In a reversal of action taken by a somewhat differently-composed version of itself nearly 22 months ago, the Yucaipa City Council has elected to now impose limits on the amount of donations its members can take from individual donors.
Nearly three years ago, three members of the Yucaipa City Council brought unwanted attention upon themselves and their city when they constructively terminated their town’s city manager, Ray Casey, and outright fired the city attorney, David Snow, replacing them with a city manager, Chris Mann, whose company specialized in representing developers and promoting development projects, and Steven Graham, whose career as a municipal attorney included serving as city attorney when Mann was employed as the city manager of the City of Canyon Lake.
There was widespread suspicion that the move to replace Casey as city manager by then-Mayor Justin Beaver and then-council members Bobbie Duncan and Matt Garner was part of an effort to remove barriers to aggressive growth in Yucaipa.
Prior to his 2008-to-2023 tenure as city manager, Casey had been Yucaipa’s city engineer, which informed the city’s policy of requiring those developers and construction companies undertaking industrial, commercial and/or residential projects in the city to either pay for or themselves provide accompanying infrastructure or augmentations to existing infrastructure to ensure the newly-created neighborhoods, residential or commercial subdivisions, factories or warehouses did not overburden existing roads, traffic circulation, storm drains or facilities such as wastewater treatment plants. Casey had insisted that the landowners, developers and builders who were to profit from the improvements to property or the transition of fallow or undeveloped land into developed land covered the expense of constructing the infrastructure that went with it rather than foregoing the creation of that infrastructure or having the city and its taxpayers defray its cost. As a consequence of Casey’s conservative approach, there had been only moderate growth in Yucaipa during a time when other San Bernardino County cities such as Fontana, Rancho Cucamonga and Hesperia were experiencing explosive expansion, a circumstance in which landowners, developers and elements of the construction and real estate industries were generating for themselves substantial wealth.
A significant cross section of Yucaipa’s citizenry were made suspicious by Casey’s forced departure and the hiring of Mann. In particular, it was widely perceived, the troika of Beaver, Duncan and Garner had a personal financial stake in moving Casey out of the city and bringing in the pro-growth Mann. Duncan was a real estate agent who stood to make more money as more houses were built and sold in Yucaipa. Garner was a partner in a building materials company, by which he had a stake in the city being more accommodating toward development. While many Yucaipa residents considered Duncan and Garner to be caught up in a typical conflict of interest that commonly ensnares elected officials, they assigned an even more sinister motivation to Beaver’s his participation in jettisoning Casey and embracing Mann. Beaver was employed as a police corporal with the Azusa Police Department, through which there was no actual or ostensible connection to the building industry. When confronted by the city’s residents and the press as to why it had been necessary to precipitate Casey’s departure from Yucaipa, less than three months after the previous city council, which did not include Garner, had extended Casey’s managerial contract by more than 20 months and barely two months after Garner had been elected to the city council in the November 2022 election, Beaver, like Duncan and Garner, was unable, or unwilling to provide an answer. This was an indication, many said, that Beaver had been given or promised monetary inducements by elements of the construction industry or developers and landowners who stood to profit from accelerated growth in Yucaipa. Reports to that effect spread rapidly throughout Yucaipa, and by March 2023, an effort to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner was under way. While those three initial recall efforts failed to proceed to the ballot when the petiion-gathering and qualifying process bogged down in the face of a legal challenge, a highly-motivated and actuated group of Yucaipa residents showed determination to yet see Beaver, Duncan and Garner removed from office. They resolved, in the 2024 election cycle when Beaver and Duncan were due to stand for reelection, to actively oppose them in the run-up to the November balloting. Since Garner’s 2022 election meant he would not need to stand for reelction unti 2026, they devoted themselves to another recall effort against him, and ultimately obtained a sufficient number of signatures of registered voters in Yuciapa’s First City Council District, which he represented, to qualify a recall question to be placed on the November ballot.
It was in the face of this citizen resolve that the council in January 2024 contemplated raising the limit on political donations its members can receive from any single contributor from the current state generic standard of $5,500 to $10,000, but held off on doing so. The following month, as the intent of a determined set of Yucaipa’s residents to remove Beaver, Duncan and Garner from office had grown even more pronounced, the council instead voted preliminarily to remove limitations on donations to the council members altogether. The following month, the council finalized the policy of allowing donors to give as much money as they wanted to the city’s elected officials. Aware that his colleagues were lining up to approve having no limit on contributions, Beaver made a show of voting in opposition to the no campaign donation limitations ordinance. It was believed at that time, while Mann was still the city manager, that developers and builders, who had an interest in keeping the troika who had hired Mann in office, would come through with tens of thousands of dollars or perhaps well over a hundred thousand dollars, to make sure that Beaver and Duncan had enough money in their political war chests to run campaigns that would keep them in office, and that those donors would prove equally generous to Garner, so he would be in a position to counter the campaign of those who were seeking to oust him from office before he had served two years in the capacity as councilman.
