By Mark Gutglueck
In a last-ditch effort, San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran stemmed yet further erosion in the erosion of the power and prestige she holds as the 34th municipal leader of the county seat.
Tran, the city’s one-time human resources director who left the city when she had a run-in with her predecessor as mayor and then gave up a lucrative career as a municipal administrator to return as a vanquishing heroine and occupy a position that many thought might prove a major step on her way to eventual occupancy of the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento, has learned just as literally a dozen of what were seemingly upward bound politicians before her came to know: the gavel she wields seems to be cursed.
The power that was once vested in the San Bernardino mayor and what remains of it is of a highly nuanced nature, requiring deliberate, delicate and carefully calibrated maneuvering.
For 111 years, the mayor’s influence was more, or was potentially more, administrative than it was political. Nevertheless, during that era, the post was, if held by a skillful political operator, a powerful political position. Eleven years ago, the mayor’s administrative authority was taken away, necessitating that the mayor’s political instincts and skills needed to be honed to perfection if he or she was to be an effective leader.
The City of San Bernardino came into being, more or less, in 1853 with the Mormon migration to California and the establishment of a settlement – at that time a fort – in San Bernardino. It had two mayors in the early days but when Brigham Young called the Mormon faithful back to Salt Lake City in the winter of 1857/58, civic organization was put on hold until the city officially incorporated in 1869.
San Bernardino had no mayor from 1869 to 1905 because it was incorporated as a town rather than a city during that period, governed by a board of trustees rather than a mayor. The municipality fluctuated between being unincorporated and incorporated as a town or city, formally becoming a city again in 1886 and later, with the adoption of a new charter 1905, returned to a mayoral system.
That 1905 charter, which called for municipal elections in odd-numbered years and provided for a mayor, city attorney, city clerk and city treasurer elected at large and councilmen elected to represent wards, created what in municipal parlance is referred to as a strong mayor form of governance. While the mayor had no voting power as the presiding member of the city council under normal circumstances, as the presiding officer he wielded the gavel and officiated over the meeting, controlling the ebb and flow of debate, with unfettered freedom to place items for action or discussion before the council. He had the power to break a tie-vote, and veto power on any votes that ended either 4-to-3 or 3-to-2, which in practical terms meant that on any issue where the vote was going against the position the mayor held, he in fact had two votes. More significantly still under the 1905 charter, the mayor had administrative power equal to or indeed greater than his political power. The 1905 charter endowed the mayor with the power to hire and fire city employees. This made the mayor, in a sense, a co-regent of the city with the city manager. And if the mayor had differences with the city manager, the mayor could fire him.
On one level, the mayor had attenuated political power in that he did not, on most routine items, vote. Yet, on items that went his way, he did not need to vote. And unless the items that did not go in accordance with his preference passed by what in those days was a 4-to-1 or 5-to-0 vote and later, when the city went to seven instead of five wards, by a 5-to-2 or 6-to-1 or a 7-to-0 vote, he could use his veto to change the outcome. Moreover, if he were skilled and persuasive, he might be able to pull or push, cajole or wheedle, influence or maybe even intimidate a majority of the city council to see things his way.
That level of power was inherent in the position. Some of those who wielded the gavel chose to exercise that power. Some did not.
In 2013, a year after San Bernardino had declared bankruptcy and during the last full year of Patrick Morris’s term as mayor, discussion began over the revision of the 1905 charter. A committee of citizen volunteers was formed to adjust city operations, which led to a proposal to eliminate the elected city attorney, city clerk and city treasurer positions and the mayor’s administrative authority and move elections to even numbered years. That change was put on the 2016 ballot as a measure to be voted upon by all city residents, whereupon it passed, 27,478 or 60.57 percent in favor and 17,890 or 39.43 percent in opposition. As a result, San Bernardino was transformed from a city with a strong mayor form of government to a council/city manager model in which the council as a panel set city policy which the city manager carried out, such that the administrative and managerial authority once infused in the mayor was attenuated and his or her power of hiring and firing was discontinued, remaining only insofar as having one of eight such votes on hirings of the city manager, city attorney, city clerk and city treasurer/finance director.
