The Barstow City Council, which for just over five years has been afflicted with precipitously shifting alliances and seemingly unpredictably divisive developments among personnel changes, whipsawed the historic and quintessential railroad town toward further political dysfunction last month with a vote to censure its longest currently serving member.
Once a model of progressive-leaning governance, the City of Barstow is now competing with Yucaipa, Montclair and the County Seat and winning in the contest to claim the title of the most disjointed and poorly-informed decision-making panel heading local government in San Bernardino County.
At the Barstow City Council’s December 16 meeting, Mayor Tim Silva, Councilmen John Williams and James Noble and Councilwoman Carmen Hernandez voted to censure Councilwoman Barbara Rose, ostensibly for launching misdirected personal attacks on City Manager Rochelle Clayton.
That circumstance grew out of a series of unclearly-sourced and unverified social media postings which accused Barstow City Manager Rochelle Clayton of failing to evince sufficient excitement over the Barstow High School football team’s march toward capturing the CIF State Division 4AA championship and what was said to be her attempt at undermining support of the team the night of what was a crucial championship series game for the team.
The Barstow community was understandably enthused over the Aztec’s 2025 performance. The team dropped its first three games in August and September to to Capistrano Valley, Serrano and Sagerstrom, but from September 12 onward convincingly defeated Sultana, Burroughs and Victor Valley, beat Silverado 24-to-17, and then trounced Granite Hills and Adelanto before meeting up with Serrano for a rematch in the first round of the California Interscholastic Federation championship playoffs on November 7, revenging the earlier loss in the season with a 34-to-12 victory and advancing to the quarterfinals. The Aztecs then blew out La Canada 34-to-6 before embarrassing Palm Springs 28-to-7 and defeating Apple Valley 10-7 on November 28 to capture the CIF-Southern Section Division 7 Championship. On December 5 Barstow beat Immanuel for the CIF 4AA Southern California title and on December 12 beat Sutter 17-7 in a come-from-behind win to capture the CIF State Division 4AA championship.
Throughout the Aztec’s impressive run in which it proved to be the first high school from the High Desert to garner a state football championship, a frenzy over the team manifested, which included accolades from a number of community luminaries. Absent from those registering those congratulations was City Manager Rochelle Clayton, a relative newcomer to Barstow. Clayton, who worked for 17 years with the County of San Bernardino, as assistant city manager for the City of Menifee, deputy & interim city manager/administrative services director for the City of Banning, had been functioning in the role of interim city manager of the City of San Bernardino for ten months when she was hired by Barstow to come in as city manager last March.
Clayton resides in home in the upscale Woodcrest District of Riverside and the terms of her employment contract with Barstow were negotiated with Mayor Tim Silva and Councilwoman Barbara Rose, who was then the city’s mayor pro tem. There was concern among some at the time of Clayton’s hiring that the 82-mile one way one-hour and 15-minute commute in light traffic or 164-mile two-hour-and-30-minute in light traffic round trip daily commute for Clayton from her Riverside home to her workplace could prove taxing and might over time diminish her enthusiasm for the job as well as her performance. It was noted at the time that the annual gross base salary of $274,000, up to $39,171 in perquisites and pay add-ons and $44,450.12 in benefits, or $357,621.12 in total annual compensation she is receiving from Barstow is substantially less than the $325,000 salary and $452,313.36 total annual compensation she was on the brink of receiving from the City of San Bernardino upon what was anticipated to be her acceptance as that city’s fully established city manager.
Both Silva and Rose, however, were confident that Clayton was a good fit for Barstow and that she represented the best option available for finding a municipal management professional to succeed Willie Hopkins, whose departure in 2022 to move into the city manage position in Compton had resulted in the city substituting Police Chief Andrew Espinoza and Assistant City Manager Kody Tompkins into the interim post.
At some indeterminate point in the Summer of 2025, however, Rose had, for reasons that are not entirely clear, grown disenchanted with Clayton.
