Leaders who as the dregs… flow through public scorn as mud from a muddy spring, rulers who neither see nor feel nor know but leechlike to their ebbing power cling ‘til they drop without a blow … as a two-edged sword to all who wield.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

With the close of 2025, the San Bernardino County Establishment finds itself on the eve of what is to due to play out in 2026 as a major test of its political credibility.
Embedded in the convoluted mishmash of competing principles and the self-interest of current officeholders is whether those who have the upper hand at the moment are going to reverse course and in spirit deviate from the principle their party has long stood for so they can extend their own personal control of the machinery of local government or whether they will stand down and pass the scepter to the next generation.
At the heart of the matter is the political machine that the county’s Republicans constructed some six decades ago and which remains to the present the dominant force on the San Bernardino County political scene. Of parallel importance is the concept of term limits, which originated in San Bernardino County and elsewhere in California as a means by which Republicans hoped to hold in check the growing influence, hold and hold and now the dominance and monopoly the Democrats have over politics in the Golden State. Through attentiveness and energy, hard work, determination and vigilance and, increasingly, sleight-of-hand and bareknuckled exploitation of the lack of coordination on the part of their counterpart Democrats, the Republicans have maintained their ascendancy in San Bernardino County.
In 1936, Harry Sheppard, a former railroad executive and the president and owner of the King’s Beverage Company of Los Angeles, at the age of 51 ran for Congress as a New Deal Democrat, defeating the Republican incumbent, Sam Collins in the race to represent the California’s 19th Congressional, encompassing the lion’s share of San Bernardino County. This shifted political control over San Bernardino County into the hands of the Democrats, who remained in charge for three decades. Sheppard served as San Bernardino County’s primary Congressman in the House of Representatives from January 1937 until January 1965, representing California’s 19th Congressional District in the 1930s, the state’s 21st Congressional District in the 1940s, its 27th Congressional District in the 1950s and the state’s 33rd Congressional District in the 1960s. He likely would have remained in office beyond that but for a major faux pas he engaged in during January 1964 when, over a two-day period, he made 27 separate $10,000 deposits into 27 different banks and savings and loan institutions in Washington, D.C., and communities surrounding the nation’s capital in Virginia and Maryland, in each case one cent below the mandatory IRS reporting threshold that banking institutions were bound by. Reports pertaining to the deposits reached the nation’s newspapers. He claimed that he was merely making prudent deposits of his life savings, which he had formerly kept in a safe deposit box and in his bedroom closet. Though he was at that point the dean of California’s Congressional Delegation, one of the two most powerful members of both the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee and considered the most influential member of the CIA Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, instantaneously he was no longer an asset to President Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats but rather a liability. On February 20, 1964, he announced he was retiring from Congress after the completion of that term. He was succeeded in January 1965 by another Democrat, Kenneth Dyal, but the financial scandal Sheppard had embroiled himself in greatly damaged the Democratic Party and in 1966, Dyal was replaced by Jerry Pettis a Republican, who came into office in the same election cycle when Ronald Reagan was elected governor.
Over the next four decades, San Bernardino County remained a Republican stronghold, even as by the dawning of the Third Millennium the state as a whole fell back under the sway of the Democratic Party. Despite the state’s leftward trend, right up until 2009, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats in San Bernardino County. During the gradual GOP declension throughout the state, the Republicans had latched onto a number of approaches and strategies in an effort to remain, if not dominant, relevant politically. One of these included championing term limits, preventing New Age Democrats from becoming entrenched in office over the course of multiple decades in the way that Democrats such as Sheppard had in the middle of the 20th Century. Republican politicians such as Governor Pete Wilson and one-time Assemblyman and Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum campaigned vigorously for the passage of term limits on statewide office, while Democrats, perhaps most notably Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, opposed them. The Republicans’ calculation was that members of their party, supported by wealthy large corporate and smaller entrepreneurial interests, stood a better chance of being elected to office if they were not opposed by Democrats who could remain in office decade after decade while accumulating and compounding donations coming their way through the advange of incumbency.
