In an intriguing but perhaps not entirely unexpected turnaround, the Yucaipa City Council on Monday February 23 moved toward the forefront of movement to resist the State of California’s usurpation of local land-use authority.
The move is an attempt to put the brakes on what might otherwise prove to be a develop frenzy that virtually all elements of the building industry view in a positive light. Of note is that just three years ago, pro-development forces, acting independently of state officials and utilizing three of the members of the city council, staged a coup which removed the city’s long-time city manager, whose controlled growth approach to municipal governance had prevented Yucaipa, the seventh smallest geographically of the county’s 24 municipalities, from being subjected to unbridled urbanization. Those events resulted in the most chaotic and disruptive chapter in Yucaipa’s 37 years as an incorporated city, including the recall of one of the councilmen. the decision by another to retire from politics and the virtual destruction of a third councilman’s reputation.
Now, roughly a half decade after the governor and state legislature initiated a historic effort to override local control with regard to the intensity and quality of development that takes place in California communities in an effort to construct housing to accommodate the state’s burgeoning population, bring down the skyrocketing cost of housing and alleviate the growing phenomenon of homelessness, the city council as it is now composed has come around to the position a handful of cities in San Bernardino County and three or four dozen from around the state assumed four and five years ago when they stood up to state officials and enunciated their conviction that loosening planning and development standards would not cure the housing shortage as much as it would create neighborhoods that are far less livable than they have been throughout the California’s first 170 years as a state. The vast majority of those cities have now given up the fight, unwilling to pay the price of resistance, which consists of Sacramento applying the leverage it possesses, which includes not only expensive litigation in state courts in which the judges are state employees but being subjected to the state withholding funding. It remains to be seen whether Yucaipa will be able to fare any better than those who valiantly crossed swords with the state.
Traditionally in California, land use decisions have been left to local governments rather than to the state legislature of bureaucrats in the state capital. In this way, city councils or planning commissions, in consultation with city planning staffs determined the character of the development that was to take place in their individual cities and how intensely the properties in their communities were to be developed. Hanging in the balance was the question of density, or how many dwelling units were allowed to be constructed per acre, the height of buildings, the ratio of space occupied by buildings to the space occupied by unpaved ground with grass or plants growing on it, the mix of residential, commercial, industrial development and open space to be permitted in a city, along with whether apartments and condominiums should be allowed to displace single family homes. These decisions historically were left to the people who lived in the places that were to be impacted by the decisions.
Developers, being profit driven, wanted to build as intensely as possible. By building on ever smaller lots, they could put twice or three times or four times or six times or eight times as many houses on an acre as was the case in the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s, so they could sell more houses and make more money. Some elected officials – mayors and city council members – saw no problem with that. They supported the idea of developers being able to maximize their profits. Other elected officials, however, looked at the consequences of stuffing more and more people into houses with ever smaller yards, packing them in like sardines into a can, and saw the social harm that fostered, the rapid deterioration of the property that had been developed, the way in which those who lived in apartment or tenements took less pride in renting or in ownership than did those who lived in, if not an estate, then a semi-estate in which they could enjoy some personal space, not be cramped and create an aesthetic about themselves that was good for them psychologically, socially and financially in terms of owning something of value.
In this way, each community took on, or had an opportunity to take on, a different character, ones that were slightly different or immensely different, depending upon the approach of the politicians running those cities.
There was a more sinister differentiation among cities in that in some, the application of money by those in the development community and building industry would influence the land use process. Through campaign donations or both direct and indirect bribes, project applicants were able to influence the standards enforced by city councils, planning commissions and city officials with regard to the quality of development, its density and the accompanying need to provide adequate infrastructure to moderate the impact of that development. Thus, in some cities, there was a greater emphasis on the quality of life of residents and the quality of neighborhoods than in other cities.
In many places in San Bernardino County, this came into much greater play as the region beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then even more rapidly in the 1980s transitioned out of being a semi-agricultural and partially rural environment to a topography that was to be more citified and dominated by urban elements. In rezoning property from agricultural land to other uses, local elected political and hired municipal officials had virtually unlimited autonomy in the choices they made and how aggressively that transition was to be effectuated.
