Flooding in at various locations throughout 73.4-square mile Hesperia over the holidays, scores of the city’s residents say, has betrayed that the city’s infrastructure deficit, legacy of corruption and managerial incompetence continues as a reality into the Third Millennium, 71 years after the modern communities founding, 37 years since its incorporation as a municipality and three years following the city’s hiring of a woman city officials said would be able to overcome the greed and neglect of the men who had been entrusted with running municipal operations previously.
In contrast to the time of Rachel Molina’s appointment as city manager when Mayor Brigit Bennington in her first go-round as mayor leapt to her defense when it was suggested Molina did not have the experience or mettle to handle the challenges the county’s most physically problematic cities presents, Bridget remained silent as resident after resident expressed anger, disappointment and frustration with City Hall’ inability to provide its citizens with the most rudimentary of modern necessities and municipal services.
No city official was willing to contest what the city’s residents and others have been saying for more than forty years: that the county local agency formation commission acted prematurely and irresponsibly in allowing Hesperia to incorporate as a city.
Hesperia is marred by what is, hands down among all 22 cities and two incorporated towns in San Bernardino County, the most intensive of infrastructure deficits. That deficit came into being with the transition from historical Hesperia to modern Hesperia in 1954 and has never relented, as the one-time town that has now grown into a city of 103,??? has never been able to overcome a reflexive and prideful embrace of size, growth, self-importance and politicians ready to personally advance and profit by assisting those fleecing their constituents.
On April 22, 1954, while he was yet serving as the vice-president and director of Standard Federal Savings and Loan Association of Los Angeles, M. Penn Phillips consummated what was billed as the largest private land sale in Southern California in 35 year when his corporation, the Omart Investment Company, purchased a 36-square mile tract seven miles south of Victorville, representing roughly 90 percent of the entire township of Hesperia, for $1.25 million from the Appleton Land and Water Company and the Lacey Estate, which had owned the land jointly since 1888. Phillips, who during the Second World War served as the executive vice-chairman of the U.S. Treasury Department War Finance Committee for Southern California, signed, in his capacity as the president of Omart, the land transfer documents at Pioneer Title and Insurance Company in San Bernardino.
Phillips simultaneously announced his intention to spend $8.25 million through the Hesperia Land Company, a subsidiary of Omart Investment Company, to prepare the property for development, indicating 1,000 acres of the property was to be allocated to industrial development, 8,000 acres for agriculture and that 5,000 homes would be built along with a two-and-one-half mile-long-and-one-quarter-mile-wide artificial lake, and a resort section.
Involved with Phillips in the Hesperia venture were Jack Dempsey, the one-time heavyweight champion, as well as Charles Allen, vice-president of E.F. Hutton and Company of New York City; Fresno-based attorney Milo E. Rowell, Nat Mendelsohn of Riverside; Philip J. Farrar of Fresno; along with Los Angeles investment brokers, Dan Christy and Henry Paul Willis.
Within a week Phillips and Dempsey announce plans to renovate the Hesperia Hotel, which had been dormant since 1926.
Phillips, born in Parsons Kansas on June 13, 1887, was an intense and dynamic man who left his mark on the world as he founder of the M. Penn Phillips Company, and as a result of his operations in the Western states from the 1920s through the 1970s. Starting in the 1920s, he undertook the development of Clear Lake Highland in Lake County, and completed Frazier Mountain Park near Bakersfield in 1924, and a development known as the Avocado Farms near Vista in 1926. He developed large tracts in the Las Vegas basin in 1927, the development of 5,800 lots and 18,000 acres of land in the area around Coos Bay, Oregon between 1929 and 1933. He built, in association with Dempsey the famed Hotel Del Pacifico in Ensenada Mexico in 1931. From 1929 to 1932 he bought and sold more than 60,000 acres of undeveloped land in the Colorado River basin.
Despite his accomplishments, he was also a charlatan who left crippled communities, often ones of his own creation, in his wake as he went on to the next place where he would ply his schemes to intensify his wealth.
In 1954, Phillips created the Hesperia Land Development and Hesperia Sales Corporation, which worked to promote his concept of the U-Finish Home, mass-produced housing units that were completely finished on the outside, leaving the buyer to complete the interior. He secured water rights to support the modern community of Hesperia through the newly created Mojave Water Agency, of which he was a founding member.
The formula Phillips applied in Hesperia was much like the one he used with his developments elsewhere: secure land, build homes on it, put in the minimal amount of public improvements to make the neighborhoods habitable, bring in a population that creates the basis for a community that includes momentum for establishing some form of a jurisdictional governmental agency, sell all of the parcels acquired, take a profit and move on to the next development elsewhere.
After he was gone, those communities would be as lacking in completed and adequate infrastructure as U-Finish Homes were minus kitchen sinks or toilets or bathtubs.
Phillips built roads for Hesperia that were of a decidedly low standard, consisting of a mixture of desert sand used as aggregate and bitumen to create a road that was no more than one-and-a-half inches thick. The roads, when new, looked good, but under the withering sun and use, began to deteriorate within three to four years. The flash floods the desert is prone to further washed out these roads over the following decades, leaving many of Hesperia’s streets in poor condition, including some that eventually returned to being nothing more than dirt roads.