By October, as the Aztecs fortunes were advancing and Clayton found herself fully engaged in the minutiae of planning, organizing, directing and controlling municipal operations in Barstow, with little time or opportunity to focus on anything else, John Garner, the administrator of the Barstow Citizens Facebook Page, began making occasional negative posting about Clayton, noting her apparent indifference toward the Aztecs gridiron achievements and the manner in which Barstow head coach Clayton Leleimene was driving the team toward a historic outcome.
Well ahead of the Aztecs’ accomplishments on the athletic field, the city had scheduled the annual Christmas Tree lighting at City Hall for 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on December 5. As it would turn out, the Aztecs’ game for the CIF 4AA championship fell on December 5 after Barstow High defeated Apple Valley on November 28. There were calls for the city to reschedule or postpone the Christmas Tree lighting, which was met with a slight degree of deference by Clayton, who called for initiating the annual Christmas season celebration one hour earlier than previously scheduled, changing it from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on December 5.
There were several sharply worded postings made to the Barstow Citizens Facebook Page about the city’s and city management’s lack of sensitivity to the significance of the Aztec’s appearance in the championship game. Garner, with some degree of relish, it seemed, permitted the postings calling for city officials to postpone the tree lighting to dominate the site and then authored a piece that was critical of Clayton and questioned her commitment to Barstow.
Garner’s posting grew considerable attention in the isolated desert town. He had launched the Barstow Citizens Facebook Page during the mayoralty of Paul Courtney and had used it as a forum from which he disseminated his view that Courtney was “corrupt” and, after Courtney opted against seeking reelection, used it during the 2024 political season to oppose those who in his words “were supported by the good ol’ boy structure.” Earlier this year he transitioned Barstow Citizens into what he maintained was intended to be an online community newspaper, one that was to be restricted, he said at that time, to upbeat news and positive things about the community. “I won’t be attacking anyone or anything but reporting on the good people of Barstow and the ‘good’ things happening here that either are important or of interest to us,” he had vowed.
Thus, when Garner posted what was a editorial-article hybrid alleging Clayton was seeking to undermine the accomplishments of the Aztecs in having made it to the CIF championship game, city officials or most of them, were taken aback. Silva, Noble and Williams and to a lesser extent Hernandez grew concerned that there was a growing perception that Clayton, who serves at the pleasure of the council, has slighted the community. In exploring the matter, they came to the conclusion that Rose had been actively fueling some of the expressions of discontent over Clayton’s apparent refusal to change the date of the Christmas Tree lighting. All four, who take part in the executive sessions of the city council that take place outside the earshot and presence of the public behind closed doors during regularly scheduled city council meetings, were aware that Rose for some time has had misgivings over Clayton’s stewardship of the city. In separate dialogues with Williams, Noble and Silva, Garner claimed to have taken his cue from Rose and that Rose had been undercutting Clayton, suggesting that the city manager was purposefully disregarding the historic accomplishments of the Aztecs. In this way, it became the perception of the mayor, Williams and Noble that Rose had used the Barstow Citizens Facebook Page as a cat’s paw against Clayton.
Councilmen Williams and Noble requested that the city council at its December 16 meeting consider censuring Mayor Pro Tem Rose related to her conduct and consider imposing sanctions within the city council’s power under the city’s ethics code.
On December 16, after Mayor Silva, in a normally rotation move that is made every year, appointed Noble to the mayor pro tem position to succeed Rose, the council considered the censure request.
The hearing was marred by Williams and Noble often or consistently and both Mayor Silva and Rose at times blurring the distinction between the concepts of censorship and an act of censure as well as mispronouncing the word “censure” – i.e., “sen(t)-shər” as “censor” – “sɛn(t)sər.” Webster defines censor “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable” or “to suppress or delete as objectionable.” Webster defines censure as “to formally reprimand someone.”
