In a rebuff to four members of the board of supervisors and the man who has in recent years evolved into their preeminent political supporter, a review by an Oakland-based firm the supervisors used nearly $200,000 in taxpayer money to retain has concluded that the supervisors’ dream of having San Bernardino County break off from California to form its own state is politically and economically unfeasible.
In August 2023, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors at a cost of $192,400 commissioned Blue Sky Consulting Group to do an analysis of developer Jeff Burum’s call to foment a determination among a majority of county residents to secede from California and convince the California legislature and the U.S. Congress and Senate to consent to the 20,105 square miles of San Bernardino County forming a new state.
Though that study was completed months ago, county officials withheld it from the public. At a special meeting of a county subcommittee on August 14, the substance of the report was at last discussed in public. On August 16, the report, in the form of a memorandum and executive summary, was made public when it was included as part of the agenda for the August 20 board of supervisors meeting, which was to formally accept it at that time.
Blue Sky’s 11-page memorandum detailing its findings together with a 33-page annotated executive summary delineated why such an undertaking is impractical and undoable. The report further severely undercut Burum’s premise that San Bernardino County and its taxpayers have been shortchanged on their “fair share” of state and federal revenue, documenting, in an examination of the taxes paid by the county’s residents and businesses in comparison to those paid by their counterparts elsewhere in the state, that in category after category of spending by the state, it is San Bernardino County and its residents that have been freeloading at the expense of taxpayers in other counties.
Decrying the State of California allocation of resources and complaining that San Bernardino County’s taxpayers were paying way more to Sacramento than the county and city governments were getting back from Democrat-dominated Sacramento, Burum on July 26, 2022 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 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.”
A citizen or group of citizens looking to place an item on the ballot normally require a lead time of upwards of six months in order to collect the required signatures of 8 percent of the voters who participated in the previous gubernatorial election where the initiative was to apply to put the matter before a vote of the people. In this case, acting on their own as citizens, Burum and those he was affiliated with would have needed to gather 42,981 valid signatures of the county’s voters. Since the absolute last date for everything to be submitted to the county registrar of voters for the November 2022 election was August 12, 2022, Burum’s mission seemed impossible.
Burum’s request of the board was that its members use their authority as elected officials to have the registrar of voters place the measure before the county’s voters that November rather than forcing him to undertake the quest as a private citizen. Burum’s status as one of the top two or three contributors to Republican candidates and Republican causes throughout San Bernardino County historically convinced the four members of the five-member board of supervisors who are Republicans – Paul Cook, Jesse Armendarez, Dawn Rowe and Curt Hagman – to accommodate him. They ordered the clerk of the board to put discussion of such action on the agenda for their next meeting, which was scheduled for August 9, 2022.
But even if the board of supervisors used its authority as the panel embodying the county’s top elected officials to bypass the need to gather the 42,981 voter signatures to place the measure on the ballot at the August 9, 2022 meeting, the deadline would still be missed, since such a request from an elected board must be voted upon and given what is called a first reading and then be considered again, at which time it is confirmed with a second reading. Since the board was not scheduled to meet again until August 23, 2022 at which point the registrar of voters’ ballot deadline would have passed, Burum and those who had signed onto the secession idea, including Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren and Upland Mayor Bill Velto, were out of luck, or so it appeared.
The board, determined to please Burum, scheduled a special meeting for August 3, 2022, at which it took up the ballot initiative proposal. The board’s members voted to approve the idea on the spot on August 3, then took up the second reading on August 9, 2022, at which point the way was cleared for the item to get on the ballot.
On November 8, 2022, after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the tallying of the votes began. Ultimately, it turned out, a majority – a slight one but still a majority at 212,615 or 50.62 percent in favor and 207,439 or 49.38 percent opposed – supported Burum’s brainchild, which had been dubbed Measure EE.