Phillips was equally irresponsible in the creation of the town’s water system. Though he started with the tremendous advantage of Hesperia being blessed with a world-class water supply, he squandered that asset in his headlong pursuit of a profit. Hesperia lies near the headwaters of the Mojave River, the watershed area north of the San Bernardino Mountains, a pristine and perpetually recharged water supply created by melting snow and overflowing rainwater from the heights southeast of Hesperia. The water system Phillips created for Hesperia consisted in large part of pipes cannibalized from a petroleum conveyance operation from depleted oil fields. Thus, the Hesperia Water Company, capturing water at the foot of the mountain before it rushed forward to become the Mojave River and wend out into the desert, used substandard pipes, which compromised the quality of the product provided to Hesperia for domestic use.
In this way, Phillips created what would become Hesperia’s initial infrastructure deficit. In the nearly sixty-five years since Phillips took his final leave of Hesperia, the city has struggled to overcome its inferior infrastructure foundation.
When Hesperia became a city in 1988, it was poorly served by the incorporation committee that had succeeded in obtaining that milestone. The incorporation committee, partially as a consequence of its members’ lack of sophistication, shortsightedness and haste, failed to hold its own in hard-nosed bargaining with county representatives and other competing entities during the process for arriving at the property tax allocation formula for local governmental entities in the Hesperia community, including the city, post incorporation. Previous to Hesperia’s incorporation, when the county directly provided many of the services to the community along with the previously existing Hesperia Recreation and Park District, the Hesperia Fire District and the Hesperia Water District, that formula was somewhat less arcane. Upon incorporation, city officials failed to broker a very favorable split of property taxes with the county.
Like many of the cities that incorporated after the passage of Proposition 13, Hesperia was given a less-than-generous allotment of the diminishing property tax stream. This was a particularly harsh circumstance for Hesperia, which at its roughly 73 square miles, had over 473 miles of roads, many of them neglected and deteriorating.
The city was allotted a mere 1.59 percent of the property tax revenue – $1.59 of every $100 collected. That was the second smallest allotment of any of the cities in the county at that time and it is now the paltriest property tax share of any of the county’s current incorporated cities. At present, the county of San Bernardino keeps 14.23 cents of every property tax dollar collected in Hesperia. Indeed, in Hesperia there is a fifteen-way split of property tax. The other thirteen beneficiaries of the property tax rolls are the Hesperia Unified School District, which is given 29.5 percent; another 21.41 percent goes to the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund, most of which comes back to the school district; the Hesperia Fire Protection District pulls in 15.3 percent, nearly ten times what the city receives; The Victor Valley Community College District claims 6.4 percent; the Hesperia Recreation and Park District is given 4.3 percent. The county’s flood control district claims 2.2 percent for operations and 0.09 percent for administration; the county library system takes 1.38 percent; the Hesperia Water District is provided 1.03 percent; Community Services Area 60, which lies at the city’s periphery, is entitled to 0.99 percent; the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools accroaches 0.97 percent; the Mojave Water Agency abducts 0.50%; and the Mojave Desert Resource Conservation District nabs 0.02 percent.
Hesperia was not the only city in the county which formerly found itself shortchanged with regard to the division of property tax. Chino Hills, which incorporated in 1991; Apple Valley, which like Hesperia incorporated in 1988; Highland, which incorporated in 1987; Victorville, which incorporated in 1962; Rancho Cucamonga, which incorporated in 1977; Fontana, which incorporated in 1952; and Adelanto, which incorporated in 1970, found themselves in similar circumstances, with Victorville at that time being allotted no return in property tax at all. In no case were any of those cities formerly experiencing more than a 5.2 percent return of property tax collected within their respective borders. In 2003, the county agreed to allot all of those cities 7 percent of the property tax on any land annexed into those cities after that point. Also, several of the cities, individually and collectively, pursued litigation and legislation sponsored by local state lawmakers aimed at upping those cities’ property tax revenue.
Hesperia participated in those efforts. The first legislative effort in this regard, Assembly Bill 1057, failed on the Senate floor in 1999. Subsequently, then-Assemblyman Phil Wyman introduced Assembly Bill 1378, which was designed to give Hesperia a larger share of property taxes collected by the county, such that Hesperia at that time stood to be the recipient of $2 million more per year if Assembly Bill 1378 passed. But the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to oppose AB 1378 and a key member of the board, former Assemblyman and then Chairman of the Board Fred Aguiar, lobbied in Sacramento against it. Wyman than dropped the legislative try, saying “I killed the bill because we’d rather do it together at the local level.”
Hesperia officials abandoned the legislative approach and pulled out of litigation the city was engaged in as a co-plaintiff with other cities after assurances were provided that then-Hesperia Mayor Jim Lindley would be able to use his entrée with his then-political ally, then-supervisor Bill Postmus, to amicably negotiate with the county an increase in Hesperia’s share of the property tax return. That came to naught, however, when there was a falling out between Postmus and Lindley, whereupon Postmus ceased his intercession on behalf of the City of Progress.
For Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, and Fontana, the litigative/legislative approach succeeded and by 2006, those cities saw an increase in their end of the formula for property tax splits.
Victorville saw its share of property tax pass-through upped from zero to 4.72 percent, with 6 percent going to its fire district and 5 percent going to its park district.
Apple Valley was granted 9.4 percent of the property taxes its residents pay, and another 9.2 percent was handed over to the town’s fire district.
The city of Rancho Cucamonga now gets 5.11 percent and its fire district is provided with 12.48 percent.
A deal was brokered with the city of Chino Hills such that it continues to get a 3.9 percent return on property tax paid for property that was previously within the city and ten percent of taxes from new development. The city of Chino Hills’ fire district also receives 15.15 percent of the property tax paid by Chino Hills residents.
In Fontana, the city receives a 3.8 percent property tax return, while its fire department is granted an 18.55 percent return.
The city of Highland is given 24.4 percent of the property tax collected within city limits.
Hesperia remains as the forlorn stepchild of the county when it comes to the distribution of property tax, receiving receives 1.75 percent of the property tax the residents living within its city limits pay.
The infrastructure deficit Phillips saddled Hesperia with was compounded by a series of decisions made by the fledgling city council shortly after the city was incorporated in 1988 and doubled down upon by the councils that succeeded the first. Looking southward at the upwardly mobile population of Rancho Cucamonga, a city which had incorporated a mere eleven years before in 1977, the newly formed city council, led by mayor Bruce Kitchen and council members George Beardsley, Mike Lampignano, Percy Bakker and M. Val Shearer, lured Rancho Cucamonga Deputy City Manager Robert Rizzo to town to serve as the city’s first city manager. Deluded into thinking that cityhood would instantly transform their city into an economically dynamic hotbed of upscale development similar to Rancho Cucamonga, the city council empowered Rizzo to cut deals with developers to convince them to begin building aggressively and soon. Rizzo took the council’s somewhat naive instructions too literally, pushing his planning staff to approve projects as proposed by developers, entailing projects with sketchy or inadequate infrastructure, both in the immediate vicinity of the neighborhoods which were springing up as well as throughout the city in general.
In some cases, Rizzo, to meet payroll, diverted bond money intended for the provision of infrastructure into the general fund, where it was eaten up by the day-to-day expenses of running the city. In time, many of the landowners inveigled into the assessment districts created to debt service those bonds lost those properties in tax foreclosures as the promised increases in the value of their properties failed to materialize because the infrastructure those bonds were supposed to pay for was never built. Correspondingly, the sales tax producing commercial development that was to accompany the improvements to those properties in question never materialized, depriving the city of revenue that could have been converted into infrastructure improvements.
The centerpiece of Hesperia’s developmental fixation was the Rancho Las Flores project, which was being pushed by the Dana Point-based ARC Las Flores Corporation and was originally projected to result in the construction of 9,100 residential units in Summit Valley on 10,000 acres at the city’s extreme south end that consisted of the 490-acre Las Flores Ranch and several adjacent parcels, including Bureau of Land Management property obtained through a series of land swaps. Rizzo convinced Bakker, Beardsley, Shearer and Lampignano and Kitchen that the project would generate economic development and create neighborhoods to rival those in upscale Orange County. Within two years, the scope of the project grew and in 1990, the city approved the Rancho Las Flores specific plan, which called for development of 15,540 housing units in eight phases.
Rizzo, however, was manipulative and dishonest, exploiting the very city council members who hired him, enabled him and directed him to develop the city at any cost. During the 1990 election, he arranged with developmental interests to get scores of residents in Orange County to write $99 checks in blank and entrust them to him. He then distributed those checks to the candidates up for election in the city council race that he deemed to be most accommodating of the pro-development agenda, including Percy Bakker, M. Val Shearer and planning commission member Donna Roland. In this way, Rizzo was seeking to obtain leverage over those to whom he was answerable. No one on the council objected until press accounts in early 1992 revealed what had occurred. Even then, the council sought to minimize the transgression. But public outrage over the corruption of the electoral and governmental process forced the council’s hand and in April 1992, Rizzo left the city.
Some 18 years later, Rizzo’s corrupt manipulations of the elected city officials who hired him came home to roost when a series of legal, financial, managerial and governmental transgressions he had engaged in as city manager with the City of Bell came to light and he was arrested, criminally charged, convicted and given a 12-year sentence in state prison.
The Rancho Las Flores project never got off the drawing boards, though it remained active, on paper, under succeeding city managers and the guidance of community development director Tom Harp and principal planner Dave Reno, suffering setbacks with the revelations of Rizzo’s illicit efforts to filter money from Orange County development interests into the campaign coffers of council member candidates amenable to the aggressive development proposal that would have doubled the city’s population. The project’s prospects were damaged as well by other significant challenges that retarded its progression, such as the economic downturn of 1991 and 1992 and the listing of three species that inhabited the property – the arroyo toad, the Least Bell’s Vireo and the willow flycatcher – as endangered.
