By Mark Gutglueck
Former Caltrans engineer Raymond Wolfe’s nearly 13-year tenure as the head of San Bernardino County’s transportation agency has drawn to a close, with the board of county solons overseeing the region’s transit issues having voted to elevate Carrie Schindler as his replacement.
Since 2013, when he replaced Ty Schuiling as the executive director of what was then called San Bernardino Associated Governments, Wolfe has overseen the cooperative effort among San Bernardino County’s 22 cities, two incorporated towns and its county government to deal with the full range of transit-related challenges that apply to San Bernardino County. Those are outsize challenges: San Bernardino County, at 20,105 square miles is larger than New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island, combined.
It was believed that Wolfe was up to the technological challenge. He had a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from USC, a more down-to-earth master’s degree in in civil engineering from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona and a doctorate in civil engineering from USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering He had qualified as a registered civil engineer after leaving CalPoly, and in 1991 went to work for the California Department of Transportation as a transportation engineer. In 1998, he was promoted to the position of senior bridge engineer, and in 2001 was entrusted with the assignment of opening a new bridge design office as the Southern California region’s supervising bridge engineer. He managed the structure design implementation efforts related to accelerated bridge construction throughout Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Imperial and San Diego counties. In 2008, the California Department of Transportation, also known by its acronym Caltrans, designated him as the director of its District 8 office, overseeing both San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Upon assuming the District 8 director role, Wolfe was also delegated an ex-officio member of the San Bernardino Association of Governments board.
San Bernardino Associated Governments, known by its acronym SANBAG, was created in 1973 as San Bernardino County’s council of governments and its regional planning agency. It subsequently took on the role of the county’s transportation agency overseeing freeway construction projects, regional and local road improvements, train and bus transportation, railroad crossings, call boxes, ridesharing, congestion management efforts, freeway service patrols and emergency freeway service, and continued to serve as the county’s council of governments. When voters in 1989 passed Measure I, a half-cent sales tax override, the proceeds from which were intended to provide transportation improvements countywide, SANBAG was entrusted with the administration of that funding.
The infusion of Measure I money transformed SANBAG from existing as a joint powers authority of limited and ill-defined purpose to a dynamic and defining element of governance, with a direct and unmistakable impact on the quality, tenor and intensity of life throughout the county. A mistake made by the county’s political leadership that had successfully appealed to the voters to pass Measure I was a decision to forego allowing the proceeds from the half-cent sales tax measure to accrue and spending that money as it went, and instead borrowing against the future revenue the tax created to allow the county officials to begin work on road, freeway and other transportation projects and programs at once. Thus, from the outset, a significant portion of the income from Measure I was and continues to be used to cover the cost of financing projects rather than paying in real time for the projects themselves, meaning paying to service the debt on those projects, be it paying back the principal and interest on loans and making payments to the purchasers of bonds issued by SANBAG or its follow-on entity, SBCTA.
As an ex-officio member of the San Bernardino Association of Governments board from 2008 to 2012, Wolfe did not have a vote, but his expertise was relied upon by the other board members, in many cases to the exclusion of advice provided by SANBAG staff. There were none or at most very few on the board who were not impressed by his command of the technical issues relating to constructing roads, bridges or highways and his ability to adequately anticipate complications, costs and considerations relating to contemplated or actual transportation-related undertakings.
After Deborah Barmack departed as SANBAG’s executive director in 2011 and was replaced on a temporary basis b Schuiling, the board relatively quickly came to a consensus that even if SANBAG could conduct a nationwide search for Barmack’s permanent replacement and find someone with the skill set and temperament Wolfe displayed, it would be highly unlikely that whoever that would be would possess the in-depth knowledge Wolfe had already acquired of San Bernardino County’s existing transportation systems, including its shortcomings and problems, its maintenance and refurbishing issues, its breathtaking span and complexities and its not insignificant positive features.