The idea languished thereafter, however, as the enormity of creating a new state set in among those involved in government. The board of supervisors designated a subcommittee that was to consist of Supervisor Curt Hagman, then-County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez and County Chief Financial Officer Mathew Erickson to come up with some direction. Hagman, who is the county board’s leading recipient of Burum’s financial support, Hernandez and Erickson convened on July 7, 2023, at which point they recommended that an independent set of eyes look at the matter. In August 2023, the county entered into its $192,400 contract with Blue Sky Consulting Group to brainstorm about the secession proposal and “all options to obtain the county’s fair share of state and federal resources,” which, after all, it was reasoned, was what Burum wanted all along.
Blue Sky’s examination consisted of looking at the hard data available with regard to the state’s various means of revenue collection and taxing arrangements and balancing those against the return of money collected by the state to the county through governmental programs, distribution modalities, the 26 different forms of direct or pass-through revenue, and the subventions San Bernardino County received from other government agencies.
Blue Sky found that there were places where San Bernardino County lagged behind several of the state’s 57 other counties and in some cases a majority of those counties.
Of most significant note, in this regard, according to Blue Sky, is that the San Bernardino County’s 30 judicial vacancies – unfilled judgeships at the Superior Court level – are more pronounced than with any other county in the state. Of the 98 such unfilled posts stateside, San Bernardino County represents 30.6 percent of them.
San Bernardino County is also being shortchanged by the state in help provided to deal with its homelessness problem, Blue Sky found. While something on the order of 2.1% of the state’s homeless population is dwelling on San Bernardino County’s streets, its alleyways, beneath its railroad trestles and freeway underpasses, along the shores of its riverbeds and in parks, on its sidewalks, vacant lots and abandoned buildings, the county receives 1.1 percent of the funding from California’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program and 1.4 percent of the state’s Encampment Resolution Funds to redress those problems.
Along the same lines, San Bernardino County fell behind 48 of the state’s counties in laying claim to federal tax credits provided for affordable housing units over the past 20 years, Blue Sky’s churning of the numbers determined.
In an issue of particular sensitivity in relatively remote spots of the county such as Hinkley, Daggett and Wonder Valley, the county is taking in from the state $401 per user for what California officials catalog as “at risk” water systems, while on average statewide counties receive $485 per user of such inadequate water systems.
In the distribution of Mental Health Services Act funding over the three fiscal years ending in 2022-23, San Bernardino County was lagging behind roughly four-sevenths of the state’s counties, receiving an average of $64 per person compared to the statewide average of $68 per person.
The county’s share of capital funding for community colleges – i.e., building facilities on those campuses such as classrooms, laboratories and lecture halls – falls below what is due it in terms of the number of students being educated at those institutions. Community Colleges in San Bernardino County received $63.5 million of the 2,048,387,096 in state capital outlays for community colleges statewide over the past decade. That means the state provided San Bernardino County community colleges with 3.1 percent of its money reserved for funding community college capital improvements over the last ten years, while roughly 4 percent of the students attending community college statewide are doing so at the six public community colleges within San Bernardino County’s confines.
Blue Sky further reported that with regard to the rather unclearly defined category of “state aid for construction funding” that San Bernardino County had fared poorly in comparison to many of its counterparts elsewhere.  “In recent fiscal years, the county has received very little revenue in the ‘state aid for construction’ category,” Blue Sky stated in the report. “Historically, however, the state’s capital projects funding has varied significantly. From Fiscal Year 10-11 to Fiscal Year 13-14, state aid to the county significantly exceeded the statewide average. Over the entire 20-year period, the county has received an average of $3.46 per capita annually, compared to $4.15 across all other counties.”
Despite experiencing a lag with regard to funding from the state for certain programs, on balance, San Bernardino County has wrung from the state government more money for a large number of crucial undertakings than a majority of other counties, according to the statistics Blue Sky cited.