For the speculators who purchased former farm acreage with the intent of converting it to other purposes and the development companies they worked hand in glove with, upping the permitted intensity of use on that property was the primary factor in how great of a profit could be achieved in their efforts. Whereas in previous years – the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s and the early 1960s – an unspoken concept and standard of building single family homes on lots of a quarter acre or more predominated locally, as developers took control of the hundreds of acres upon hundreds of acres and square mile upon square mile of orange groves, lemon groves, grapefruit groves, walnut groves, poultry farms, vineyards and grazing land, they requested, importuned and pushed those in political control to allow them to deviate upward from that four houses-to-an-acre standard.
The region’s municipal leadership had the option of simply resisting, insisting that the intensity of use in the neighborhoods replacing the trees, rows of grape vines and pastures match what already existed. Only initially and then rarely thereafter did they show that resolve. By the mid-1970s, many development companies, strengthened by the role their owners and corporate executives were playing in becoming major donors to the political war chests of the regions mayors and council members. An element in the growth of the development community’s influence, one only rarely spoken about openly, was graft, the willingness of those with business before the government such as developers who needed the approval of elected officials to be allowed to proceed with their project proposals to provide money in the form of bribes, kickbacks, “gifts,” inducements, lucrative no-show work assignments and the like to those decision-makers in return for the votes to give those projects go-ahead. Over time, the growth in the influence of the real estate industry, landowners, speculators and developers established a new standard that commonly allowed for the construction of six residential units to the acre, followed by neighborhoods and subdvisions in which the yards grew progressively smaller and seven or eight homes were typically configured onto an acre. As had previously been the case, apartment complexes were being built, and during the 1970s and into the early 1980s, condominiums began cropping up. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the distance between homes diminished to the point where 12 houses were packed into a single acre. Yards in many places no longer existed except in the form of minimalist landscaping in front of a residence. The developers of such residential projects became fabulously wealthy, whereupon they plowed some of the money they were realizing back into political donations and payoffs to the politicians giving their projects go-ahead, clearing the way for ever denser development. By the early 2000s, there were entire neighborhoods in many cities in San Bernardino County that consisted entirely of duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, townhouses and rowhouses adjacent to apartment complexes.
An examination of the current population densities of San Bernardino County cities shows that Yucaipa falls within the lower middle range. While it is nowhere nearly as full-up with people as 5.52-square mile 36,664-population Montclair, the county’s most densely packed urban lot of land with 6,642.02 people per square mile, neither is it as ghost town-like as 4,844-population 30.81-square mile Needles, the county’s least dense city with 157.22 people per square mile. Rather, with its 57,677 population living within its 27.89-square mile confines, Yucaipa has 2,068.017 people per square mile, making it the 14th most dense of the county’s 24 cities. Once the site of an expansive cattle ranch, Yucaipa for much of the 20th Century attracted permanent residents in favor of a rustic and less than urban environment, and the community developed in what many people consider to be a quaint fashion, with the commercial district essentially confining itself to both sides of Yucaipa Boulevard and the two or three blocks to its either side as it winds from the 10 Freeway through the city toward the foothills north of the city. Yucaipa had become something of a combination of Old West, worldly, agricultural, mercantile, semi-rural and urban influences. In 1989, the city incorporated, the 22nd of the county’s current 24 municipalities to do so.
Simultaneous to, and partially consequent of, the unprecedented population growth in San Bernardino County and Southern California, the entire State of California was experiencing a massive expansion in the number of people within its confines. Paralleling this was a housing crisis and a jump in homelessness. Among the reactions to this by the state’s leaders in Sacramento were strategies to increase the state’s housing stock and its affordability. This took multiple forms.
One part of governors Jerry Brown’s and Gavin Newsom’s approach was to reduce the ability of local officials to limit development, such that developers would have not only an even freer hand to build homes than they did before but an incentive for doing so. Even though many local governmental officials had already practically suspended or surrendered their land use authority to the point that they were allowing land owners, real estate speculators and developers to build high density residential projects at will, the state through legislation and executive action undercut any local jurisdictions that had hung onto the land use authority that had traditionally been their perogative to exercise.