Even without Rizzo at the helm, the developmental imperative that the city council embraced pervaded other project proposals and inescapably resulted in the city waiving requirements that those projects given approval entail the foundational framework and both on-site and off-site improvements such as roads, wastewater treatment capability, water and sewer lines and stormwater facilities to handle the impacts and consequences of that construction and the inhabitation of what was being built. When objections were made to allowing projects to proceed without the needed supporting improvements to accommodate them, project proponents or members of the council themselves would respond by saying that insisting on such requirements would impede progress and economic opportunity. Continued growth would generate prosperity and a larger local economy, which ultimately would lead to the enhancement of property values and commercial development, and thus future property tax and sales tax enhancements, the growth proponents insisted. Redressments of inadequate infrastructure could come later, they said. With that attitude prevailing, the city’s infrastructure deficit continued to compound.
Rizzo was replaced by D.J. Collins, who for years had been the general manager of the Hesperia Water District. Under Collins, the water district in short order was subsumed by the city. Collins made little headway in dealing with the city’s infrastructure problems, and though he succeeded in diverting some of the money available from the city’s water operations to shore up the city’s inadequate road system, he and the council were strongly criticized for having broken a commitment to strictly devote water revenues to maintaining the city’s water system.
Collins’ administration was severely challenged by “the revolt of the Young Turks” in the fire department, which came about when many of the fire department’s personnel, most of whom were a generation to a generation-and-a-half younger than Collins, objected to the city overriding efforts by the fire marshal to strictly enforce the state and municipal fire code with regard to new development as City Hall sought to liberalize regulations and encourage building.
Collins would be succeeded by a succession of relatively short-lived city managers – David Berger, Steve Dukett, David Bentz and Steve West. Following West’s departure, the city council temporarily elevated assistant city manager Rod Foster to the city manager’s position. In 2000, Western Water made an overture to Hesperia with regard to purchasing the city’s municipal water division. Making that pitch for Western Water was Robb Quincey. Quincey, who had a Bachelor of Arts degree in public administration and political science from the University of Minnesota, a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of South Dakota and a doctorate in public administration with an emphasis in economics and organizational development from the University of La Verne, left quite an impression on the city council, though they did not accede to his suggestion that they sell the city’s water system to Western Water. Nevertheless, in October 2000 they offered Quincey a position as city manager. He accepted the offer. Titularly, Foster returned to his assistant city manager’s post. Quincey, however, had no actual experience in managing a governmental organization. He proved no more effective in holding in check the developmental imperative embodied by the city’s political leadership than any of the previous city managers and, in actuality, embraced it in his effort to remain in good standing with the city council.
In terms of overseeing the day-to-day municipal operations, Quincey, the show horse, proved highly dependent upon Foster, the workhorse, who in essence served as the de-facto city administrator during Quincey’s more than four-year tenure as city manager in Hesperia.
In March 2005, Upland Mayor John Pomierski succeeded in convincing Quincey to jump ship and take on the managerial duties in the City of Gracious Living. For twenty days after Quincey’s departure, Foster again served as interim city manager in Hesperia. In Upland, where like in Hesperia his reputation exceeded his skill level, Quincey soon recognized he was in over his head. He convinced Pomierski to hire Foster to serve as his assistant city manager. Foster then followed Quincey to Upland. Over time in Upland, events would overtake Pomierski and Quincey, with both criminally charged and convicted of corruptions of the political process, based on graft, monetary diversions and conflicts of interest, with Upland reflecting what had occurred in Hesperia, mainly the developmental imperative having been sustained by the development community’s payment of bribes and political contributions to the elected decision-makers who approved development proposal after development proposal without requiring that the project proponent accompany each succeeding addition to the community with adequate infrastructure to keep up with the impact of the new growth let alone replace, refurbish or redo the crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure from previous rounds of overdevelopment. Because of Upland’s higher profile than Hesperia and the greater level of sophistication of its citizenry, Pomierski and Quincey were caught out in relatively short order and prosecuted, whereas in Hesperia, similar depredations, while not entirely unnoticed, continued without being effectively checked, prevented or prosecuted.
With Quincey’s departure to Upland in 2005, the city had an opportunity to promote Foster, a committed municipal managerial professional who was perhaps the most qualified and talented employee in that role the city ever had, but Quincey prevailed upon his political masters in Upland to offer Foster a contract to serve as his assistant city manager there, and Foster departed.
Hesperia turned to Mike Podegracz, who had served as Hesperia’s contract engineer/director of public works before he was hired in 1999 outright as the director of development services. Podegracz would remain in the city manager’s post for just over a decade, making him the city’s longest serving city manager. Despite the adherence of a majority of the city council to the development imperative, there was hope that under Podegracz, an engineer by training and profession, the city would adopt some semblance of a policy by which the new growth would be balanced with sufficient infrastructure. That promise was lived up to only to the extent that through much of Podegracz’s tenure as city manager – that is from late 2007 through 2013, the local, state and national economies were dealing with what was at first a severe downturn followed by a sluggishness of several years’ duration that sharply reduced development.