While Burum and to a lesser extent the supervisors that supported him in getting Measure EE on the ballot and passed maintained that San Bernardino County was being given short shrift by the state’s Democrat Party-dominated leadership, the report showed that in actuality, San Bernardino County in the majority of cases has been receiving no less money on average than other counties in the state and that with respect to a fair number of funding categories, it receives more and sometimes substantially more than other counties.
In particular, the Blue Sky report dispelled the widespread misrepresentation that the state was stiffing the county by imposing upon it unfunded mandates that it provide service.
In actuality, according to Blue Sky, while the state in 1991 and again in 2011 undertook what is referred to as realignment by which it transferred responsibility for certain programs or services formerly carried out by the state to the 58 counties, in doing so the state made funding transfers to cover the counties’ increased costs in meeting those mandates. These realignments in the main pertained to health, mental health, and public safety purposes, among others.
Though taking on the burden of providing those programs or services represented increased costs to the counties, according to Blue Sky, Sacramento passed through sufficient money to cover the increase in costs, such that none of counties, including San Bernardino County, went unreimbursed by the state for carrying out those programs. This was true, according to Blue Sky, despite some counties, with regard to certain programs, receiving more funding than others.
Local governments receive revenue from multiple sources, including locally collected taxes and transfers from state and federal governments, known as intergovernmental transfers or subventions. San Bernardino County has not been shortchanged on subventions, according to Blue Sky.
“Across all sources, over the past three fiscal years, the county has received 9 percent more state funding per person than other counties statewide,” Blue Sky’s 33-page annotated executive summary states.
The Blue Sky report makes the point that over the two-year period of governmental fiscal years 2019-20 and 2021-22, which run from July 1 to June 30, San Bernardino County was provided with an average of $829 per person in state and federal funding, compared to a statewide average of $763 per person.
Despite doing less well than other counties, on average, with regard to realignment subventions provided as pass-throughs of Mental Health Services Act funding, overall in terms of realignment subventions, San Bernardino County is doing better than its counterparts, on average.
In comparison to what on average is being provided to all 58 counties in terms of prison realignment funding, San Bernardino County is ahead of the game in being provided with the financial wherewithal to move prisoners in the state’s prisons into local jails and detention centers as part of plan to eliminate overcrowding and inhumane conditions in California’s penal institutions. San Bernardino County received $431 per county resident in fiscal year 2021-22 versus the statewide average of $406 in prison realignment subventions.
With regard to benefiting from Proposition 172, a half-cent sales tax approved by the state’s voters to fund law enforcement enhancements, San Bernardino County has claimed more of that money than 39 other counties, according to Blue Sky. In the three fiscal years running from July 2019 to June 2022, San Bernardino County received an average of $106 per person in Proposition 172 funding, while the statewide average was $99 per person.
Blue Sky reported that the State of California, in the quarter of a century running from from the 1999-2000 school year through the 2023-24 school year, invested more heavily in constructing new schools along with classrooms at existing schools in San Bernardino County than it did in most other counties. San Bernardino County’s school districts received $3.06 billion in state school facilities funding, or 7.3% of the $42.65 billion in total state funding earmarked for this purpose. During that 25 year span, San Bernardino County averaged about 6.6 percent of the enrollment of students from kindergarten through 12th grade statewide, ranging from a low of 6.2 percent to a high of 6.8 percent.
According to Blue Sky, credible evidence that San Bernardino County, its government and its residents are being cheated out of their tax money by the politicians in Sacramento is difficult to come by.
“State transfers to the county, municipalities and special districts in San Bernardino County over the past 10 years have exceeded the statewide average by various metrics,” Blue Sky stated. “State transfers per capita to the county were 37 percent higher than the statewide average. State transfers per road-mile were 23 percent higher. State transfers per daily vehicle mile traveled (DVMT) were 5 percent higher. The county received more funding than the statewide average in several major categories, including realignment and Proposition 172 public safety sales tax revenues.”