Despite City Attorney Matthew Summers having laid out a definition of censure and the process by which it is carried out in a staff report that accompanied the agenda item requested by Williams and Noble, throughout the hearing on December 16, reference was made to “free speech,” by which Rose suggested that her constitutional rights were being abridged, while Williams, Noble and even the mayor appeared focused on the concept of limiting speech.
At various times during the December 16 meeting as members of the council headed off on a tangent suggesting that what was being pursued was an effort to “censor” Rose, Summers, who was unwilling to cast a spotlight on the ignorance of his political masters, did nothing to refocus the proceedings toward the legitimate matter at hand, to ensure that what was being carried out was an official “censure” of Councilwoman Rose, i.e., making a condemnation of her action or behavior.
The censure of Rose was further tarnished by Williams, Noble and Silva relying upon their citations of Garner’s renunciation of his own posting related to Clayton. All three framed the censure of Rose as stemming from Rose’s efforts to disparage Clayton indirectly through the use of the Barstow Citizens website by having manipulated Garner through the provision of false, inaccurate or misleading information. Nevertheless, Garner was not present at the December 16 meeting and there was no direct statements from him offered into the record upon which to base the council’s action.
Rather, Williams, who was given the first opportunity to make the case for censuring Rose, implied that Garner’s posting critical of the city manager had been formulated based upon misrepresentations Rose had made about Clayton to Garner.
At the December 16 meeting, Williams, a former assistant football coach at Barstow High, said, “I talked to Mr. Garner the day that message came out. I asked him, ‘Why? Why would you do something like that? Why would you write something so vicious and go after the city manager? Explain to me the details of what went on. Explain to me that in eight months he hasn’t heard from Councilwoman Rose, but at the last minute she made the phone call. What that discussion was was incredible. Going after the city manager and doing what Councilwoman Rose did was basically take the wind out of the city manager’s sails.”
Williams said that by proxy what Rose had done was to tell the community that Clayton “is not invested” in Barstow. “What is our public going to be saying to us?” Williams asked. “What is our staff looking at when we hear our city manager is not invested?”
He said Rose was engaging in “personal attacks” on Clayton that were “ridiculous. The city manager’s been through too much. I’m not going to sit back and watch it happen.”
Noble at the December 16 meeting said, “When I heard what had happened and it came form one of us, that’s very disturbing.”
Noble then alluded to the 2021 censure of Mayor Courtney.
“We went through this a few years back with another council member,” Noble said. “We had to go through the same process. This is not good. We got beat up pretty bad from you guys out there because we waited and waited so long before any action was done. I’m tired of waiting. We’re not going to be waiting anymore. If we do something wrong, we should be hold (sic) accountable.”
Rose in seeking to convince her colleagues to desist in censuring her, said, “What Councilman Williams is stating is based on hearsay. It’s my word against John Garner’s word. Prior to any consideration of proposed censure, I state the following: John Garner authored the referenced article entirely on his own initiative. I did not direct, request, encourage, review or in any way influence him to write the article. I expressly disavow the article’s content and any suggestion I supported, endorsed or approved it. I had no involvement in nor do I condone what he wrote and the harm and adverse effects that has been caused on our city manager.”
Williams, without saying so directly, suggested that Rose was prevaricating, and that there was proof of as much, implying that Garner has recordings of his conversations with her.
Williams said the “bottom line was she made the phone call. She had an alternative (sic) motive for doing that.”
Referring once again to the censure as a “censor, Williams assured the public the council was doing the right thing in taking action against Rose, even though the entire rationale for doing so might not be disclosed.
“You guys may not know everything going on behind back doors,” Williams said. “You may not see it all.”
Rose constructed her defense along the lines that she had herself made no disparaging remarks about Clayton and the pointed criticism of the city manager was contained in what Garner had written and posted.
“The article was and conceived, written and published entirely on his own initiative and discretion,” Rose said.
Rose said she had made “several phone calls [to see] whether city would consider rescheduling” the Christmas tree lighting. She suggested that those calls included exchanges with Clayton in which she was trying to make the rescheduling “if at all possible.. to help residents avoid having to choose between two important community commitments.”
