Upland city officials ran into a buzzsaw this week when a wide cross section of city residents revolted at an effort to benefit one of the city council’s most generous political donors by close to $300,000 per year through the transfer of billing on residents’ utility payments to the county tax roll.
The matter is fraught with a multitude of political and legal issues, the latter of which have both civil and criminal implications.
What has emerged is the remarkable degree to which the mayor and four members of the city council either disregarded or were entirely unaware of specific restrictions pertaining to not just the revamping of the city’s billing methodology, but conflicts of interest involving the primary architect of the change. Perhaps the most startling revelation was that the city for an unknown period of time has – essentially in secret – been billing residents for a “service” City Hall made a binding agreement to discontinue charging for more than two decades ago.
Tied up in the controversy is the relationship between City Hall and the city’s franchised trash hauler, Burrtec Industries.
The marriage of Upland and Burrtec is a storied one.
Ed Burr, with a single trash truck, went into the trash hauling business in 1954. Over the next 25 years, he, with the assistance of others and his family and a lot of hard and honest work, built the company into a competitive business. A major component of that success was Burr’s willingness to forego an obscene profit by eschewing cutthroat business practices or making payoffs to politicians, instead striving to provide a first rate, affordable service which built the company’s positive reputation. By the 1990s, with its corporate child, EDCO, Burrtec was among the three largest trash haulers in San Bernardino County and had a presence in other counties, as well. In 1996, when the City of Colton dissolved its municipal sanitation division and put out to bid the city’s trash hauling franchise, Burrtec won the competition hands down in a process that was exacting and on the up-and-up. One of the competing companies, Taormina Industries, however, after the fact, through bribes handed out to Mayor George Fulp, Donald Sanders and Abe Beltran, had the decision to award the contract to Burrtec rescinded. In a stunning reversal, Taormina was given the contract that Burrtec had won, fair and square. At that point, something snapped. Burrtec and its ownership, which had previously played by the rules and centered its existence and success on hard work and fair play without recourse to husbanding double-covalent-bonded political connections cultivated through hefty political donations, virtually overnight became one of the most generous political donors in the county. Moreover, it jumped into San Bernardino County’s patented revolving door ethos, in which it made no secret of the fact that it was open to hiring former government employees, either directly or as consultants.
By the early 2000s, Cole Burr, who had inherited Burrtec from his father, and Cole Burr’s wife, Tracy, together with Burrtec, had become the fourth-ranking contributor to the political war chests of San Bernardino County elected officeholders. Of note was the money that Burrtec and the Burrs gave was almost exclusively provided to those already holding office – the incumbents – in the cities or jurisdictions where Burrtec had the trash hauling franchise or where competition for the renewal of a franchise held by another company was to soon take place.
Known as the City of Gracious Living, Upland as a community had begun as the north neighborhood to Ontario, where that city’s wealthy business leaders and its elite lived. In 1906, Upland incorporated as a separate city, an effort that was made to distinguish it, which featured nice homes, very nice homes, even nicer homes, estates, mansions and even a few manors, from Ontario. Though it might have been unspoken, what was understood for well on more than a century was “a better place” than those surrounding it.
In 2000, John Pomierski was elected mayor. One of the first undertakings of the Pomierski regime was to explore the city’s options with regard to its longstanding franchise contract with the city’s trash hauler, Waste Management, Inc. A bidding competition was held, and a decision was made to change Waste Management out for Burrtec.
Conferred upon Burrtec was a seven-year evergreen contract. The way this worked was that Burrtec had the trash hauling franchise locked in for seven years at any point. If the city wanted to consider another company or hold a bid for the franchise, it had to inform Burrtec of that intention prior to July 1. If it made that notification, a seven-year countdown would be initiated, at the end of which the Burrtec contract would terminate and the city would be at liberty to enter into a franchise arrangement or contract with whatever company it chose. If, however, the city did not make such notification by July 1, the contract would roll over for another year, such that ending the franchise with Burrtec was to remain intact for at least seven more years.
