering of electioneering technique, with which he three times garnered the most votes in his election, reelection and second reelection to the central committee as well as in both of his own races for the West Valley Water Board. He referenced his work as caucus chairman in the Fifth District and his willingness to battle the long odds on behalf of the GOP. “The voter registration was a 2:1 Democrat advantage,” he wrote. “But I knew there was a path and a strategy to succeed.” With regard to his initial election to the water board, he asserted, “I was largely written off by my opponents. I not only won the election but I finished in a commanding first place ahead of a 20-year incumbent, a 10-year former incumbent, and the former general manager who had worked at the district for over 50 years. I showed that we as Republicans can win in Democrat strongholds if we have the right approach and work together. In 2017, I would not only help my Republican board member [Clifford Young] get re-elected despite fierce efforts to defeat him, but I also helped sweep the other two seats with Republican candidates.”
Upbraiding his fellow central committee members, Young wrote, “You would think the party might be interested in learning how my team had been so successful in heavily Democratic areas, but you showed little interest beyond brief congratulations. I have noticed for some time, and other central committee members have as well, that the party has been drifting back to the old ways of the long-ago Bill Postmus era. Winning elections and growing the party is not what is important anymore. Power and money are what really matters and a handful of power brokers dominate the priorities of the party, and if you get in the way of that you must be not only defeated but destroyed.”
Young’s missive continued, “When outside special interests wanted to use the new Republican majority at the West Valley Water District to financially benefit political friends with executive level jobs with no experience, I pushed back hard. This is not what the Republican Party or its actions are supposed to be. When you stand up to corrupt elements of your own party with ties to Bill Postmus, you become a big target. False and malicious accusations were made against me in order to wound me in the race and only came out after I filed for reelection.”
Young wrote that “I knew that 2019 was going to be a tough reelection for me. I knew if the Democrats came after me in an organized effort, I would have a hard go. But something remarkable happened. After keeping my promises of cutting rates and giving the ratepayers rebates, the Democratic Party took a pass on my race. I had a former board member running against me who had raised rates in 2012, but she was not endorsed by or working with the Democratic Party. I literally scared the organized Democratic Party out of my race, but my real challenge would be from corrupt fellow ‘Republicans’ desperate to remove me as an obstacle to their plans. Those ‘Republicans’ tried desperately to find someone in my district to run against me without success. Finally, they resorted to an old and true tactic of moving a straw candidate into my district mere days before the filing deadline. The 20-something-year-old candidate moved from Fontana to Bloomington just to take me down, and was ironically also an alternate in my own caucus.”
Young wrote, “As if the Republican-on-Republican battle was not bad enough, the central committee decided to go full stupid and strip me of my endorsement as an incumbent to give it to the no-experience carpetbagger with dirty money friends. After over a decade of service to this party, you cast aside one of your own caucus chairs and Republican incumbents to endorse a nobody. It is a dark stain on the body that will haunt it for years to come. So much for all that talk about standing with our incumbents and getting them more involved in the party.”
Young said he resented the cheap shot hit pieces against him that had been generated to assist Ramirez. “The people of the district know who I am and not what dirty outside special interests tried to paint me as,” Young wrote. “I have been told by insiders that close to $50,000 was spent both on and off the books against me including vicious and dirty attacks from the once-reputable Inland Empire Taxpayers Association. Ironically, the Inland Empire Taxpayers Association supported me when I first ran, and you would think as an incumbent who actually cut rates that they would support me again. Sadly, they showed that they are just as dirty as the money they take to launch false attacks against fellow Republicans. They actually sent out puff pieces for the former Democrat board member in my race, and she was one of the board members who raised rates. When a taxpayers association, run by Republicans some of whom are not only members of this Central Committee but are part of the leadership of this party, are promoting Democrats who raise rates, that is the height of hypocrisy and a clear sign that the party desperately needs to be cleaned out.”
Young said, “It is ironic that at the central committee meeting after the election there was a desperate call for members to give money to the party. Imagine how much better the party’s financial position would have been if so many of you had not wasted close to $50,000 trying to take out one of your own. There are still some good people in the central committee but they are clearly a minority of the body. The party is really run by a group of jackals comprised of political operatives, consultants, and wannabe power brokers there to only serve their special interests.”
Stating, “I can be far more effective without your dirty politics of personal destruction,” Young vowed he would “continue to fight for my conservative values in my community. I can work with decent and honest people regardless of labels, and fight for a more honest system and leadership without enduring such disrespect as you have shown me. I will make it a personal mission to tell the story of what you did to me, to every elected official and Republican voter. If this party is going to behave the way it did against me, then conservatives everywhere should turn their backs on it until it purges itself of its corruption and returns to the purpose and principles that will actually grow the party.”