In 2018, John Valdivia, who had been the Third Ward councilman, defeated Carey Davis, who had succeeded Mayor Morris, in Davis’s reelection effort, becoming the city’s 33rd mayor. Valdivia, who was consumed by overleaping ambition, had aspired to the mayoral post of San Bernardino County’s largest city because he believed it to be a municipal apex of sorts, a platform from which he could launch a successful campaign for yet higher office, such as county supervisor, the state legislature or U.S. Congress. He recognized before becoming mayor the need to cultivate political reach, which translated into being able to influence or control at least four votes on the seven- member council in order to push his agenda as mayor through. For a time, a relatively short one in late 2018 and into the summer and early fall of 2019, he had four and even five members of the council whose votes he could count on. One by one, those votes began to slip away as his administration was beset with political miscalculations or elements of his overbearing personality clashed with one, then two and then three of the members of the council who had been his allies. Even as his ruling council coalition dissolved, the reality of what the 2016 Charter had obliterated the administrative authority that had resided with the mayor in the original 1905 Charter fully dawned on Valdivia. He found himself in a role that was nowhere near as dynamic, consequential and impactful as what he had envisioned and he was soon flailing about, trying to assert power he did not have, lashing out at members of the council when they failed to coalesce into the ruling majority he needed to build the record of accomplishment as mayor he needed to propel his political career forward. The best he could do was to engage with elements of the business community, promising them the council’s support for their projects, licensing applications, franchise bids or service provision/supply vendor contracts he could not truly deliver on in exchange for donations to his electioneering fund which led to the perception that mayoral regime was steeped in a pay-to-play ethos. In his effort to reassume the administrative authority that had been taken from the mayor with the [adopting] of the 2016 Charter, early on in his tenure he orchestrated the forced departure of City Manager Andrea Travis Muller and then sought to broker with her two successors – Teri LeDoux and Robert Field – a deal by which they would retain the title, pay and benefits of being city manager but surrender or defer to him the administrative, ministerial and managerial authority of the city manager’s post, in essence undoing the reform in the charter change that had done away with the city’s strong mayor form of government. Valdivia’s attempt to obtain LeDoux’s connivance to remake himself into co-city manager ultimately failed and was only slightly more successful while Field was city manager.
Valdivia’s tenure as mayor was further marred by his efforts to manipulate, order intimidate or otherwise orchestrate city employees, in particular members of city staff working in the mayor’s office to engage activity that several of them considered to be harassment, improper or politically motivated. No fewer than five of those employees lodged civil suits against Valdivia and the city over their treatment. Three of those five suits have since ended in settlements favorable to the employees. Caught up in the fallout from the charges brought forth in those claims and lawsuits filed against Valdivia by those employees was the city’s human resources director, Helen Tran. As one of the city’s top seven administrators/department heads whose duty included ensuring that city employees not be exposed to a hostile working environment, Tran found herself caught between Valdivia, ostensibly the highest ranking and most powerful political figure in the city and at City Hall to whom she was, through the city manager, answerable and the employees, three of whom were women who claimed that Valdivia among other things had been pressuring them to have sex with them. The women – one-time mayoral assistant Karen Cervantes, one-time senior customer service representative Mirna Cisneros and mayoral office field reperesentative Jackie Aboud – maintained that the city administration, most pointedly Tran because she was the head of the human resources division, had failed to protect them from Valdivia. The record shows that Tran, while she was San Bernardino human resources director, expressed concern that Valdivia was insisting upon Cisneros accompany him to after-hours functions that were not part of her job assignment. Tran said she was not informed while she was still a department head with San Bernardino of any sexual harassment on Valdivia’s part. Nevertheless, she was convinced that remaining in San Bernardino in the role of human resources director might prove problematic professionally for her, given the way in which city employees were being put upon by Valdivia and the risk she had to run in offending him and potentially put her job into jeopardy by continually writing him memos about it. Toward the end of 2019, after reaching an understanding with David Carmony, then the city manager of West Covina, that he would hire her as human resources director there, she resigned from her position as human resources director in San Bernardino, where she was being provided with an annual salary of $150,824.47, perquisites and pay add-ons of 17,151.41 benefits of 56,089.73 for a total annual compensation of $224,065.60.
Except for making the daily 86-mile round-trip commute from San Bernardino, where she lived, to West Covina, the transition was relatively painless for Tran, as West Covina paid her $144,805 in salary, another $13,762 in perquisites and pay add-ons, $109,273.07 in benefits for a total annual compensation $267,840.07.
Her final year in San Bernardino, where she had begun in 2006 as an executive assistant to the human resources director, stuck in Tran’s craw. In many ways, the job in San Bernardino, where she was making very good money and she had to drive just a few miles to get to work, was a dream assignment. She greatly resented that Valdivia had ruined things for her and her family. Moreover, Tran was not without some degree of political ambition herself.
As Valdivia’s term as mayor was winding down, a member of the city council, Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett, who had long been at odds with Valdivia, floated a proposal to alter the charter and do away with the elected mayor’s post, instead instituting a policy of rotating the mayoral function among the seven members of the council. Valdivia and others both affiliated with him and his rivals opposed the concept and the Shorett’s proposal died quietly, while those displeased with Valdivia redoubled their efforts toward having him removed through the traditional electoral process.