County officials quickly disabused him of any intention he might have had of remaining with the California Department of Transportation and perhaps rising into a more senior position there, perhaps even to the that of the head administrator. While the State of California was had been paying him $124,869.89 in salary and roughly $75,000 in benefits while he was working as Caltrans District 8 director, the SANBAG board offered him $212,530 in annual salary, another $21,000 in pay add-ons and $74,967.81 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $308,497.81 to start. He took the position and has remained in place not quite 13 years – 12 years and 11 months. At present, his annual salary has zoomed to $384,082.29 and his total annual compensation, including that salary, pay add-ons, perquisites and benefits, now comes to $561,263.56.
In 2016, San Bernardino Associated Governments dropped the name it had gone by since its inception, but did not divest itself of any of it function. From that point forward, it dropped the SANBAG moniker, taking on the somewhat predictable title of the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, or SBCTA for short. It continued to function not only as the county’s transportation agency but as its council of governments, in which capacity it dealt with issues of common interest among the county and its cities that were not transit related.
Wolfe in his capacity as executive director and both SANBAG and SBCTA have an impressive record of accomplishment in his 12-plus year run. During that time, county officials, the state, the federal government and the SANBAG/SBCTA board entrusted to Wolfe’s guidance the expenditure of 13.598 billion dollars.
Like many other places in the world, North America, the United States and California, part of San Bernardino’s reality is that it suffers from an infrastructure deficit.
Following the end of World War II, thousands found themselves attracted to Los Angeles and greater Los Angeles every month. Soon arrivals were counted in the tens of thousands. Thereafter the population of Los Angeles and its environs was growing by hundreds of thousands every year. San Bernardino County, a combination of desert, mountains and mostly agricultural land that had been converted from what had once been desert or semi-desert, was relatively unaffected by this in the 1940s. By the late 1950s, select places in the county were feeling the effects of the spillover of the many coming to or toward Los Angeles from the east. By the 1960s, construction and then construction on an ever larger scale was occurring in the vastest county in the lower 48 states to accommodate the influx. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, San Bernardino County was the location of a development frenzy that would sustain itself for the next fifty years. Those developers – at first dozens, then scores and then hundreds – were cutting a fat hog. In order to perpetuate the profit machine they had going, they began purchasing politicians by providing them, in conjunction with others in the development industry, with political donations with which they could run their campaigns and guarantee or practically guarantee that they would remain in office. This was originally intended to make certain that the development frenzy continued apace and that no controlled growth or slow growth or no growth politicians got into office.
In time, the political donations took on a new meaning in that they were intended to buy more than simply perpetuating the building frenzy. Those donations were also being made to restrict the amount of infrastructure or off-site improvements such as streets and curbs and gutters and storm drains and sidewalks and parks and schools and the like that had to accompany the building that was ongoing, thereby increasing the profits of the developers. To be certain, it was this trend away from requiring the development industry from providing the infrastructure – or at least the fees to finance the building of that infrastructure – that had created a situation where the politicians in the late 1980s had to go to the constituents they represented to ask them to give passage to Measure I and the imposition of the half cent sales tax to pay for the transportation infrastructure that San Bernardino County lacked.
At no time did those politicians being bankrolled by the development industry ever take stock of the infrastructure deficit they and their communities were beset with and consider discontinuing the construction frenzy long enough for the infrastructure construction to be financed by Measure I tax proceeds to catch up with the ever-expanding number of vehicles that were using the overburdened road and highway systems that had been built in previous decades to accommodate far fewer vehicles. And none of the professionals at SANBAG or its later incarnation in the form of SBCTA, including the executive directors that preceded Wolfe or Wolfe himself ever display the temerity to tell their political masters on the SANBAG/SBCTA board – the elected members of the board of supervisors or mayors/city or town council members that perhaps they might want to consider discontinuing the unabated approval of subdivision after subdivision after subdivision that housing an ever-increasing population that was overwhelming the county’s roads, streets, boulevards, highways and freeways.