In June 2010, a severe blow was dealt to Upland’s reputation and its residents’ conceptions of themselves as being a cut above or more like three or four cuts above their neighbors when more than half of a dozen FBI agents accompanied by IRS counterparts barged into Upland City Hall and then spent close to ten hours rifling through files and auditing the contents of computers. Eight months later, Pomierski, who had been reelected in 2004 and 2008, in part by virtue of the financial help his campaign had received from the Burrs and Burrtec, resigned and was named in a federal indictment the next day. He was convicted on political corruption – bribery – charges and spent just shy of two years in a federal penitentiary.
In 2014, when a decision about whether an open bid on the Upland trash franchise should be held such that the 2001 franchise with Burrtec would not go past its 20-year anniversary without some form of competitive bid process, a substantial degree of discussion ensued about what the city was to do. Of note, the city’s then-assistant public works director was Acquanetta Warren, who was [and remains] the mayor of Fontana. Fontana likewise has a trash franchise arrangement with Burrtec and Burrtec, Cole Burr and Tracy Burr are and have consistently been major political donors to Warren. In the midst of the 2014 discussions with regard to whether the Burrtec franchise contract should be rolled over, Burrtec Vice President Mike Arrequin made an offer to Upland Mayor Ray Musser and his council colleagues they could not refuse: Burrtec would lock in its present rates, no matter what, through 2021 if the city would guarantee the continuance of the contract until that time. This meant, in addition, that Burrtec would remain as Upland’s trash hauler at least until 2028, since the 7-year rollover would remain in place and unmolested until 2021. Warren, who had been detailed to evaluate the city’s trash franchise arrangement with Burrtec, despite the clear conflict of interest she had as a recipient of large-scale donations from Burrtec and its owners and the consideration that the city where she was mayor also had a franchise with the company, recommended that the city extend the franchise with Burrtec. The city council did so.
In 2015, the City of San Bernardino moved to dissolve its sanitation division and solicit bids for a franchise trash hauler. When the decks were cleared of the also-rans, the competition came down to two companies: Burrtec and Athens Services. Both sides made their proposals. Assigned to evaluate the contract proposals were San Bernardino Assistant City Manager/Public Works Director and Assistant San Bernardino Public Works Director Chris Alanis. A proforma analysis showed that in virtually all respects – including commitments by both companies to hire the city sanitation workers that were to be displaced as a consequence of that division’s shuttering – the two companies’ bids were in large measure indistinguishable, the only difference being that over the course of the ten years of the franchise arrangement, the city would realize more than $10 million more in franchise fees from Athens than from Burrtec.
Simultaneously, however, Burrtec was making substantial payments – represented as political contributions – to two of the San Bernardino City Council members, John Valdivia and Henry Nickel. It was reported that Burrtec agree to provide Valdivia with $10,000 after Athens refused his request for a like amount of money. In a 7-to-1 vote, with San Bernardino City Councilman Fred Shorett dissenting – Burrtec was awarded the San Bernardino trash hauling franchise. There were ironic references to the Colton trash franchise decision from 19 years previously. Subsequently, Alanis was hired by Burrtec into a corporate management position.
In 2019, when the trash hauling industry was hit with the double-whammy of the State of California intensifying its recycling mandates and the People’s Republic of China ended its acceptance of a range of recyclable materials, Burrtec, like other refuse handling companies, sought permission from governmental entities with which they had franchises to up the rates they charge customers. Despite major protests from Upland residents that the city had bypassed the open bid process on the trash franchise in 2014 on the basis of Burrtec’s commitment to not raise rates until 2021, the city council caved and granted the rate increase on customers in Upland.
Alanis, while working for Burrtec oversaw its Upland operations. In 2024, after the forced departure of former Upland Public Works Director Braden Yu, Upland brought Alanis in to serve as interim public works director. More recently, the city has hired Damian Arrula as assistant city manager, and in that capacity Arrula is serving as the public works director. The city, however, is yet employing Alanis in the capacity of special projects consultant.
While no one at Upland City Hall at this point knows how it came about, the city has historically done the billing for trash service, relieving Burrtec of that burden. Upland residents and businesses alike have been billed by the city not just for trash service but for water service and sewer service. More recently, after a hiatus of may years, the city has also been billing residents for storm drain service.