One such manifestation of Sacramento dictating land use policy throughout the 163,696-square mile state consisted of transforming the the Regional Housing Needs Survey first created as an assessment and suggestive tool in 1969 into a cudgel by which cities were forced by mandate to clear the way for massive numbers of residential units to be allowed into their cities if, in fact, developers were prepared to build them. Another was the drafting a passage of the State Housing Crisis Act of 2019, which sought to overcome the imbalance of available housing to the need for more homes by streamlining housing development processes and enhancing tenant  protections. A third measure was Governor Newsom’s signing in September 2024 of three legislative bills into law – Assembly Bill 2533, Senate Bill 1211 and Senate Bill 1077 – which took effect on January 1, 2025, which in one swoop gave homeowners the power to double the density of their residential property by constructing on it another home or “granny flat.”
Using the housing and homeless crises as pretexts and California Government Code §65580 as a legal basis, the California Department of Housing and Community Development began using the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, originally intended to reveal how the state’s population was most logically to be distributed into the thousands of cities and unincorporated communities throughout the state proportionally, imposed on all jurisdictions in the state, meaning counties and cities, a mandate that those entities include in their general plans and zoning codes an accommodation of the number of dwelling units specified in the assessment, meaning each city must allow the construction of at least the number of homes the state says is its share of the burden to meet housing demand statewide.
By this daring social experiment, the State of California required each municipality in the state to assist in alleviating the homelessness crisis by complying with what the California Department of Housing and Community Development deems to be each city’s housing responsibility.
Under this so-called Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, the Department of Housing and Community Development came up with the number of people projected to be in need of housing within California by certain specified dates and then entrusted to a regional planning agency in the state’s several regions the assignment of determing where within those regions that influx of population was to be housed. In this way, the Southern California Association of Governments – a joint powers authority consisting of Imperial, Riverside, San Bernardino County, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties – was responsible for crunching the Regional Housing Needs Allocation effort numbers in all of Southern California except San Diego County. The Southern California Association of Governments, also know by its acronym SCAG, determined that San Bernardino County must accommodate the construction of 138,110 new homes between October 2021 and October 2028, including 35,667 intended for very-low-income homebuyers; 21,903 for low-income homebuyers; 24,140 for moderate-income homebuyers and 56,400 for above moderate-income homebuyers.
Though the vast majority of municipal officials in California accept the state’s asserted authority in this area, up and down the state there has been protest of, and in some cases resistance to, these mandates.
In 2021, over 150 cities, functioning as members of an ad hoc entity calling itself California Cities for Local Control registered a lukewarm protest over what the state was doing, expressing their collective belief that municipalities should be trusted to make determinations with regard to zoning and land-use within their jurisdictions. Yucaipa was among those cities.
The City of Huntington Beach, in the case of City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, challenged California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation law on constitutional grounds. Another 51 cities in the state joined in, filing amicus briefs in support of Huntington Beach or otherwise giving indication that they considered the state’s usurpation of local land use authority to be an overreach.
In San Bernardino County, 20 of the 24 municipalities docilely adhered to to the state mandate. Four county cities, most vociferously Chino Hills, gave indication that their officials believed the state was making demands that went beyond what was appropriate, not lonely intruding into the arena of land use authority more properly reserved for local authorities but mandating that their cities accommodate a number of homes that would be damaging to their communities.
In the case of Chino Hills, the state’s expectation was that the city welcome 3,720 more dwelling units from October 2021 to October 2029. Almost immediately, Chino Hills stood up to Sacramento, counter-proposing that instead of the 3,720 homes, it allow 1,797 units, a 52 percent reduction.
Three other city councils in San Bernardino County – those in Fontana Chino and Barstow – were brave enough to challenge the state. Barstow asked the state to cut its 1,516 house-building mandate by 58 percent to 635; Chino wanted a 49 percent cut from 6,961 to 3,564; and Fontana insisted that the 17,477 units it was being asked to accommodate was 30 percent too optimistic, requesting that its mandate be reduced to 10,563.
