By Mark Gutglueck
San Bernardino City Clerk Genoveva Rocha is departing San Bernardino after five years with the county seat, having achieved, it is said, the municipal employment equivalent of winning the lottery by landing the city clerk’s post in Vernon.
Within the next ten years, it is anticipated, Rocha will be able to accumulate personal wealth in excess of $5 million, merely by facilitating the traditionally corrupt governmental operations in the city where she is now employed.
Over the past five years, Rocha has survived in a political/governmental atmosphere in which adhering to the dictates of the city’s often conflicted leadership has allowed her to keep her job which provides her with a $145,761.48 salary, $14,346 in perks and pay add-ons and $65,577.87 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $225,685.35. In that role, she had to navigate a path between warring factions and shifting alliances among the city council members as well as those occupying the position of city manager and city attorney. She had been promoted to city clerk during the John Valdivia mayoral administration, in the middle of one of the more notably corrupt periods in the history of a city at the forefront of what is widely considered to be among the most politically corrupt counties in the United States, one rife with pay-to-play politics in which unquestioning service to benefit the most generous of the donors to the campaign funds of the elected leadership is considered a requirement to remain employed.
Vernon, which is located not in San Bernardino County but in Los Angeles County, is one of the few cities in the United States which is demonstrably more corrupt than the legion of the most outrageously graft-ridden municipalities in San Bernardino County such as San Bernardino, Upland, Ontario, Adelanto, Fontana, Colton and Hesperia.
Co-founded in 1905 by John Leonis as a railroad hub/“exclusively industrial” city roughly five miles south of downtown Los Angeles despite having a negligible population base, the city was dominated for more than four decades by Leonis, who served on the city council for 45 years. In the late 1940s, John Leonis was indicted by the Los Angeles County District Attorney on charges that he was a political boss engaged in voter fraud by stuffing ballot boxes to keep himself and his cronies in power and that he did not actually live in Vernon but rather in a magnificent mansion in Hancock Park. Leonis’s fortune, which at that time exceeded $8 million allowed him to legally outmaneuver the district attorney’s office, which dropped the charges.
As Leonis, who died in 1953, was stepping down as the dominant figure controlling Vernon, his grandson, Leonis Mahlberg rose to fill his role, serving for a total of 53 years on the Vernon City Council and as mayor.
A huge element in the formula that allowed the Leonis family to take control of the 5.14-square-mile city was its diminutive population. While the city is host to some 1,800 separate business operations where on typical weekdays over 40,000 workers come into the city to work during three shifts, at no point in its history did the city have more than 212 residents.
This was deftly exploited by the Leonis family, which utilized a host of means, including favors to those residents such as free rent or straight-out payments to them to essentially buy a sufficient number of votes to maintain control over the city council. Mahlberg owned virtually all of the 31 dwelling units in the city. His official residence since 1967 had been in an apartment atop a commercial building he owned on Leonis Boulevard. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, however, he was actually living in the same Hancock Park mansion his grandfather lived in.
Governance in Vernon has traditionally been and remains a self-contained and self perpetuating unit. Most of the city’s voters are city employees or city employee relatives who have been vetted and selected to live in homes provided to them by the city fee of charge or rented to them for a nominal fee.
Between 1980 and 2006, the city held no contested or realistically competitive elections. In 2006, when both the state and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office initiated separate but related investigations in earnest, only one of the five members of the city council then in office had been put in office by a vote of the city’s residents, with the other four have been appointed to their posts by city employees.
Those investigations led to Mahlberg, his wife and his son being charged with voter fraud and the misdirection of public funds. Prosecutors also indicted Bruce Malkenhorst, who led Vernon for nearly three decades as Mahlberg’s city manager, during which time he was California’s highest-paid government official, making $911,000 in his final year as city manager, and then retired in 2005 to become the Golden State’s highest-paid public pensioner, receiving just over $500,000 a year.
Thereafter, Eric Fresch, who had been with the city since 1982, replaced Mahlberg, and was provided with a total annual compensation of just over $1 million. He resigned as city manager shortly thereafter, but was kept on as an administrative consultant to the city’s light and power department, in which capacity he was paid $525 an hour, invoicing the city $5.4 million in the six-year-and-four-month window from July 2005 to November 2011. When the state sought to audit Vernon’s books, Fresch grew uncooperative, choosing to end his relationship with the city and move into retirement.