As it would turn out, with the July 2024 filing deadline to run for reelection in the November 2024 election approaching in July 2025, Duncan lost his nerve and opted out of running. As had been anticipated, financial support came through for Beaver, and he was able to garner 51.26 percent of the vote and hold off two challengers, Kristine Mohler and Gordon Renshawin the November 2024 election to remain in office. Garner, however, was unable hold off the overwhelming enmity of a large segment of the residents in Yucaipa for his participation in Casey’s demise, and he was recalled from office.
Earlier this year, the city council, on which the only participant in the 2023 removal of Casey remaining is Beaver, negotiated with Mann and concluded a severance deal in which he was provided with payout equal to one year’s salary to terminate his slightly more than two-year run as city manager. He has now been replaced with Sean Moore.
There were multiple casualties throughout the chapter of Yucaipa’s history that entailed Mann’s displacement of Casey. Self-inflicted were the premature ends of Duncan’s and Garner’s political careers, as well as the damage to Beaver’s reputation and outside career. A significant and vocal contingent of Yucaipa residents have come to believe that Beaver, Duncan and Garner were championing a circular pay-to-play environment that was being choreographed and coordinated by Mann in which the deal was for a majority of the city council to approve development proposals that city staff headed by Mann recommended for approval, the project applicants who profited by those approvals would pay the council members who approved them, the council members would use that money to remain in elected office and continue to use their authority to keep Mann in place as city manager and to approve more development proposals, the proponents of which would continue to cycle money to the council members to perpetuate the situation, ultimately resulting in 55,000-population growing into a city of 100,000 and then 125,000 and 150,000 by mid-century.
Reportedly, complaints alleging Yucaipa City Hall was riddled with corruption were made to the FBI as a consequence of the contretemps involving the council, Casey and Mann. It was in this atmosphere that Duncan decided to leave office and Garner was removed from office by a 65.73 percent to 34.27 percent margin. Beaver continues to cling to office, but there have been indications the allegations of corruption yet befouling him have done him no good in his profession as a police officer. In many instances, law enforcement officers who simultaneously are elected to public office see a career boost in terms a promotion with the law enforcement agencies that employ them. In Beaver’s case, after having worked with the San Bernardino county Sheriff’s Department as a deputy in 2011, 2012 and 2013, in 2017 he was hired by the Azusa Police Department in Los Angeles County as a police officer. In 2021, following his election to the Yucaipa City Council, he obtained a promotion to police corporal. In December 2022, his council colleagues elevated him to the position of Yucaipa mayor. While the mayoral post in Yucaipa is not a directly elected one which is rotated among the city’s council members and Beaver’s selection was a part of this process, his advancement to the mayor’s position in just two years came about more rapidly than the historic norm. Some expected Beaver’s meteoric political rise on the east side of the San Bernardino/Los Angeles County divide to be replicated in his function as a law enforcement professional on the west side of the county line. That has not occurred. Four years have elapsed since his rise to police corporal status, and Beaver remains in that rank. Reports, perhaps apocryphal, are that Azusa Police Chief Rocky Wenrick, who was formerly employed before he went to work with Azusa PD as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service in Los Angeles, has learned through either official or informal channels from his contacts in federal law enforcement about the probe into alleged political malfeasance involving the trio on the Yucaipa City Council and that this has curtailed Beaver’s further assent up the chain of command within the Azusa Police Department.
Whatever, precisely or imprecisely, has led to the miasma of corruption in Yucaipa, city officials there are anxious to be free of the taint Beaver, Duncan, Garner and Mann brought upon themselves and the city. For Beaver, who managed to be reelected in 2024 and whose current term in office will not elapse until December 2028, the elimination of a campaign donation ceiling the council adopted in 2024 has achieved its purpose. For that reason, he made no objection when Councilman Bob Miller, who was selected by the council to replace Garner after his recall, requested that the council revisit the campaign donation limitation concept at this week’s council meeting on Monday, December 8. Referencing ethical considerations, which at the very kleast had the potential of making Beaver uncomfortable, Miller suggested that the $5,900 default limit on any single contributor contained in Assembly Bill 571, which was passed by the state legislature in 2019 and went into effect in 2021, was in his words “meaningful and appropriate” for officeholders in a city the size of Yucaipa.
Miller said that officeholders would yet be able to raise money for their campaigns, but in what was an obvious allusion to Beaver he said making the change would erase the advantage enjoyed by candidates who can rely on a handful of extremely wealthy donors. This would prevent, he said, certain candidates who have curried favor with deep pocketed developers by approving their projects achieving the backing of three or four donors who provide them with far more money than is collected by other officeholders who rely on far smaller donations from numerous donors. “It makes the playing field more level for people who just want to run that maybe aren’t connected,” Miller said.
The council unanimously voted to adopt the state’s $5,900 per donor limit.