Tran, along with five others, challenged Valdivia in the 2022 mayoral race. Despite the consideration that Valdivia had a campaign war chest that was twice that of all six other candidates combined, he finished third in that year’s June Primary. Tran found herself in a run-off against the city’s former elected city attorney, Jim Penman. Tran’s association with the Democratic Party served her well. Since she was a freshman in high school, she had volunteered on the campaigns of Democrat candidates, including that of a career politician Joe Baca, Sr., who spent 13 years in Congress and seven years in the California Legislature. At present, Baca is the mayor in neighboring Rialto. Throughout high school and into college and beyond, Tran remained politically involved in working for Democrats seeking election or reelection. In the 2022 contest, she had the solid support of the local Democratic Party. She also had the advantage of the city’s experience with Valdivia being the backdrop to the race. Valdivia had achieved his early political success as a Penman protege, but Penman had grown alarmed as the younger man had involved himself in scandal upon scandal when he was mayor. Penman tried to redefine himself as someone who rejected the values Valdivia had gravitated to and rejuvenate his legacy by displacing him as mayor. For much of the electorate, however, Penman was too closely tied into Valdivia, and Tran soundly defeated him 16,869 votes or 62.78 percent to 10,002 votes or 37.22 percent.
Tran came into office in December 2022. Virtually the entire city council welcomed her into the mayor’s office, with the possible exception of Third Ward Councilman Juan Figueroa, who had been selected with Valdivia’s backing by the Third Ward’s voters during a special election in 2019 to fill out the remaining two years of Valdivia’s term on the council following his 2018 election as mayor.
Tran featured a multiplicity of advantages and positive traits. She was a relatively young, attractive, well-educated, well-dressed and articulate Asian woman, indeed the first Vietnamese-American woman to be elected mayor of an American city. Those advantages fed upon themselves and immediately upon her victory over Penman, she was widely perceived among Democrats in San Bernardino County, Los Angeles, Southern California and the entire state as heralding the wave of the future, Instantly, she was being discussed as the Democrats’ standard bearer in future races for county supervisor, state Assembly, state Senate and potentially the governorship.
In short order after actually taking on the mayoral role, however, difficulties for and with Tran arose.
Just as had been the case with Valdivia, Tran did not appreciate before she was mayor the degree to which the mayor’s actual power under the 2016 Charter had been attenuated. The San Bernardino mayor’s position was completely devoid of administrative authority and its political power was entirely dependent upon the personal dynamism of the mayor. A mayor who was ready, willing, able and determined to engage in backroom political horsetrading could, conceivably and realistically, come to dominate governance in San Bernardino. This would require that the mayor study each member of the city council, or at least a majority of the members of the city council, learn what that council member’s hierarchy/priority of needs and goals are, engage in multiple and involved dialogues with those council members and broker deals among them for each of them to realize their goals by agreeing to support each other in what they are looking to accomplish and simultaneously steer the collective into a consensus to simultaneously support the mayor’s agenda. Reaching such a consensus is a time-consuming, drawn-out, painstaking process. It soon became apparent that Tran did not have the combination of time, patience, presence, perseverance or commitment to assemble a ruling coalition on the council.
An illustration of how Tran’s attitude, approach and personality were incompatible with the ideal qualities of someone in an elected leadership role were her appearances at the meetings of the several joint powers authorities or regional planning entities in which she was enrolled as mayor. Such meetings are ideal forums for elected and appointed officials that take part in them to meet, greet, trade notes, form alliances and bonds and network with their counterparts from other cities and governmental agencies. Tran would be present at the meetings, but, other observed, not there. While government officials from various jurisdictions were interacting with one another or listening intently to a speaker’s presentation, she would be engaged with her cellphone. Not only do such meetings feature decision-making sessions and votes on those entities’ agendized action items, but in-depth discussions or exchanges that would go on for many minutes or even hours among some of the participants after the meetings were concluded. Tran never took part in these. By the time the meetings adjourned, Tran was long gone.
She very early on earned a reputation as a show horse rather than a workhorse. At such joint powers or regional governmental authority meetings, groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings and the like, Tran would show up, be prominently visible when the cameras were present, effectively getting photos of herself with other movers and shakers or elected officials into newspapers or on television, web pages or into social media. Nevertheless, in terms of assembly a voting coalition consisting of, at a minimum, four votes on the council to obtain passage of the items on her agenda, she consistently fell short. There were recurrent accounts, pertaining to both the first two or three weeks after the 2022 election and then the two or three weeks after the 2024 election where Tran had meetings with one or two of the members of the city council. Those accounts were remarkably similar. Tran was cordial, hopeful and confident, expressing the need for a new beginning in San Bernardino. Her expressed expectation was that her leadership was to be acknowledged and that it was in the best interest of the council members for them to follow her lead. What was presented, essentially, was Tran’s presumption that she already in political control, could count on the votes of the other members of the council who were not present and that she was extending an invitation or an opportunity for the council member or council members she was meeting with to join her team, which was represented as intact and in charge. In 2022, every one of the council members she met with following her election, all seven of whom had been in office for at least two years at that point, knew and fully appreciated what Tran did not know or fully appreciate: that the mayor had no administrative authority, the mayor had no vote on routine matters and the only political authority or power that a mayor in San Bernardino possessed was what he or she earned through hard work and coordination with the members of the council. So, while Tran had in essence given the seven members of the council an ultimatum of sorts – “Join my team or else” – each council member knew the “or else” was merely a bluff and that Tran had no leverage to speak of. Virtually from the outset, Tran was off on the wrong foot with the members of the city council.
