In a surprise move, the Yucaipa City Council has apparently signaled that it now prepared to extend City Attorney Steven Graham’s tenure as the city’s legal advisor.
For months, a sizable segment of the Yucaipa community has been saying that Graham, who now uses the last name of Pacifico, is to be a logical casualty in the purge of Yucaipa city employees who either arrived during or prospered under the Chris Mann administration in the city.
In Graham’s/Pacifico’s case, he is the city official most visibly connected and closely associated with Mann.
Graham/Pacifico worked with Mann at Canyon Lake, where Mann was the city manager prior to his hiring by Yucaipa in January 2023. It has been widely assumed and stated publicly that Graham/Pacifico was hired in Yucaipa upon Mann’s advent and that Mann made his acceptance of the Yucaipa city manager’s position conditional upon the city council agreeing to accept the hiring of multiple personnel he was handpicking to serve with him. The same night – January 9, 2023 – that the three-member council majority of Justin Beaver, Bobby Duncan and Matt Garner forcibly persuaded former City Manager Ray Casey to resign and then moved to approve the hiring of Mann, it also voted to fire then-City Attorney David Snow, who had served as city attorney with Casey since 2012.
Others hired into key city posts by Mann’s edict Ana Sauseda, who had been city clerk in Canyon Lake and then came to Yucaipa to serve in that role, and Joe Pradetto, one of Mann’s associates who was given the position of director of governmental affairs and public information officer after he came to Yucaipa.
One difficulty it did not previously seem that Graham/Pacifico would be able to over come was the role he played in Mann’s formulation of a strategy to stymie a grass roots effort in Yucaipa to question, protest and perhaps even countermand the city council decision to get rid of Casey and replace him with Mann. In reaction to the abrupt forced exit of Casey, 194 Yucaipa residents in the districts represented by Beaver, Duncan and Garner filed paperwork with Sauseda’s office declaring their intent to circulate petitions to qualify ballot initiatives asking whether each of those three should be removed from office. Mann then quarterbacked a set of plays that included hiring, at taxpayer expense the attorneys Bradley W. Hertz and Eli B. Love of the Los Angeles based Sutton Law Firm’ to represent Sauseda in making a legal challenge of the recall effort by asserting that one of the grounds cited for seeking to removed Beaver, Duncan and Garner – violations of the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law – was untrue. In responding to Sauseda’s suit, some of the recall proponents were able to establish the accuracy of the Brown Act violation claim and that they had a constitutional right to proceed with the recall. Nevertheless, the legal challenge threw the recall effort into disarray, and the original attempts to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner failed.
Virtually all 194 recall proponents came to bitterly resent the tactic of having the city clerk file a lawsuit against them to desist in their effort to redress what they felt was a miscarriage of governance in their city. There is an even larger contingent of those recall proponents’ supporters who feel the same way. Many feel that Graham/Pacifico failed them when, as city attorney, he stood by while Beaver, Duncan, Garner, Mann. Sauseda, Hertz and Love trod on their rights.
Ultimately a recall vote against Garner was put on the ballot, and the voters in his district overwhelmingly voted to remove him from office in the November 1994 election. Duncan, sensing the ire of voters in his district over the Casey sacking and Mann hiring, decided against running for reelection in the same contest. Of the members on the council that was in place following the 2024 election, Beaver was the only member of the ruling majority that had cashiered Casey in January 2023. Remaining on the council were Jon Thorp and Chris Venable, who had been opposed to getting rid of Casey. In December 2024, Bob Miller was appointed by the four members of the council to replace Garner.
Thorp, Venable and Miller by January were moving full speed ahead toward relieving Mann as city manager. They sought to do this by holding performance reviews of the city manager in closed sessions, which enabled them to openly discuss with Beaver and Judith Woolsey, who had been elected to replace Duncan, the advisability of having the city part with Mann and who might replace him. At its February 24 meeting, the council during one such closed session performance evaluation, debated whether it should fire Mann, citing cause for doings so, and therefore avoiding the contractual obligation it had with him to confer on him a severance payment equal to his annual salary – $233,535.92 – if it did not give a reason for simply firing him without an explanation. Ultimately, roughly a week later, it was announced that the troika of Thorp, Venable and Miller had decided to provide Mann with a payout of $279,045 and provide him and his family with one year of health benefits in exchange for his making a clean departure from the city.
Two weeks prior to the February 24 meeting, on February 10, the city council had met in closed session to evaluate the performance of both Mann and Graham/Pacifico. After adjourning out of that closed-door executive session and into its public meeting that evening, Thorp, as the 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. Graham had not termination clause in his contract that would require the city to provide him with a severance.
Thorp’s announcement on February 10 was taken as an indication that Graham was on his way out of Yucaipa.
On Monday night, April 14, however, the city council in closed session voted to extend the city’s contract with Graham Pacifico to provide attorney services for at least another year. That vote was unanimous. The council will take up at its April 28 meeting the financial terms in that 12-month arrangement, meaning whether he is to be provided with a strict hourly rate for billable hours or is to be paid a capped yearly salary for his work on behalf of the city.