The pro-growth forces that had driven Hesperia’s population to increase from 48,373 at the time of its incorporation in 1988 to 50,819 in 1990 to 62,582 in 2000 to 90,173 in 2010 to 100,200 in 2020 had never abated, paralleled by Bill Holland and Russ Blewett being elected to the city council in 2010 and Paul Russ being elected to the council in 2014.
In 2012, the council voted to reduce its development impact fees as a ploy of encouraging further expansion and it extended those reductions in 2014. Also in 2014, the Texas-based Terra Verde Group, led in California by its director of development, John Ohanian, signaled its intention to revive the Las Flores Ranch project, which had lain dormant for some two decades, after having acquired the 10,000 acres near Summit Valley previously controlled by then-bankrupt ARC Las Flores for roughly $45 million.
Podegracz’s term as city manager drew to a close in 2015 when he voluntarily retired.
Rather than seek out a career municipal management professional to replace Podegracz, one who would take the infrastructure deficit bull by the horns and prevent any further development from taking place unless those undertaking it matched it with public improvements to mitigate the impacts of having to accommodate tens of thousands more people living, driving and adding to the discharge of effluent that development would ultimately entail, the city council, dominated by the stridently pro-development Holland, Blewett and Russ, opted to hire Nils Bentsen, who over the previous three-and-a-half years had been the commander of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s Hesperia Station – serving in the capacity of what was essentially Hesperia’s chief of police, as the city has from its inception contracted with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement services.
Holland, who was then the mayor, had previously worked as a sheriff’s deputy and personally knew Bentsen. While for some, the challenges and extraordinary issues Hesperia faced as a city presented a strong reason for relying upon a seasoned city manager steeped in the arenas of either financial organization, civil engineering, land use policy or urban planning, Holland, Blewett and Russ felt having a manager who would not obsessively focus on the barriers to further development would better allow them to pursue the economic growth in the city that those who had bankrolled putting them in office were looking to achieve. In that way, Bentsen’s lack of expertise and experience in ensuring adequate roads, bridges, sewers, utilities, flood control and other infrastructure and public improvements registered as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, a quality that recommended him insofar as the then-ruling coalition on the city council was concerned.
Once in place, Bentsen proved himself to be in line with the council’s expectations, an accommodationist rather than an obstructionist. Moreover, he was willing to install into a key position relating to Hesperia’s welcoming of the building industry – that of development services director – not a traditional municipal professional committed to the standards of best practices and land use standards but rather someone not unlike himself, a law enforcement professional who had no formal training with regard to municipal or governmentally-imposed building standards, Michael Blay, a former sergeant with the sheriff’s department with whom he had once served.
An object demonstration of the pro-growth orientation of the Bentsen administration was made on January 26, 2016, not even a month after he had assumed the city manager’s post, with staff’s presentation of the Tapestry development proposal, the follow-on to the unrealized Las Flores Ranch Development.
Terra Verde Group, it turned out, never intended to build the homes but merely obtain the entitlement to build, intending to have the actual construction handled by established home builders in the region. Issues with the availability of water, which always existed but were never cogently addressed, became an existential threat to the undertaking, entailing delay upon delay for more than four years. What eventually became clear was there was never any intention that the proponent would provide the infrastructure a 15,663-home planned development would need, and that the game plan that had existed for the Las Flores Ranch property and the surrounding acreage since Rizzo had been city manager had never changed: the developers who stood to profit by the conversion of the land would manipulate the pro-growth politicians they had bankrolled into office to force the city’s staff to machinate having infrastructure costs for the project defrayed through a combination of public financing and homebuyer fees that are to be applied to the Tapestry neighborhood homes, with each homeowner who buys into the subdivision taking take on the responsibility, on top of his/her annual mortgage and normal property taxes, a yearly $4,000 to $5,000 Mello-Roos assessment.
After a relatively short duration as Hesperia’s development services director, particularly one who had no previous experience in municipal management or the issues pertaining to urban planning and development, Blay was promoted by Bentsen to assistant city manager. Having spent the their twenties, thirties and much or all of their forties patrolling streets and fighting crime, collaring armed and strongarmed robbers and drug dealers, Bentsen and Blay knew frightfully little about land use, regional planning, urbanism, zoning or what constituted adequate infrastructure. Nor did either have the skill set to redress or undo three generations of compounding infrastructure inadequacies. Instead, they defaulted to meeting the expectations of their political masters on the city council, who were demanding that the developmental imperative continue.
In 2021, Blay left Hesperia following a falling out with Bentsen and surfaced later that year as the Upland City Manager. In 2023, Bentsen, having accumulated more than 38 years across two of California’s public retirement systems and thereby qualifying for what was a pension at more than 100 percent of what his salary had been as a sheriff’s captain, retired.
Selected to replace him was Rachel Molina, whose experience with city consisted of serving as the Podegracz’s senior office assistant in Podegracz’s office from 2007 to 2009, as public information officer from 2009 to 2016, assistant to the city manager from 2016 to 2020, deputy city manager from 2020 to 2021 and assistant city manager in 2021.
