A major factor in Yucaipa’s current political/governmental climate stems from what was unanticipated action by the city council majority barely two months after the last election.
On November 8, 2022 two newcomers were elected to the council. Matt Garner managed a narrow victory with 35.59 percent of the vote over Sherilyn Long and her 33.96 percent of the vote in the four-person District 1 council race which also involved third-place finisher Mark Taylor and Erik Sahakian, who came in fourth. In the District 2 contest, Chris Venable, with 62.11 percent, convincingly outdistanced Nena Dragoo, with 37.89 percent of the vote, to capture a seat at the council dais.
Both Garner’s and Venable’s victories had been set up by the decision of two longtime council members – David Avila in District 1 and Greg Bogh in District 2 – not to seek reelection that year.
Garner and Venable were sworn in during a largely ceremonial council meeting held on December 12, 2022. In Yucaipa, the mayor is not directly elected by the city’s voters. One of the handful of matters taken up by the newly installed council at that December 12 meeting was the council’s selection of which member would serve as mayor and which would be given the secondary honorific of mayor pro tem, what is essentially the vice mayor.
Justin Beaver, who had been in office only since 2020, was selected mayor. Councilman Bobby Duncan, who had been mayor in the past, was made mayor pro tem. With the December holiday season coming thereafter, the second council meeting for December 2022, which would have been held on December 26, was canceled.
On January 9, 2023, at what was the second public meeting of the newly composed city council and the first council meeting of the year, the vast majority of the Yucaipa community was blindsided when Garner joined with Mayor Beaver and Duncan in confronting City Manager Ray Casey during the closed session that precedes the open public session of council meetings. Beaver and Duncan informed Casey, who had originally been hired as Yucaipa’s city engineer in 2003 and was promoted to its top administrator in 2008, that if he did not tender his resignation immediately, he would be fired on the spot, as they had Garner’s vote to hand him a pink slip. With no better option available, Casey, reluctantly, resigned.
A vote was taken to accept Casey’s resignation, which passed by a margin of 3-to-2, with Beaver, Duncan and Garner prevailing and Councilman Jon Thorp and Venable dissenting. The council then voted 5-to-0 to terminate City Attorney David Snow. At that point, Steven Graham, the city attorney with the City of Canyon Lake in Riverside County, materialized and began functioning as Yucaipa’s city attorney. The council thereupon voted 4-to-1, to offer the position of city manager to Chris Mann, who at that time was the city manager of Canyon Lake, a member of the Yucaipa Water District Board of Directors and the principal in Mann Communications. Mann, like Graham, had been present on the civic center grounds throughout the meeting.
Nearly two score Yucaipa residents who had been alerted at the last minute that something was in the offing had shown up at the meeting, several of whom had hoped to be able to talk the council out of getting rid of Casey, a Princeton-educated civil engineer with extensive public works experience in governmental and municipal settings and construction experience in the private sector. The crowd’s efforts at intercession had been to no avail, and Casey abruptly joined the ranks of the unemployed or retired or both.
There were multiple grounds for the public’s discomfiture.
One of those was that just over two-and-a-half-months previously, a unanimous vote by the Yucaipa City Council as it was then composed had taken place on October 23, 2022 to extend Casey’s contract until June 2024. In taking that action, the council granted Casey a 3 percent salary increase that jumped his yearly salary to $299,420, such that he was making $422,901.50 in total annual compensation, putting him among the 25 highest-paid city managers in California. Comments by the council members that night memorialized their apparent collective belief that Casey’s experience and standing within the municipal management profession justified the action. Casey had served on the League of California Cities’ Inland Empire Executive Committee for three years running and had also been a board member with the League of California Cities’ Housing, Community and Economic Development Committee for three years. More impressively still, he had recently served a two-year stint as the chairman of the City/San Bernardino County Manager Technical Advisory Committee.
The council that extended Casey’s contract into 2024 consisted of Bogh, Avila, Beaver, Duncan and Thorp. Based on their long history of working with Casey, Bogh and Avila considered the October 23 vote to be one of their final significant acts while in office, since ensuring Casey would remain with the city for more than a year after what was to be the new council was in place would allow the two new members to familiarize themselves with his abilities and therefore be able to decide whether he should remain with the city to well beyond 2023. This, Bogh and Avila hoped, would be one of their legacies.