Concluding, Young wrote, “I therefore, resign as Fifth District caucus chair and as a member of Republican Central Committee, effective immediately.”
Young’s departure comes at an inauspicious time for the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. Last week, Fontana City Councilman Jesse Armendarez finished in a strong second place in the four-way contest to replace the soon-to-be-termed-out Josie Gonzales as Fifth District supervisor. Armendarez, a Republican, qualified for a November runoff against Rialto Councilman Joe Baca, Jr., a Democrat. Young’s assistance in helping Armendarez overcome Baca’s advantages, which include Democratic affiliation in the heavily Democratic district and name recognition he possesses as a result of his father’s illustrious political career as an assemblyman, state senator and congressman, would be invaluable.
The Sentinel’s efforts to obtain from San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee Chairwoman Jan Lija her version of events was unsuccessful.
-Mark Gutglueck

After a month of increasing alarm with regard to the spread of the coronavirus, active precautions being taken by public agencies, elements of the private sector, private individuals and families this week have manifested in a profound change in the tenor of life throughout San Bernardino County, impacting the lifestyle of virtually all but the most reclusive elements of the county’s population.
Because of the perceived hazard of the disease, efforts, perhaps futile, have been undertaken nationally and locally to limit human interaction and contact on a macro-level in places and at events where people congregate. Major League Baseball announced Thursday that it will suspend spring training in response to the coronavirus outbreak and delay the start of its regular season. The NBA suspended its season after a Utah Jazz player tested positive for coronavirus. In Southern California, after Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood closed their amusement venues, Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, SeaWorld and Legoland followed suit.
The exhibition of caution at first crept into San Bernardino County and then leapt in full blown with the county board of supervisors on Tuesday declaring a public health emergency existed, and the county’s public health officer, Dr. Erin Gustafsen, ordering the immediate cancellation or postponement of gatherings of more than 250 people within the county until further notice. That order applied to concerts, conferences, and professional, college, and school sporting events. The county said the order was “in line with guidance issued by the California Department of Public Health.”
In rapid succession, most of the county’s school districts canceled classes for most, if not all, of the remainder of the month, though in some cases the closures fall close to or correspond to the traditional spring breaks schools take this time of year. The Adelanto School District is to close today, March 13, through March 27; the Alta Loma School District is to close today through April 3. Barstow Unified will shutter March 16 through March 20; the Central School District in Rancho Cucamonga will close March 16 through April 3; the Chaffey Joint Union High School District is closing today through April 3; the Chino Valley Unified School District is closing March 16 through April 3; the Etiwanda School District is closing March 16 through April 3; the Helendale Elementary School District will close March 16 through March 20; the Hesperia Unified School District is shutting down March 16 through March 27; the Mountain View School District in Ontario is closing March 16 through April 3; the Ontario-Montclair School District is closing March 16 through April 3; the Rim of the World Unified School District is closing March 16 through March 20; San Bernardino City Unified is closing March 16 through April 3; the Snowline Joint Unified School District is closing March 16 through March 27; Upland Unified is closing from March 16 through April 13; and the Victor Elementary School District is closing March 16 through March 27.
In accordance with the county health officer’s order, school athletic programs and interschool competitions will be canceled during that period as well.
At the University of Redlands, its spring sports activities have been canceled. Several local colleges, including Crafton Hills and San Bernardino Valley, have at least temporarily shifted to online classes so as to avoid having students in close proximity to one another.
The San Bernardino Catholic Diocese, which had already instituted changes in the way that taking communion – the sharing of unleavened bread during the religious celebration known as Mass – was done, has said the requirement that parishioners attend Mass on Sunday will be temporarily suspended.
The City of San Bernardino canceled its ArtsFest planned for tomorrow. The city’s employees in its park and recreation as well as its community service departments have been furloughed, and those departments’ programs are suspended until April 1.
The City of Highland postponed its March 28 Citrus Harvest Festival indefinitely.
Redlands is ending Thursday Market Nights and Saturday Farmers Markets at least until the end of March, and is postponing its Downtown Art Walk.
The City of Chino Hills has canceled or postponed its Youth Track & Field Meet, set for March 21; its Adult Easter Egg Scramble on April 3; its Easter Egg-Citement Event on April 11; activities at its teen center; as well as activities and events involving its Tiny Tots, Pee Wee Sports, youth rookie clinics, mobile recreation; Active Adults 50+ Drop-in programs, and those for special interest groups including quilting, knit & stitch, bookworm, scrapbooking, pinochle, cribbage, ping pong and billiards. Further, today’s Walk in the Park event is canceled, as are active adults paid classes, active adults line dancing, active adults fitness, mat pilates for adults and active adults intro to computers classes.
