By Mark Gutglueck
There is a rampant rumor of Ray Casey’s imminent return as Yucaipa city manager, following a more than two year hiatus in what would have been by now his two-decade tenure with the county’s 12th largest city.
Speculation about Casey’s re-assumption of the top administrative position with the city he guided as city manager for more than 14 years and which he in large measure shaped as Yucaipa’s city engineer and public works director for five years previous to that comes as Chris Mann has been relieved of the managerial post after an experimental trial with a more aggressive pro-development policy at City Hall that the previous ruling coalition on the city council sought to implement but which never quite gelled.
Now, it appears, a significant change in the city’s political leadership has created an atmosphere in which the newly installed powers that be are seeking to placate the sleeping political giant that was awakened by the abrupt forced departure of Casey nearly 27 months ago.
Unanswered at this point is whether Casey will be willing to return after being ignominiously forced to tender his resignation in January 2023, less than three months after the Yucaipa City Council,  on October 23, 2022, as it was then composed, voted to extend his city managerial contract until the end of June 2024, raising his annual salary to $299,420 and his annual benefits and pay add-ons/perquisites to $123,481.50, making him, at $422,901.50 in total annual compensation, among California’s 25 highest paid city managers, despite Yucaipa’s ranking as the state’s 173^rd largest among the state’s 482 incorporated municipalities in terms of population.
The city council, which then included Mayor/District 1 Councilman David Avila, District 2 Councilman Greg Bogh, District 3 Councilman Bobby Duncan, District 4 Councilman Jason Beaver, and District 5 Councilman Jon Thorp, had voted unanimously to make that show of confidence in Casey just weeks before the November 2022 election in which Avila and Bogh had chosen not to compete. With the support of Duncan and Beaver, Matt Garner narrowly captured first place with 35.59 percent of the vote against three competitors in District 1, replacing Avila, and Chris Venable emerged victorious in a convincing show with 62.11 percent of the vote in a contest that featured a single competitor.
Unbeknownst to virtually everyone in the city, neither Duncan nor Beaver were pleased with Casey’s performance as city manager, despite his having overseen relatively stable operations at City Hall as Yucaipa’s top administrator for 14 years at that point and having kept the city abreast of or a step or two ahead of its infrastructure needs during the same period as well as when he was public works director prior to that.  Throughout his tenure in Yucaipa up until his last month there, Casey was highly thought of by the majority of his political masters on the city council, and for the most part, he managed to steer the city around any major areas of controversy. He rode herd on a roster of city employees who were neither overstaffed nor top-heavy with an excessive number of supervisors, department heads or assistant division directors. Educated as an undergraduate at Princeton with a degree in civil engineering, he was generally perceived as being competent, and his training and experience heightened his value to the city.
He had served on the League of California Cities’ Inland Empire Executive Committee for three years, the League of California Cities’ Housing, Community and Economic Development Committee for three years and he was the chairman of the City/County Manager Technical Advisory Committee for two years.
Casey appeared adept at toeing, or at least straddling, the fine lines between some contradictory elements of the culture in Yucaipa that had existed prior to and well beyond the city’s 1989 incorporation as the 22nd of San Bernardino County’s current 24 municipalities in which its Old West, semi-rural, agricultural and traditional features had continued to exist, side-by-side in some cases with the more modern, worldly, mercantile urban influences that had crept into place within the 28.27-square mile confines within the city limits.
On January 9, 2023, at what was the first city council meeting after the single council meeting in December 2022 when the newly composed council was installed and Garner and Venable were sworn into office, the council held a closed-door discussion in which the performance of Casey and of then-City Attorney David Snow were scheduled for discussion. During that executive session of the council, held outside the view and earshot of the public, Casey’s resignation was requested. He was informed that if he did not acquiesce to being excused from his post as city manager, Garner, Duncan and Beaver would, on February 6 at 8 p.m. or shortly thereafter, vote to remove him. Polls close at 8 p.m. and February 6 was the 90^th day after the November 8, 2022 election. A Yucaipa ordinance prevented the city council from firing a city manager for 90 days following a municipal election. It was Beaver and Duncan who did all of the talking. Garner did not speak, but Casey, reading his body language, understood that he was backing both Beaver and Duncan in their threat. Securing from the troika an assurance that if he went quietly the city would fulfill its commitment made with the October 23, 2022 vote and that he would be paid, through June 30, 2024 the salary laid out in the contract – $299,420 per year – he agreed to resign.