What was unknown to everyone but a small circle of people in Yucaipa in the fall and early winter of 2022 was that there was a hidden agenda, one that involved Beaver, Duncan, Garner and just a handful of others. Beaver and Duncan were displeased with Casey’s performance and had been for some time. They were aware, however, that Bogh and Avila sharply differed with them in their assessment of Casey, and that Thorp, who had been on the city council since 2020, would side with them. For that reason, at the October 23, 2022 meeting, they had gone along with the majority to extend Casey’s contract, not wanting to prematurely reveal what they were planning.
While the Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, prohibits a quorum – meaning three or more of a five-member panel such as the Yucaipa City Council – from discussing any public issues to be decided by those members in their elected capacities outside the public forum of an agendized meeting, that law did not prevent Beaver and Duncan from talking over and coming to a consensus between themselves regarding what they felt about the city manager and whether he should remain with the city. Nor were they restricted from discussing their feelings or intentions with anyone else who was not on the council, and that included prospective members of the council such Garner, Long, Taylor, Sahakian, Dragoo and Venable, the candidates seeking election that year. While it is not known whether Beaver and Duncan made any overtures to Long, Taylor, Sahakian, Dragoo or Venable, it is now common knowledge that the two councilmen were dialoguing with Garner prior to the election. Garner signaled to Beaver and Duncan that he was prepared to jettison Casey if he were to succeed in his race.
When Garner was elected, but before he was sworn in in December, he reiterated in his contact with Beaver and Duncan that he was on board with tossing Casey from Yucaipa’s ship of state just as soon as he was in place to do so.
There was, however, a technicality that would prevent an early activation of the plan to remove Casey. A provision that had been placed into the Yucaipa Municipal Code was that “The city manager shall not be removed from office, other than for misconduct in office, during or within a period of ninety days next succeeding any general municipal election.” As such, the earliest the city council could have acted to fire Casey would have been 8:01 p.m. on February 5, 2023.
Beaver and Duncan, however, were determined to strike while the iron was hot and before Casey or anyone else would have an opportunity to dissuade Garner or compromise the resolve the trio had to move Casey out of the Yucaipa City Hall executive suite.
Diane Smith, a pillar of the Yucaipa community who was a member of the planning commission and later the city council, is and has been extremely knowledgeable about issues within the city, often having in-depth information about events of significance at City Hall and elsewhere within the city’s 28.3-square mile confines before they occur. On New Year’s Eve 2022, Smith buttonholed Duncan, inquiring about rumors she had heard to the effect that Casey’s days in Yucaipa were numbered. Duncan, recognizing that if he were to prevaricate with Smith his credibility thereafter would be forever damaged, told her that Beaver at the then-upcoming January 9, 2023 council meeting was going to ask Casey for his resignation or that he immediately retire. If Casey refused, Beaver was prepared to play his trump card, which consisted of his vote linked with Duncan’s and Garner’s to fire him.
It thus appears that Casey, who had previously expected to remain as city manager at least until 2024 and reportedly some three years beyond that, was aware before going into the January 9, 2023 meeting that his head was about to roll. Recognizing that his hand was being forced, he ultimately resigned, but not without a concession that the city would honor the commitment made in the October 23, 2022 contract extension to pay him his annual $299,420 salary until the end of June 2024.
It has since been reported that during the closed session “one hell of an argument” broke out between, on one side, Beaver and Duncan, and, on the other, Thorp, while Garner remained silent but stood by the mayor and mayor pro tem, with Venable taken aback by the whole scene.
Among the roughly 40 Yucaipa residents who had come to the meeting were several who went on the record, after the closed session was concluded, as supporting Casey. That had no appreciable impact in convincing the council to reverse course by rescinding its action. With Graham functioning as city attorney, the council thereafter voted 4-to-1, with Thorp dissenting, to offer the position of city manager to Mann.
For a substantial cross section of the Yucaipa community, including members of the traditional establishment and its old guard, the events of January 9 were upsetting and disillusioning. With Mann and Graham on hand for the meeting and Graham assuming the role of city attorney on the spot without any forewarning, there were immediate accusations that a violation of the Brown Act had taken place.
Residents who were opposed to what was tantamount to Casey’s sacking reasoned that a Brown Act violation had to have taken place, as Graham was on hand for the meeting, waiting in the wings at City Hall, before he was hired as city attorney and, likewise, Mann was immediately present, reportedly waiting in his car in the civic center parking lot, in anticipation of the action the council ultimately took.