In the aftermath of her 2022 election and before she was sworn in to office, Robert Field, who had been the city manager hired by Valdivia in 2020 and who had facilitated, with only sporadic success, Valdivia’s effort to recapture as mayor the administrative authority that had been removed from the mayor in the 2016 Charter, tendered his resignation. Field, perhaps correctly, perhaps inaccurately, believed that he would be unable to work with Tran as mayor, given that she had just deposed the mayor he had shown such allegiance to. In this way, Tran found herself in a fix from the moment she became mayor. The City of San Bernardino’s ship of state at that point was rudderless, adrift without a captain to steer the ship. There began immediately an effort to find and hire a city manager. Early in Tran’s tenure, the city turned to Charles McNeely, who had been the city manager from 2009 to 2012, having come to San Bernardino from Reno, Nevada. Even before McNeely had arrived the first time, San Bernardino was hampered by a structural/institutional fiscal deficit that had existed for nearly a decade. Over the course of three years, McNeely had been unable to cure San Bernardino’s penchant for spending more than it earned, and a mere three months before the city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, McNeely had resigned the city manager’s post, not wanting to be the city manager of record when that historic event took place. The city had exited bankruptcy in 2017, and in January of 2023 McNeely, who was by that point retired, availed himself of the opportunity to come back for a short time to the city under less dire circumstances than when he had left it, and the city was hoping that it would benefit by having an experienced and competent municipal manager guiding it while the city made conducted a recruitment of candidates to serve as city manager and then evaluated them to select one with the suitable experience, skills and temperament to competently plan, organize, direct and control municipal operations over an extended number of years to provide San Bernardino with the consistency and stability it had lacked going back to the time when Fred Wilson, the city manager prior to McNeely, was in charge of the city.
McNeely had been brought in as the interim city manager with the understanding by all that he was to be there only for the period while the search for a permanent city manager was ongoing and that he was not to be considered as a candidate for the permanent job. Two or three months into that temporary assignment, McNeely began to warm to the idea of returning to San Bernardino as the full-fledged city manager. Some on the council thought that idea had merit. Others, conscious that McNeely had already eclipsed retirement age and was not likely to remain in the post for more than two or three years, did not want to rehire him as city manager, given that there was no prospect of his longevity in the role. The recruitment effort turned up the prospect that the city might be able to lure Stockton City Manager Harry Black, who had previously been the city manager of Cincinnati, Ohio, to accept the San Bernardino city manager assignment. For a short time in the summer of 2023, it appeared that would take place but when word leaked out, Black withdrew his name to prevent the city council in Stockton from becoming upset and firing him. A few weeks to a month later, the city set its sights on Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan. Tran and at least four of the city council members were convinced that Carrigan would make a good fit for San Bernardino. A further confidential dialogue with Carrigan ensued, involving city officials, the Berkeley-based executive recruitment firm the city had hired to assist it in the city manager search, Koff & Associates, and Koff & Associates employee Frank Rojas. Tran and four city council members were convinced that the city would not be likely to find someone better than Carrigan to fill the city manager’s post, given that he had been successfully wresting with challenging issues in Salinas such as homelessness and dwindling finances that were dogging San Bernardino. Soon, a fifth council member and then a sixth council member was sold on Carrigan, at which point what was for the time being supposed to be a confidential agreement that he was to leave Salinas and come to San Bernardino was reached in August 2025. Instead of moving at once to close that deal and ratify the hiring contract with Carrigan at its first meeting in September 2025, however, the council postponed doing so and then cancelled its next regularly scheduled meeting for that month so the council members could attend an out-of-town conference. The mayor and council were scheduled to vote on the contract with Carrigan at its October 4, 2023 council meeting, but as a consequence of the delay, Carrigan was subjected to criticism in Salinas over what was seen there as his intention to leave the city in the lurch. On September 28, Carrigan informed Rojas that he was no longer interested in the San Bernardino job and wrote a memo to the Salinas City Council and Salinas staff informing them that he was no longer contemplating working in San Bernardino and was committed to remaining in Salinas as city manager. On October 3, 2025, however, the Salinas City Council, in a specially-called meeting, voted 6-to-0 to terminate Carrigan. Subsequently, Carrigan, citing what he and his lawyers claimed were leaks emanating from San Bernardino, fired a claim against the City of San Bernardino over his firing by the City of Salinas, intimating in doing so that he was going to sue over the matter. Ultimately, to settle the matter with Carrigan, the City of San Bernardino agreed to pay Carrigan $800,000, despite his not having served in the capacity of city manager at all.