It remains unknown, precisely, what shortcomings Beaver and Duncan were convinced marred Casey’s management of the city. In the United States and particularly in California and even more particularly in San Bernardino County, local government officials, at least in some measure owing to the power of public employee unions, enjoy the protection of confidentiality with regard to the evaluations of their performance by the administrators and political leaders who oversee them and their employment records are similarly subject to strict confidentiality, making it extremely difficult if not absolutely impossible to ascertain anything about the quality or even substance of a city worker’s function or the quality thereof while he or she is on the job. At no time over the last two years and nearly three months have Garner, Duncan or Beaver expressed what it is about how Casey was running the city that bothered them.
What is known is that Duncan was a real estate agent. Garner was the partner in a building materials company which did over $4 billion in business per year. There was a widespread perception at the time, one which has continued to fester, that both Duncan and Garner had a stake in the city being more accommodating toward development and that Casey, who was insistent that development companies doing business in Yucaipa defray the cost of the infrastructure that accompanied their development projects, which reduced the profitability of such projects – residential, commercial and industrial – thus inhibiting the growth that Duncan and Garner wanted to facilitate and in which they had a financial stake.
Before the January 9, 2023 closed session was concluded, the council voted 5-to-0 to fire City Attorney David Snow and to appoint Steven Graham to substitute in as city attorney. Graham, who had been waiting elsewhere on the civic center grounds, materialized in the meeting room and began functioning at once, without missing a stroke, as city attorney. The council voted 3-to-2, with Beaver, Duncan and Garner prevailing and councilmen Thorp and Venable dissenting, to accept Casey’s resignation. Thereafter, the council voted 4-to-1, with Thorp dissenting, to extend a contract to Chris Mann, who was likewise present at the civic center, to serve as city manager, effective going forth in March 2023. At that time, both Mann and Graham were the city manager and city attorney, respectively, with the City of Canyon Lake in Riverside County.
Neither Beaver nor Duncan nor Garner would provide a substantive explanation of their rationale, collective or individual, for dispensing with Casey and Snow and replacing them with Mann and Graham. The closest the residents of Yucaipa were given to an explanation were vague expressions of a desire to take the city in “a new direction.” In particular, Beaver’s refusal to provide an explanation was of some frustration to the community in that he had been selected by his council colleagues, in December 2022, to serve as mayor.
It was noted by the public at large than Mann was the principal in Mann Communications, which he touted as specializing in representing developers and development interests seeking to move building proposals past the planning process and get them approved, in so doing, according to the firm’s website, making sure that “elected officials are… provided the political cover they need in order to support good projects” to “provide our clients with a wealth of knowledge and experience and a winning approach to land use entitlement.”
As the owner of Mann Communications, Mann typically took an ownership stake in the projects being pursued, which technically made him a developer himself. He publicly stated that he was “an active partner in numerous development projects in California, Nevada and Arizona.” Through his company, he had a professional relationship with residential developers Lennar, Pardee, Meritage Homes and Richmond American and builders Holland Development, Jacobsen Family Holdings, Turner Dale, Rotkin Real Estate Group, Carlton Properties and AES Corporation. Moreover, Mann had done previous work on development project involving Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, Inc., Clear Channel Outdoor, BrightSource, Preferred Business Properties Real Estate Services, Beaumont Garden Center, Passantino Andersen, Robertson’s Cement, Oakmont Industrial Group, The Golshan Group and Desmond & Louis Incorporated. Many of those companies had intentions of pursuing projects in Yucaipa.
Yucaipa residents were thrown by the ruling council majority’s embrace of Mann and his placement into a position at City Hall where he oversaw the regulation of development that was to take place in the city. Instantaneously, their suspicions were piqued. It appeared that Duncan and Garner, with their personal financial interests in the real estate development industry, were potentially in violation of California Government Code Section 1090, which prohibits a government official from participating in any discussion, decision or vote as a public official in which he or she has a financial interest. While Beaver, as a law enforcement officer who had formerly worked for the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department as a deputy before, apparently, departing that profession for three years before hiring on as an officer at the Azusa Police Department in 2017, where he promoted to police corporal in 2021, having remained at that rank ever since. Beaver’s unwillingness, indeed his outright refusal in the face of repeated requests to explain his rationale for jettisoning Casey in favor of Mann begat widespread accusations of graft involving Duncan, Garner and Beaver in which the former two were enriching themselves by participating in professionally in the shift toward an accommodation of development in the city and money or benefits in some fashion were being filtered to Beaver.