While no one has questioned Wolfe’s engineering know-how, his acumen in dealing with 29 political masters – a mayor or councilman from each of the county’s 22 cites and its two incorporated town and all five of the members of the board of supervisors – who serve as the SBCTA board was nowhere near as solid. Each board member has his or her own different expectations, priorities and demands. Well before Wolfe’s arrival as director, SANBAG had set its methodology for prioritizing the projects and programs that are to be paid for with the Measure I revenue along with any other state or federal funding the agency receives. An overarching principle in San Bernardino County has long been ensuring that traffic continues to flow on the regional transportation system by which the county’s residents make their several ways to their places of employment on a daily basis.
The I-10 Freeway, which was conceptually laid out to span the continent from Santa Monica to Jacksonville, Florida by the Federal Highway Administration in 1947 and came into existence in California during the Eisenhower Administration, runs east from Los Angeles through San Bernardino County to Riverside County and Palm Springs and beyond. It was the original and remains the major freeway from San Bernardino County to Los Angeles. By the mid-1960s, it was beset with standstill traffic westbound beginning with the “rush hour” between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. involving commuters heading into the megalopolis to work in the morning and similar traffic backups of eastbound traffic beginning around 4 p.m. in the late afternoon and into the early evening of weekdays. In 1969, following the redesignation of a similarly numbered east-west route, the 60 Freeway running from Los Angeles County in the west through south San Bernardino County and then into Riverside County opened, alleviating, for a time the logjam on the 10 Freeway. Nevertheless, with the explosive growth that took place in Southern California after the Second World War continuing apace throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, by the mid-1970s both freeways were overburdened.
In 2002, the western segment of the I-210 Freeway from Glendora eastward opened, creating what was essentially a third east-west freeway in San Bernardino County linking it with Los Angeles County. Again, this temporarily alleviated some of the flow off of the 10 and 60 freeways in the morning and late afternoon/early evening, but within three years all three freeways again regularly jammed up on a daily basis, Monday through Friday.
In 1992, a full two decades before Wolfe became SANBAG’s executive director, the Metrolink commuter rail system was established between Union Station in Los Angeles and the City of San Bernardino on a long existing track originally designed for heavy engines pulling freight cars. Metrolink utilizes diesel engines to pull its passenger cars and must share its track with four freight trains on a daily basis, such that at present it features 17 departures daily from Downtown San Bernardino to Union Station in Los Angeles and 17 departures daily from Union Station to San Bernardino. The most frequent departures of Metrolink from San Bernardino to Los Angeles are the ten between 3:41 am and 9:38 am, averaging one every 45 minutes and 42 seconds. The most frequent departures of Metrolink from Los Angeles to San Bernardino are the ten between 3:38 p.m. and 9:38 p.m. every afternoon and evening, one every 36 minutes. The traveling time between San Bernardino and Los Angeles on Metrolink runs between one hour and 35 minutes to one hour and 40 minutes. The traveling time between Los Angeles and San Bernardino on Metrolink runs between one hour and 43 minutes and one hour and 48 minutes.
In 2003, the first link of the light passenger rail Gold Line was established between Union Station and Sierra Madre Villa in Los Angeles County. Over $2 billion has been expended extending the Gold Line, consisting of a light rail train on two separate tracks running northerly from Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Foothill communities and then west-to-east, currently to Pomona and, conversely, back from Pomona to Union Station. The Gold Line runs with significantly greater frequency than does Metrolink, with 106 departures daily from the station at Pomona to Union Station per day from 4 a.m. to 12:50 a.m. The trains run every 9 minutes at peak usage times to every 20 minutes during late morning, mid-afternoon and later evening hours. The Gold Line offers 105 departures daily from Union Station to Pomona between 4:02 a.m. and 1:02 a.m., with trains running every 8 minutes during peak commuting hours and every 24 minutes during off-peak hours.
While at one point ridership on Metrolink neared 30 percent capacity, it dropped considerably, rarely achieving 20 percent capacity for nearly two decades At present, Metrolink trains remain nearly 95 percent empty on most trips. In some cases, as in Rancho Cucamonga, elected officials took action which discouraged ridership, such as ending free parking at the Metrolink station and imposing a per day charge for use of the parking spaces at its car lot. SANBAG/SBCTA officials, including Wolfe, failed to intervene to prevent such measures and policies, which discouraged Metrolink ridership even further.