There were misgivings galore about Molina’s ability to take on the position. While she has a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership from Chapman University and a master’s degree in public administration from California Baptist University, her background as a municipal employee consisted of what was essentially clerical work in the city manager’s office and serving as a public information officer before being moved into her deputy and assistant city manager assignments, a deviation from the traditional route into city management or senior administration, which typically involves extensive experience in municipal finance, public works or land use/planning. More concerning about Molina was the situation she was taking on with the city’s overwhelming dearth of infrastructure.
An overwhelming issue in this regard is the Santa Fe railroad track’s bifurcation of the city.
In the 1880s, the California Southern Railroad, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, undertook the construction of the rail system between Barstow and Colton, entrusting oversight of that effort to civil engineer Jacob Nash Victor. Victor laid that line through what is today Hesperia, in so doing creating the community. The township of Hesperia grew up around the rail line, rather than to one side of it, and in the fullness of time, that rail line became a division in the city, a very real physical barrier. With a slight degree of curvature and variance mostly at the north end, the rail line runs essentially on a straight line through the city south-south-southwest moving south or north-north-northwest moving north, such that it divides the city east from west. The railroad tracks can be forded only at Bear Valley Road on the city’s extreme north end, by means of the Myra McGinnis Bridge on Main Street in the central part of the city and the Ranchero Road Underpass at the city’s south end. Santa Fe Avenue West and Santa Fe Avenue East closely parallel the rail line through much of the city. The east-west streets Sequoia, Pitache, Capri, Donert, Manzanita, Trinity, Sycamore, Alder, Birch, Catalpa, Hackberry, Eucalyptus, Lilac, Deodar, Mesa, Lemon, Mauna Loa, Mojave, Hercules, Willow, Vine, Live Oak, Pine, Cajon, Chestnut, Smoke Tree, Spruce, Juniper and Yucca, all of which lie between Bear Valley Road and Main Street, are divided east from west by the railroad track corridor. Walnut, Orange, Olive, Sultana, Muscatel, Lime, Palm, Elm, Joshua, Sage, Cactus, Allthorn, Mesquite, Bodart, Ash, Mission, Fremontia, Fir, Adelia, Larch and Rodeo streets and El Centro Road lying between Main Street and Ranchero Road are all prevented from meeting one another east and west of the railroad tracks. In this way, Hesperia is a city that is largely divided from itself, such that going from the east of the city to the west or vice versa often entails a commuting rigamarole and delay. Overcoming this problem is expensive, as the most recent fix to the dilemma, consisting of the Ranchero Underpass completed and opened in 2013, cost $27 million in 2006 dollars.
Thus, the entity that might be credited with being most responsible for creating Hesperia – the Santa Fe Railroad – is equally responsible for saddling Hesperia with an intractable problem, a physical and geographical division that it has yet, despite the best minds available to it during its prehistory and its 35 years as a city, been unable to solve. While certainly this is not a problem of Molina’s creation nor one which can be laid at her feet, she is at this stage the one individual personally responsible for seeking a solution. As it stands, the railroad is not amenable to allowing grade crossings at any of the 51 prospective spots where traffic might move from the east side of the city to the west or vice-versa but cannot do so because of the obstruction, and Molina has not taken the initiative to begin that dialogue.
A second serious issue is that only about 22 percent of the development in the city is serviced by sewer facilities, leaving more than 77 percent of the city reliant upon septic systems.
Hesperia, at present, has a total of 538 miles of roads, with 498 miles of paved roads and 40 miles of unpaved roads. Of those 498 miles of paved roads, 195 linear miles, give or take – roughly 39 percent – qualify as being in what is defined as good or fair condition by TRIP, a national transportation research nonprofit. That leaves 303 miles of the city’s paved roads in “poor” condition. Of those 303 miles of the city’s poorly paved roads, 138 miles of those roads are in such an abysmal state that they are said to do more damage to the cars that drive them and represent a greater hazard – primarily because of the substantial unevenness of the roadway and the differential in traction – than they would if they were unpaved. In an untallied number of miles around the city, the foundation beneath the existing pavement is substantially eroded to the point that the pavement is prone to, or in more than passing danger of, giving way under the weight of standard passenger vehicles.
Topping all of this is the quadruple whammy of the consideration that the entirety of the city lies within a flood plane complete with nightmarish contours of the land’s natural drainage, the inadequacy of the municipal storm drain system, exacerbated by the failure of the city to insist upon the elevation of all foundations to a rationale and prudent level above the flood plane level, taken together with the failure of the city post incorporation and the county pre-incorporation to insist upon barriers – something as simple as curbs – being erected between roadways and residential properties.

What many of the city’s residents recognized was that Molina, like virtually all of the men who served as city manager before her, lacked the strength of character and force of will to 1) stand up to the monetary, business and developmental interests who were intent on achieving a profit by furthering the city’s infrastructure deficit and 2) the ability to husband the city’s existing limited financial resources and/or enhance its revenues and direct them into an efficient and effective effort to redress the infrastructure deficit. Those residents were unable to prevent the city council from extending a $214,275.42 per year salary, $64,308.50 per year perquisites and $127,129.86 benefits contract to Molina, which provided her with $405,713.78 in total annual compensation contract to Molina.