Rose indicated that Clayton was likewise “doing everything she could to accommodate the situation.”
She was not behind the bad publicity that Clayton had been subjected to, Rose insisted.
“At no point during our exchange did I ask John Garner to write a disparaging article about the city manager, contrary to Councilman Williams’ allegations,” she said.
She sought to suggest that it was Williams rather than she who was responsible for the aspersions cast on Clayton. She said it was Williams who in the past had attacked city employees, other community members, police officers and all of the sitting members of the city council, and that he was the one “sowing unnecessary division within our community.”
Moreover, she pointed out, Garner is Williams’ friend.
Mayor Silva in his remarks relating to the censure, repeated and enlarged upon a theme earlier articulated by Williams and hinted at by Noble, that the members of the city council were knowledgeable about the manner in which Rose was conducting herself behind the scenes, both at City Hall and within the community at large. Specifically, Silva intimated without marshaling definitive evidence, Rose is militating against Clayton and is gunning to remove her from the city manager’s position.
Before the vote, in response to Silva’s inquiry, Rose acknowledged she had an exchange with Garner on social media and then spoke with him on the phone.
Mayor Silva inquired as to what Rose’s intention was in phoning Garner. She said that in calling Garner she had sought to “share with him the excitement of the football team. We were conversing back and forth, excited about the football team. That was my intent, to share with him the excitement about the football team.”
Silva asked why Rose had not simply engaged in a dialogue with Garner relating to the community pride being generated by the team on the Barstow Citizens Facebook texting app instead of conversing with Garner by phone, which was done privately rather than publicly. Rose said the question was irrelevant and not germane to the issue.
Mayor Silva said, “I just want to state that the public doesn’t know everything. Councilmember Rose has been attacking the city manager for at least six months. We at this dais know that. This was not her first attack. This lady [Clayton] is getting pressured to leave because of these attacks. Why don’t I do anything about it? I have sat down with council member Rose. I have sat down and contacted Council Member Williams. You don’t know everything, so don’t presume that I have not thought to change actions up here. I mentioned Day 1 when I came up here that I would not allow anyone up here to attack staff. I called Mr. Garner. I wanted his side of the story. My questions to him were basically to find if these were his ideas that he posted or were these ideas given to him. His opinion, what he stated was given to him. Yes, it’s hearsay. Yes, we have to believe one or the other. I don’t understand why Councilmember Rose doesn’t understand my question. It’s very clear. Why did it have to go to where it could not be documented when they had a conversation that could be documented? That’s fact enough for me, right there. I trust Mr. Garner. I know Mr. Garner. zIt’s just very suspicious to me. Again, Councilmember Rose has been after this city manager for at least six months, and you out there have not seen it. Us back here have. Our city manager got beat up on social media because of the actions of one person. This council cannot allow that.”
The vote to censure Rose was made by Williams and seconded by Noble. The motion passed 4-to-0, with Rose abstaining.
The votes of Silva and Williams to censure Rose were emblematic of the shifting alliances that have dogged the council going back several years.
In 2020, Paul Courtney, a Barstow native who had found business success through operating a janitorial company, PACE Services Corporation and had enhanced his reputation by founding a nonprofit entrepreneurial resource center, ECBarstow, to help people graduate from high school, enroll in college or start their own business, made a dynamic rise to the top of the political hill in Barstow, a desert railroad town that was once key to San Bernardino County’s establishment as not only the nation’s largest county but one of its more dynamic ones in terms of mining, manufacturing, travel and logistics at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century. The ninth of the county’s 24 municipalities to incorporate, Barstow was at one point the county’s fourth largest city in terms of population, but since that time had fallen to become, at 23,857 residents, the 20th largest of the county’s 24 cities and incorporated towns.