In recent years, city officials have taken stock of what a burden this utility billing represents on the city both in terms of financial cost and the monopolization of personnel.
A possible solution to this dilemma, some believed, would be transferring the collection burden to the county, which sends out property tax bills to county residents twice per year. Other cities have piggybacked on the county’s bills by including on each property’s tax bill, itemized billing for services and utility usage.
In San Bernardino County, Adelanto had put its trash collection bills on the county property tax rolls, Chino Hill had placed sewer charges on the county tax rolls, Fontana had placed sewer and trash bills of its residents on the county tax roll, Highland had put its trash bill on the county tax roll, Rialto had placed the sewer and trash bills on the county tax roll and Yucaipa had placed the trash bill on the county tax roll. Based in large measure on this trend among a limited set of cities in the county and elsewhere in California,
Having handled Burrtec’s billing in Upland for more than a fifth of a century, Upland could have, had it wished, asked the company to return the favor by asking it to handle its own billing, and, while it was at it, bill residents for water service and sewer service. The city did not do that, however.
Another option would have been to consolidate all of the service billing in Upland to one bill, combining water service, sewer service and trash service, not to mention the hidden storm drain on one bill.
Instead, it assigned Alanis to design a program by which the utility billing in Upland would be handled by the county.
Thereupon, Alanis generated a full color document summarizing just such a proposal, justifying doing so and providing the basis for selling the idea to Upland’s residents.
The impetus for sliding the billing onto the tax rolls was an outgrowth, Alanis maintained in the presentation, action the State of California took in 2019 with the passage of Senate Bill 998, the Water Shutoff Protection Act
“Senate Bill 998 imposed strict requirements on when and how water service could be discontinued for residential accounts,” according to Alanis. “Senate Bill 998 and other State actions affect the city’s ability to collect unpaid bills. It eliminated local control and increased delinquencies substantially. Prior to Senate Bill 998, the City of Upland primarily relied on water shutoffs as the main enforcement mechanism to collect payment on delinquent utility accounts “
The city’s burden of dealing with deadbeat service users had been manageable in year’s past, according to Alanis.
In 2017 the city had two delinquent sewer accounts for a total of $1,017.52 and one delinquent trash account for a total of $291.69; three delinquent sewer accounts in 2018 for a total of $1,193.77 and one delinquent trash account of $301.72; three delinquent sewer accounts in 2019 for a total of $1,335.82 and two delinquent trash accounts for a total of $391.44; and three delinquent sewer accounts in 2019 for a total of $1,158.27 and two delinquent trash accounts for a total of $373.80.
Upon the Water Shutoff Protection Act taking effect on February 1, 2020, Alanis said, things changed and the city began to sustain substantial losses from the arrearages on sewer and trash bills.
At present, according to Alanis, the City of Upland is staggering under $392,507 in sewer service delinquencies and $530,178 in trash service delinquencies for a total delinquency of $922,685.
In making his pitch for the billing makeover, Alanis wrote, “Due to changes in state law and its associated impacts on delinquencies, staff is requesting for consideration that the utility bills be placed on the San Bernardino County tax rolls. These charges will be added into a single efficient bill twice a year and included in monthly mortgage impound accounts. The city will continue to retain full control over rate setting, any future rate increases, and the policies governing utility services. Transitioning to tax roll billing does not shift control to the County. It simply utilizes an existing, proven municipal best practice for revenue collection. Placing utilities on the county tax roll provides a streamlined and responsible solution that improves efficiency while maintaining local authority, accountability and ensuring other rate payers aren’t affected. Under the new system, utility charges will be collected twice a year instead of six times. These charges will be included on property tax bills, which are issued in two installments. Residents will receive fewer bills each year, and those with mortgage impound accounts will see their updated charges in their monthly escrow payments. If approved, the City of Upland will develop a public outreach plan to inform residents about their available options.”
Alanis asserted that this would “protect compliant ratepayers, make for more efficient debt collection and cost reduction.”
