By Mark Gutglueck
Chino City Clerk Natalie Gonzaga possesses highly prejudicial information regarding Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner, individuals familiar with the circumstance at Ontario International Airport have reported to the Sentinel.
Neither Wapner nor Gonzaga responded to questions posed to them this week by the Sentinel. There remain conflicting reports as to whether Gonzaga’s departure from the top clerical position at the Ontario International Airport Authority more than two-and-a-half years ago was precipitated by Wapner’s demands of her that she take action she considered to be unlawful, including orders that she withhold from public scrutiny incriminating documents Wapner was intent on keeping under wraps. It is further unclear whether Gonzaga has spoken to federal investigators about her full range of knowledge with regard to events that transpired at the airport during her tenure there or provided to those authorities documents which were once entrusted to her custody.
A team of five auditors, reportedly connected with the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service, arrived in Ontario within the last month and have since pored over the Ontario International Airport Authority’s books.
Since its inception in 2011, the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Directors has been headed by Wapner, who has held the title of board president for 13 years. Wapner was rewarded with the presidency of the airport board because of the lead he had taken in an effort by the City of Ontario to recapture ownership and both control and management of Ontario Airport from the City of Los Angeles and its corporate entity, Los Angeles World Airports, which managed and operated Los Angeles International Airport, Burbank Airport and Ontario Airport for the Los Angeles Department of Airports. In 2015, following Ontario’s increasingly intense and bitter effort to wrest control of the airport from Los Angeles, which included Ontario suing Los Angeles over the matter in 2013, Los Angeles agreed to return the aerodrome to Ontario, which was effectuated officially on November 1, 2016. Continue reading →

Los Angeles-based Cadiz, Inc.’s intense round of lobbying featuring the filtering of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the region’s politicians appears to have achieved paydirt as the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors is surrendering any prospect that it will contest what Cadiz, Inc.’s opponents maintain are spurious water rights claims.
For four decades, succeeding corporate officers with the entity variously known as the Cadiz Land Company, Cadiz, Inc. and the Cadiz Water Company have had designs on the East Mojave Desert’s underground water supply, hoping they can, without having to pay for it or replenish it, divert trillions of gallons of desert water to a water district in Orange County at a tremendous profit.
The plan, first conceived in 1984, has undergone multiple permutations and was effectively opposed in virtually all of its forms previously by a coalition of environmentalists, East Mojave residents and landowners, employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and key politicians in San Bernardino, Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
The atmosphere has changed significantly, however, with the 2023 death of Dianne Feinstein and the defections of both current and former officeholders who were committed project opponents of the Cadiz Water Company camp, based primarily on money being provided to them in the form of hefty political donations or employment opportunities. Continue reading →

County officials have expended $192,400 to ascertain what the policy advisor to the board of supervisors’ only Democrat told them two years ago when he was the chief of staff to a Republican supervisor: San Bernardino County will not secede from the State of California.
Ken Hunt, who was then Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford’s Chief of Staff, in the summer of 2022 made an immediate size-up of a proposal by Jeff Burum to ask San Bernardino County’s voters to weigh in on whether San Bernardino County should withdraw from California. Hunt, who had been Fontana’s city manager for two decades, said the proposal would never fly. After much hoopla, excitement and expense, it appears that everyone, even those who so enthusiastically embraced the idea, have come to the same conclusion.
On July 26, 2022 Jeff Burum came before the board of supervisors, asking them to consider putting what was termed an “advisory” measure in the form of a question on the November 8, 2022 ballot asking whether San Bernardino County should separate from the State of California and venture into the world from here on out as the 51st State of the Union, to be named “Empire.”
Continue reading →

Prosecutors, this time ones from the federal government, are going to take a second run at putting Ari Aki Young behind bars, most likely for a decade or two, more than a year after he was acquitted or otherwise exonerated on eight of nine charges against him stemming from his 2019 confrontation with a deputy in which he severely beat her and took her gun away from her.
The Young case is a highly paradoxical one, with some of the case’s elements having pitted so-called liberals and conservatives against one another while other elements of the case simultaneously touched off even more bitter philosophical fights within and among factions of progressives and factions of law enforcement advocates.
Young languished in county jail for more than four years after he was wounded and arrested in the aftermath of the September 4, 2019 incident. He at last went to trial in March 2023 on charges of attempted murder, assault with a firearm on a peace officer, two counts of discharging a firearm, obstructing or resisting a peace officer, use of a firearm during the commission of a crime, felony battery against a police officer, disarming a police officer and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
Represented by attorney Raj Maline, who convinced the magistrate hearing the case, Judge Miriam Morton, to dismiss the obstruction of a peace officer charge, both charges of discharging a firearm, the battery against a police officer charge, the charge of disarming a police officer and the charge of using a firearm in the commission of a crime, Young was found not guilty by the jury on the assault with a firearm on a peace officer charge and not guilty on the attempted murder charge. He was convicted of discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
Maline had Young, who is schizophrenic, plead not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity on all charges. Continue reading →

For the second election cycle running, Upland city officials are looking to effectuate a tax increase, this time by appealing to voters to allow City Hall to change the business licensing schedule it has had in place for more than three decades.
In 2022, Upland officials qualified the placement of Measure L on that year’s November ballot. Measure L asked for authorization to impose an added one cent per dollar sales tax on all retail transactions within the city involving merchandise upon which sales tax is permitted under California law, that is, excluding groceries and medicine. Ultimately, the city’s voters rejected Measure L, with 10,222 voters or 44.6 percent in favor of it and 12,697 voters or 55.4 percent opposed to it.
In California, any new tax must be approved by a vote of the people to pay that tax.
Members of the Upland citizens group who effectively opposed Measure L expressed hope Upland municipal officials would embrace the concept of Upland as a consumer friendly city which eschewed taxes and would appeal to the region’s shoppers in that fashion, pointing out that relative to the sales tax burden in nearby Ontario at 8.75 percent; Montclair at 9 percent; Chino at 8.75 percent; and Pomona at 10.25 percent, Upland’s 7.75 percent sales tax offers an opportunity for residents of the west end of San Bernardino County and the east end of Los Angeles County patronizing Upland’s merchants to save money, particularly on big ticket items such as cars and major household appliances. Continue reading →

Three of five former employees within then-San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia’s office whose lawsuits filed in 2020 contributed to his once-promising political career coming to an abrupt end in 2022 have come to terms with the city for $1.2 million.
Those settling include the three women – customer service representative Mirna Cisneros, office assistant Karen Cervantes and legislative aide Jackie Aboud – whose narratives about what occurred involved the most arrestingly lurid details pertaining to sexual harassment contained in the five suits against Valdivia and the city.
The first week of January 2000, Aboud, now 27, was fired by the city, less than nine months after she had gone to work as a part-time field representative for Valdivia in April 2019. Cisneros, now 34, and Cervantes, now 28, who anticipated being accorded the same treatment as Aboud, retained one-time Adelanto Mayor Tristan Pelayes to represent them. Continue reading →