Courtney, had a few things going for him. He was the son of William Courtney, a one-time Barstow police officer and former city councilman. In addition to owning PACE Services and being involved in ECBarstow, he had served on the Barstow Fire Protection District Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2010 and he was active in the Barstow Chamber of Commerce. In the 2020 election, he challenged Mayor Julie Hackbarth-McIntyre, a niece of one of Barstow’s most successful entrepreneurs, Ed Hackbarth, the co-founder of the Del Taco fast food chain.
Courtney ran in league with two other newcomers to Barstow municipal politics, Barbara Rose, a 13-year member of the Barstow Unified School District Board of Trustees, and Marilyn Dyer-Kruse, an employee of the development company owned by Michael Lewis, Barstow’s elected treasurer since 2012 and one of Courtney’s major political backers. The three campaigned together and became known to many in the city as the “Troika,” appearing on billboards, mailers and fliers they put out in common. An important element of Courtney’s appeal to the city’s voters was to belabor that the city was in what he said was a precarious financial state, while he simultaneously emphasized the need to ensure that funds generated by Measure Q, a one cent-per-dollar sales tax override put on the local ballot for the November 2018 election by the city council and approved by 59 percent of Barstow’s voters, were responsibly utilized. Measure Q was intended to generate roughly $7 million annually in local funding for ensuring the provision of local fire protection and paramedic services; providing police services, including neighborhood police patrols, crime prevention and investigations while squelching gang activity and drug-related crimes; maintaining streets and filling potholes; keeping parks in decent shape; reducing response times to 9-1-1 emergencies; and funding both senior and youth programs.
Courtney, and by extension Rose and Dyer-Kruse, were assisted in their electoral efforts by public statements occasionally made by members of the city’s Measure Q Resident Oversight Committee suggesting that the Hackbarth-McIntyre Administration was not applying the Measure Q money available to the city with alacrity.
Ultimately, Courtney prevailed in the election over Hackbarth-McIntyre, while Dyer-Kruse ousted incumbent Councilwoman Carmen Hernandez in the city’s District Four city council race and Rose prevailed in the District Three contest against her opponent Leonard Williams, ultimately replacing former Councilman Richard Harpole, who had resigned from his then at-large council position to move with his family to Texas in December 2019.
Almost immediately after being installed as members of the city council, the Troika in short order rendered the two existing members of the city council, Tim Silva, who had first been elected to the council in 2006, and James Noble, who had been elected to the city council in 2018, political irrelevancies, at least temporarily. One of the first moves of the newly-composed council was to rescind the 90-day period for the review of the performance of the city manager and city attorney, the two positions at the city hired directly by the council, reducing the review time to 30 days. Then, only 28 days after their triple swearing-in, the Troika, with Silva and Noble dissenting, moved to force City Manager Nikki Salas, a vestige of the Hackbarth-McIntyre era, out of her position.
On January 8, as the city council was on the verge of placing Salas on administrative leave and firing Assistant City Manager Cindy Prothro outright at the end of the business day, Prothro, seeing the writing on the wall, tendered her “involuntary voluntary” retirement immediately. As was planned, Salas was put on administrative leave by a vote of the city council. Eleven days later, during a closed-door meeting, the council voted 3-2, with council Tim Silva and James Noble in opposition, to accept Salas’s official resignation.
In arriving at their agreement the previous year to work hard together to change the Barstow political landscape, Courtney and Rose had cut a deal that called for Rose to be installed as mayor pro tem, the de facto vice mayor position. With the support of Dyer-Kruse, that agreement was kept, and the mayor pro tem honor was conferred upon Rose, preparing the way, perhaps, for Rose to one day become the full-fledged mayor herself upon Courtney’s equally potential move to assume higher political office. In the interim, it was expected and anticipated that Rose and Dyer-Kruse were to be loyal members of Courtney’s ruling council coalition, such that he was to be the prime mover at Barstow City Hall, the dominant figure in local government.