The state refused to talk turkey with any of those entities, and the California Department of Housing and Community Development did not budge in its demands, conveying that the government does not negotiate with scofflaws, renegades, terrorists or any entity or anybody that does not respect the rule of law. Lest anyone forget, California Government Code §65580 is the law, those city officials were warned.
In January 2022, a still-determined Chino Hills City Council, bolstered by an outpouring of resident sentiment, ventured even further down the path of resisting having to surrender land use authority within that city’s confines by adopting a local housing initiative referred to as “Neighborhood Voices” that asserted local land use and zoning laws trumped any conflicting state laws.
Over the next six months, however, developmental interests looking to construct housing subdivisions in Chino Hills, chaffing at the limitations on density, i.e., the number of units per acre to be permitted on property they had purchased or had tied up within the city, made it known that they were considering legal action against the city in which they were prepared to allege the city was denying them the right to develop that land to an intensity they were entitled to under the newfangled state law.
Faced with the threats of legal action by deep-pocketed elements of the private sector, seeing the difficulties the state was imposing on Huntington Beach, which was at the forefront of the struggle over local land-use control and outgunned by Sacramento, which was able to withhold funds from those cities which stood on principle and refused to accept the state’s mandates, officials in Chino Hills, essentially, gave up the fight, accepting, at least conceptually, the call for the construction of the 3,720 units within the city by 2029.
One of the few other jurisdictions in San Bernardino County that had shown any level of resistance to the State of California and the California Department of Housing and Community Development with regard to the housing and housing density issue was Chino.
In addition to going on record in 2021 that its officials considered the mandate that their city accommodate 6,961 new dwelling units by October 2029 to be unrealistic, Chino has proven forthright on several occasions since then in expressing the view that Sacramento is being much too authoritarian and inflexible in its demands that cities in general – and Chino in particular – suspend their officials’ judgment about what type of and how much development will be of benefit to their communities.
Nevertheless, like Chino Hills, Chino abandoned protesting or resisting the state’s mandate that it be prepared to accept another 6,978 housing units within its city limits by October 2029, recognizing that the state government possessed too many apples to reward the city if it simply fell in line with what it was being told to do and that the state government also possessed a whip with which it could lash the city unmercifully if it did not do what it was ordered to do.
Earlier this year, Chino officials began once more to feel their oats. In April, in a letter signed by Mayor Eunice Ulloa, city fathers expressed to Governor Newsom the view that state government was becoming too bossy in its approach toward the housing and development issues. Ulloa said the Chino community was “firmly oppose[d to] the relentless proliferation of state housing laws that have overridden local control without regard for [local preference], effectively sidelining the voices of our community and undermining years of responsible local planning. Our progress has been shaped by our philosophy of ‘smart growth,’ which has allowed us to retain the small-town feel that has defined our community for generations. Since the elimination of redevelopment agencies in 2012, our City’s ability to retain local control over development has been chipped away year after year by a litany of housing bills designed to increase ministerial or by-right housing approval processes. While the City of Chino respects the pursuit of housing production amid a statewide crisis, the way forward is to work with cities to allow for growth in ways that make sense for their communities. Instead, cities have been virtually shut out of the process, and these new laws have diminished general plans, stripped away authority over local development, and left community members demanding answers from their local elected officials.”
Though Ulloa decried Chino and other cities being subjected “to draconian penalties” for not complying with state mandates, subsequently, when a development company which in virtually all of its communications with the city regarding a project that involved exceedingly dense mixed uses, i.e., commercial development accompanies by several stories of multifamily apartments, the city council caved in and allowed the project to proceed, signifying that Chino was not going to stand up any further against the state’s housing mandates.
Similarly, both Barstow and Fontana, which had contemplated resisting Sacramento with regard to its land-use mandates, have concluded the upside of fighting the state on the issue is less substantial than the downside.
Fontana’s population has continued to surge, to the point that there is a debate over bragging rights ongoing between Fontana and San Bernardino municipal officials over which city is the most populous. While Fontana officials claim their city has surpassed the county seat in terms of the numbers of people living within their respective city limits at roughly 223,000 to 222,000, San Bernardino officials dispute that, saying the city’s population is 226,103, more than the 224,393 undercount some others have attributed to it, which is safely ahead of Fontana’s officially claimed 223,089 residents.