In Ontario all city passport services are temporarily suspended, effective Monday, March 16; and in accordance with the closure of Colony High School, the Lewis Family Branch Library at the south end of the city will be closed until April 6.
Anyone other than senior citizens and staff are banned from Fontana’s senior citizens centers. The city has also imposed a ten-person limit in senior citizen vanpools.
The City of Yucaipa is postponing civic events and other mass gatherings through May, including a rodeo, Community Emergency Response Team training courses, an event previously billed as the Emergency Preparedness Expo, and its State of the City event, along with the Yucaipa Music and Arts Festival. At the city’s highly-touted Performing Arts Center, ticket sales are to be limited to no more than 250 to reduce attendance at performances.
This week, in many shopping venues such as grocery stores and department stores, there has been and continues to be a mad crush of humanity, with tens of thousands of people coming into close proximity with one another as they make their way through crowded aisles and wait in long lines, a situation rife with the possibility of the disease spreading. Most of the crowding was a result of panic buying of foodstuffs, bottled water and personal items such as toilet paper, precautionary action in anticipation that the disease will result in a large-scale crisis.
For many, the hysteria attending the outbreak of cornonavirus is perplexing. While there has been some criticism leveled at officialdom for having made an inadequate response to the threat the disease represents, some have expressed dismay at the degree to which the various levels of government have in their action prompted what some consider to be an overreaction to the situation.
A historical perspective is useful. In 1918 and 1919, the Spanish influenza outbreak caught the entirety of the world flatfooted. That flu pandemic proved to be the deadliest in history, and infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, equal to one-third of the human population at that time, death from which claimed at least 20 million and as many as 50 million, including some 675,000 Americans.
At the low end, those suffering from Spanish influenza had a mortality rate of 4 percent, and at the high end those inflicted with Spanish Influenza had a mortality rate of 10 percent.
It is difficult to draw comparisons to the Coronavirus because it has not been fully defined or evaluated by epidemiologists, and as such, quantification of the disease at present is tentative and unreliable.
The World Health Organization has referred to coronavirus as a subset of “a large family of viruses.” Though there is less than perfect clarity, the contagion at large now is believed to be a version slugged as COVID-19. Unreliable data holds that as of March 11, over 125,000 people worldwide had contracted the disease with certainty, that being those definitively diagnosed with COVID-19. Of those, 4,605 had died. The most serious outbreaks have occurred in China, Iran and Italy, with instances of the disease in at least 118 other countries. Health facilities and accurate testing is uneven country to country, rendering data unreliable. Based on the above-referenced numbers, those infected with the strain of coronavirus the world is dealing with now have a mortality rate of 3.684 percent. Statisticians believe the spread of the disease is wider than the 125,000 so far accounted for, likely making the mortality rate lower than the aforementioned 3.684 percent. Nevertheless, the killing potential for the condition has dictated that health professionals and the various organs and ministries of public health formulate a response.
It is believed that coronavirus represents far less of a mortal threat to those with intact and healthy immune systems than those with compromised, weakened or dysfunctional immune systems. The very young, the elderly and those with conditions or taking medications impacting immune reaction are likely at moderate to grave danger. For the majority of those contracting the condition, the symptoms are relatively mild, sometimes described as virtually imperceptible and more commonly comparable to a light cold, with coughing and nasal congestion, a sore throat, shortness of breath, potential fatigue, body aches, and diarrhea. Some fever that is associated with the condition might reflect an accompanying and not necessarily related infection. At the more extreme end, the symptoms will manifest in what is labeled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which can be fatal.
Meanwhile, in San Bernardino County, in contrast to neighboring Los Angeles County where there have been confirmed cases of COVID-19, no such diagnoses have been made as of this morning. There were some reports of infection that either turned out to be negative upon testing or which have otherwise not been verified. A University of Redlands student was for a time thought to have contracted the disease, prompting concern about those who had been in contact with the student, including others on the campus and the medical professionals rendering treatment. It turned out the student was not infected. There was a report early this week that two people at San Antonio Regional Hospital in Upland were quarantined for COVID-19. Thereafter, however, the county’s website reported that there were zero cases known within the county.
-Mark Gutglueck

Assemblyman Chad Mayes, who built a towering political career on a bedrock of right wing conservatism in what is arguably the most reliably Republican political jurisdiction in the State of California, finds his political future in doubt, shortly after boldly pulling out of the GOP and seeking to find his way in the world as an independent.