Some three weeks after the Carrigan debacle, which had come about because of imprudent delay, on October 18, 2023, Tran and the city council rushed into a vote, which passed by a margin of 5-to-3, to approve a contract with Charles Montoya, who had previously been the city manager of Watsonville in California and the town manager of Florence, Arizona and city manager of Avondale, Arizona, to serve as San Bernardino city manager. Among the three votes in opposition to Montoya’s hiring was that of Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin. From the beginning of Montoya’s tenure as city manager, Calvin pursued questions about his qualifications and what she cited as his outside entanglements, particularly with entities doing business with or to potentially do business with the city. Tran and the majority of the city council initially dismissed Calvin’s concerns. As 2023 gave way to 2024, Calvin pursued those issues, in particular Montoya’s unilateral signing of a letter of intent with the San Francisco-based bond underwriting firm Stifel Financial Services in preparation of the issuance of some $120 million in municipal bonds to be utilized for various improvement and infrastructure projects in the city, action that was taken without explicit approval by the entire city council. Calvin asserted that Montoya had past dealings with Stifel in his previous capacities with other cities that had not been disclosed to Tran and the council. In May 2024, the council and Tran, in a closed session outside the presence of the public, voted unanimously to terminate Montoya. In doing so, the city council agreed to provide him with a severance payout equal to 12 months’ salary – $325,000, which came in addition to the $182,812.50 in salary and $40,832.43 in perquisites and benefits that had been paid to Montoya from October 2023 through May 2024. In this way, it cost San Bernardino taxpayers $548,644.93 for the roughly 6.75 months that Montoya worked for them as their city manager.
At the same meeting when Montoya was let go, the city council voted to elevate Rochelle Clayton, who had been hired the previous month by Montoya to serve as deputy city manager, to fill in for him as the interim/acting city manager.
At that point, 18 months after Tran had been elected mayor and 17 months after she had acceded to the post, the city had been languishing, day after day, week after week and month after month in a constant state of discontinuity, instability and uncertainty as to direction and management. Moreover, the best that had been accomplished during that time was simple day-to-day operations without any concentration on long-term or even medium term planning. In the morning, the lights would get turned on and at night the lights would be turned out, but that was about it. Tran had no accomplishments as mayor to speak of, which might be as expected after only 17 months in office, but there was nothing on the way toward being accomplished. The city, under her watch, had not even been able to settle on hiring a city manager. That was particularly problematic because to the extent that Tran had any municipal expertise, it was in the area of human resources, i.e., finding competent potential employees, vetting them and making sure they are qualified, capable and hardworking and then putting them into place and monitoring their performance and production, incentivizing them to achieve the organization’s or municipality’s objectives. She had not been able to do that.
Over the next several months, Tran was encouraged with what she was seeing in Clayton. Not only that, the members of the city council, all of them it seemed, were in concurrence with her. Given the city’s previous inability to fully hook and reel in Black, follow through with the hiring of Carrigan and its experience with Montoya, the council and existing staff were cautious and deliberate in making arrangement to extend an offer of the city manager’s position to Clayton, even as Tran was continuously pushing to expedite the process. At its October 2, 2024 meeting, after a closed executive session at which a unanimous determination among the council was reached as to Clayton’s suitability, the city council unanimously indicated it was amenable to hiring Clayton as the full-fledged city manager.
That led to the formulation of an employment contract with Clayton by which she would begin at an annual salary of $325,000, subject to an annual cost of living increase tied to the consumer price index and capped at 5 percent, another $11,619.95 in perks and pay add-ons and $115,693.41 in benefits, for an initial total annual compensation of $452,313.36.
The city council would have voted to officially promote Clayton into the city manager’s post and ratify the contract at its regularly scheduled October 16, 2024 city council meeting, but because the city council on that day was engaged in a League of California Cities convention, that meeting was cancelled. The council action to formally commit itself to hiring Clayton was to take place at its first regularly scheduled meeting in November, on November 6, 2024. In the meantime, an additional provision to the contract was added whereby the city was to provide Clayton with a one-time relocation benefit of $10,000, if she were to move to a residence within the boundaries of the City of San Bernardino within two years.
In a déjà vu scenario, just as the city council’s cancellation of its second regularly scheduled meeting in September 2023 delayed and ultimately untracked the hiring of Carrigan, the cancellation, 13 months later of the October 16, 2024 council meeting resulted in the city being failing to close a deal with Clayton. At the end of October, Second Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, through inquiries using the California Public Records Act, learned that in July 2024, Clayton had been informed by the California Department of Housing and Community Development in correspondence that came directly to the city manager’s office that San Bernardino had been selected to receive a $17 million Homekey grant to pay for a sizeable percentage of a $24 million homeless shelter the city intends to build on Sixth Street. Clayton had not informed the city council about the state’s offer of the money. In his follow-up inquiries, Sanchez learned that Clayton had declined the money on the city’s behalf over her concerns that the money had come with “strings attached,” and the city was not prepared to meet the state’s requirements to accept the money. Again without informing the council, Clayton notified Sacramento that the city was declining the money. Sanchez would also learn that the city had under Clayton’s watch failed to lay claim to another $3 million grant from San Bernardino County to pay for homeless service efforts because the city had not made three adjustments to its planned homeless assistance strategy that would have qualified it to receive the money. When this was brought up for discussion during the closed session prior to the public session at the November 6, 2024 council meeting in which Clayton’s hiring was to take place, the council elected at that point to pull the ratification of the city manager’s contract from the public portion of the meeting agenda, placing her hiring, or at that point possible hiring, into indefinite abeyance.