Fontana has also taken up a controversial strategy to block state housing mandates. In recent years, the city has taken to approving virtually every development proposal that comes along for warehouse construction, including granting variances, zone changes and general plan amendments to convert what was previously residentally zoned land into warehousing. This approach, however, is not favored by a substantial cross section of the community, which considers warehouses or semi-industrial uses to be incompatible with surrounding residential neighborhoods.
While this back-and-forth was ongoing between other cities in San Bernardino County and California and the state government, Yucaipa was, if not oblivious, then uninvolved or otherwise engaged. In January 2022, it seemed as if Yucaipa lurched hard toward the State of California’s pro-development position. Following the November 2022 election, in which former councilmen Greg Bogh and David Avila had not run and were replaced by Matt Garner and Chris Venable, at the December 2022 council meeting, Garner and Venable were sworn into office and Justin Beaver, who had first been elected in 2020, was elevated to the mayoral post by city council proclamation. At the first meeting in January 2023, the city council summoned Ray Casey, who had been city manager since 2008 nto a closed session where Beaver, Garner and Bobby Duncan, who had been on the city council since 2012, informed him that if he did not resign, they would fire him. Casey tendered his resignation after he was given an assurance that the city would pay him the remainder of his contract through June 2024. The council then fired City Attorney David Snow, replacing him with Steven Graham Pacifico, who was the city attorney in Canyon Lake in Riverside County. The council then arranged to bring Chris Mann, who offered comprehensive representation to the development community through his firm, Chris Mann & Associates, and was at that time serving as the city manager of Canyon Lake in as city manager.
The coup in which Casey was deposed was a crucial element of the hidden agenda that had been formulated by the development forces behind Beaver, Duncan and Garner. Beaver was a police officer in the Los Angeles County city of Azusa. Duncan was a real estate agent active in Yucaipa. Garner was an executive with a building material company that did $4 million worth of business annually. Their intent was to put Mann into control of City Hall, whereupon the city was to embark on a construction accommodation effort that would triple the city’s population to over 150,000 by 2050, further enriching those bankrolling and highly invested in the political careers of Beaver, Duncan and Garner, and further enrich Duncan and Garner, who had a financial interest in seeing the city grow.
Banishing Casey had been necessary to this scheme had been necessary because as the city engineer prior to becoming city manager, he had a sharp appreciation of the necessity of preventing the city from falling into an infrastructure deficit and ensuring the city’s roads, streets, bridges, culverts, storm drains, sewer system, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, schools and parks maintained a handling capacity to match any growth in the population that might take place. Accordingly, throughout his time as city engineer and as city manager, he had required that development companies working in the city either build at their own expense accompanying infrastructure to offset the impacts of that growth or that they pay development impact fees to defray the cost of infrastructure the city needed to build to accommodate that growth. By removing Casey and replacing him with the pro-growth Mann, the idea was to eliminate the requirement that developers and builders provide at their expense or pay for the construction of that infrastructure, thus making development within the city far more profitable for those entities undertaking it.
While this change of policy was to be of tremendous benefit to the landowners, real estate speculators and developers, it would be a disadvantage to the city’s residents. The developers would be able to reduce the amount of money needed to undertake and complete projects, while simultaneously increasing their profits and being able to move forward with those projects far more rapidly. The city’s residents, however, would suffer as a consequence of the city’s existing infrastructure being overwhelmed by the increasing numbers of users, which could only be alleviated by the imposition of fees and taxes on the city’s residents and/or visitors to generate money needed to increase or augment the existing infrastructure.
The other two members of the council, Jon Thorpe, who was elected to the city council in 2020, and Venable, did not support the agenda being hatched by Mann, Beaver, Duncan, Garner and the developers bankrolling them, but did not have the political muscle, as they had only two votes, to prevent the three-member majority coalition from moving ahead with their plan.
