San Bernardino Acting City Manager Rochelle Clayton this week provisionally rescinded her self-demotion to deputy city manager, as the jockeying for longevity, if not permanence, in the county seat’s two most powerful staff position is intensifying.
Clayton, who was first hired by San Bernardino to serve as deputy city manager in April and was precipitously promoted to interim/acting city manager in May, was on the verge of being promoted into the full-fledged city manager post in October. In November, however, her grip on the reins of control in the city become somewhat more tenuous. This month, two of her most abiding supporters on the city council are leaving as a consequence of the results of this year’s election cycle. Over the next several weeks, moving into early 2025, there will be grounds for suspense as events play out to determine whether Clayton, who has already picked up the support of two of the three incoming council members can secure the backing of the third and can regain the confidence of at least one of the four current members of the council to guarantee that five of the city’s eight elected leaders will entrust her with the administration of the city for the next five to ten years.
Since 2012, the city has employed six city managers, one un-actuated or would-be city manager, and five so-called temporary/stand-in/interim and/or acting city managers. The discontinuity San Bernardino has suffered in its managerial echelon, which is equal to or greater than that of any of the 23 other municipalities in San Bernardino County over the last dozen years, has been compounded with other misfortunes pertaining to its litany of senior staff members. Two of those managers sued the city, with one receiving a $750,000 settlement in addition to her severance for what she claimed was an unjust termination and the other, whose employment with the city was never actuated when he spurned the city’s employment offer, collected an $800,000 settlement when he claimed the city’s failure to keep its job offer to him confidential cost him his job as city manager in Salinas, the city where he was employed when he applied for the San Bernardino job. The city paid out nearly a million dollars more in severance packages when it parted company with three of the other city managers. Continue reading →

A second former top tier West Valley Water District official acknowledged last year that he was caught up in a bribery scheme involving entanglements that connected the district to a growing list of one-time Baldwin Park city officials, several of whom have now been indicted on political corruption charges, the U.S. Attorney’s Office disclosed last week.
Since 2022, the way in which the hiring and contracting policy at the West Valley Water District in Rialto had been manipulated as part of a quid-pro-quo arrangement to essentially pay off former Baldwin Park Councilman Richard Pacheco has been known. What has now been learned is that Robert Tafoya, who was Baldwin Park city attorney while he was simultaneously serving as the water district’s general counsel, was in on the graft. Based upon both previously and recently available information, it appears that at least one of the district’s former board members and a local state senator also took part in receiving, in one form or another substantial amounts of graft money – political grease – put up by the owner of a business that succeeded in obtaining a permit to sell marijuana in the Los Angeles County city.
Central to the circumstance is Mike Taylor, who was once seen as a pillar of both the Los Angeles County/Baldwin Park and Los Angeles County/Rialto communities.
Taylor as a young man went to work with the Baldwin Park Police Department in the 1981. Baldwin Park is a 6.9-square mile city in which the population now stands at 72,176. Over Taylor’s first three decades with the police department, he slowly but steadily promoted through the ranks, educating himself to include certificates in specialized law enforcement disciplines extending to completing courses at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia and bachelor of arts and master’s degrees in political science and then a doctorate in education in public administration. In 2014, Taylor reached the top, or very nearly the top, of his profession when he was promoted to Baldwin Park police chief. Continue reading →

The four-fifths strength Yucaipa City Council this week bypassed a prime mover in the successful effort to remove Matt Garner from the council’s ranks when its members made a [3-to-1] decision to fill Garner’s empty council post with an individual who has been less outspokenly critical of the city’s leadership.
Garner’s abbreviated political career was rooted in events that took place in the weeks and months before he was elected to and sworn into office in the Fall of 2022.
At that time, Garner was vying, along with Sherilynn Long, Mark Taylor and Erik Sahakian, to succeed then-incumbent District 1 Councilman David Avila, who had declined to run for reelection that year. Similarly, in the city’s District 2, incumbent Greg Bogh was not seeking reelection. Chris Venable and Nena Dragoo were competing to take Bogh’s place.
On October 23, 2022, 16 days before the November 8, 2022 election, the Yucaipa City Council as it was then composed – consisting of Avila, Bogh, District 3 Councilman, District 4 Councilman Justin Beaver land District 5 Councilman Jon Thorp considered a proposal to extend then-City Manager Ray Casey’s employment contract, one which guaranteed his employment with the city until June 30, 2024, granted him a 3 percent increase of his base salary to $299,420 annually, 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, which included prior work as the Yucaipa’s city engineer/public works director from 2003 until 2008 and his 14 subsequent years as city manager, taken together with his standing within the municipal management profession, justified the action. Continue reading →