There ensued a redoubled effort on the part of Mayor Tran to recapture the council consensus to elevate Clayton into full-fledged city manager status. Joining her in this endeavor was then-Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin, whose bid for reelection during the city’s March 2024 municipal election had come up short. Calvin therefore saw installing Clayton as the city’s permanent city manager as a possible enduring legacy that would live beyond her time on the council, which was set to end in December. Joining with Tran and Calvin in their belief that installing Clayton as city manager would be a sound move was then-Fifth Ward Councilman Ben Reynoso. Reynoso, like Calvin and then-Seventh Ward Councilman Damon Alexander, had failed in his March 2024 reelection attempt, and was due to leave office before the end of 2024. He was ready to join with Calvin and Tran in designating Clayton as the city’s top administrator, a development which yet needed the support of two further members of the council. Those votes, however, proved elusive. Alexander was troubled over the city’s rejection of the state and county money that could have been put to use in homeless relief efforts and the contretemps that followed. Based on how Sanchez and some of the other members of the council were reacting to what Clayton had done with respect to the grant money that could have been used to get the homeless off the streets, he had become convinced it would be best if no decision on who should be lodged in the city manager’s office was made until the three new council members who were to replace Reynoso, Calvin and him – Kim Knaus, Mario Flores and Treasure Ortiz, respectively – were in office so they could weigh in on whom they wanted to work with as the city’s top staff member.
Clayton’s hiring was put off again and again in November and December and early January 2025. In February 2025, the City of Barstow offered the city manager’s position there to Clayton and she agreed to accept, officially moving into the Barstow city manager’s post in March 2025.
The episode with Clayton was for Tran’s critics anther indication of the mayor’s inability to assemble a working majority council coalition. San Bernardino has an acute and growing problem with homelessness, such that it has more unhoused people – 1,535 by the latest count – living within its 62.3-square mile confines than are subsisting in the five cities in the county with the next highest number of destitute. Of the city’s list of intractable problems, dealing with its homeless population was one of the few issues about which there was no meaningful division on the council and a ready-made consensus. Yet, by her die-hard advocacy of hiring Clayton as city manager, even after the way in which Clayton had looked the state’s gift horse of financing more than 70 percent of the cost of a comprehensive housing facility to assist in getting a large number of the dispossessed off of San Bernardino’s streets, Tran succeeded in forcing more of a wedge between her and the at least four of the members of the council.
Another factor in Tran’s inability to achieve traction as mayor and command the political reach she needed to succeed in taking charge of the city direction consisted of her moves against the grain of the current political establishment. In the summer of 2024, a collection of city residents undertook a recall effort against Councilman Sanchez and Councilman Shorett. Both efforts bogged down as the proponents were unable to obtain the signatures of 2,517 Ward One voters needed to qualify the recall measure against Sanchez for the ballot or the signatures of 3,576 Ward Four voters to qualify the recall measure against Shorett for the ballot. Tran was working, quietly she had hoped, behind the scenes to assist the recall proponents. Her assistance, however, became known, distancing her further from Sanchez and Shorett.
By the numbers, San Bernardino is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Of its 108,902 registered voters, 48,788 or 44.8 percent are affiliated with the Democratic Party, while 24,809, or 22.8 percent are registered Republicans. The city’s Republicans are outnumbered by the 25,457 residents or 23.4 percent who are registered to vote but profess no party preference. The remaining 9 percent of the city’s voters are members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom or other more obscure parties. Shorett and Sanchez were Republicans. Shorett is yet affiliated with the GOP but Sanchez has reregistered as a Democrat. Second Ward Councilman Juan Figueroa has declared no political affiliation. Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra, Fifth Ward Councilwoman Knaus, Sixth Ward Councilman Mario Flores and Seventh Ward Councilwoman Treasure Ortiz are Democrats.
Despite their common Democratic partisanship with Tran, Sanchez, Ibarra, Knaus and Ortiz find themselves at odds with Tran. Flores, alone, registers his votes on the council dais faithfully in line with Tran.
While the council on the vast majority of routine and noncontroversial and typical municipal operational matters vote in unison, on the vast majority of items of controversy, the vote generally breaks along a predictable line-up of Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus forming the council controlling majority, Flores falling in line with Tran and Ortiz unaligned with either side.
In June 2025, the Tran and six of the city council’s members reached a consensus to hire Fullerton City Manager Eric Levitt, who had previously served as the top administrator in Alameda, Simi Valley, Janesville, Wisconsin, and Sedona, Arizona as city manager, effective in August 2025. Ortiz alone dissented in that vote.
With Levitt in place, Tran in the intervening months has endeavored to undertake efforts to make up for the municipal malaise that gripped the city through the fist-two-and-a-half years of her tenure, when it was functioning without any clearly defined or uncontested managerial authority.
She, as well as her supporters, have assigned the blame for the manner in which the city had been adrift to the lack of clear administrative leadership. That tentativeness could not be laid at her feet, her supporters insist, but is rather a product of divisiveness on the council.