Neither Beaver nor Duncan nor Garner anticipated the anger and outrage that ensued within the community as residents, at first just a handful, then dozens, scores and hundreds, learned of what was going on. Recognizing that if effective action was not taken to hold Beaver, Duncan and Garner in check, that the their lifestyles would be impacted and the quality of their lives would be impacted, activated residents founded an entity, the Coalition to Save Yucaipa, through which they ‘undertook an effort to qualify recall elections against Beaver, Duncan and Garner. The effort to gather the requisite number of signatures from residents living within the electoral districts the three represented were under way and appeared to be progressing toward success when Mann rallied, at taxpayer expense, a downtown Los Angeles law firm to come in and represent the new city clerk he had hired, who had been his city clerk in Canyon Lake, in an action to derail the recall effort. That city clerk, Ana Sauseda, alleged that the information the recall proponents provided to those approached to sign the recall petitions was inaccurate. As a legal squabble over that accusation ensure, the recall proponents missed the 90-day deadline to gather the required number of signatures, and the recall effort, for the time being failed.
A San Bernardino County judge, in response, to countervailing legal action taken against Sauseda, would conclude that the city clerk’s legal suit was indeed questionable. The San Bernardino County Grand Jury, upon looking into the action taken by the council majority and Mann concluded City Hall had “eroded the public trust and the Yucaipa City Council itself must share some of the blame. [T]he Yucaipa City Council has developed a reputation among many residents of ignoring the concerns of the public and of fostering an atmosphere of mistrust, disdain, anger, resentment, lack of transparency and appearances of conflicts of interest.”
While Beaver, Duncan and Garner had ducked the 2023 recall effort, the Coalition to Save Yucaipa revived that effort in 2024. The consideration that both Beaver and Duncan were due to vie for reelection in the November 2024 prompted the Yucaipa residents to drop the recall effort against them to instead concentrate on keeping them from being reelected. Duncan, believing he had little prospect of winning, did not seek reelection. In November 2024, the recall effort against Garner succeeded and he was removed from office. Beaver, despite the sentiment against him, managed to gain reelection.
The reconstituted city council, consisting of Beaver, Thorpe, and Venable, together with Judy Woolsey, who was voted in to replace Duncan, and Bob Miller, who was appointed to fill the gap created by Garner’s removal from office, changed the complexion of government. Ultimately, in early 2025, Mann resigned as city manager after a round of private negotiations with the city council in which it was agreed that he would be granted a $279,045 severance. With Duncan, Garner and Mann gone, the aggressive pro-development ethos that had been envisioned under the Beaver/Duncan/Garner/Mann Administration had been eradicated. Beaver remained in place, but without the two solid votes of Duncan and Garner to join with his, he did not have the power to get projects that involved intensive land use and escalated density approved. Moreover, the no-growth/slow-slow growth/controlled growth forces in the city were no longer in the position of having to spread and diffuse their scrutiny and passion against three council members but were now able to concentrate their attention on Beaver. From virtually the night of Casey’s force departure, there was a strong belief among a substantial number of Yucaipa residents that political corruption was at the basis of the coup that had taken place at City Hall on January 9, 2023. It was widely if not universally inferred that Duncan’s status as a real estate agent and Garner’s professional and financial interest in the local construction industry explained their embrasure of the Chris Mann-directed development strategy to facilitate heavy development in the city. Beaver, as a law enforcement officer employed in a city 57 miles distant from Yucaipa was not in a position to professionally profit from the initiation of intensive development in the city. As such, a recurrent accusation was that he had been “greased” and some form of an improper inducement or inducements had been provided to him to get him to spearhead the forced departure of Casey. Beaver did not improve the situation by refusing, or being unable, to articulate why he and his two council colleagues had felt it necessary to sack Casey.
Accusations against the troika of Beaver, Duncan and Garner were made, resulting in contacts with and complaints lodged with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Public Integrity Unit and the U.S. Department of Justice/FBI, resulting in investigations being opened. Those probes apparently did not turn up substantial enough evidence of any criminal wrongdoing to result in charges against the three, but once underway, investigations take on a life of their own and are vert rarely officially closed out, meaning they remain open-ended. Duncan and Garner did not overcome the political damage the events that triggered those investigations caused nor the specter of the investigations themselves, and their political tenures have come to a close. Beaver remains as an officeholder, but the complications from the Casey sacking/Mann elevation scandal yet leave a cloud over him personally, politically and professionally.