Concerned that the troika of Beaver, Duncan and Garner were utilizing Mann to transform Yucaipa into a community indistinguishable from scores or even hundreds of other cities in Southern California that are now composed, practically, of wall-to-wall houses, Yucaipa residents formed a political action committee, Save Yucaipa, which undertook a petition gathering effort to qualify placing recall questions against Beaver, Duncan and Garner on the ballot.
Penultimately, Mann acted to block the recall effort against council members who had been responsible for Casey’s departure and his hiring. He brought in a replacement, Ana Sauseda, for the city clerk who had been in place under Casey, Kimberly Metzler. Sauseda, city residents soon learned, had been city clerk in Canyon Lake when Mann was city manager there. Mann then choreographed a plan by which Beaver, Duncan and Garner voted to appropriate money to allow Sauseda to hire the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm to file a petition for a writ of mandate challenging the language cited in their recall petitions which suggested that beaver, Duncan and Garner had engaged in a violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, when they engaged in the action they did on January 9, 2023 in confronting Casey and forcing his resignation and in firing Snow without adequately specifying that action on the agenda for the January 9, 2023 city council meeting. On Sauseda’s behalf, two of the Sutton Law Firm’s attorneys, Bradley W. Hertz and Eli B. Love, alleged that no actual violation of the Brown Act had taken place and therefore the recall petition notice was impermissibly misleading the voters who were being asked to sign the recall petition.  This necessitated that Save Yucaipa and its members and supporters advocating for the recall engage themselves in the legal process and hire attorney, which distracted them from the signature gathering process. Consequently, Save Yucaipa’s 2023 effort to qualify recall elections against the three councilmen failed when they did not obtain sufficient signatures on the petitions.
Thereafter, Superior Court Judge Michael Sachs ruled, in response to legal answers prepared by some of the recall advocates to Sauseda’s lawsuit that the supposition that the Brown Act had been violated with the sackings of Casey and Snow were reasonably drawn inferences from the totality of what had occurred. Judge Sachs ruled in favor of Colleen Wang in her legal challenge of the lawsuit brought against her and the other members of Save Yucaipa based on their effort to recall the troika from office. Sachs made a finding that Wang – and by logical extension the others – were merely exercising their constitutional rights to seek redress against the government when they advocated that Beaver, Duncan and Garner be removed from office.
Meanwhile, a complaint made to the San Bernardino County Civil Grand Jury resulted in that panel concluding that “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.”
Save Yucaipa redoubled its efforts to qualify a recall question against Garner for the November 2024 election, at which point both Beaver and Duncan were scheduled to stand for reelection. Duncan, aware that a significant contingent of voters was gunning to remove him from office, opted against seeking reelection. Beaver sought reelection. Ultimately, Beaver was returned to office by the voters in the Fourth District. Voters in the First District voted overwhelmingly to remove garner from office. In the Third District, Judy Woolsey was chosen to replace Duncan. Thorp ran for reelection in November 2024 unopposed.
In December 2024, after Beaver, Woolsey and Thorp were sworn into office, the city council voted to appoint Bob Miller, a member of the Yucaipa Calimesa School District Board of Trustees to the city council to replace Garner.
While Beaver and Woolsey remained favorably disposed toward Mann, the three other members of the city council – Thorp, Venable and Miller – remain poignantly conscious of the anger and distrust in city officials that was sown with the abrupt and unexplained removal of Casey as city manager and the widespread impression that Beaver, Duncan and Garner were entangled in conflicts of interest, graft, payoffs, kickbacks and corruption of the governmental process, and that Mann was their henchman. Additionally, it was not lost on them that Graham had accompanied Mann to Yucaipa when he made his exit from Canyon Lake. On February 10, the city council met in closed session to evaluate the performance of both Mann and Graham. After adjourning out of that closed-door executive session and into its public meeting that evening, Thorp, who is now mayor, stated that the council was directing staff to put out a request for proposals with a 30-day timeframe for city council attorney candidates, indicating that Graham, who recently has begun using the last name Pacifico, is on the way out of Yucaipa.
The agenda for the council’s February 24 meeting indicated that Mann’s performance was yet undergoing review. Some assumed the council was in the process of negotiating with Mann over the terms of an extension of his contract to serve as city manager. In fact, what was taking place was a discussion between the council and Mann about what the terms of his departure from the city were to be. At issue was whether Mann was to be terminated with the council citing cause, in which case it would need confer nothing – neither a full year’s salary as stipulated under Mann’s contract if he were to be dismissed without cause or a severance package – or whether it would let him go without citing cause, in which case it would need to provide him with a full year’s salary, which at this point amounts $233,535.92. A decision was reached to not cite cause in terminating him, after which the council and Mann hashed out a separation agreement in which he is to forego his right to being paid the $233,535.92 he would otherwise be due and both he and the city are to mutually hold each other harmless with regard to his serving as city manager, his departure or the situation or circumstances with regard to both in exchange for a one-time $279,045 payout as well as the provision of one year of health benefits for Mann and his family.