Over the course of two years, events bore out the Hesperia residents who had misgivings about Molina. Development in Hesperia continued apace, particularly in the city’s southeasternmost quadrant, where the Tapestry project’s first phase has progressed toward completion and further phases have begun construction without crucial infrastructure in place and no clear understanding or contractual clarity on which entity is to construct it and how it is to be financed.
During the just concluded holiday season, thousands of Hesperians were given ample illustration that what many of their fellow and sister residents already recognized as Molina’s dearth of both fortitude and clarity with regard to the need for communal facilities is matched by sheer ineptitude and incompetence.
Going back to 2013, California was hit with a drought which persisted for more than 12 years. The parching conditions were alleviated in December when heavy rains in general resulted in virtually every reservoir in the state aside from those under repair being above their historic average storage, with a handful brimming at or near total capacity.
With the exception of a heavy rain season in 2011, the entirety of Molina’s time as an employee in Hesperia was unmarred by flooding of any serious consequence in the city. Moreover, the positions she held did not being her face-to-face with the engineering issues inherent in having to practically deal with how sheet flow – the shallow, thin, and broad movement of water such as that typical in stormwater runoff over a plane surface such as a field, street or parking lot without a defined channel – is to be collected and safely diverted before it converges into rills or streams and, as a consequence of volume and gravity, becomes a potentially or actually destructive force.
Because of the drought during that portion of her time with the city when she was moving into higher and progressively more responsible positions, she, like much or the rest of the employees at City Hall were lulled into a state of complacency with regard to the acute dangers of flooding – and in particular flash flooding – that is a hidden but very real element of existence in the normally very dry desert.
While at one time, particularly when the city was headed by Podegracz, there was a degree of sensitivity at City Hall to the problematic nature of inadequate drainage generally in the city and critically at in specific locations, Molina, by the time she was made city manager, was removed both a temporal and bureaucratic sense from such considerations. Rather than riding herd on Director of Public Works/City Engineer Cassandra Sanchez, Deputy City Engineer Kevin Sin or Associate Engineer Enrique Villalobos, she simply deferred to them with regard to any engineering issues or the responsibilities and duties of the public works department. Her utter lack of appreciation of the importance of such issues, let alone possession of the experience, expertise and hard knowledge with regard to engineering issues, she was not in a position to or capable of ensuring Sanchez, Sin or Villalobos were tending to the matters that would, if not prevent flooding from ensuing if the Victor Valley was hit with a deluge, at least mitigate its intensity and impacts on particularly vulnerable areas of the city.
In more mature cities in San Bernardino County such as Chino, Montclair, Ontario, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the San Bernardino County Flood Control District have proven energetic in constructing deep flood control channels which have substantially alleviated flood conditions in those communities. The Army Corps of Engineers and the San Bernardino County Flood Control.
The San Bernardino County Flood Control District is an offshoot of/parallel agency to the County of San Bernardino, with boundaries that are the same as those of the county, considered a separate legal entity from the county but one that is nevertheless governed by the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors. Its functions are handled by the county’s department of public works.
While the Army Corps of Engineers and the San Bernardino County Flood Control District have not been entirely absent in the High Desert, they have been far more active historically in the lower, non-desert portion of the county, where the population in decades past was more heavily saturated.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working in conjunction with the San Bernardino County Flood Control District constructed the Mojave River Dam and Mojave Flood Control Basin and some other regional drainage related [assets] in the Victor Valley. More recently with regard to the area and Hesperia in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers has been doing studies and planning with regard to the long planned-for and long-delayed Bandicoot Flood Control Basin and other risk assessments and feasibility studies for basins and water transfer channels to upgrade protection for Hesperia.
In this way, the community of Hesperia has in large measure needed to rely upon itself in dealing with its flood vulnerability.

In practical terms, this has come down to the city making use – and the most – of what is already at its disposal. There are some limited means of protection available to the city, both in the form of some facilities that exist for water-related purposes but which have flood control or flood diversion capability and in taking practical steps in a timely manner to either impede/divert water to a less damaging route of flow or, at the least, relocating those people and other movable assets out of harm’s way.
Among water department-related or water use-related facilities are percolation ponds, where water on the surface filters through porous earth into the aquifer – the water table underneath the ground; basins; reservoirs; pipelines; pipes; channels; flumes; culverts; and other physical means of conveying water in some order of a controlled fashion. If these facilities are in working order and have available capacity, they can be of some assistance in mitigating a flood situation by reducing the volume of water by temporarily holding it or absorbing it, moving water to another location or allowing it to escape; limiting the amount or flow of water on roads or land, diverting it to a holding facility or away from the surface and reducing the pooling of water or allowing it to flow beneath the surface of road or street without undermining it.
The functionality of these various facilities must be maintained, sometimes on a constant basis and sometimes intermittently. A crucial issue in this regard is that the flow, drafting and course of the water into them, through them, permeating them or past them consistent with the way they are designed is crucial to their functionality.