While Mayes has not been drummed out of the statehouse just yet, over most of the next eight months it appears that Mayes will likely prove a test case to determine if Republican holders of state office in California can realistically maintain their public careers by departing from the Party of Lincoln, either out of a sincerely arrived-at philosophical break with the establishment they have formerly embraced or as part of a strategy to salvage their electability by abandoning the political organization that has grown lopsidedly out of favor with the state’s voters.
Indeed, if Mayes is to remain in office, it is clear at this point that he is going to need the support of a sizable contingent of the 42nd Assembly District’s Democratic voters, an alignment that as recently as six months ago would have been outright unthinkable.
In 2014, when Mayes first successfully ran for the legislature in State Assembly District 42, 41 percent of  the voters in the district were Republicans, a sizable lead over registered Democrats, then at just under 34 percent. In the six years since, the Republican registration advantage in the 42nd has slipped. Now, roughly 35.74 percent of the district’s voters are affiliated with the Republican Party, slightly less than the 36.19 percent of the voters there who are registered as Democrats. Still, in District 42, as virtually everywhere else, Republicans turn out to vote in far greater numbers than do Democrats. In the case of the 42nd District, that voter participation advantage is better than 8 percent. Last year, before Chad Mayes precipitously changed his registration to no party preference, the Republican Party at the state level as well as both the San Bernardino County and Riverside County central committees, the regional organs of the GOP, endorsed Mayes. Mayes’ parting from the Republicans, taken the first week of December, forced all three of the party’s arms into making a rather awkward rescission of those endorsements.
A question now stands as to whether Mayes can endure as a politician.
The son of Roger Mayes, who is the pastor of Grace Community Church and one of the most influential members of the Yucca Valley Community, Chad Mayes established himself as a rock-ribbed conservative in the town of nearly 21,000 by following his father’s formula, which equated Godliness with goodliness and virtue with conservatism and conservatism with Republicanism. In the universe the Reverend Mayes occupies along with the Grace Community Church’s parishioners, big government is the work of the devil and Satan counts among his legion of followers the members of the Democratic Party, which is forever imposing its “liberal” will on the individual while militating against smaller government.
After attending and graduating at the age of 16 from his father’s Grace Christian School, Mayes took some courses at Copper Mountain College before, in accordance with his parents’ wishes, matriculating at Liberty University, a private evangelical Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia. Studies at Liberty University have a conservative Christian orientation, requiring Bible-studies classes for undergraduate students. Those attending the university are prohibited from engaging in premarital sex, and private interactions between opposite genders are not allowed. A self proclaimed “bastion of the Christian right,” Liberty University is considered a breeding ground for Republican politicians. While attending Liberty University, Chad Mayes interned for Senator John Ashcroft in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from college and arriving back in Yucca Valley, the Reverend Mayes’ son embarked on the path his father had hoped he would. While working as a financial advisor, young Mayes entered the world of politics. In no little measure because the Reverend Roger Mayes commended his church members to lend his son their support, Chad Mayes was elected to the Yucca Valley Town Council in 2002 when former Marine Colonel Paul Cook was that body’s mayor. Cook went on to the California Assembly and then Congress. Young Mayes succeeded Cook as mayor and subsequently made his way to the Assembly.
Throughout his time as a local politician, Mayes conducted himself as a true believer, adhering to Republican principles at every turn. With his wife, Shannon, by his side, Mayes was portrayed as the perfect Christian family man.
His arrival in Sacramento, however, presented for him, as it does every Republican politician, a challenge of faith and mettle. The Democratic Party dominates the city, as it controls the governorship, has a supermajority in the upper legislative house – the California Senate – as well as a supermajority in the lower legislative house – the Assembly – and controls virtually every major state office, including that of secretary of state, attorney general, auditor, insurance commissioner and secretary of education. Sacramento is for California’s Republicans virtually indistinguishable from Sodom or Gomorrah.
Among the slim ranks of Republicans in Sacramento, Mayes advanced rapidly. Thirteen months after he was sworn into California’s lower legislative house, he was made minority leader of the California State Assembly. It was while in that position that the loose morals of the Democrats that surrounded him began to pervade his existence. Mays had succeeded Kristen Olsen as minority leader of the Assembly. According to Olsen’s now ex-husband, it was while Olsen was minority leader that she initiated an affair with Mayes. In 2017, both Mayes and Olsen filed for divorces.
Also in 2017, Mayes made what Republicans considered to be a sharp turn away from the central tenets of the Republican Party.