As ridership on the Metrolink single-track system that run for the most part at a frequency of no more than one per hour at a one-way fare of $11 fro Union Station to San Bernardino diminished, commuters swarmed to utilize the Gold Line, running on dual tracks dedicated to passenger transport alone from Downtown Los Angeles to Pomona. Simultaneously, the Gold Line Construction Authority, based in Los Angeles County, as well as members of the California legislature whose districts straddle Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties such as Assemblyman Chris Holden and State Senator Henry Portantino, have pressed San Bernardino County and SANBAB/SBCTA officials to link forces with them to extend the Gold Line into San Bernardino County. SBCTA indicated it would be willing to dedicate $39 million in Measure I dollars toward the Gold Line project and did a joint application with the Los Angeles Metro Transit Agency for a State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant. With Los Angeles County transportation officials doing the heavy lifting in lobbying the various decision-makers in Sacramento, $41 million in grant money was obtained to cover the then-projected $80 million expense of extending the Gold Line on the eastern side of the Los Angeles County/San Bernadino County Line to Montclair.
Indeed, there had been grandiose talk of the Gold Line at some point, perhaps as far out as the end of the 21st Century, reaching Palm Springs. There were a series of more modest Gold Line extension goals bandied about, which included a first breakout from Los Angeles County to Montclair; to Ontario International Airport; to Fontana; to San Bernardino; to Redlands; and to Yucaipa. Some major momentum and synergy toward what seemed to be the realistic concept of having the Gold Line reach Ontario Airport by 2028 was engendered with the International Olympic Committee’s 2017 decision to stage the 2028 Summer Olympia in Los Angeles. With the $41 million grant already in the pipeline and viable prospect of the Gold Line Construction Authority working with SBCTA and other San Bernardino County officials to obtain more state and federal transportation grants and funds, a push was on to construct the extension of the Gold Line, which had reached Azusa by that point and was in the midst of being connected out to Pomona, all the way through Claremont, into Montclair and the final stretch to Ontario Airport by the summer of 2028. The hope was that the existence of the fast commute line between Ontario and Union Station, in combination with other fast transport options from Union Station to the Los Angeles Colosseum, would allow Olympic tourists flying in from around the world and other parts of the country to have two major options: to come into Los Angeles International Airport and avail themselves of the nearby hotel and hospitality industry to overnight during the 16 days that the competition is to last or to fly into Ontario and utilize the hotels and restaurants in the vicinity of Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Montclair and Chino and travel into Los Angeles via the Gold Line in the morning and back in the evening, on trains that would depart during peak usage times every six to seven minutes.
Wolfe, however, perhaps having been jaded on the potential for rail transport in San Bernardino County because of the poor ridership numbers on Metrolink, was never fully committed to the Gold Line dual track frequent-arrivals-and-departures light rail concept.
In October 2019, he convinced SBCTA’s transit subcommittee to “throw in the towel” on trying to complete the Gold Line extension into San Bernardino County and to instead have Gold Line passengers heading eastward from Los Angeles load onto another train at the Claremont Station which would run on the existing Metrolink track and that commuters originating in San Bernardino County traveling west likewise take one of the more infrequently running Metrolink trains to the Claremont or Pomona Station. In dispensing with the plan to extend the Gold Line into San Bernardino County, SBCTA had to give up on receiving the $41 million State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant.
Many consider Wolfe’s failure to follow through and push to have the Gold Line extended to Ontario Airport to be his most significant failure.
Some of his defenders and even those who are not necessarily in his camp point out that he had to function with the disadvantage of pleasing nearly 30 board members on a constant basis, such that he had to apportion money in in packaged increments to carry out transportation-related projects not only in the 24 cities and towns where 24 of SBCTA’s board members had their constituents but in more than a dozen other places in unincorporated around the county overseen by the five members of the board of supervisors, who were also SBCTA board members.