Tran has sought, at east publicly, to remain upbeat and above the fray, avoiding mudslinging and pointed criticism of the politicians she must work with.
“I’m here to push the positive,” Tran has stated publicly. “I am probably the most positive person you’ve ever met.”
When invited to focus on how her agenda has been blocked, primarily by Sanchez and Shorett with the assistance in most cases by Ibarra, Figueroa and Knaus, the mayor has refused to take the bait. “I’m trying to build an image that is no longer negative.”
Shorett, who during the last two years of Valdivia’s reign had sought to eliminate the elected mayoral position, and Sanchez, are among those who have observed that the strong mayor model of governance represents good government if the people elect a good mayor and disastrous government if they put a bad mayor into office. Shorett and Sanchez have observed that administrative authority was taken from the mayor with the voters’ approval of the 2016 Charter. The two mayors voted into office following that reform, both further observed, went to extraordinarily damaging lengths to bypass or overcome that lack of administrative authority. And both of the mayors elected in the aftermath of the 2016 Charter change, they opine, have been bad mayors. Their solution? Follow through with Shorett’s proposal from four and five years ago that faltered, the one to simply get rid of the mayor.
In this go-round, it is Sanchez who led the charge, with the support of Shorett. They believed, at least somewhat reasonably, that the atmosphere for doing so had changed somewhat from what it was in 2021 and 2022, when the previous effort to get rid of the elected mayor failed. It appeared they had, at the very least, the support of Ibarra, Figueroa, Knaus and Ortiz. In 2021, when Shorett had floated the concept, Ortiz, who was not yet in office, said she was in support of jettisoning the elected mayor. In 2022, when she had run, albeit unsuccessfully for mayor, during her campaign she said she was running so she could be the city’s last elected mayor and that during her mayoral tenure, the mayor’s post, as one independently elected at-large by the city’s voters, would be eliminated, to be replaced by a rotational system that would give the seven members of the city council intermittent responsibility of presiding over the council meetings.
The council was scheduled to take up the proposal, sponsored by Sanchez, at a specially-scheduled meeting on Monday February 1.
At no point during Tran’s 1,137 days up to that point as mayor of San Bernardino were her skills as a politician on display as they were that evening. It became absolutely clear as the meeting progressed, with the vast majority of the meeting time taken up by comments from the public, that she had expended a great deal of effort to make sure that those in her camp marshalled arguments against making any change to the city’s mayoral arrangement. It was as if it took the existential threat to her existence as mayor to trigger her fight or flight response. Tran did not run. Instead, she fought, fought with every gram of her slight corporal 105-pound pound being, which was transformed into a display – more like a tour de force – of parliamentary maneuvering.
What was needed for Sanchez and Shorett to lop off Tran’s pretty little political head was to publicly preview during the course of the meeting the idea of changing the charter to get rid of the elected mayor and adding to the function of the seven council members the rotating responsibility of wielding the mayoral gavel to preside over the panel’s meetings, and posit the rationale for doing so. That was to be followed by giving the public the opportunity to weigh in on the matter, after which the council would dialogue on the issue and vote, presumably, as to whether the voters would be given the opportunity to vote in June or perhaps in November to alter the city’s charter accordingly.
The first indication that Sanchez and Shorett were in for some rough sledding that night was that the 286-seating capacity Bing Wong Auditorium within the Norman Feldheym Library, where the city council holds its meetings was flooded with more than 286 people. Arrangements were made for adjusting the accommodations, but the number of those present went beyond the maximum number of people allowed in the room under the city’s fire code.
Normally, during public hearings held by the San Bernardino City Council, as with most other city councils in San Bernardino County and Southern California, members of the public are provided with three minutes to address the council with their individual concerns, perspective or what they believe should be relevant to the decision-making process. Those members of the public fill out speaker cards so the city clerk can make an accurate record of who spoke and the mayor or mayor pro tem conducting the meeting can make an orderly call of those who want to address the council to come forward. If the number of those seeking to speak reach or exceed 20, in order to expedite the proceedings and speed things along, the speaking limit will be reduced to two minutes or if the number of those speaking exceeds two dozen, the speaking time will be halved to a minute-and-a half. If three dozen speakers show up, the time each is allowed to address the council will be reduced to a minute. In some cases, the public as a whole will have the time for comments reduced to an hour or an hour-and-a-half, such that when that time elapses, no further input from the public is heard.
Tran made the most out of her mayoral authority that evening. The mayoral gavel put her in control of the meeting, how it was conducted and how the discussion and debate was to flow. Recognizing that the vast majority of those present were intent on railing against the mayoral elimination, she adroitly made a command decision that in order to ensure that the public was given as full of an opportunity to provide the city’s decisionmakers with their perception and pieces of their minds, there would be no reduction of the three-minute speaker limitation. Nor was there to be, she decided, a limitation on the overall time for the public to make its collective feelings known.