In the 1970s, what was then a bipartisan effort was undertaken toward reducing air pollution in Southern California along several tracks, including implementing smog control on vehicles as well as reducing smokestack emissions. On the latter track, efforts were made to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other combustion byproducts from industrial operations, including the use of scrubbers and other emission control devices on smokestacks. In addition, the concept of preventing the expansion of air polluting industry was hit upon through the use of what at that time were labeled air pollution credits. In this way, a company’s emission levels were measured after all possible reduction measures on its smokestacks were effectuated, and that company was issued a permit to continue to function at that emission level. The rights of those smokestacks to exist and continue to function were “grandfathered in” at that point, and no further permits to operate smokestacks were to be issued by the government. A company with a right to operate a smokestack could shut that smokestack down, yet retain the right, or permit, to pollute. For a company to create an operation that did not previously exist which used a smokestack, that company would need to purchase existing polluting credits from a company that had possession of such available credits or rights from having retired a smokestack. The legislation creating this regime had been put together by both Democrats and Republicans. Among these was Pete Schabarum, a former NFL player turned no-nonsense conservative Republican politician. Eventually, this trading in air pollution credits became known as “cap and trade,” with “cap” referring to the limit put on the total degree of emissions to be allowed in Southern California and “trade” alluding to the ability to pass or sell the polluting right from one entity to another. Over the next generation, the concept of cap and trade  became anathema to the pro-business Republican Party, which saw the limitations it imposed as restricting economic development in the state, despite the consideration that such GOP icons as Schabarum had once embraced the concept.
In 2017, the Democrats, then in control of the governor’s office and the legislature, sought to renew existing but expiring cap and trade legislation, together with a tax-increase package they said would fight climate change. It included provisions that bumped the state’s gas tax up by at least 63 cents per gallon and as much as 90 cents per gallon, and an electricity rate increase of somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.  Mayes, as Republican Assembly leader in concert with six other Assembly Republicans, went along with then-Governor Jerry Brown and the Democrats in extending the state’s cap-and-trade program and adopting the new energy fees. Mayes at once found himself assailed on all sides by members of his own party. “Meet Chad Mayes, California’s newest tax-and-spend Republican,” screamed a headline of an editorial in the Orange County Register. The following month, his position as the head of the GOP in the lower house no longer tenable, Mayes resigned as Republican Assembly leader. From there, it seemed as if Mayes was falling ever more firmly into the clutches of Lucifer and the Democrats.
In 2018, Mayes swung behind former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in promoting, as a member of the centrist advocacy group New Way California, an approach to politics and legislation “that seeks to put people above political parties to improve the lives of all Californians.”
To many Republicans, that sounded like, at best, compromise with the Democratic enemy or, at worst, outright surrender. He was likened to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian army officer and politician who infamously cooperated with Adolf Hitler in the German occupation of Norway. In July 2019, Mayes was critical of President Donald Trump’s insulting characterizations of Democratic politicians. That provoked further representations of Mayes as having betrayed the Republican cause. Mayes compounded the situation by suggesting the president lacked civility and decency.
In December, when he left the party to re-register as a voter unaffiliated with any political party, Mayes was the second Republican legislator that year to make a point of leaving the Party of Lincoln. In ending his GOP affiliation, Assemblyman Brian Maienschein of San Diego had gone all the way, re-registering as a Democrat. Mayes did not do that, but acknowledged that he had been advocating for the Republicans to become more moderate in their political approach and efforts toward governance, and he said he was simply fed up with his inability to penetrate the wall of resistance he was encountering from his former party colleagues in adopting a realistic attitude of compromise and accommodation. He and his retinue of supporters pointed out that he was not the one who had left the Republican Party, but rather it was the Republicans who had left him.
“It’s something I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to,” Mayes said. “Really simply: It’s because of my frustration with the way our political system is working today. The political discord in this country is tearing us apart. Unfortunately, all politics is no longer local. It’s national.”
In making his move, just three months before the 2020 California Presidential Primary, Mayes was gambling that he could yet utilize his power of incumbency to prevail, and that his status as an officeholder would trump the pullback he would experience from the Republican Party faithful who would be offended by his action, so that he could sustain enough momentum to prevail in November.
Two others, Deniantionette Mazingo, a Democrat, and a Republican, San Jacinto Mayor Andrew Kotyuk, perhaps inspired by the discomfiture the Republican establishment was experiencing toward Mayes, had prepared to get into the 42nd District Assembly Race well before Mayes withdrew from the GOP.