This ate up the lion’s share of the money available to the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, preventing Wolfe from having enough money to undertake the projects that would truly cut to the heart of undoing San Bernardino County’s and Southern California’s freeway gridlock problem. The extension of the Gold Line would conceivably allow for the traffic on the 10 Freeway and the 210 Freeway to be diminished, it is estimated, by as much as 12 percent and 8 percent, respectively, during peak usage hours. While perhaps not enough to unlock the traffic, combined with other relatively minor adjustments such as a doubling in carpooling or freeway widening, significant inroads on traffic congestion could be achieved on the three major east-west freeways from San Bernardino County through Los Angeles County.
To be fair, it was not just Wolfe’s inability to convince the politicians from the areas of San Bernardino County more distant and remote from the highly congested travel corridor into Los Angeles County at San Bernardino County’s southwesternmost corner that they should consider deferring the transportation projects and programs that would be of benefit to their localities which has left the gridlock on 60 Freeway, the 10 Freeway and the 210 Freeway in place. The decision by politicians a generation-and-a-half ago to borrow against the Measure I revenue rather than simply adopt a pay-as-you-go approach that has left San Bernardino County transportation officials without enough money, despite the generosity of the county’s voting taxpayers in approving the original Measure I in 1989 and its extension until 2040 in 2004, to cover the cost of all of the transportation projects they would like to see completed.
While the fluctuation of interest rates on a constant basis and the rate of inflation both have a bearing on the relative advisability of borrowing money to undertake infrastructure improvements and massive scale public projects, such that defraying the cost of such undertakings over the course of one or two generations of taxpayers might reduce the actual cost adjusted for inflation if rampant inflation indeed ensues the initiation of those undertakings, in general terms, using financing boosts the price of a project to 250 percent to 300 percent of the original cost in terms of actual dollars. In this way, over the course of the nearly 36 years since the passage of Measure I, more than 62 percent of the Measure I proceeds have gone toward financing rather than actual projects.
In his time as executive director, Wolfe has done nothing to alter that.
In July 12, 2017, the SBCTA board, then headed by Board Chairman Alan Wapner, a member of the Ontario City Council, to proceed with a much-needed widening of the 1-10 Freeway from the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County Line, doing so by an impressive four lanes, two going east and two going west. One catch, however, was that the four lanes were to be toll lanes, ones that could not be used by members of the traveling public unless they paid what was termed a “FasTrak” toll.
To many who heard about what was being contemplated ahead of time and importuned the board collectively or some of its board members individually before the vote and to many who learned about the toll project after it was approved, the entire concept was problematic. For one thing, the toll roads themselves were being constructed in the middle of the freeway, which had been paid for with federal, state and local taxpayer funds some six to seven decades previously when the 10-Freeway was constructed during the Eisenhower Administration. In addition, the county’s taxpayers had in 1989 voted to approve, and in 2004 voted to extend, the Measure I taxing authority. Throughout the entire time, the county’s taxpayers, including those who made daily or less regular commutes on the I-10 Freeway, had paid the Measure I tax. Furthermore, SBCTA, like SANBAG before it, was a recipient of state and federal grants, money that had originated with American taxpayers all across the fruited plain, including Californians and ones in San Bernardino County. What’s more, California motorists who purchase gasoline in the state are subject to a gas tax that at 68.1 cents per gallon is the highest in the United States, making gasoline purchased in the Golden State more expense than fuel purchased elsewhere in the country. Now, to use the toll lanes on their drive on the 10 Freeway through Montclair and Upland and Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana would need to pay an additional fee – a tax. The toll was not and is not, they reasoned, a mere double tax, which is illegal. Nor was it a mere triple tax, they asserted, which is doubly illegal, nor even a quadruple tax, which is triply illegal. It was a quintuple tax, which is quadruply illegal, they maintained. Initially, when the project broke ground in 2020, SBCTA said the work was to be completed by October or November 2023. That estimate penultimately was moved to April 2024 some two years later. Work began on the widening/toll lanes in 2020, which resulted in lanes being blocked and slowdowns, which the traveling public tolerated, as the vast majority of people assumed that the project would go on for six or seven months and conclude with an extra lane in either direction, which would facilitate the flow of traffic thereafter. Others observed that actually four lanes were being created, and this was seen in a most positive light. Few recognized at that time that when the additions were completed, the “freeway” or at least the two lanes being added to it in either direction were not “free.” Moreover, the work dragged on for much longer than four months, through and beyond the 2022 election cycle. In this way, what was coming into being did not seem to have any appreciable impact on the election results. The project moved on and went into 2023 and then dragged into 2024. In late 2023, it was announced that the project was to miss its April 2024 completion date because of inadequacies with the beams that had been placed into the support beams for the Vineyard Avenue bridge.