Shortly after Salas’s firing, things gradually began to go bad between Courtney and Rose. Rose, a strong-willed woman, began to question some of the things Courtney, an Alpha type, wanted to do. After a few meetings, it went from Rose playing the devil’s advocate and asking tought questions but still voting in line with Courtney to on occasion and then more often voting against his proposals. Within three months, they were on the outs with one another. The differences continued to escalate and things grew ugly. At that point, their political partnership was over. Courtney decided he did not want Rose as his mayor pro tem, at which point he arranged to remove her from the post and elevate Councilman Noble to the position.
In his rush to depose Rose as mayor pro tem, Courtney cast caution to the wind and violated a basic protocol in California governance pertaining to the state’s open public meeting law, known as the Ralph M. Brown Act, which requires that all governmental business and decision-making be conducted in public and that prior notice of that action must be given to the public at least 72 hours in advance on the agenda posted prior to official meetings before a vote can take place. The Brown Act further prohibits a quorum – a majority – of the members of a governmental decision-making body from discussing such action before the official public meeting.
In his zeal to remove Rose as mayor pro tem and then orchestrate her replacement with Noble, Courtney had private discussions with Noble, Dyer-Kruse and Councilman Silva at several junctures in April. Then, on May 3, 2021 despite the consideration that no explicit prior announcement of considering the removal of Rose as mayor pro tem was made in the agenda for that meeting, Courtney ushered the council into a discussion of doing just that, whereupon Rose, seeing what was coming, resigned from the vice-mayoral post. With Courtney and Silva sensing that proceeding further might result in Rose making a legal challenge to the action, they postponed promoting Noble to mayor that night. At its May 17 meeting, after properly placing on that evening’s agenda an item which consisted of staff’s recommendation to appoint Noble mayor pro tem, the council voted 4-to-1, with Rose dissenting, to designated Noble as the mayor pro tem.
From that point on, Rose and Courtney were at war.
Courtney, in league with Rose’s brother, Frank Maestas, who is estranged from his councilwoman sister, worked to expose to the world, using correspondence generated or obtained by Maestas, to reveal to the world that Barbara, allegedly, had engaged in a multiplicity of fraudulent, indeed felonious, acts, including tax violations, by falsely claiming guardianship over their disabled sister and routing two of her sister’s COVID crisis-related stimulus checks to herself.
In response to Courtney using information about Rose’s family situation to malign her, Rose, in turn, alleged in a complain to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office that Courtney, in league with her council colleagues, violated the Brown Act in the move to remove her as mayor pro tem. Deputy District Attorney Phil Stemler carried out an investigation into the matter, determining that Courtney, Noble, Silva and Dyer-Kruse had violated the Brown Act by the holding of serial discussions relating to the removal of Rose and her replacement with Noble, discussions that were not agendized and which occurred privately and outside of a public forum. The district attorney’s office elected to not carry out criminal prosecutions based on City Attorney Summers assurance that he would hold a training session for the council to ensure they had a better understanding of the Brown Act to be able to avoid violating it in the future.
As 2021 wore, a number of factors, which included Courtney’s dictatorial manner, resulted in his losing control over the ruling council coalition – consisting of himself, Dyer-Kruse and Noble – he had formed in the aftermath of his falling out with Rose.
After Salas was sacked, Courtney and the remainder of the council retained Jim Hart to serve as Barstow’s interim city manager. Hart’s previous career as a municipal official included an extended tenure as the City of Rancho Cucamonga’s administrative services director followed by ten years as the city manager of Twentynine Palms, more than two years as the city manager of Rancho Santa Margarita and ten years as the city manager of Adelanto. Members of the council, reportedly including Noble, grew concerned at the way in which Courtney as mayor used his position of authority to suborn Hart, a well-traveled municipal executive, to his will.
Word began to spread that Courtney had a financial interest in actions being taken by the city council.
This week, during a scheduled council hearing to consider the call to censure Courtney, the sponsors of the censure, councilmembers Tim Silva and Barbara Rose, acted as the mayor’s de facto prosecutors.