Had Mayes simply remained in line with the Republican Party with which he was previously identified, there is little prospect that his place in the state legislature would be in jeopardy. The San Jacinto Mayor had nothing approaching the political war chest that Mayes had accumulated over the years, and the Republicans had already committed to backing Mayes, even though he was no longer embracing the right wing ideals of his youth. By spurning the Republicans, Mayes gave up the advantage he once enjoyed, and put himself at odds with a dynamic that perhaps even he did not fully understand. He was defying his roots.
The results of the March 3 election were telling. In the end, Mayes achieved a plurality of the vote, though not by a substantial margin. Overall in the 42nd District, which straddles both San Bernardino and Riverside counties, with more of its voters in Riveside County than San Bernardino County, Mayes claimed 40,875 votes or 35.3 percent. Kotyuk captured 39,009 votes or 33.7 percent. Mazingo managed 35,786 votes or 30.9 percent. Looking at a breakdown county by county, Mayes fared better outside of his native county than where he lives. In Riverside County, Mayes’ margin was neither convincing nor comfortable, but it was a lead. He had 31,226 votes or 36.04 percent. Mazingo polled 28,264 votes or 32.62 percent. Kotyuk was in third in Riverside County with 27,148 votes or 31.33 percent. In San Bernardino County, where Mayes is best known and where his base is, or actually was, Kotyuk beat him with 11,861 votes or 40.85 percent. Mayes brought in 9,649 votes or 33.24 percent. Mazingo received 7,522 votes or 25.91 percent.
Mayes now finds himself in something of an electoral fix.
In years past, Chad Mayes had relied upon the support of his father, the Reverend Roger Mayes, the champion of the Republicans in Morongo Valley, to crack the whip that would drive the Republican faithful to the polls to vote in favor of his son. That huge electoral weapon, upon which he was so dependent, is no longer in Chad Mayes’ political panoply. Simultaneously, as the calendar progresses toward November, Kotyuk, now the official standard bearer of the Republicans, will have time to inform the Republican voters out in Riverside County that he is the only Republican in the race, and of Mayes’ defection from the GOP fold. Certainly, Mayes cannot count on bringing in a higher percentage of Republican votes from Riverside County in November than he did this month, and in all likelihood, with the Republican Party now campaigning against him, he can realistically expect that there will be substantially less support for him among the Republican Party faithful throughout the 42nd District. Thus, Mayes must now see his base reconstituted from the locked-in Republican vote that made him victorious in 2014, 2016 and 2018, to the independent vote and Democratic vote in the 42nd District, a segment that has nowhere near the rate of voter turnout as do the Republicans. Moreover, Mayes, who for years was branded and sold as the darling of the right wing representing the Golden State’s bulwark against the sinful and wasteful Democrats who had grown fat and sloppy by profligately spending taxpayer money, will now need to sidle up to those Democrats to convince them he is really their friend. So too, with every overture he makes to woo the Democrats, Mayes runs the risk of informing those Republicans in the further reaches of the 42nd District who may not yet have heard that he left the Republican Party that he is no longer true to their ideals.
-Mark Gutglueck

The Upland City Council this morning rejected a call that it postpone its consideration, now scheduled for March 23, of Bridge Development Partners’ proposal to construct a 201,096-square foot distribution center for on-line retail giant Amazon on property north of Foothill Blvd. and south of Cable Airport.
Originally publicly previewed last June as a three-building 977,000-total square foot warehouse complex, the project generated considerable controversy when the city allowed Bridge to use a mitigated negative declaration process rather than a full-blown environmental impact report to achieve environmental certification of the project, at that point reduced to a single building involving slightly more than one quarter of the originally proposed square footage.
There ensued a voting faux-pas in which the planning commission initially rejected the project’s site plan and then reversed itself.
City staff, touting an agreement by Bridge to provide the city with $16 million in so-called deal sweeteners in exchange for the project’s approval, has recommended that the city council give go-ahead to the project in a timely manner on March 23 to allow Amazon to complete the project in time for the 2020 Christmas shopping season.
This morning as the city council was considering precautionary measures relating to the coronavirus outbreak, project opponent Steve Bierbaum asked the council to hold off on the hearing for the project until such time as it is safe for a large number of residents to attend large public gatherings. Though Councilman Bill Velto favored Bierbaum’s suggestion, his colleagues demurred in granting the delay, and the meeting is yet on for March 23.

By Mark Gutglueck
In what appears to be the steepest and most serious challenge in her seemingly charmed 18-year political career, Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson over the next month-and-a-half is to be subjected to the double gauntlet of an audit completion and an investigation with criminal implications in which her action as an elected official is under focus.