In San Bernardino County, term limits were championed by County Supervisor Paul Biane, who acceded to both vice chairman and chairman of the board of supervisors while simultaneously serving as vice chairman and chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. In 2006, Biane sponsored Measure P, which, while raising the salary members of the board of supervisors received by over $50,000 from $99,000 yearly to $151,000, imposed on them being limited to three four-year terms in office.
In 2009, the number of registered Democrats in San Bernardino County eclipsed the registered Democrats. In the more than 16 years since, the Democrats have widened that registration advantage. At present, 479,303 or 38.7 percent of the 1,238,861 total voters in the county are registered as Democrats, while 380,694 or 30.7 percent identify as Republicans, with 272,051 or 22 percent declaring on party affiliation and the remaining 8.6 percent registered with the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freed or other more obscure parties.
Despite the Democrats 8 percent registration advantage over the Republicans, Republicans remain as the dominant party in San Bernardino County politically. In California, all of the constitutional state offices from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner to state controller in California are occupied by Democrats. In the state’s lower legislative house, the California Assembly, 60 of 80 members are Democrats. In the upper house, the California Senate, 30 of 40 members are Democrats. In California’s Congressional Delegation, both Senators are Democrats and of the state’s 52 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 43 are Democrats and nine are Republicans. San Bernardino County bucks the statewide trend significantly. While five of its eight state senators are Democrats, that is because large portions of three of those districts lie in neighboring counties dominated by the Democrats. Five of the district’s ten assembly members are Republicans. Two of the district’s four members of Congress are Republicans. In seventeen of the county’s 22 cities and two incorporated towns, Republicans hold a majority of the council seats. Four of the five members of the county board of supervisors are Republicans.
In 2017, the Red Brennan Group, a nonpartisan government reform committee, sought to place a series of reform initiatives relating to San Bernardino County government on the June 2018 ballot. The board of supervisors effectively used its control over the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters and the office of county counsel – the county’s stable of in-house attorneys – to administratively and legally block those initiatives, despite the Red Brennan Group having obtained a sufficient number of voters’ signatures to qualify the measures for a vote. Despite later determinations that the county’s bureaucratic maneuvering was legally invalid, the delays that were created as a consequence of the challenges succeeded in keeping the measures off the 2018 ballot because the printing deadline for the ballot had elapsed. Despite that setback, the Red Brennan Group redoubled its efforts and once again qualified another reform measure for the November 2020 election, one that redefined the county supervisors’ posts as part time ones, reduced the yearly total remuneration for the supervisor position to $60,000 and imposed on them a single four-year term in office. Despite legal and administrative efforts by the supervisors, the county’s administrators and the office of county counsel, the Red Brennan Group succeeded in gathering sufficient signatures to place the measure on the ballot. Designated as Measure K, it passed on November 3, 2020 with 516,184 votes or 66.84 percent in favor and 256,098 or 33.16 percent opposed.
Shortly after the measure passed, the board of supervisors took the extraordinary step of directing the office of county counsel and retaining three attorneys – Bradley Hertz, James Sutton and Nicholas Sanders of the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm – to file on its behalf a lawsuit against its own employee, Lynna Monell, who was the clerk of the board, in an effort to legally block Measure K from being implemented. The filing of the suit resulted in both the salary reduction and term limit provisions of Measure K being put on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
Then-County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and then-San Bernardino County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez arranged to have the lawsuit maneuvered into the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Don Alvarez, who was known to be both beholden and sympathetic to the county’s governmental hierarchy.
Judge Alvarez made a finding invalidating the entirety of Measure K on the grounds that its secondary provision limiting supervisors to a single four-year term was unconstitutional and that the term limitation element of the measure was not separable from its salary and benefit reductions. This, Judge Alvarez ruled, rendered Measure K unenforceable.