Beaver continues to live and hold a position of prominence within a community where a good number of his fellow and sister residents and his constituents believed, suspected or continue to suspect he was on the take.
Though he managed to gain reelection to the council in 2024, Beaver, as an incumbent, nevertheless was voted against by 48.74 percent of the Yucaipa Fourth District residents who participated in the election.
Generally speaking, public employees in California, extending to law enforcement officers, who seek and gain elected political office while still employed, see their professional careers enhanced as a consequence of their political success. Indeed that has been the case for Beaver following his 2020 election to the Yucaipa City Council. He had been hired by the Azusa Police Department as a police officer/patrolman in 2017. In 2021, shortly after he was elected to the city council in Yucaipa, he was promoted to the position of police corporal, the next significant rank up from police officer. In 2023, Beaver’s status was changed to that of corporal detective, and he took on assignments in Azusa related to “crimes against persons.” In September 2024, he was moved into a “watch commander” post at Azusa, with the tentative rank of sergeant. In January 2025, he was given official promotion to that of administrative sergeant.
Among those in the Yucaipa/Azusa circle, there has been concern that Beaver has hit a situational professional ceiling brought on by the lingering aftereffects of the federal investigation into what was cataloged as “corrupt governmental practices” relating to putting a development industry representative, i.e., Mann, into a position at the top of Yucaipa’s municipal ladder regulating developmental issues and legislative/administrative practices. The Azusa police chief, Rocky Wenrick, at one point earlier in his career worked as a federal agent, having been assigned to the Secret Service detail in Los Angeles. As such, Wenrick is within the informational loop federal officers and former federal officers are privileged with. Knowledge that one of his underlings was at one time being looked into for possible bribe-taking might leave Wenrick reluctant to move that officer into a command level position.
In recent weeks, Beaver has come across as wanting to distance himself from his entanglement with Duncan, Garner, Mann and both the building industry and development community. Rather than move against the landowners, speculators and developers who were anticipating Mann clearing the way for them, however, Beaver appears to be moving in a direction that replicates what Chino Hills and Chino, and to a lesser extent Barstow and Fontana were attempting three, four and five years ago – which was to follow the example of the City of Huntington Beach in contesting the state’s expansion of land use authority to attenuate local planning control.
At the February 9 Yucaipa City Council meeting, Beaver called upon city staff to put a letter together expressing city officials’ belief that local government should be the arbiter of zoning, land use and development issues. Beaver suggested that the city might explore joining with other municipal alliances seeking to forclose the state’s domination of cities with regard to development standards.
In response, City Manager Sean Moore, who was ultimately selected to supplant Mann, authored a letter to which the mayor and city council could affix their signatures, calling upon the State of California to stay within its traditional lane and restore land local land-use authority to cities in general and the City of Yucaipa in particular.
The letter is addressed to Governor Gavin Newsom, with electronic carbon copies to Gustavo Velasquez, the director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development; State Senator Rosalie Bogh, who represents Yucaipa in the State Senate; and Greg Wallis, who represents the city in the California Assembly.
Asserting “The City of Yucaipa is a special place and its residents chose to live here specifically for its rural and small-town charm” the letter laments that “state housing laws have been assaulting our rural way of life for several years, and we have reached a breaking point.”
The letter continues, “Californians choose to incorporate cities to control their local destinies and gain autonomy. Land-use control gives local residents the ability to design communities that fit their local geography, both in how they look and adapt to natural risks and hazards. Yucaipa sits at the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, and our geography places us in significant fire danger. Our development pattern is inspired by our ranching and agricultural history. In good faith, the City of Yucaipa complied with State law, developed a robust housing element compatible with our unique community, and received certification from the Department of Housing and Community Development. Yet, the reward for our compliance has been punitive. While we have planned for adequate housing to meet Regional Housing Needs Assessment allocations, the goalposts continue to move. Laws like SB 330 and State Density Bonus Law create a bait-and-switch that makes local planning impossible. Developers are now leveraging the State Density Bonus Law bonuses to drive actual densities to higher than what we authorized in our certified housing element. Large housing projects with densities exceeding our plans strain our local infrastructure. These bonus units exceed the physical capacity of our roads and sewers, yet provide insufficient compensation for necessary upgrades. In our high fire hazard severity zones, one-size-fits-all density is a liability. Increased density without planned infrastructure compromises evacuation routes and emergency response time in the wildland-urban interface.”