It was the draft findings of a review of the city’s finances carried out by the certified public accounting firm of Riverside-based Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. as a preliminary part of that audit which was delivered to the city in December that alerted city officials of nepotism involving Robertson and her daughter which under federal law may qualify as a criminal conflict-of-interest. The finalized version of that audit is to be presented to the city council for public review and acceptance on April 28.
Though the document in question did not specifically name Robertson, it made a pointed enough reference to the circumstances touching upon the city’s pass-through of federal Community Development Block Grants and the provision of operational quarters to a non-profit entity headed by Robertson’s daughter. The subsidies provided to that nonprofit through action in which the mayor participated total somewhere in the neighborhood of or exceed a quarter of a million dollars. It does not appear that Mayor Robertson recused herself from approving, as a voting member of the city council, that arrangement or that she made adequate disclosure that the recipient of the federal funds and what has been tantamount to free rental space was her blood relative.
On September 24, 2019, the Rialto City Council voted to retain Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. to carry out an audit process, otherwise referred to as “independent audit services” to augment Rialto’s “2018-19 Audit and Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.”
The work to be performed by Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. beginning in September was covered under the previous contract the city had with the firm for it to complete independent auditing services. According to a letter of engagement dated September 16, 2019 and signed by one of the firm’s certified public accountants, Joshua Calhoun, the areas of review to be covered by Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. were issues relating to the city’s provision of post employment benefits and pensions to former employees and the impact those are having on the city’s financial situation, budgetary comparison schedules, the city’s financial statements, the combining of the city’s financial statements, municipal financial statistics and the “schedule of expenditures of federal awards.” In a side letter also dated September 24, 2019 and signed by Calhoun which related to the work that Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. was to perform beginning in September, it is stated, “An agreed upon procedures engagement is not designed to detect instances of fraud or noncompliance with laws or regulations; however, we will communicate to you any known and suspected fraud and noncompliance with laws or regulations affecting the city’s appropriations limit documents that come to our attention.”
Indeed, that is precisely what appears to have occurred.
Buried in the reams of financial documents Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. auditors pored over is documentation that the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women was provided with $38,475 in federal Community Development Block Grants that were doled out at the discretion of the Rialto City Council in the 2018-19 fiscal year.
Community Development Block Grants are a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program in which federal money is provided to local communities, primarily cities, which can then utilize those funds as their political leadership deems fit insofar as they are applied toward the goals of providing affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development. Community Development Block Grants are subject to less federal oversight than categorical grants. They are dispensed to projects and programs conducted locally at the direction of local authorities, which in the case of a city, is the city council. They are nevertheless subject to the provisions of federal law.
Milele Robertson, Mayor Robertson’s daughter, is the president of the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women, which offers what is described as job training services. Though the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women was formerly identified as being headquartered at 649 E. Foothill Boulevard in Rialto, it has been operating out of a city-owned building at 141 S. Riverside Avenue in Rialto for at least four years, having done so free of charge for that entire time.
Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc.’s accountants delineated the federal grant funding received by the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women, and traced out the blood relationship between Deborah Robertson and Milele Robertson. In its draft finding, which upon further refinement will go into the 2018-19 Audit and Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. referenced a member of the city council who had participated in providing the Community Development Block Grant funding to the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women without directly identifying the mayor, though the reference, by inference, is clear. “The member of the city’s governing body did not properly disclose or report the family relationship nor abstain from the selection and award of the agreement,” according to the language in the preliminary finding.
The matter lay dormant for several weeks, while the report Teaman, Ramirez and Smith, Inc. had generated to encapsulate the independent audit service it had undertaken between September and December to augment Rialto’s 2018-19 Audit and Comprehensive Annual Financial Report was being assimilated by city administrators, in particular Finance Director Jessica Brown.
Further examination of the circumstance revealed that since 2012, the year that Robertson became mayor, the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women had received over $200,000 in Community Development Block Grants distributed by the Rialto City Council.
January 22, the city council adopted a resolution with little comment amending the city’s previous conflict of interest code.