The council learned that Courtney was spending what was deemed “an inordinate amount of time” at City Hall “micromanaging” city operations, allegedly dictating to Hart action that Courtney insisted upon, despite the council not having discussed or voted upon those directions.
In time, councilmembers Tim Silva and Barbara Rose, surprisingly since Silva deeply resented the direction Rose had adopted for the city upon first coming into office, began to form a team that was intent on documenting what they characterized as Courtney’s misdeeds. Those, they said, involved:
– Courtney using his weight as mayor and without bringing the matter before the council, to induce Hart to cancel a city contract with Main Street Murals Inc., a nonprofit corporation based in Barstow devoted to featuring artistic renditions along historic Route 66;
– The mayor forcing Hart, unbeknownst to the city council, to end the city’s contract with a lobbying working on behalf of the city in Washington, D.C.;
– Without consulting with or a vote of the city council, Courtney having Hart allow a contract with the Harvey House, an historic train station in Downtown Barstow, to elapse;
– Hart, on repeated occasions, point blank denying that Courtney had threatened him in inducing him to take actions which were kept hidden from the remainder of the council;
– Courtney, in an effort to create the appearance that the city was making substantial economic progress during his tenure in office, generating fliers purported to have come from the city’s finance department that falsely touted a set of positive financial criteria relating to the creation twenty new businesses in the city. The fliers, put together by Courtney and his political operatives and distributed throughout the Barstow community, utilized the city’s logo and the names of city council members on the letterhead.
– Courtney utilizing his position as mayor and access that position gave him to obtain correspondence from Frank Maestas and then took action to distribute the information in an effort to inflict personal and political damage on Rose.
– Courtney threatening city employees other than Hart to induce them into carrying out actions not approved by the remainder of the council which benefited him politically.
In December 2021, Silva and Rose used the charge sheet against Courtney to call upon staff to schedule a censure vote against the mayor.
During the meeting at which the censure question was discussed and voted upon, Silva insisted the case against Courtney was airtight, though he was somewhat secretive in the way he presented the charges against the mayor. While presumably, Courtney knew whom he threatened, Silva stopped short of documenting in public who that employee was. It was not clear why Silva did not make that disclosure.
“A Barstow employee was threatened by the mayor of their position if they did not do what he wanted,” Silva said. Silva implied the threatened employee worked in the code enforcement division, although he was not explicit.
“He did make a decision that employee would not do their job,” Silva said. “He did threaten a city employee with firing.”
When questioned by Silva, Courtney denied intimidating city staff.
Silva summarized Courtney’s transgressions as “abuse of official capacity” and the “gain of personal benefit from the misuse of government property.”
Rose said Courtney was involved in “the misuse of tax dollars, the use of power to intimidate our staff. He is hurting our city and continues to put our city at risk.”
After presenting their case and giving Courtney an opportunity to respond, the council voted 4-to-0, with Courtney abstaining, to rebuke him. Silva managed to take it beyond that, getting the city council, including Dyer-Kruse, who had been and remained one of Courtney’s primary political associates, to follow up with a secondary motion to have an independent investigation into Courtney’s action.
Thereafter, some nine months later, in September 2022, based upon the preliminary findings of that internal investigation, the council voted to bar Courtney from having direct access with anyone at City Hall other than City Manager Willie Hopkins.
Though he remained as mayor and was yet eligible to participate in, vote and preside over council meetings, Courtney’s privileges as an elected official at City Hall ended. His office was sealed off and his key and passcode disabled.
No authorized statement regarding that action has been publicly made, although a written statement was, according to an employee within the city manager’s office, distributed to city employees.
Silva, who at that point had served 16 years on the council, did not seek reelection in 2022, and he was replaced as the city’s District 1 representative on the council by Carmen Hernandez.
In 2024, neither Courtney nor Dyer-Kruse sought reelection. Silva made a political comeback in 2024, vying for mayor and winning against three other candidates, including Carmen Hernandez. He captured 42.37 percent of the vote. Rose successfully ran for reelection. John Williams, in a four-person race to replace Dyer-Kruse, won.