In August 2024, the toll lanes opened, at which point upwards of 70 percent of those who traveled on the freeway on a daily basis throughout the workweek realized that the modernized and widened freeway that they had envisaged while they were patiently putting up with lane closures and delays over the previous four years of their life had not come into being as they had anticipated. The more well-fixed among them, somewhat grudgingly, paid the fees to be able to use the newly constructed lanes. Most – the vast majority – did not, either on general principle that they were not going to pay to use a “freeway” they were already paying for and had already paid for and were going to continue to pay for or simply because they did not have the money to expend on tolls.
While San Bernardino County Transportation Authority officials had confidently declared that the new FasTrak lanes were going to relieve congestion and get people to their destinations faster, that change was only applicable for those who could afford to pay for it. Others, for tolerating four years of inconvenience and paying more at the checkstand every time they made a purchase within the county, got nothing. Residents of the county, having learned by traveling in close proximity to the first phase of the FasTrak project construction and now seeing that what it had delivered up were four toll lanes, found them faced with the sobering reality that they would need to endure the same delays a bit further east on the 10 Freeway beginning in another two years when Phase Two is to add another 11.1 miles of two toll lanes eastbound and two toll lanes westbound from Ontario to Pepper Avenue in Colton beginning with construction in mid-to-late 2025, to be followed by Phase Three running 12 miles from Pepper Avenue to Ford Street in Redlands beginning in 2029 or thereabouts.
There was concern among some members of the SBCTA board that the voters might hold those of them who had supported the toll lane project with their July 12, 2017 vote. In the November 2024 election however, the only officeholder running who had taken part in that vote was Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa, who had voted against proceeding with constructing the toll lanes.
Indeed, those who had voted in favor of the project on July 12, 2017 were Ontario Councilman Alan Wapner, as the board’s chairman at that time, along with Apple Valley Councilman Curt Emick, Colton Mayor Frank Navarro, Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, Grand Terrace Mayor Darcy McNaboe, Highland Coucilman Larry McCallon, Montclair City Councilman John Dutrey, Needles Mayor Edward Paget, Rancho Cucamonga Mayor Lloyd Dennis Michael, Redlands City Councilman Jon Harrison, San Bernardino Mayor Carey Davis, Upland Mayor Debbie Stone, Yucaipa Councilman David Avila, Yucca Valley Councilman Rick Denison, First District County Supervisor Robert Lovingood and Third District County Supervisor James Ramos.
Of those, Wapner, Emick, Navarro, Warren, McCallon, Dutrey, Michael and Dennison remained in office. Casting votes in opposition were Ulloa and Third District County Supervisor Josie Gonzales. Not present for the vote were Adelanto Mayor Rich Kerr, Barstow Mayor Julie McIntyre, Big Bear Lake Mayor Bill Jahn, Chino Hills Councilman Ed Graham, Hesperia Councilman Bill Holland, Loma Linda Councilman Rhodes “Dusty” Rigsby, Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson, Twentynine Palms Councilman Joel Klink, Victorville Councilman Jim Kennedy, Second District County Supervisor Janice Rutherford and Fourth District County Supervisor Curt Hagman.