The Red Brennan Group appealed Judge Alvarez’s finding and obtained a ruling from the 4th District Court of Appeal in the summer of 2022 reversing his invalidation of the measure. The lawsuit challenging Measure K bought the board of supervisors two years of time, during which the county government placed on the November 2022 ballot what it represented as its own government reform initiative, Measure D, which restored each individual supervisor’s total annual compensation to roughly $255,000 to $275,000 – roughly 80 percent of what is provided to a Superior Court judge – while imposing on the supervisors term limits of three four-year terms, essentially equivalent to what had been the wage-scale and number-of-years-in-office rules that had been in place before Measure K’s passage. Measure D passed by a margin of 241,894 votes or 58.22 percent to 173,582 votes or 41.78 percent in the November 2022 election.
In the meantime, the county lodged an appeal of the 4th District Court of Appeal’s ruling validating Measure K. In 2023, the California Supreme Court let the Fourth District Court of Appeals’ ruling upholding 2020’s Measure K stand. Nevertheless, it was the position of the county board of supervisors and thus the county’s position that Measure D superseded Measure K and that not only was the remuneration level for the supervisors restored, but that the members of the board of supervisors were once again permitted to serve three four-year terms.
Given that Measure D, technically, is applicable going forward and is not retroactive, there are those who now take the position that the incumbents in place when it passed – Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman, who was first elected to the board in 2014, reelected in 2018 and reelected in 2022; Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, who was appointed to the board in 2018, elected in 2020 and reelected in 2024; First District Supervisor Paul Cook, who was elected to the board in 2020; and Fifth District Supervisor Joe Baca Jr, who was elected to the board in 2022 – are bound by the three term limitation only as of elections that occurred after 2022. In addition, according to those of this mindset, Second District Supervisor Jesse Armendarez, who was elected in the same November 2022 election in which Measure D passed but who ran for election before it passed, is likewise not subject to the three term limitation until after the term he is now serving ends. By this interpretation, Hagman is now at liberty to run for reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034, such that he would be barred from seeking reelection in 2038. Further, Cook, Baca and Rowe would count the term they were elected to in 2024 as the first of the three terms to be counted under the term limit rule now in effect, such that they can seek reelection in 2028 and 2032 if they choose to, and Armendarez can, like Hagman, serve out his current term and then have the three four-year term limit kick in, allowing him to seek reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034.
It is nonetheless, unclear as to exactly what restrictions currently apply on the terms to be served by the members of the county supervisors, as there exists a competing theory with regard to when the clock began to run on the three terms specified in Measure D. Under that alternate theory, Hagman’s first term in office, which initiated after his 2014 election, counts toward his three allotted terms, the term he served following his 2018 reelection counts as his second allotted term and his current term, to which he was elected counts as his final term in office. In applying this theory to the remaining members of the board of supervisors, Cook, Baca and Rowe are now serving the second of three terms they can be elected to and they are entitled to seek reelection in 2028 if that is their will, but all three would be barred from seeking reelection in 2032. Armendarez, under this interpretation can run for reelection in 2026 and in 2030, and would be termed out when his third term concludes the first week of 2035.
Of immediate focus is Supervisor Curt Hagman, as he is currently the longest serving supervisor and the term limit issue is therefore relevant to the upcoming June 2026 primary election. If the first interpretation is applied and Supervisor Hagman is permitted under the way in which the county applies the three term rule contained in Measure D to seek reelection next year, that will serve as the precedent to allow Cook, Rowe and Baca to remain on the board of supervisors, conditional upon their decision to do so and the willingness of the voters to sustain them in office, until January 2037 and Armendarez until January 2029.
Key to which interpretation will prevail is Laura Feingold, who was elevated to the position of county counsel last month after what was either the willing or forced departure of Tom Bunton earlier this year. If, indeed, Hagman opts to seek or at least attempts to seek reelection as 4th District supervisor in the June 2026 primary election, Feingold will be called upon, either by the board of supervisors or the public at large, to render a decision as to whether under the term limits imposed by 2022’s Measure D, Hagman is eligible to run for reelection.