The Blue Sky report indicated that the plan to have San Bernardino County secede from California was so unworkable it would be difficult to determine which aspect of it is most unrealistic.
One issue highlighted in the report, much to the embarrassment of not just the supervisors who had gone along with Burum in placing Measure EE on the 2022 ballot but the citizens of San Bernardino County, is just how economically dysfunctional the county’s citizenry is, which is matched in large measure by the county’s business sector.
“Overall, across both state personal income tax and sales tax revenues, San Bernardino County generated $2,055 per capita for the state’s general fund in the most recent years for which state personal income tax and sales tax data are available,” the Blue Sky memo states. “The average Californian outside San Bernardino County generated double this amount ($4,112). Together, these two revenue sources accounted for 74% of total general fund collections as of the 2022-2023 Fiscal Year.”
Statistical comparisons between San Bernardino County and the counties that are host to the California’s real entrepreneurial/corporate powerhouses and which serve as the most dynamic economic engines for the state are outright depressing.
As of 2023, the average household income in San Bernardino County stood very near $50,000. Earners within Silicon Valley or its trade area dwarfed what the breadwinners in San Bernardino County make. The average household income in Santa Clara County in 2023 stood at $148,000; in San Francisco County, which is coterminous with the city limits of San Francisco, the average household income was $158,000; in Marin County, the average family income was $175,000; and in San Mateo County the average household income was right at $180,000.
Using delicate language to avoid rubbing the board of supervisors’ collective nose in it it, Blue Sky nevertheless made clear that at present it is San Bernardino County which is sponging off the rest of the state rather than the other way around.
“State fiscal data shows that, on a per capita basis, the tax revenues generated in San Bernardino County are likely less than half the revenues generated statewide,” according to Blue Sky. Put plainly, San Bernardino County is not pulling its own weight economically and is being subsidized by the more affluent counties and communities of California.
Given its already anemic financial performance, striking out on its own would dump San Bernardino County from the frying pan directly into the fire, the report suggests.
“Secession would trigger a wide variety of economic impacts countywide alongside fiscal impacts on the county government, local municipal governments, and school districts,” according to Blue Sky. “While a new state of San Bernardino could decide for itself what taxes to impose, the economic and state fiscal metrics show that if the county enacted a tax system identical to California’s – i.e., the same taxes imposed at the same tax rates – the revenues generated would be much lower per person than the current system in California.”
If San Bernardino County were to obtain a divorce from California and instead of remaining single as a U.S. territory or establishing itself as the 51st state opted to shack up with or remarry either Nevada or Arizona by signing on as a new county with one of those states, Blue Sky said, it would end up doing worse for itself because Nevada and Arizona are in an even less enviable financial condition than California and neither would be able to support San Bernardino County in the manner to which it is accustomed.
Public services in San Bernardino County, most notably the education of minor children, would very likely suffer if the county were to leave the State of California, according to Blue Sky.
“[T]otal assessed value in San Bernardino County is roughly $66,000 lower per capita than in other counties,” Blue Sky noted. “As a result, property tax revenues generated by county properties provide less support per capita for the county’s school districts. Under the state’s system for funding public schools, the state ensures that total per pupil funding—i.e., including both state and local property tax contributions—is roughly equal across local school districts. The state therefore provides more aid, on a per pupil basis, to districts receiving lower levels of local support, such as those within San Bernardino County.”
If San Bernardino County leaves California, according to Blue Sky, “the county’s residents would lose access to the services that California’s state agencies provide directly (e.g., Medi-Cal, the state university system) and gain access to new state services. The county, its cities, special districts and school districts would no longer receive their share of the state transfer payments that fund local programs. Whether the county could effectively maintain the equivalents of these services for its residents and funding for its local governments largely depends on whether its new state could generate per capita state tax revenues equal to those generated in California.” With that statement, Blue Sky, which had delineated elsewhere in the report and memo the degree to which San Bernardino trails most of the rest of the state in generating tax revenue, implied the economic numbers militate against secession.
