In a political comeback that in at least some respects was as or more remarkable than the one achieved by President-elect Donald Trump at the top of the ballot, Councilman Joe Baca Sr defeated four-term Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson on Tuesday.
Baca’s storied political career has entailed an uncommon degree of persistence and a litany of rivals, some of them of impressive stature, who have interrupted his electoral/ re-electoral prospects in almost as many contests as he has proven victorious.
With his vanquishing of Robertson, Baca cements his reputation as one of the more, in not the most, resilient politicians in San Bernardino County history.
In addition to being the county’s most variegated politicians in terms of the levels of office he has held, he is also the longest serving of the county’s current crop of officeholders, with his first term in office extending back to 1979. That year, he cut his political teeth when he was elected to the San Bernardino Valley College District Board of Trustees, the first Latino to hold that post.
A Democrat, Baca nonetheless remained boxed in by his quintessential rival, Jerry Eaves, a unionist Democrat. Baca’s political ambition led him to challenge Eaves, who served as a Rialto city councilman from 1977 until 1980, Rialto mayor from 1980 to 1984 and as a member of the California Assembly from the 66th District from 1984 to 1992. Eaves turned back each of Baca’s challenges in the 66th District in 1988 and 1990. In 1992, when Eaves elected to leave the Assembly and make a successful run for Fifth District San Bernardino County supervisor and designate his protégé, then-Rialto Mayor John Longville to succeed him in the Golden State’s lower legislative house, Baca handily defeated the well-financed Longville in the Democratic primary, going on to an easy victory in the heavily Democratic district in the November 1992 race.
Baca remained in the California Assembly for six years. In 1998, having exhausted the three terms he was eligible to serve under the state’s term limit law put in place in 1990, he was able to transition and step up into the upper legislative house, succeeding Ruben S. Ayala in the California Senate’s 32nd District.
Just a few months after Baca was elected to the state senate, California 42nd District Congressman George Brown, Jr., the venerable 33-year veteran of Congress who had represented portions of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties from just after his first election in 1962 with a two-year hiatus from January 1971 until January 1973 when he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1970, died. Baca seized the opportunity this provided and vied to replace Brown in a special election, ultimately winning. He won the seat more convincingly with 59 percent of the vote in 2000. After the 2000 census, Baca was reapportioned into California’s 43rd Congressional District, a majority-Hispanic district. Baca was easily reelected in this redrawn district in 2002 and was handily elected there throughout the remainder of the first decade of the Third Millennium.
Baca obtained berths on the House Financial Services Committee, where he was a member of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises, and the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit; as well as on the House Agriculture Committee, where he was the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Departmental Operations, Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry. As a member of Congress, he championed increasing Hispanic representation on corporate boards and in executive suites, doing so as the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He created and co-chaired the Congressional Sex and Violence in the Media Caucus. He was also an animated member of the Military/Veterans Caucus, and participated in the Congressional Diabetes Caucus, the Native American Caucus and the U.S.-Mexico Caucus.
For the first decade of the Third Millennium, Baca was, arguably and with the possible exception of Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis, the most powerful political figure in San Bernardino County.
After the 2010 United States Census, California’s congressional map underwent a significant redrafting, and most of the 43rd District was folded into the 35th District, although Baca’s residence in Rialto was placed into the 31st District. Baca opted to use that provision of federal law which requires only that a Congress member live within the state of the district he represents so that he could remain as the congressman to the lion’s share of the constituents he had been representing, declaring his candidacy in the 35th District. Baca seemed safe in the 35th District, given its heavy Democratic and Latino demographics, his incumbency and his name recognition. Michael Bloomberg, the then Republican mayor of New York City and independently wealthy owner of Bloomberg News, intent on reducing gun violence in his city, in July, August and September of 2012 pumped $3 million into the campaign of Gloria Negrete-McLeod, a Democrat who had vied against Baca in California’s June 2012 open primary campaign in the 35th District, a contest in which Baca captured what appeared to be a commanding victory with 12,619 votes or 47.17 percent, as opposed to the 9,078 votes or 33.93 percent picked up by Negrete-McLeod. Bloomberg’s stated intent was to prevent Baca, one of five so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats in Congress at that time who were opposed to gun control. Baca was caught flat-footed as the 2012 35th District race as it approached the clubhouse turn in September and went into the final stretch in October and November. The infusion of funding from Bloomberg paid for campaign consultants and advisors to guide Negrete-McLeod’s campaign together with television commercials and radio spots, mailers, flyers, handbills, signs, billboards and bumper stickers promoting her candidacy. It also ensured that the 35th Congressional District’s voters were saturated with political hit pieces attacking Baca, who was blown out of office when Negrete-McLeod tallied 61,129 votes or 54.36 percent to Baca’s 51,319 or 45.64 percent in the November 2012 general election.
Two years later, Baca attempted to stage a comeback but, having lost the magic of incumbency, he was thwarted in the June 2014 primary when he ran for Congress in the California 31st District, again as a Democrat, placing fifth overall, with 11.18 percent in a seven-candidate race behind two Republicans and two Democrats, including the eventual winner, Democrat Pete Aguilar.