McNaboe, McIntyre, Jahn, Avila, Paget and Lovingood were no longer in office and Ramos had moved on to the California Assembly. Circumstances suggest that McNaboe’s, Stone’s and Davis’s support for the project had something to do with their political demises in 2022, 2020 and 2018, respectively.
In 2026, Emick, Warren, McCallon, Wapner, Michael, Dennison are due to run for reelection as are Navarro and Dutrey, who are no longer councilmen in their cities but rather mayor.
Wolfe making his exit before those reelection efforts have to take place might make the road to remaining in office easier for Emick, Navarro, Warren, McCallon, Dutrey Wapner, Michael and Dennison if they can point to Wolfe as having been responsible for the decision to construct toll lanes and note that he is no longer in place.
There is a suggestion though no strong indication that such political considerations had something to do with Wolfe reportedly informing Chino Hills City Councilman Ray Marquez, who had been elected SBCTA board chairman in June 2024, and Yucca Valley Councilman Rick Dennison, who had been named SBCTA board vice-chairman at the same time, that he was contemplating retiring in July 2025, at which point he will be maxed out under the San Bernardino County Employees Retirement System, meaning he will be eligible to draw 100 percent of his highest annual salary while employed with SBCTA, which at that time will be $395,604.76.
Marquez told the Sentinel that he and others on the board “tried to talk him out of leaving,” but to no avail.
Dutrey, a longtime member of the SBCTA board, indicated that Wolfe was “retiring under good terms” and that “as executive director, Ray rejuvenated SBCTA with many significant surface and transportation projects to enhance transportation in San Bernardino County. His successor has very large shoes to fill.” Dutrey said that “a great majority of SBCTA board members agree with my assessment of Ray’s leadership.”
Marquez said that SBCTA would be able to “carry on much like we did before.” He indicated that the board had been eyeing Schindler as Wolfe’s eventual replacement and she thus had been preparing all along for such a transition. Like Wolfe, Marquez noted, Schindler is an engineer and had been promoted to Wolfe’s second in command. “She has handled several departments as his assistant and gets along well with staff,” Marquez said “We think this will allow her to move into the position immediately,”
There was, however, some indication of tension on the board with regard to Wolfe’s departure. Before the public portion of this week’s meeting began in earnest, the board went into a closed session outside the scrutiny and earshot of the public. One of the items set for discussion on the closed session agenda pertained to “public employee appointment” of the “executive director.” Before the closed session concluded, Redlands’ representative, Mayor Mario Saucedo, abruptly walked out of the private meeting.
According to a source with extensive knowledge of the authority’s operations, “There had been rumbling for a long time that Carrie [Schindler] was being groomed for the job but the timing was very peculiar, especially with Saucedo leaving the closed session and then Chairman Marquez giving the closed session report rather than it being given by the general counsel for the authority, and the appointment not being an item in the open session. This gives the impression or seems to point to the situation being forced by something that may be time dependent.”
Word is that a federal audit is in the offing or already under way and the Department of Governmental Efficiency might have locked on to certain aspects of the authority’s operations or some of its programs.
During the meeting, Steve Rogers used the three minutes of time allotted to members of the public to comment on items before the board to offer a statement.
Rogers, himself a certified civil engineer who has previously worked for the cities of Ontario and Redlands, said, that under the guidance provided by Wolfe, SBCTA went forth with some dazzling projects that were impressive from an engineering stanpoint but which were not matched to the needs of the county’s residents.
Rogers referenced “federally funded projects affecting .. Redlands [including] [the] Redlands Arrow Passenger Rail [project] and the I-10 [Freeway] widening which was originally an HOV [high occupancy vehicle] project but it was expanded to be a toll lane project. Both of those projects [were originally] majority federally funded.” He said that with regard to the train project, “That [federal funding] is going to continue because basically there are not very many revenues I can see coming in because there’s not a lot of ridership on that.”