A wide cross section of Upland residents weren’t buying what Alanis was selling.
Over the last month, a handful of residents, aware of what was in the offing, addressed council members, both publicly and privately. A number of them reported getting an acerbic reaction from their elected representatives when they expressed the view that involving the county in putting utility bills on the tax roll was an unacceptable crossover of governmental authority. One resident, Mark Walters, related that when he expressed the view that including utility payments on property tax bills was fiscally irresponsible and lacking in transparency, Councilwoman Shannon Maust personally attacked and belittled him. The council’s general perception was that whatever public sentiment there was against the tax roll utility billing collection concept, it was not substantial enough to obstruct it from being put into place.
When the city council was scheduled to take up the matter on Monday night and vote to place all residential solid waste, sewer, and storm drain charges in the City of Upland on the San Bernardino County property tax rolls beginning July 1st, 2025, an untold number of city residents, estimated at more than 200 showed up to voice their opposition to the proposal.
The council took one look at the hostile crowd, which was far larger than could be accommodated in the 160-person-capacity of the council chamber in City Hall, and threw in the towel. It was not merely a surrender for the evening, the Sentinel has learned, but the city council has given up on the idea entirely.
The council needed to act expeditiously, since this year’s first property tax bill goes out on July 1, and some lead time is needed to complete those bills.
As the meeting was getting under way, Mayor Bill Velto announced that the three votes to be taken on the matter that evening – placing the solid waste charges on the tax roll, placing the sewer charges on the tax roll and placing the storm drain charges on the tax roll – had been removed from the agenda.
Gauging the anger of the crowd, Velto contemplated prohibiting anyone from speaking about the issue but then thought better of it. The council normally hears comment with regard to items on the agenda and in a separate forum at the end of meetings comment about things not on the agenda. In order to placate the crowd, the overflow of which had spilled to outside of City Hall, Velto let anyone who wanted to weigh in on the issue of shifting utility payments to the tax roll speak their piece, even though the item was no longer on the agenda.
So many people spoke that after a certain point, City Clerk Carrie Johnson, who normally seeks to record the names of those speaking, gave up, and many who spoke were not identified.
One theme was that monthly or bimonthly bills are manageable for many residents but a bill with an accumulation of six months’ worth of utility costs would be overwhelming for some homeowners. Another objection was putting information about household operations onto the publicly observable tax roll. Others said the burden of collecting late payments or nonpayment of trash bills should fall on Burrtec. One suggestion was that the three bills – for sewer service, trash service and the storm drain fee – be combined into a single bill. Others objected to the county’s imposition of a $250 late fee on tax bills. Others objected to the stampede toward making the change, with only a single hearing within days of Alanis’s report becoming public. There was concern expressed about Burrtec upping its cost of service and that impacting the tax burden. It was noted that Burrtec had already implemented changes on its end to accommodate the transfer of the billing to the tax roll, betraying that the council was already primed to approve the transfer of the billing to the tax roll, meaning it was a done deal and the hearing that was previously scheduled for that night a sham formality.
Nor was it lost on several of the city’s residents that the architect of the billing methodology changeover was Alanis. The question was, they asked, whom had Alanis worked to benefit by placing the trash, sewer and storm drain service bills on the county tax roll: the city’s residents or Burrtec? They asked: “Didn’t this represent a conflict of interest? If the city no longer wanted to defray the cost of doing billing for Burrtec, why were city officials letting a former Burrtec employee design a means for Burrtec to continue to avoid having to go to the expense and bother of doing its own billing, particularly when so many residents objected to seeing their utility bills made part of their twice-yearly property tax levy?
Things then grew worse for the city.
In 1998, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the Apartment Association of the Greater Inland Empire, the Upland Hills Country Club Homeowners Association, the Upland Hills Estates Homeowners Association and Glenn Bozar, who in subsequent years would go on to become a member of the Upland City Council, sued the City of Upland over its imposition of a storm water fee on all developed property in the city. Short of the matter going to trial, the city settled the suit by agreeing to rescind the storm water fee, permanently.