On February 11, at its regularly scheduled city council meeting, the council was scheduled to discuss nine items during the closed session prior to the public portion of the meeting, consisting of eight matters of existing litigation and one item pertaining to negotiations relating to the sale or purchase of property.  Before adjourning into that closed session, however, City Attorney Fred Galante said that there were three items that needed to be added to the closed session discussion agenda, consisting of a claim against the city for damages, another matter involving existing litigation and one more item from which, Galante intimated, the mayor would need to abstain. After the council’s closed session discussions were concluded, Galante reported that with regard to the item the mayor was barred from discussing or voting upon, she had abstained and left the room. Thereupon, after the completion of the council’s consideration of the matter, upon a motion by Councilman Ed Scott and seconded by Councilman Andy Carrizales and carried on a 4-to-0 vote, the council authorized City Manager Rod Foster to execute an agreement with Teaman, Ramirez and Smith to perform a so-called agreed-upon-procedures audit, assist in providing the management response to the city audit and review the city’s Community Development Block Grants, Proposition 47 funding and  Homeless Emergency Aid Program grants, at a cost of  $175 per hour for an approximate total cost of $40,000. The city council further authorized, as part of that motion, for Foster to retain the Los Angeles-based law firm of Manatt Phelps to review and analyze any potential conflict issues as pertain to the mayor. The motion also contained a provision that Foster reassign the responsibility for the administration of the city’s Community Development Block Grants, Proposition 47 funding and Homeless Emergency Aid Program grants to the deputy city manager and finance director in conjunction with the police department, removing those programs’ oversight from Community Services Director Perry Brents.
The development puts Robertson’s previously promising political career in jeopardy.
Robertson grew up in San Diego, graduating from Lincoln High School and then obtaining a bachelor’s degree in urban studies from the University of California at San Diego. Subsequently, she earned a master of public administration degree from the City University of New York – College of Staten Island, and was a National Urban Fellowship recipient at Baruch College.
She worked in the administrative division of the California Department of Transportation, known by its acronym, CalTrans, for more than two decades.
First elected to the Rialto City Council in her maiden foray into politics in 2002, Robertson was reelected in 2006. Then in 2008, she challenged Rialto’s sitting mayor, Grace Vargas, suffering the lone defeat in her political career, as Vargas’s power of incumbency tided her to victory with 12,355 votes or 54.55 percent to Robertson’s 10,296 votes or 45.45 percent. Two years later, neither Robertson nor her council colleague, Joseph Baca, Jr., had to stand for reelection, as no one deigned to run against them. In 2012, with Robertson again intent on challenging Vargas, and Robertson’s popularity surging among the Rialto electorate, Vargas chose to not seek reelection. Instead, Robertson found herself in a contest against longtime Rialto political figure and council member Ed Scott. When the dust cleared after the election, Robertson had cruised to victory by a comfortable margin, 12,013 votes or 57.21 percent to Scott’s 8,985 votes or 42.79 percent.  In her 2016 mayoral re-elective effort, Robertson faced a single challenger, Councilman Ed Palmer. She handily won that contest, 14,784 votes or 59.79 percent to Palmer’s 9,950 votes or 40.23 percent.
As a member of the council and as mayor, Robertson parlayed her professional expertise with the California Department of Transportation to take up leadership positions on regional governmental joint powers authorities relating to urban planning and transportation, such as Southern California Associated Governments and San Bernardino County’s transportation agency, formerly known as San Bernardino Associated Governments and now known simply as the San Bernardino Transportation Agency. In her time as mayor, Robertson has become a virtual kingmaker in blue collar and heavily Democratic Rialto, with her endorsement carrying substantial weight among the electorate. Her most notable recent achievement in this regard was her sponsorship, support and successful coaching last year of political newcomer Channing Hawkins, who was elected to the board of the West Valley Water District in November in his first attempt at public office, whereupon he was named, less than an hour after he was sworn in as a board member, as the board’s president. Previous word was that Hawkins was being groomed for a run for the city council later this year to be followed by his advancement to the mayor’s post upon Robertson’s vacation of that spot for higher office such as Assembly or Congress.
The nepotism investigation now ongoing dampens considerably Robertson’s political prospects. She is due to seek reelection as mayor in November, and were she to relinquish that position, either voluntarily or by means of a challenge, her viability in moving on to other political positions would be greatly compromised.
Under California law pertaining to public officeholder conflict of interest, assisting or promoting a family member by participating in a vote on a contract involving that family member, providing that family member with employment with the public agency the politician heads or approving a project the politician’s family member has an interest in is not illegal unless it can be demonstrated that the politician and the family member have financial interests in common. While it is generally considered illegal for a politician to vote with regard to any issue benefiting a spouse since it is assumed their financial interests are one and the same, a similar vote impacting a child, parent or sibling is not necessarily illegal. Federal law, however, is far more strict with regard to nepotistic situations. That the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women received federal funding in the form of Community Development Block Grants puts Robertson, at least potentially, within the crosshairs of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Moreover, the City of Rialto’s conflict-of-interest ordinance prohibits the city’s elected officials and employees from participating in voting on contracts or presenting contracts or arranging for the purchase of goods or services from anyone to whom they are related by either marriage or blood. It is unclear what penalty or penalties can be applied for such a violation.