His official date of departure is on March 31 The termination agreement was finalized on March 10.
Beaver, Duncan and Garner clearly misgauged the depth of respect the most civically active element of the community had for Casey and degree to which those residents identified him as the embodiment of the governance they would not simply tolerate but live with. Over most of the last two years, Thorp and Venable found themselves coexisting, and to an extent being associated, with Beaver, Duncan and Garner. While a good number of Yucaipa residents were conscious or even hyperconscious that Thorp and Venable had not participated in blasting Casey out of town, their ineffectiveness in opposing or preventing what occurred had not endured them to a good cross section of the city’s residents. Miller was unassociated with that chapter of the city’s history entirely, but his presence on the council now leaves him in a position of opportunity that he shares with Thorp and Venable. The three could virtually ensure their electability across the next one to two to three election cycles by simply undoing what Beaver, Duncan and Garner did in January 2023 with respect to Casey.
While some consider such a scenario far-fetched or outright undoable, the possibility is actually remarkably plausible. Indeed, there are considerations that make engineering Casey’s return to Yucaipa the most logical and workable solution to the dilemma of replacing Mann. Nevertheless, there are a few hitches that would need to be smoothed over or cast off before Casey will take up his old place in the administrative suite at Yucaipa City Hall.
Perhaps the most obvious problem is Beaver’s continuing incumbency. Just reelected in November 2024, he will not be turned out of office, at the earliest, until December 2028. Whether Casey is willing to live with Beaver as someone he must answer to, even if Beaver is only one of five members of the council and does not have the wherewithal to tell him what to do without first getting two more votes to join with his own, is an open question. One possible mitigating factor is that Casey’s institutional knowledge and understanding of the political and developmental lay of the land quite likely makes him aware of all of the angles and possible shots, gives him an understanding of where the graft impacting the community originates, just who it was, or what combination of entities were, influencing Duncan, Garner and Beaver when they combined forces to force him out. In this way, Casey may very well have Beaver’s number, and without two votes to fire Casey, Beaver simply cannot make Casey dance to his tune. Rather, with what Casey very likely knows now or will in time learn, he is the one who would be in a position to blow the whistle on Beaver.
Sauseda’s continuation in the position of city clerk in Yucaipa could prove untenable if Casey returns as city manager. She blindly went along with Mann’s game plan to not only prevent Yucaipa’s most politically active residents from acting upon their outrage over what had happened to Casey, she did so in a way that dragged them into court and made them expend money so they could exercise those rights. Casey may refuse to serve as city administrator if the council wants him to work with someone who foreclosed citizens’ rights when it was her assignment to ensure that citizens have access to the machinery of local governance.
Similarly, Casey may not be ready to come back to Yucaipa City Hall if another of those who Mann hired, Joe Pradetto, remains in place as the city’s director of governmental affairs and public information officer. Pradetto was acting in that capacity in 2023 when he issued statements backed by the full authority of City Hall and with the apparent backing of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which serves as the police department in Yucaipa, and the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office that the recall proponents had, individually, committed misdemeanors by making a factual misrepresentation by stating that Beaver, Duncan and Garner had violated the Brown Act by terminating Snow and forcing Casey’s resignation on January 9, 2023 without adequately agendizing that action and, by extension, had engaged in felony conspiracy in doing so.
In recent years, indeed in recent months, a number of San Bernardino County cities – San Bernardino, Barstow, Rialto and Upland – have demonstrated the difficulty of finding a suitable city manager candidate to match the specific needs of those respective communities. In the case of Yucaipa, the city and city council experienced an uncommon degree of sustained stability during the 14 years Casey was city manager. Even if the city were to find a skilled and seasoned municipal manager, the learning curve in out-of-the-way Yucaipa would likely run to years rather than months. Casey’s in-depth knowledge of the city acquired over the course of nearly two decades gives him a leg up on any potential rival for the spot.
It is not as if the now 64-year-old Casey has now gotten himself engaged in another municipal management assignment from which he would be unwilling to extract himself. Only relatively recently did he begin working with the civil engineering consulting firm Transtech.
City officials and Casey were unwilling to discuss how far along the discussion of his returning to Yucaipa has progressed.