When Curt Hagman was elected to the board in 2014, the restrictions of 2006’s Measure P were in effect. Under Measure P, he was eligible to serve three terms as supervisor and after being reelected in 2018 and 2022, ineligible to run for 4th District supervisor in 2026. Measure P, however, was rendered null and void by the passage of 2020’s Measure K. Measure K never went into effect and has been, apparently, superseded by Measure D, which became effective following the 2022 election and subjected the supervisors once more to three four-year terms.
The question has now become whether Measure D went into effect as of the certification of the November 2022 election such that it obviated any previous limitations on the terms of service and began the clock anew on how many terms the supervisors could serve post 2022. Feingold will be asked whether Supervisor Hagman, who had his three bites at the apple under Measure P, has also had three bites at the apple under Measure D and, as such, is to be termed out of office after the term he was elected to in 2022 ends. In addressing that question, Feingold will also be called upon to determine, simultaneously and conversely, whether Measure D erased all previous term limitation rules or considerations and is only applicable going forward and not retroactively, such that Supervisor Hagman is now eligible to run for reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034.
This week, the Sentinel addressed questions to both Hagman and Feingold.
It sought from Hagman whether he intends to seek reelection as Fourth District supervisor next year.
The Sentinel inquired of Feingold which interpretation of the applicability of Measure D is correct and if, in her legal opinion and that of her office, Supervisor Hagman’s course as Fourth District supervisor will have run at the end of 2026, making him therefore ineligible to run for reelection in the June 2026 primary and November2026 general elections or whether he is at liberty to run for reelection as Fourth District supervisor in the 2026 election cycle and by extension in the 2030 election cycle and the 2034 election cycle.
Neither Hagman nor Feingold responded to the Sentinel by press time.
It is of some note that Hagman, a Republican who was formerly a councilman and mayor in Chino Hills, served six years in the California Assembly between 2008 and 2014, at which point he was termed out of office and ran for supervisor. Before doing so, he maneuvered himself into the position of chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. In that capacity, he bought into and embodied the principles of the national and state GOP, which included support for term limits. At this point, as county supervisor, Hagman is provided with an annual salary of $193,555.79, further remuneration of $42,089.76 and benefits of $86,122.97 for a total annual compensation of $321,768.52.
To remain loyal to the Republican Party principle of embracing term limits he formerly espoused, as both an elected member of the California legislature, as a Republican Party member and the leader of the Republican Party in San Bernardino County, Hagman will need to forego that $321,768.52, subject to cost-of-living increases, he stands to make annually from, potentially, 2027 until the end of 2038, which would total $3,861,222.21, without those cost-of-living increases being calculated. Whether Hagman is going to live up to that principle when doing so would come at such a steep personal financial cost will become known on March 6, 2026, when the filing period for supervisorial candidates closes.
Just like Hagman has a lot of money riding on whether he will seek to remain in office as 4th District supervisor, Feingold has a personal financial interest in which way she renders her legal opinion how the term limit provision in Measure D should be interpreted.
As county counsel, Feingold serves at the pleasure of the board of supervisors. Unlike the two previous county counsels in San Bernardino County – Michelle Blakemore, who served four years as the county’s top staff attorney, and Bunton, who last likewise four years in the post before retiring – Feingold is nearly a decade younger than what her predecessors were when she assumed the position. Given her relative youth, she could remain as county counsel for as long as a decade. By rendering a legal opinion that would allow Cook, Baca and Rowe to begin counting the number of their permissible terms in office as of those they were elected to in 2024 and Hagman and Armendarez to begin the countdown on the number of terms they can be elected to as of the 2026 election, Feingold stands to accrue a degree of favor and ingratiate herself with those who are in a position to see that she remains for as long as they remain in office in a position which at present provides her with no less than $326,500 in annual salary, another $27,250 in perquisites and pay add-ons and $150,500 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $504,250.