Then-City Attorney Bill Curley, later-City Attorney Jim Markman, then-Assistant City Attorney Steven Flower, former Assistant City Attorney Kimberly Hall Barlow and former City Attorney Richard Adams were aware of the settlement and its terms as presumably were current City Attorney Steven Deitsch and Assistant City Attorney Thomas Rice. Nevertheless, surreptitiously within the last few years, Upland has again begun to collect the fee, disguising it by burying it in euphemistic language in residents’ water bills. The scheme came to light only because it had to shoot straight with the county in laying out the plan to transfer the responsibility for its collection.
At 5:02 p.m. on Monday, several members of the city council received a text message from Bozar, who was in the Sierra Nevadas, informing them he had become aware of the city’s collection of the storm drain fee.
It is unknown whether Bozar’s call alone turned the tide, but when a dozen, then a score, a few score more than an hundred and ultimately 200 irate residents made their way into the council chamber as the 6 p.m. hour approached and the meeting was about to begin, the council members singly and then collectively lost their nerve. Mayor Velto made a command decision to pull the items pertaining to loading the city’s utility charges onto residents’ tax bills.
Using the fire code building capacity limits as a pretext, Velto had the police called in to start escorting members of the public, in particular the ones who appeared to be the angriest, out of the building.
Still the same, a capacity crowd remained inside the council chamber, and a swarm of several dozen people remained outside the building, who were given the impromptu courtesy of being provided with loudspeakers so they might, at least, listen to if not watch the proceedings inside.
Recurrently, those who addressed the council suggested that they expected the city would proceed with placing citizens’ utility bills on the county tax roll as soon as the controversy dies down and scrutiny is no longer heightened.
There is grounds, however, to believe the council has given up on the concept. A primary consideration is the negative consequences of the publicity linking the council’s members to Burrtec.
Before he was elected mayor in 2020, Bill Velto was appointed to the city council in January 2019. In the 2020 mayoral contest, Burrtec heavily supported the incumbent Debbie Stone. Nevertheless, campaign finance disclosure documents filed by Velto in 2019, when he was on good terms with Burrtec, and 2020, have been obscured by the Upland city clerk’s office, such that they are not available to the public.
Burrtec, through Cole and Tracy Burr, is the largest campaign donor to Councilman Rudy Zuniga.
Burrtec has heavily invested in the political career of Councilman Carlos Garcia, and is the single largest contributor of funds to his campaign war chest. In the last 16 months alone, Burrtec has provided him with $6,702.75. In addition, within that time frame, $3,000 originating with Burrtec has been filtered into Garcia’s electioneering fund through Acquanetta Warren.
Consequently the council is anxious to prevent any further scrutiny of their decision to assign former Burrtec employ Alanis to framing, designing and promoting the utility billing changeover to the county.
Pointedly, the mayor, city council, top city administration and City Attorney Steve Deitsch are trying to recover from the revelation that the city had violated its binding agreement with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the Apartment Association of the Greater Inland Empire, the Upland Hills Country Club Homeowners Association, the Upland Hills Estates Homeowners Association and Glenn Bozar not to collect the storm drain fee. It now faces the necessity of discontinuing the collection of the fee and determining what to do if a demand that the city refund all of the money it has collected since it began secretly levying it at some indefinite point within the last several years.
Maust, who was heavily in favor of the plan up until this week, having lambasted those, such as Walters who questioned the plan as petty obstructionists when she believed they did not have the political muscle to hold their own, made a 180 degree flip after seeing the resident turnout on May 12. On social media, two days later, she made a statement indicating she is not going to support the bill transfer to the tax roll going forward.
The Sentinel asked Mayor Velto where things are going to go from here.
“I have no desire to participate in this matter any further, nor was I stymied by any past action,” he said. “If a future Upland City Council chooses to consider this option, that will be their decision. The current council, less one member, continues to support the need for substantial additional revenues to meet the demands for infrastructure improvements and public safety.”
Velto added, “There is no consideration nor has there been, to place the water service charges as an assessment on the county tax billing. The only time it is a consideration, is if a property owner is delinquent and the process for collection is not yielding payment, then the city has no other recourse than to lien the property.”