A housing element is a policy document updated every eight years to assess a community’s housing needs for all income level, including special needs populations.
The letter continues, “As the state usurps our local control, residents turn to their local representatives with blame and scorn. We are the ones accessible to them in the grocery store and the council chambers, yet we are being stripped of the tools to address their legitimate concerns. We are forced to implement unpopular, monolithic laws that ignore the specific geography and safety needs of our community.”
Boldly, the letter states, “We demand relief, a restoration of local control to determine our own destiny.”
After thus asserting, perhaps unwisely, parity with the state in terms of authority, the letter seeks a compromise by proposing, again boldly and perhaps rather unwisely given the disparity of power between the state and the city, that “For jurisdictions that act in good faith, we propose a reward: Once a city’s housing element is certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development, that city should be exempt from mandates or state density bonuses that exceed the maximum densities established in that certified plan for the remainder of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment cycle. This change would restore the integrity of the planning process, ensure that infrastructure planning remains viable and return a modicum of local control to the people of California in their respective jurisdictions.”
The letter then again tempts the ire of the governor and his network of state functionaries by lecturing the city’s governmental superiors with regard to fairness. “We have done what you asked,” the letter states. “It is time for the State to respect the plans it mandated we create.”
According to the City Manager Moore’s report accompanying the letter “On February 8, 2021, [the] city council took a position to oppose the relentless erosion of local control by adopting Resolution 2021-06, warning that Sacramento’s barrage of housing mandates was a direct assault on the unique character of the Yucaipa community. The California housing crisis is not a monolithic issue, yet Sacramento continues to push one-size-fits-all solutions. The factors contributing to the housing shortage in coastal urban centers are largely driven by a massive imbalance between job growth and housing production.”
Beaver, whose reticence with regard to issues of controversy is legendary, has not enunciated what changed his mind with regard to the desirability of accommodating aggressive development in Yucaipa. Other city officials have given indication that City Hall was pushed into taking the stand it has because an apartment complex at the corner of Second Street and County Line Road was shoved down its throat. The project, originally proposed as a 172-unit, two-story development, was enlarged into a 258-unit, three-story project without the city having any say, since the alteration was imposed “by right.” State housing mandates forced the city and the city council to automatically approve the project, while prohibiting the city from reconsidering the locked-in approval despite the intensification of its land use. This meant that the sdering re-notifying residents, holding additional public hearings or reducing density.
Three years after Beaver, Duncan and Garner sought to commit the city to building whatever developers propose, it appears someone encountered a burning bush on the road to Damascus and now Yucaipa wants to explore staring down Sacramento like Chino Hills, Chino, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Carson, Whittier, Lakewood, Rancho Palos Verdes, Simi Valley and Huntington Beach did previously with regard to the state’s housing mandates.
If Yucaipa city officials insist on following in the steps of those cities and actually make a contest of seeing who has the last say with regard to land use, they are likely to learn that the state holds all, or at least most, of the cards. If Yucaipa elects to roll the dice and see if it can establish that cities can defy the state by hanging onto control over the character of their communities, even if it wins it could lose. Chino Hills, Chino, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Carson, Whittier, Lakewood, Rancho Palos Verdes, Simi Valley and Huntington Beach all know or have learned there are plenty of ways Sacramento can outright deny or withhold the funding cities are dependent on to survive, including taxes, subventions and other forms of pass-through revenue. If Sacramento cannot cut that money off completely, there are thousands of ways to drag its feet in providing it, creating financial crises Yucaipa will be ill-equipped to deal with. Just like the state can hand out apples to reward the city if it simply falls in line with what it is being told to do, the state government also possesses a whip with which it can lash the city unmercifully if it does not do what it is being ordered to do.