The council majority would eventually form a response to the Brown Act violation accusation that held no such violation had occurred since the collusion with regard to Casey’s forced exit and Snow’s firing had taken place prior to Garner being sworn in as a member of the city council, such that when that plotting took place, the three did not constitute a quorum. Further, the council majority and their defenders rejected the claim that Casey’s sacking violated the municipal code section that related to not firing the city manager during the 90-day period after an election. They pointed out that Casey had resigned and had not been terminated by council action.
For those upset at Casey’s departure, those defenses were ones that relied on distinctions without differences and constituted an admission of duplicity on the part of the three, given Beaver’s and Duncan’s October 23 vote to extend Casey’s contract and Garner’s failure to inform the community of his intention with regard to the city manager prior to his election.
Moreover, many Yucaipa residents, had come to believe that installing Mann, whose company, Mann Communications, serves as a mouthpiece for the development industry, was a harbinger of a wave of aggressive development consisting of “stack and pack” subdivision after subdivision being approved by the newly-formed council majority that would make Yucaipa indistinguishable from scores of other cities in Southern California that are now composed, practically, of wall-to-wall houses.
Adding insult to injury, a band of Yucaipa residents maintained, was that in its haste to get rid of Casey and put Mann in place, the council troika had created a circumstance in which the city was double-paying for the services of a city manager. In addition to the $220,130.80 in annual salary, $8,181.81 in pay add-ons and perks, and $44,134.19 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $272,446.8 that the city was paying to Mann to serve as the city’s top administrator, it was paying a $299,420 salary to Casey. Those city residents were baffled at why, if Beaver, Duncan and Garner were so set on getting rid of Casey and hiring Mann, they didn’t wait to make the transition at mid-year 2024, when the city’s contractual obligation with Casey was set to draw to a close.
A recall committee formed, and some 193 city residents lent their names as sponsors of the effort, with 62 residents of District 4 signing the notice of the intention to circulate the recall petition against Justin A. Beaver, 67 residents of District 3 signing the notice of the intention to circulate the recall petition against Bobby Dean Duncan and 64 residents of District 1 signing the notice of the intention to circulate the recall petition against Councilmember Matthew Gabriel Garner.
Reasons given for seeking the recall against each of the three were that they had acted to terminate Casey and had violated the Brown Act in doing so.
In the aftermath of Casey’s departure and the hiring of Mann, Mann replaced the city clerk who had been in place under Casey, Kimberly Metzler, with his own choice, that being Ana Sauceda, whom he had previously promoted to city clerk when she was employed at the City of Canyon Lake, from which he had departed to become Yucaipa’s city manager.
To protect his political masters on the city council, Mann formulated a strategy of hiring the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm, using city money, to represent Sauseda as a plaintiff, acting in her capacity as the city’s chief elections officer, in a lawsuit challenging the validity of the recall effort.
Two of the Sutton Firm’s attorneys, Bradley W. Hertz and Eli B. Love, filed a writ of mandate on Sauseda’s behalf, asserting that the stated grounds for the recall of Garner, Duncan and Beaver were false and misleading, since the recall proponents could not prove their allegation that a Brown Act violation had occurred with the forced departure of Casey, and the recall proponents’ separate accusations against Beaver, Duncan and Garner that each had acted to terminate Casey and Snow was not true since no single one of them had such authority and the actions to relieve Casey of his city manager’s post and fire Snow were ones taken collectively by the entire city council body. The lawsuit was presented as adhering to a recently passed law, AB 2584, allowing Sauseda to contest the accuracy of the stated grounds for a recall. Sauseda’s suit was filed against all 193 of the recall proponents.
To augment that effort, Mann had Joseph Pradetto, whom he had hired to serve as Yucaipa’s director of governmental affairs and official spokesperson, intensify the intimidation level against the recall proponents. Pradetto, in trumpeting to the Yucaipa community that the recall proponents were being sued by the city clerk, publicly stated, “In addition to the provisions of AB 2584, Sauseda also cautions recall proponents that, ‘Per Elections Code section 18600, it is a misdemeanor offense to circulate or obtain signatures on a recall petition that intentionally misrepresent (sic) or make (sic) false statements.’”
Faced with the distraction of the lawsuit and stood off by Pradetto’s threat to have them jailed for persisting with the recall effort, recall proponents fell far short of gathering, by the August 16, 2023 deadline, the minimal 1,826 valid signatures from among District 1’s 7,303 registered voters to qualify a ballot item on recalling Garner, the minimal 1,478 valid signatures of the 5,912 registered voters in District 3 to qualify a ballot item on recalling Duncan and the minimal 1,623 valid signatures from among the 6,492 registered voters in District 4 to qualify a vote on recalling Beaver.