Beyond the consideration that leaving California would likely redound to the economic detriment of San Bernardino County and its residents, Blue Sky dwelt as well on the governmental and administrative barriers to secession.
Such departures from a state as was advocated by Burum are exceedingly rare, Blue Sky pointed out.
“Despite numerous state partition or secession attempts both in California and in other states, secession has occurred only three times in the United States’ history,” the report states. “In 1791, shortly following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the State of Kentucky seceded from the State of Virginia. In 1820, the State of Maine seceded from the State of Massachusetts. And finally, in 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War and the State of Virginia’s secession from the United States, the State of West Virginia voted to secede from Virginia in order to remain a part of the Union.”
The first hump secessionists would need to surmount would be to get a more explicit expression of the will of San Bernardino County’s residents to declare independence from California than was obtained with the thin approval of Measure EE, according to Blue Sky.
“While not referenced explicitly by the Admissions Clause [of the U.S. Constitution], a county’s secession effort would first likely require some form of approval of a county’s elected leadership and/or voters,” the report states. “Not only is a county’s elected leadership unlikely to seek secession from the state without its residents’ consent, but the state would also presumably be far less likely to approve this petition if the county’s voters were not supportive.”
Beyond the will of the local populace to leave the state, actual secession would require the consent of the state in letting the county go, Blue Sky averred.
“Following the approval of a county’s voters (or potentially its elected leaders), a county’s secession effort would next require the approval of the state legislature,” according to the memo. “Though previous secession efforts in California have sought to use the ballot measure process to bypass a legislative vote, such an effort may not be allowed by the state’s Supreme Court.”
The implication of Blue Sky’s analysis in that regard was that there is little likelihood the politicians in Sacramento would ever consent to the county leaving the state.
And the road to secession is strewn with equally forbidding barriers at the federal level, according to Blue Sky.
“If a county seeks only to secede from California to create a new state, only approval from California and the federal government is necessary,” the memo states. “If a county instead attempts to join one of its neighbors—Arizona or Nevada, for example—those states’ legislatures or voters would also need to first approve this action. The relative difficulty of this step in the secession process is uncertain, as there is no precedent for it. All previous state partitions led to the creation of new states; a pre-existing state has never gained new territory as the result of another state’s partition. [S]ecession requires a simple majority vote of both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate and the approval of the President. In practice, the Senate’s approval of an attempted secession would likely require a 60-vote “filibuster-proof” supermajority. The recent Democratic-led effort in 2021 to establish statehood for the District of Columbia, for example, passed a party-line vote in the Democratic-led House of Representatives only to fail in the Senate—despite the Democratic Party’s control of the body—as the Republican Party’s opposition provided more than the 40 votes necessary, under current Senate rules, to use the filibuster to prevent the bill’s passage.”
The memo concluded, “Though secession could generate some benefits for San Bernardino County, a secession faces significant political challenges, and if accomplished, would likely result in a significant reduction in the level of government services currently enjoyed by county residents. Secession first requires California’s consent. The state legislature has thus far been unwilling to approve secession proposals, and it is unlikely that the county could bypass the legislature by submitting this measure directly to the state’s voters. Potential congressional opposition to the county’s secession is also a significant obstacle, at least to the extent the end goal was a new state.”
There are those in San Bernardino County who are disappointed in and who reject Blue Sky’s findings. They point out that the consulting firm is based in Oakland, the same city where California’s four-term Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who in their view is a “dyed-in-the-wool-liberal,” was mayor. Blue Sky works closely with state officials and is on friendly terms with Sacramento Democrats, who dominate the state’s capital and all of state government, they maintain, which makes the conclusions the firm reached and the data it relied upon suspect. They say that the new State of Empire will be realized and that Burum will be its inaugural governor.
-Mark Gutglueck