These various facilities must be maintained, sometimes on a constant basis and sometimes intermittently. The flow, drafting and course of the water into them, through them, permeating them or past them consistent with the way they are designed is crucial to their functionality.
The introduction of mud or silt into the settling or percolation ponds presents a problem. For a time, the presence of dirt or other forms of earthy soil will have a minimal impact on the percolation of water into the ground, but as fine sand, clay or dirt accumulates and settles to form a sediment, through which water will not permeate. When debris – consisting of leaves and other organic matter, twigs, branches, sticks and trash – collect in pipes, pipelines, troughs, culverts and the like, with the continued force of water in one direction and the eventual addition of sand, gravel and rocks, flow can be diminished or obstructed entirely.
The lay of the land in Hesperia presents a hodge-podge of property that has been graded or otherwise altered to accommodate improvements and development and expanses here and there that remain, basically, in their natural state, as Mother Nature birthed them. In some spots, the contour of the earth was partially a product of wind and water erosion over time, which had created arroyos, gullies, rivulets and washes, over which water would flow with the guidance of gravity or pooled in the lowest-lying ground. In others, the natural course of water flow had been altered by man’s machinations. In some cases, this changed the direction of sheet flow. In other cases it resulted in the water pooling in spots it otherwise would have left. In other cases still, the water continued in the direction it had moved previously, but with an intensification of force.
Rachel Molina officially became Hesperia’s city manager in June 2023. That gave her not quite two-and-half years to make sure that Jeremy McDonald, who was serving in the capacity of public works director in 2023 and subsequently moved into the position of water operations manager in 2024, and Sanchez, who succeeded McDonald as public works director in February 2024, utilized the city’s public works staff to clean the debris out of all of the city’s pipes, pipelines, troughs, culverts and water passages and to remove the mud and silt from the percolation ponds, basins and reservoirs in the city. That did not occur and neither did Molina, as forecasters in mid-December were predicting an “atmospheric river” was going to hit Southern California in such a way that the Mojave Desert was to have a very wet Christmas, call upon the public works department to utilize excavators, backhoes, bulldozers, loaders scrappers, graders, trenchers and dump trucks at its disposal or obtainable at short notice from the San Bernardino County Flood Control District to undertake trenching along the side of those roads without curbs where doing so would provide prevent the sheet flow from transforming streets into raging rivers or to create at crucial locations in the city impromptu water holding basins to mitigate the flash flooding that ultimately occurred on December 24.
Homeowners at various locations around the city were overwhelmed with water inundating their homes and property, encountering what were repeatedly described as “tidal waves” when they came outside and then encountering streets that were likened to rivers which made driving away if not impossible, highly advisable, leaving them stranded. Many others who were not at home when the storm touched down experienced the converse, being unable to approach their homes, in some instances from a single direction, in others from two directions and in others still, from four directions.
There is some debate as to which area of the city was hardest hit. A strong case in that regard is the environs of the intersection of Maple Avenue and Muscatel Street, where Hesperia’s subregional water recycling facility is located. The basin there filled entirely and began overflowing. At a relatively early point after the downpour began, the wall around the facility failed sending a violent sheet of water east on Muscatel and north on Maple.
Competing for first in the category of the greatest show of irresistible force by out-of-control water in the city was the raging river that formed on Sultana Street, making transit on the road virtually impossible and leaving some motorists at several spots stranded when they attempted to ford it and the water level reached above the car’s ignition and exhaust systems. The situation on Sultana was exacerbated by the failure of a bubbler, a device used to measure water level and water pressure as well as the air flow rate through a piping system and prevent water backup, which resulted in more water being added to the flow. There was a report that, additionally, a subsurface water main on Sultana broke, resulting in hundreds of thousands of gallons of water being interjected into the excessive water. The city did not confirm this report. There have been previous instances of failure involving Sultana Street water mains.
Aspen Street and Pinon Avenue between Olive Street and Aspen Street were both described as “raging rivers” by local residents at certain times during the storm.
It was remarked that had school been in session, which it was not because of the holiday vacation, the lives of students at Cottonwood Elementary School would have been in danger because of the flooding of the campus and on Cottonwood Avenue.
The flooding was so intense along Aspen that the water tore a gorge between Maple Avenue and Cottonwood Avenue that exposed multiple below-ground utilities.
Elsewhere in the city, the water created havoc.
A drainage watershed at Farmington and Coyote Trail that intersects with the California Aqueduct at that point was carrying so many tons of water with unchecked force that the aqueduct, part of the State Water Project was damaged.
A low-lying area in the south of the city near Ranchero Road rapidly filled with water, overfilling and creating water flows that made passage extremely challenging.
In multiple locations across the city the earth beneath the city’s already compromised roads was undermined by the torrents of water passing through.
Mud drifts of one to two feet were general throughout the city. In some cases mud drifts nearing five feet overwhelmed streets and properties. One resident reported that there were over 200 homes in the area south of Main Street and west of the Santa Fe Railroad tracks into which water and mud to a level higher than one foot had sloshed.

Read the remainder of this article in the Sentinel.