After Freshh’s departure as city manager, Mahlberg had arranged for Malkenhorst’s son, Bruce Malkenhorst Jr, to move into his father’s former position as Vernon city manager. Malkenhorst Sr was charged with misappropriation of public funds. Malkenhorst Jr left the city manager’s post in 2008 without being prosecuted. He was succeeded by Donal O’Callaghan, who remained as city manager until 2010. While Bruce Malkenhorst Jr and Fresch avoided being prosecuted, Mahlberg, his wife, son and both Malkenhorst Sr and O’Callaghan, who cut his wife in on the ongoing graft by hiring her as a city contractor, were prosecuted and convicted.
As a consequence of the revelations that came in the wake of the audits, investigations and prosecutions, the California Legislature, led by then-Assembly Speaker John Pérez, having taken note of the depth of the abuse of public authority in Vernon, which included city council members who had voted to give themselves yearly stipends of close to $70,000 for attending meetings that took place once to twice a month, began work on a bill, AB 46, to unincorporate cities with fewer than 150 residents. The bill was applicable to only one city in California: Vernon, with its 98 citizens.
In 2011, AB 46 was passed overwhelmingly by the Assembly. It then went to the California Senate. Before the Senate took the matter up in earnest, however, Vernon and state officials arrived at a “compromise,” wherein city officials agreed to a series of reforms, including placing a cap on the stipends paid to the council members and an effort to increase the city’s population to a point where it would be practically impossible for one entity to commandeer political control over the city. Pérez and the rest of the legislature relented in the de-incorporation initiative, conditional upon the city agreeing to construct enough housing to accommodate up to 9,000 residents, most of it to be affordable to those with low, very low and extremely low income. That housing was to be built along a strip of land running along the city’s western border, where contamination issues were not as pronounced as elsewhere in the city. The stated intention was to boost the number of residents in the city, so that someone like the Mahmberg or members of the Leonis family, which controlled virtually all of the 31 dwelling units in the city would not be able to manipulate the city’s electorate into doing their, and only their bidding. The difficulty, of course was that the level of contamination in the city as a consequence of the concentration of industrial operations there made creating a residential subdivision within the city limits an extremely problematic proposition. Nevertheless, a commitment was made to construct some 824 dwelling units in the city’s westernmost extension on property that had been the least impacted by the leaking of petroleum, solvents, pesticides, chemicals and other toxic substances from heavy industrial operations that had been operating there the better part of a century. In addition city officials agreed to have Vernon set aside $60 million to fund community projects in the small, working-class cities and communities surrounding Vernon, such as Bell, Maywood, Huntington Park and the Nevin, Hobart, Central Alameda and Butte Street Junction districts of Los Angeles.
Indeed, a 45 unit affordable apartment project was completed in 2015, and the city’s population grew from the 112 residents counted in 2010 to 222 in 2020.
This staved off the de-incorporation legislation and Vernon City Hall remained intact. The corporate entities which have a huge vested interest in preventing the imposition of environmental regulations that would require the companies that have profited for decades by cavalier disposal of the chemicals, waste and byproducts of manufacturing and refinement processes undertake remediation efforts that would entail the collective expenditure of hundreds of millions or conceivably billions of dollars have dodged that requirement. Those corporations, or at least the corporate officers of a handful of them, have stayed, essentially, in control, to the detriment of the people who actually live in Vernon.
No further residential development has taken place since 2015 and, in fact, the current population in the city has since dwindled to 207.
The city remains dogged by the same standard of control through governance that had existed under the Leonis family as those with extremely lucrative industrial operations had an interest in compromising the regulatory authority of government to allow their companies to, essentially, contaminate the local environment at virtual will, unfettered by the conflicting interests of an activated citizenry.