Rogers said, “Originally, when I started coming to these meetings, the board was called SANBAG and now you are SBCTA.. Originally it was a transportation planning agency and that was your role. That’s where I really believe the people have been failed, in that role as a transportation agency. The planning of these projects, both of these projects were not planned properly. Sure, the transportation part of it is what engineers love to do. As far as building, the agency, the construction authority engineers, love to build things, but the planning is what the people need, and we didn’t get it on both of those projects. When I say that, it’s basically because on the train project, the train was approved by SBCTA before the city had our transit villages approved.”
The Transit Villages concept was a plan by the City of Redlands to allow high-rise and dense residential projects intermixed with commercial uses to be constructed near the city’s five train stations.
“So that was the cart before the horse and now it’s a mess,” Rogers said.
With regard to the I-10 lane addition project, Rogers said, SBCTA allowed the project to grow into a far more expensive project than what was originally conceived, such that it transmogrified from a $600 million Caltrans project running from Milliken Avenue in Ontario to Eureka Street in Redlands to a $1.9 billion expenditure for the first phase of a different project. Meanwhile, Rogers said, SBCTA never brought the environmental clearance documents for the revamped project forward while relying on the original Caltrans-led approval of the less intense original project, which he said violated both the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
“On the I-10 project, it was supposed to be originally an HOV project between Redlands and Ontario. Then scope creep [the growth of the project well beyond what it was originally planned to be] occurred and Phase Two of the project hadn’t even started,” Rogers said.
Upon returning from closed session, Marquez said, “I know we’ve all been waiting for this. We basically chose unanimously a new executive director for this organization. It was very difficult. We had two excellent candidates and it was very difficult, like I said, but unanimously we chose Carrie Schindler. I’m so emotional over this because it was a difficult thing to do and I just want to say, ‘Congratulations, Carrie.”
The individual competing with Schindler for the post, the Sentinel has learned, was Otis Greer, the authority’s director of legislative and public affairs.
It appears that at this time, it is Wolfe’s decision – and his decision alone – to leave, effectively and officially in July. Having accomplished much in his career with SBCTA/SANBAG and before that with Caltrans, it is his prerogative to go at a time and place of his choosing. While it is indisputable that he had impressive technical and engineering skills which were brought to bear in creating myriad transportation projects and facilities throughout San Bernardino County, the jury is still out, many believe, as to whether he had the political skills and/or a forceful enough personality to control the worst inclinations of his 29 political masters while he was in the position of having to answer to those 29 political masters in order to keep his lucrative job. Some see manifestations of this in his failure, in the more than dozen years he headed SBCTA/SANBAG, to succeed in extending the Gold Line first to Montclair and ultimately to Ontario International Airport. Another failure many see is his unwillingness to get his 29 political masters to bite the bullet and undo SANBAG’s original sin of borrowing against future Measure I revenue to undertake projects by paying off once and for all SANBAG’s accumulated debt and going to a pay-as-you-go strategy in which taxpayer dollars are not squandered on bonded indebtedness, paying off loans and financing costs. A third perceived shortcoming of the Wolfe era is the construction of the toll lanes on the I-10, on taxpayer purchased right-of-way and, at least partially, using multiple layers of taxpayer funds – including Measure I proceeds and gas tax – to pay for them, triggering accusations, at least, of triple or quadruple or quituple taxation without any benefit to those bearing the tax. Succinctly put: SANBAG/SBCTA during Mr. Wolfe’s reign had undertaken and completed many worthwhile road, highway and transit projects and programs. Many of those are and were of benefit and convenience to isolated pockets of the county and those residents living there. At the same time, completing those localized projects entailed expenses that deprived SANBAG/SBCTA of the funding to take on and complete some major projects in the southwestern corner of the 20,105-square mile county that would have alleviated the gridlock that some 200,000 commuters must put up with and will continue to put up with every workday.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism leveled at Wolfe was that he failed during his tenure to effectively alleviate the gridlock on the 210, I-10 and 60 freeways and that he needlessly rejected a pathway to achieving federal and state grants that would have provided funding to have the near-capacity-use Gold Line in place by the 2028 Olympiad.