Rose and John Williams were supportive of each other during the 2024 elections season. Likewise, Silva and Rose came across as aligned, as it had been a relatively short time since both had been instrumental in torpedoing Courtney’s political career, and many Barstow voters, both in the city generally and in Rose’s District 3 had a clear recollection of, and associated the two of them with, the issues that chapter of the city’s history involved. After their swearing-in following the 2024 election, Silva designated, and the remainder of the council confirmed, Rose as mayor pro tem.
As things stand now, all five of the council members have been aligned with each other at one time or another and have been rivals. Carmen Hernandez and Tim Silva were members of the council together from 2012 to 2020 and cast hundreds of identical votes together in that time. Hernandez in 2024, ran, unsuccessfully, for Mayor when Silva was elected. Silva and Williams were of like mind with regard to censuring Rose. Williams, before coming into office was highly critical of Barstow government. Silva and Rose were on opposite sides of the vote to fire Salas in 2021. They were closely aligned in pursuing the investigations into Courtney, censuring him and bringing his political career to a close. They were on the same page earlier this year in the effort to hire Clayton as city manager. They came to loggerheads over the issues that led to Rose’s censure last month. In 2024, Rose and Williams came across as mutually supportive of each others’ electoral efforts. Williams accused Rose of seeking to disparage Clayton and force her out as city manager in making his justification for her censure. Rose has accused Williams of sowing dissension within the Barstow community and has suggested that Garner’s posted attacks on Clayton more likely originated with Williams rather than from her. Rose supported Dyer-Kruse in the 2020 election over Hernandez. Hernandez supported elevating Rose to the mayor pro tem position. Hernandez voted to censure Rose. Hernandez supported Williams and Nobles in their sponsorship of Rose’s censure. Noble and Hernandez went in separate directions in early 2025 when the city jettisoned Andrew Espinoza as both police chief and acting city manager and did not keep him in his post as police chief.
Former Assistant City Manager Kody Tompkins, who left Barstow in September 2024 to take on the post of director of operations and maintenance at the Victor Valley Wasewater Reclamation Authority, and Espinoza, who moved into retirement after more than 27 years with the city, are at liberty to speak about but still somewhat guarded in expounding upon their perceptions of the dysfunction at Barstow City Hall that has come about because of the conflicts among the city’s political leadership. Among employees yet working with the city, there runs a similar current of belief that the city operations are hampered by strife at the top of the organization. No one appears willing to go on the record about it, based on the belief that doing so would risk termination.
Barstow long held a respectable spot within San Bernardino County history and culture. With Needles, Colton and San Bernardino, one of four of the county’s railroad towns, it was the ninth of San Bernardino County’s current 24 municipalities to incorporate, doing so on September 30, 1947. It is today host to one of the county’s eight current courthouses and the location of one of the county’s 17 historic courthouses. In 1966 it became the first San Bernardino County City to elect a woman, Ida Sessions, mayor. Another Barstow Mayor, Lawrence Dale, was once the foreman of the San Bernardino County Grand Jury. Barstow was the first San Bernardino County City to hire a woman, Dianne Burns, as its police chief.
Exactly when things began to fall apart for Barstow, or more specifically its city council, is difficult to say. Of note is that in December 2009, then-Barstow Mayor Joe Gomez was accused of inappropriately touching the wife of a never-publicly-identified Barstow police officer during a Christmas Party. In January 2010, Gomez was charged with sexual batter. He denied the charges and the matter dragged on for more than four years, finally being resolved when, as former mayor, after the original charge had been reduced to misdemeanor batter, he agreed to plead guilty and was immediately sentenced to no jail time and three-years probation. Some date the declension in the nobility of Barstow’s elected leadership to the incident involving Gomez. Many consider the virtual illiteracy of two of the city’s current council members to be a major embarrassment.
–Mark Gutglueck