The latest recall effort in San Bernardino presents the public with a confusing mélange of conflicting political and personal entanglements, leaving confusion as to who, precisely, wants to of the senior members of the city council removed from office.
This week, it was publicly announced that a group of city residents living in both the First and Fourth wards want to force a recall question against Councilman Ted Sanchez and Councilman Fred Shorett.
Sanchez was first elected to the city council in 2018 and was reelected in 2022. Shorett was elected to the council in 2009, reelected in 2013, reelected in 2018 and again in 2022.
Shorett’s early tenure in office was distinguished by his alliance with then-Mayor Patrick Morris, which was an unlikely pairing, given that Shorett is a Republican and Morris a Democrat. Nevertheless, the two were part of a narrow ruling majority on the council that formed when the city was under severe economic challenge, with consistent consecutive budget deficits in which expenditures eclipsed revenue. Morris, who was himself a longtime public employee as both a prosecutor in the district attorneys office and then later a Superior Court judge, took what was for many a shocking stand against public employee unions, which for decades had effectively pressured previous mayors and city councils to grant them salary and benefit increases, despite the city’s shrinking income. Shorett joined with Morris in seeking to reduce city expenditures by freezing city employee pay levels and holding the line on benefits, which managed to stave off for a year or year-and-a-half an inevitable bankruptcy filing by the city in 2012. While Shorett found himself faced with the undying enmity of local public employee unions, he managed to get some level of credit for his efforts to maintain the city’s solvency and managed to stay in office for a decade-and-a-half.
Initially, Shorett and Sanchez appeared to be and actually were on a collision course, as Sanchez ran for office and was elected as an ally of John Valdivia, whom Shorett had beaten in the 2009 Fourth Ward election primary and who came into office in the Third Ward in 2012 as a candidate backed by the city’s firefighters’ union who advocated for increasing firefighter salaries and benefits. Valdivia served as a foil to Morris until he left office in 2014, and the differences between Valdivia and Shorett were legendary. Valdivia successfully ran for mayor in 2018, at which point, with the support of Sanchez and then-newly elected Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Fifth Ward Councilman Henry Nickel and then-Sixth Ward Councilwoman Bessine Richard, Valdivia took firm control of the machinery of government in the county seat. Valdivia’s hold on the city intensified in May 2019, when Juan Figueroa, whom the mayor backed, was elected to finish out the nearly two years remaining on Valdivia’s term as Third Ward Councilman.
In relatively short order, however, Valdivia overplayed his hand, and one by one he lost the support of Ibarra, Nickel and Sanchez, as he was engulfed by scandal upon scandal relating to the pay-for-play ethos of his administration.
Ultimately, in 2022, Valdivia was ousted from the mayor’s post, having been beaten in that year’s primary by both former City Attorney Jim Penman and the city’s one-time human resources director, Helen Tran. Ultimately, Tran was elected mayor in the November 2022 election.
Under Tran, a Democrat, the San Bernardino ship of state has had less than smooth sailing as took the helm of a council that consisted of four Republicans and three Democrats. Tran, who had hoped city affairs might be run in a stable and effective manner, was hampered by the departure of the city manager who had been at the helm of the city during the last two years of Valdivia’s mayoralty. Thus, her tenure in office began with a caretaker city manager in place, and at first subtle and then more pronounced differences surfaced among the members of the council with regard to whom the city should hire as its top administrator while the recruitment process was ongoing in the summer of 2023. This included a manifestation of collective schizophrenia when some members of the city council at first advocated and then rejected the idea of hiring the individual they had hired as the interim city manager, Charles McNeely, as the full-fledged city manager; Tran proving unable to convince her council colleagues to hire her first choice for the post, David Carmody, who had been the city manager in the city where she had gone to work as human resources director after she departed from the employ of San Bernardino in 2019; the city council coming to a near consensus about hiring ????? City Manager Harry Black but seeing that fall apart when Black’s salary demands gave the council pause prior to his withdrawal over concerns about the confidentiality of the recruitment process; and the inexplicable delays and stalling that took place in finalizing the council’s majority choice to manage the city, Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan, which led to his decision to withdraw as a candidate for the post. Ultimately, the city in October 2023 made a decision to hire Charles Montoya, such that a coordinated and forward-looking running of municipal affairs did not begin in earnest until November 2023, nearly 11 months after Tran was sworn into office.
There was tension on the council between three of the council Republicans – Sanchez, Figueroa and Shorett – who began to vote on many issues as a block and two of the council’s Democrats – Fifth Ward Council Benjamin Reynoso and Sixth Ward Councilman Kimberly Calvin…