Consequently, if in coming in to replace Deborah Harrington as Vernon’s interim city clerk who is now standing in for recently departed City Clerk Lisa Pope, Rocha is willing to play ball with City Manager Brian Saeki, Mayor Judith Merlo and council members Melissa Ybarra, Leticia Lopez, Jesus Rivera and Crystal Larios, she stands to make a good deal more than, perhaps even as much as five times what, her official salary is, both in terms of money that can come to her in various forms as well as being cut in on stock or stock options in the publicly traded companies that have operations in Vernon.
City officials in Vernon’s most recent draft of its housing element plan has declared that it was committed to, as of 2019, to build a total of nine new residential units between 2021 and 2029, consisting of two units for individuals or families with an extremely low income, three units for individuals or families of very low income and four units for individuals or families with low income. The same document acknowledges that the city does not intend to construct or allow to be constructed any units beyond that, including homes or units suitable for those with moderate or above moderate income, primarily because no one willing to pay that kind of money would be willing to live in an environment as contaminated as Vernon is.
According to that report, close to one third of the businesses located in Vernon – something like 600 of approximately 1,800 – handle or store hazardous chemicals, mostly in large quantities. City records indicate 38 or more of those operations involve high volumes of extremely toxic chemicals regulated by the state, such as ammonia and chlorine gas, whose accidental release could result in an environmental disaster of alarming proportion, impacting a significant geographical area.
As a transportation hub throughout much of its 120 year existence, Vernon hosts very high levels of truck and rail traffic. Much of the city is crisscrossed by 130 miles of railroad tracks and much of that has been contaminated by herbicides and spilled chemicals. Vernon is also laced with underground pipelines, many of which carry potentially explosive materials, according to a city report. A mishap involving those pipelines could likewise create a substantial environmental crisis.
Three facilities within Vernon have been identified as hazardous materials release sites by the California Department of Toxic Substance Control, Another 25 sites have been found to have had leaking underground storage tanks. A city map shows dozens of other locations with real or suspected soil contamination issues.
In a report to the state of California in 2022, Vernon city officials openly stated that “serious environmental conditions [extending to] hazardous materials storage and processing, background contamination, noxious odors, noise pollution, and truck and railroad traffic generated by the city’s pervasive industrial land uses [has] render[ed] the majority of sites throughout Vernon unsuitable for residential development.”
According to the South Coast Air Quality Management District an individual residing in Vernon runs a 40 percent greater risk of contracting cancer than is the case on average elsewhere in Southern California.
The reality is that those who live in Vernon are no closer to controlling their government or their fate than the residents who have lived there throughout its 120-year history.
There is little prospect for reform there. The police department, which consists of 50 uniformed and sworn patrolmen and detectives, receive salaries and benefits which well exceed the average pay and benefits provided to police officers elsewhere in the state. The ratio of those officers to the population they patrol – 1 to 4.14 – is the most lopsided in the entire State of California. The department is headed by a police chief who is paid $576,325.94 in salary and benefits annually and a police captain who is provided with $525,502.40 in salary and benefits annually. In the past, the police department, which is restrained by certain constitutional restrictions from trampling on individual citizens’ rights as they related to participatory democracy, has coordinated with private investigators hired by some of the corporations located within the city who are not subject to such limitations, in monitoring the activity of the more vociferous and politically ambitious residents of Vernon to ensure that a reformist faction or controlling majority does not take root on the city council.
By taking her place as a key member of governmental operations in Vernon, Rocha is on a trajectory to do very well for herself. As one resident of the city observed, if she “plays her cards right,” she will receive at least $315,804.34 in total annual compensation, subject to a 3 percent cost of living adjustment every year, consisting of $217,034.67 in salary, another $5,665.20 in perquisites and pay add-ons and $93,104.47 benefits currently.
By following the dictates of those who want to maintain the longstanding status quo at Vernon City Hall and within the regulatory atmosphere in Vernon, Rocha can expect to be cut in on a piece of the action through the stock futures and options that will be offered to her, allowing her to make investments, after the fact and depending on how well companies operating in Vernon do over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five or thirty years, which will fatten her portfolio into the tens of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, in San Bernardino, where city clerks are expected to do as they are instructed by the city manager and a lesser extent by the mayor, the city council has chosen Telicia Lopez, who was serving as deputy city clerk under Rocha, to serve as city clerk until her replacement is hired.