Having relocated his residence to Fontana, Baca the following month, July 2014, took out candidate papers to run against the incumbent mayor there, Acquanetta Warren in the November 2014 race. Warren, who by that point had established herself as one of the most prolific fundraisers in San Bernardino County, held better than a nine to one monetary advantage over Baca and the three other candidates in the race. Baca, with 3,364 votes or 18.91 percent, was able to finish second, but was well off the pace that Warren, with 10,773 votes or 60.57 percent, had set.
Baca determinedly vied for Congress again in 2016, running in the June primary against Aguilar, hoping to be able to make his way into the November general election against the younger man and perhaps appeal to voters in a toe-to-toe slugfest in which he might make a case that his considerably greater experience and longer list of contacts in the nation’s capital would be more advantageous to the district than Aguilar’s. Well before he declared his candidacy, Baca changed parties, saying he had come to identify with the GOP in that it reflected his “core Christian” values. But though Baca, with 14,020 votes or 12.45 percent made a stronger showing in the 2016 five-man primary race than he had in 2014, Republican Paul Chabot, with 25,534 votes or 22.67 percent was able to capture second place behind Aguilar, the first-place finisher with 48,518 votes or 43.08 percent, shutting Baca, who finished third among five candidates, out of the general election.
In August 2016, Baca changed his voter registration from Republican to no party preference.
In 2018, having returned to the Democratic Party fold, he ran for Congress once more, that time not in the 31st District, as he did in 2014 and 2016, but by again seeking the 35th Congressional District post he lost to Negrete-McLeod in 2012. Vying against the incumbent Democrat, Norma Torres. Torres, with 24,632 votes or 48.6 percent trounced him, as he brought in 7,725 votes or 15.24 percent, less than half of the performance of Republican Christian Lionel Valiente’s 18,324 votes or 36.16 percent.
In the meantime, his son, Joe Baca Jr. was elected to the California State Assembly in the 62nd District in 2004, and served for one term. Two years later, he made an effort to move up the political evolutionary chain, running for State Senate, as fate would have it, against the Baca Family bete noir, Gloria Negret McLeod. McLeod prevailed in that year’s Democratic primary. Without missing a beat, Joe Jr ran for a position on the Rialto City Council in that November’s race, successfully, it turned out. Joe Jr remained on the Rialto City Council until 2020, when he successfully vied for Fifth District San Bernardino County supervisor, where he is now serving.
Two years ago, Joe Baca Sr., having relocated back to Rialto, ran for the Rialto City Council as one of five candidates, including longtime incumbent Ed Scott and appointed incumbent Karla Perez. Baca proved the top vote-getter, capturing 7,265 votes or 31.45 percent, allowing him to displace Perez.
This year, Baca took on Deborah Robertson, a Caltrans employee and a Democrat who was elected to the city council in 2000, and after three terms in that capacity, was elected mayor in 2012, gaining reelection in 2016 and 2020.
While Robertson had a seeming vice-grip on the mayoral post in Rialto, over the last five years she has engaged herself in a number of controversies. One of those included her behind-the-scenes rejection of three city managers, resulting in the departure of Rod Foster, Marcus Fuller and David Carmany.
She also suffered a serious blow to her reputation and standing as a civic leader in 2020 when it was learned that since 2012, the year she had become mayor, the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women, of which her daughter, Milele Robertson, is the president, had received over $200,000 in Community Development Block Grants distributed by the Rialto City Council. In addition, the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women, which offers what is described as job training services, had been operating out of a city-owned building at 141 S. Riverside Avenue free of charge at least since 2016. Prior to the matter becoming public, in late 2019 and early 2020, intense behind the scenes efforts were made by members of the city council and then-City Manager Rod Foster to convince Robertson to willingly abstain from any further votes relating to the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women, thus allowing the matter resolve without any publicity or scrutiny being drawn to it. Assurances were given her that the city support of the center would continue without her vote, but Robertson grew incensed at the suggestion that her votes with regard to the Bethune Center-National Council of Negro Women were improper or represented a conflict of interest. She insisted on continuing to vote on the matter, which triggered the public release of 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., followed by the finalized version of the audit. Though the finalized version of that audit 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 that a mini-scandal ensued. Only then did Robertson consent to not voting on the issue.
Despite some adverse publicity from that matter, Robertson was reelected in the November 2020 election against two opponents with 47.12 percent of the vote.
Robertson might have committed political suicide three years later when she filed three claims – considered the precursors of lawsuits – against the City of Rialto for a total of $7.35 million. Those claims maintained that she was owed $1 million based upon the police department having used its access to law enforcement data bases to look into her personal history; another estimated $350,000 based on the city having misdirected, beginning in 2003, what was an agreed-upon deferred compensation payment to her of $750 per month into a wrong account; and $6 million claim against the city, consisting of $5 million in “ongoing” damages and another $1 million in “estimate prospective” damages, based on the Rialto City Council and the Rialto city manager subjecting her to discrimination, violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, violations of the Fair Employment and Housing Act, gender discrimination, racial discrimination and elder abuse. This discrimination took place, she alleged, while she was the leader of the city acting with prejudice against her.