Even with the intensification of the effort by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and other local law enforcement agencies clamp down on so-called swarm robberies and smash & grab robberie, in particular as the holiday shopping season is heading toward it zenith, aggressive retail theft in Redlands at its jewelry stores has remained undeterred.
While thieves since time immemorial have devised creative ways to pursue their larcenous inclination, during the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated thefts spiked. That approach to property crime has become a permanent phenomenon, with upticks when stores or shopping malls are crowded.
In a typical swarm theft, a significant number of participants – a dozen or more and, in some, multiple dozens or scores of of thieves – will enter a business and spend several minutes collecting and/or pocketing merchandise and then, upon a prearranged signal, walk out en masse without paying for any of it. By their sheer numbers, they overwhelm the clerks or store personnel and their ability to prevent what is occurring.
Smash and grab robberies likewise involve multiple participants, but usually far fewer than in a swarm theft scenario. Such actions similarly involve a rush and entail, at the very least, implied violence which often extends to actual violence, with an intentional display of destruction or mayhem. A key element is the distraction or disabling of any form of security or theft preventative measures. This can involve the brandishing of weapons – usually firearms – or the employment of chemical agents such as bear spray, pepper spray or mace against any security guards, the use of hammers or heavy metal rods in smashing glass display or containment cases, all carried out rapidly and with aggression. In effectuating such a thefts, perpetrators are not reluctant to make noise or conspicuously inflict damage on property to accentuate the intimidation effect. Continue reading →

The last three of Edin Alex Enamorado’s acolytes who emulated his physically aggressive brand of activism and followed him into jail as a result have been released from custody, after spending the previous 364 days incarcerated.
Six of his followers and Edin Enamorado had a part in two separate assaults on September 3, 2023 in Pomona, one against a security guard the activists claimed was wrongfully hassling street vendors and another against a man who exchanged angry words with them when their protest at that city’s police headquarters prevented him from being able to lodge a police report. The security guard was chemically maced, punched, kicked, beaten and knocked to the ground. The second man was challenged to a fight, threatened with death and forced to kneel on the ground and beg to be spared the beating his attackers were preparing to subject him to. On September 24, 2013, the same seven who were involved in the Pomona confrontations and an eighth member of the Enamorados were present in Victorville for a protest against the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department when the group set upon a bystander who had objected to the protesters surrounding the car in which he and his wife were riding, preventing them from leaving the area. He was punched, kicked, knocked to the ground and chemically maced.
Edin Enamorado, who most often goes by his middle name Alex, and his followers do not consider themselves to be criminals but avenging angels. Alex Enamorado has stated in numerous forums that North America rightfully belongs to the indigenous people of the continent and that the European oppressors and occupiers have usurped their land and are violating their human rights with the imposition of their capitalistic economic system. He is committed, as are those who follow his example, to standing up for La Raza. In recent years, the cause he and his followers – the Enamorados – have most often taken up is that of street vendors, whose rights and ability to make a living for themselves is being abridged unjustly and illegally, they maintain, by competing economic interests such as brick and mortar commercial establishments and restaurants who are being assisted by equally mendacious security guards, code enforcement officers, police officers, city governments, law enforcement agencies, public health officials and the like through personal confrontation, efforts to remove vendors and their vehicles from parking lots and the public right-of-way such as streets, sidewalks and parkways by enforcing county and city codes and ordinances and laws. In their efforts to protect street vendors, the Enamorados have sought them out, providing them with their phone numbers and arming them with pepper spray or chemical mace, instructing them to call for assistance if they are confronted by citizens; business owners or operators proximate to where the vendors have set up their carts, tables or vehicles; health department inspectors or officers; code enforcement officers; other authorities; or police officers. The Enamorados will then respond, singly or in multiple numbers and occasionally en masse. While the Enamorados have for the most part shown discretion and drawn the line at being merely verbally confrontational with police officers or sheriff’s deputies, they tended toward being more physical in dealing with others, intimidating health department inspectors and code enforcement officers and becoming physically confrontational with security officers employed by commercial business owners who objected to vendors operating from their parking lots or on the sidewalk or street in front of or near their places of business. Continue reading →

Texas-based McLane Company Incorporated has informed the California’s Employment Development Department that as of January 27, 2025, it will lay off 97 employees from its Rancho Cucamonga distribution facility.
McLane is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Incorporated.
Since 2000, after it acquired many of AmeriServes Food Distribution’s assets, McLane Company has been a major player in the foodservice industry, business in December 2000, when it acquired certain assets from AmeriServe Food Distribution to create McLane Foodservice.
In 2012, McLane acquired Meadowbrook Meat Company, another major foodservice distributor.
McLane Foodservice are part of the Yum! Brands corporation: McLane delivers grocery and food items to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Walgreens, Pilot Flying J, Circle K, Wawa, ExxonMobil, Target, Kmart, and Family Dollar.
It also provides grocery, food items and food service items to Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Buffalo Wild Wings, Arby’s, Del Taco, Denny’s, Jack in the Box, Hardee’s and Applebee’s.
The McLane Company’s Rancho Cucamonga distribution facility is located at 9408 Richmond Place.
In addition to the Rancho Cucamonga facility, McLane has two other distribution centers in San Bernardino County, one in Ontario and another in San Bernardino, as well as two in Riverside. None of those are to experience layoffs, and some of the workers in Rancho Cucamonga may be eligible to take on assignments at those locations.