The ploy of having the Sutton Law Firm prepare the writ of mandate and getting Sauseda to serve as the plaintiff had succeeded in staving off the recall effort. It also had the incidental effect of preserving Mann’s, Graham’s, Sauseda’s and Pradetto’s positions with the city, since the removal of Garner, Duncan and Beaver from the council would have very likely resulted in their replacement by three officeholders hostile to the new ruling coalition’s agenda, which the recently brought-in city manager, city attorney, city clerk and city spokesman were militating so energetically to implement.
Some of the recall proponents were so intimidated by having been dragged into court and by Pradetto’s threat of having them prosecuted that they simply wanted to desist and bug out, so to avoid expense and what was in essence an empty threat that they would potentially be jailed. Others were less intimidated than they were fed up with the complication the effort and the circumstance entailed, and they merely sought to move on with their lives. Others, however, were neither daunted nor dissuaded, and remained committed to redressing what they saw as a miscarriage of governance growing out of an illegal series of events that the council majority had engaged in with the assistance of Mann and Graham before the fact and with the connivance of Hertz, Love, Sauseda and Pradetto after the fact. A handful of them retained James Penman, who had been the San Bernardino City Attorney for more than a quarter of a century, as their legal representative.
From the outset of the litigation, the clock was running on the Sutton Law Firm’s billing of the city for Hertz’s and Love’s legal work. Having achieved the goal of thwarting the recall, Beaver, Duncan, Garner, Mann, Graham, Sauseda, Hertz and Love were purposed to simply dismiss the lawsuit. However, with Penman representing some of the defendants, city officials – in particular Sauseda, Graham and Mann – faced the unpleasant prospect of the city being in the position of having to pay not only for the Sutton Firm’s legal work but the lawyers’ fees the defendants in the case had sustained if the matter were to be dismissed on a motion by the plaintiff. Moreover, simply dismissing the case with the demise of the recall effort would be construed by virtually anyone looking at the totality of the circumstance that the lawsuit was merely a manipulation of the legal system to interrupt the recall effort. Consequently, Sauseda refrained from dismissing the suit, and for four months, from September through October, November, December and to the end of January, the matter drug on, costing the taxpayers and the defendants money.
In the meantime, through Penman, several of the defendants pushed to contest the allegations in the lawsuit and to have it dismissed on its merits or lack thereof. Paralleling that was a so-called SLAPP motion by one of the defendants, Colleen Wang, who had been one of the 64 signatories of the intent to circulate a recall petition against Garner document. A SLAPP motion, which argues that a given lawsuit is a strategic lawsuit against public participation, is a request by a defendant in a civil action for a finding that the cause of action cited in a lawsuit against him or her is activity that is a form of protected free speech or activity protected under the U.S. or California Constitution which is therefore not actionable, i.e., subject to being legally contested. In Wang’s case, it was her assertion that in signing on to the recall effort, she was engaging in action to seek redress of grievance using a methodology preserved for her and other citizens under the law, namely recalling an elected official from office, the process for which is outlined in the California Government Code.
The recall proponents had also lodged a complaint with the San Bernardino County Civil Grand Jury based upon the issue that had sparked the recall effort, that being the termination of Casey with virtually no warning followed by the hiring of Mann without any sort of competitive recruitment process for the city manager post in a way that appeared to have been a violation of the Brown Act. Ultimately, in its end-of-the 2023-calendar-year report, the grand jury, while avoiding delving into the issue of whether a Brown Act violation had occurred or not, delivered its findings with regard to the way the city council majority, tolerated by the remainder of the city council, had jettisoned Casey less than three months after having extended his contract 20 months. According to the grand jury, “[T]he council immediately replaced the city manager with its pre-selected choice. The council didn’t require applicant vetting; indeed, it didn’t require any applicants at all. The council didn’t interview other qualified applicants; there were no other applicants to be considered for such an important decision. Even before the city council vote, the soon-to-be appointed new city manager (and city attorney) waited in the parking lot outside the council chambers, to be called into the meeting and introduced to the council. These city council actions blindsided many residents; their outrage followed, soon to be fueled by additional questionable actions. Many Yucaipa citizens are incensed. They do not believe the city council demonstrated adequate concern for their objections…[and] believe that the council acted with a lack of transparency when it replaced the former city manager and city attorney, with pre-selected people, without much notice to or input from the community.”
The grand jury observed that with the recall effort having failed, the judge hearing the lawsuit brought by Sauseda concluded that the matter being litigated “is deemed moot.” Despite that, the grand jury noted that Sauseda continued pursuing the lawsuit, which the grand jury said was perpetuating the community’s distrust of city government.
“As of the writing of this report, the office of the city clerk had not agreed to dismiss the petition for writ of mandate, despite the fact that the judge deemed the matter moot,” the grand jury stated. “Nevertheless, the Office of the Yucaipa City Clerk, with retained counsel, decided to move forward with the lawsuit. If the city clerk’s office continues on this path, Yucaipa likely will spend thousands of dollars in attorney fees and the defendants, residents who had signed the recall petitions, may spend thousands more on their own attorney fees. These actions may further erode the public trust and the Yucaipa City Council itself must share some of the blame. Since the new council term began, the Yucaipa City Council has developed a reputation among many residents of ignoring the concerns of the public and of fostering an atmosphere of mistrust, disdain, anger, resentment, lack of transparency and appearances of conflicts of interest.”
In responding to the grand jury report, Mayor Justin Beaver seized upon that body stopping short of making any finding of criminal wrongdoing to state, “After nearly an entire year of public upset and scrutiny, the county civil grand jury has confidently declared our city council violated no laws.”
On January 31, 2024, Judge Michael Sachs, who oversaw the lawsuit filed by Sauseda against the 193 Yucaipa residents, entered a ruling in favor of the defendants and simultaneously granted Wang’s SLAPP motion against Sauseda and the City of Yucaipa, allowing attorney fees to be awarded, and finding that the grounds for the recall were truthful.
Judge Sachs stated from the bench, “In my humble opinion, she [Sauseda] could have avoided this. The city could have avoided incurring costs. The respondents who are essentially exercising their constitutional rights, would not have had to incur costs. And this seems to me to be a waste of funds, both public funds and private funds.”
According to Judge Sachs, Wang had established that she, like the other recall proponent defendants, was acting in the capacity of a citizen seeking to apply her constitutional rights by trying to qualify a recall measure.
“All this particular respondent did was sign the recall petition,” Judge Sachs propounded, “She [Colleen Wang] also states after reviewing the petition and agreeing the content matched her own impressions, she added a signature and authorized submission of the paperwork. On May 18, 2023, petitioner [City Clerk Sauseda] sent a letter informing the proponents she had approved and accepted the proposed petition in all but one respect. That one respect was as follows: ‘that the statements of the grounds for the recall contain false and or misleading information,’ closed quotes. At the end of that letter, the petitioner notified each of the proponents that she had commenced the lawsuit. [R]egarding the arguments, it’s pretty clear to the court the arguments being made by the respondents [recall proponents], that they were exercising their civil rights, that they did not assert anything that was false or untrue.”
In the spring of 2023, when Sauseda, represented by Hertz and Love – whose services were being paid for with taxpayer money, the expenditure of which was approved during a closed session vote by Beaver, Duncan and Garner – filed for the writ of mandate, there were immediate accusations that the concept of the lawsuit had not originated with her but had instead been cooked up by Mann and Graham as part of an effort to insulate Beaver, Duncan and Garner. That was met by denials that Mann and Graham had put Sauseda up to the filing of the suit and eventual assertions from Sauseda that the lawsuit was her brainchild.
An individual close to Sauseda has said she has on multiple occasions privately acknowledged she was instructed to serve as the plaintiff in the writ of mandate.
In January of this year, a cadre of die-hards within the city’s District 1 recommitted themselves to seeing Garner removed from office. Without interference from City Hall, they were able to get 25 percent of the registered voters in the district to sign a recall petition against Garner. Thus, a vote to remove him will be on the ballot on November 5.
In July, when the filing period for the district 3, 4 and 5 positions on the Yucaipa City Council came around, Duncan opted to not seek reelection in District 3. Beaver and Thorp filed to run again in districts 4 and 5. Thorp drew no opposition. Beaver, however, is seeing his bid to remain on the council contested by Kristine Mohler and Gordon Renshaw. In this way, the natural electoral cycle has now exposed Beaver to the judgment of the voters of District 4 with regard to the matters that prompted 62 of his constituents to sign a petition last year seeking to subject him to a recall question aimed at removing him from office. In this regard, the District 4 race and the Garner recall are seen as referendums on the January 2023 firing of Casey and hiring of Mann.
-Mark Gutglueck