Throughout the course of the evening, 124 members of the public addressed the council over the course of more than four hours. Of those, 122 made clear they believed the people of San Bernardino should be able to elect their mayor and that the council should not be entrusted to make that decision for them.
Some of those speaking were respectful. Some were not. In surveying that content, the individual most respected was the mayor. The person least respected was Sanchez, followed by Shorett. Commonly what was heard were harangues, shouts, denunciations and heckling. There were some occasional efforts at reasoning.
Despite the momentum in the room running against taking any action that would deprive the electorate of its elected mayor, Sanchez and Shorett and to a lesser extent Figueroa and Knaus angled the discussion toward the 2016 charter revision having transformed the mayor into a primarily ceremonial post with little voting power, that it was the seven members of the city council setting policy and charting the city’s direction with the city manager assisted by department heads having city staff execute carrying out that policy. Tran, it was pointed out, was continuously angling for greater power than provided for in the charter. Her department had been provided with a 5 percent budget increase yearly while she has been office, it was noted and in the current year, the mayor’s office has a $328,273 annual budget, which includes salaries for herself and her secretary, insurance, travel, car allowance, office supplies and $3,600 per year for social media communications.
Many of those who had been present to argue against Sanchez’s revival of Shorett’s proposal were gone by the time the council voted on the motion to place a measure on the June ballot that would ask voters whether a further change in the city charter is in order that would involve city residents no longer directly electing the mayor and rotating the mayoral duties among council members.
Nevertheless, Tran had managed over the course of the meeting to make inroads against what had previously seemed an ineluctable elimination of the position she holds. Up for election this year, in addition to Tran, are Sanchez, Ibarra and Shorett. While Sanchez and Shorett are prepared to withstand, or at least try to withstand, anything their critics, opponents and Tran are going to throw against them, Ibarra is not as well-braced. She was first elected in 2018. In 2022, she was narrowly reelected after the San Bernardino Police Officers Association financed her opponent because she had been critical of the way in which the police department had stood down in the face of looting that occurred during the George Floyd Riots of May 31/June 1 2020. The intensity of expression against the council over the proposal to deprive the community of an elected mayor appeared to unnerve her. She did not vote with Sanchez, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus to place the proposed measure on the June ballot.
Ortiz is not up for election this year. She is isolated on the council, however, from virtually all of its members, and is hardly on better terms with the mayor. Her intense support of Shorett’s proposal to eliminate the directly elected mayor when Valdivia held the post five years ago and the way in which she embraced the concept when she herself ran for mayor in 2022 when she openly campaigned on eliminating the position she was vying for logically would have indicated that she was going to get behind Sanchez’s proposal on February 1. Significantly and crucially, however, she did not.
Tran, who was not eligible to vote on Sanchez’s motion, seconded by Shorett, stood by idly as the vote was recorded. The motion passed, 4-to-3, with Sanchez, Figueroa, Shorett and Knaus in favor of putting the matter before the city’s voters in June, and Ibarra, Flores and Ortiz dissenting. Had either Ibarra or Ortiz voted in accordance with previous expectations, the motion would have passed 5-to-2. Such an outcome would have been beyond Tran’s reach, and the next major battle in her war for political survival would have become convincing at least 50 percent plus one of the city’s voters in June to keep their elected mayor in place. That, however, has proved out to be a battle she will not need fight. With the vote having been logged as 4-to-3, she immediately exercised her veto power, which erased the vote’s outcome.
The mayoralty in many cities often serves as a stepping stone to higher political office. Though that has occasionally been the case in San Bernardino, as with James Cunningham, who was San Bernadino’s 19th mayor, serving from May 1947 until December 1950, before going on to become a California State Senator from 1951 to 1957, in far more cases, what looked like what might prove to be a promising career in elected office ended problematically, with the holder going no further or history recording some undesirable element that ruined his reputation.
William Carpenter Seccombe was a pharmacist who was a member of the San Bernardino Board of Education before he was elected San Bernardino Mayor, a position he held from 1941 to 1947. When the Mexican American Defense Committee challenged the city’s policies on segregation, which included disallowing Mexican Americans to use the Perris Hill Plunge, the city council, including Seccombe, rejected the calls for integration. A class action lawsuit was filed against Seccombe and the city council by Ignacio Lopez, leading to a landmark decision in which a judge ruled that the San Bernardino mayor and city council were acting illegally. The case Lopez v. Seccombe immortalized Seccombe in a way that darkened his name.
Mayor Al Ballard, whose hard-nosed flamboyance played a art in getting him elected, brought him into controversy when he insisted on an aggressive response to 1960s riots, which included authorizing shotguns for firefighters and supporting a controversial figure with alleged Mafia connections.
William Robert “Bob” Holcomb was San Bernardino longest serving mayor, having been in office from 1971 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 1993. The great-grandson of legendary prospector and discoverer William F. Holcomb, he was a World War II B-17 pilot who flew multiple missions over Nazi Germany, an attorney and newspaper founder and publisher who led the successful effort to prevent the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California from subsuming the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, thus preserving local control of the San Bernadino Valley’s water supply.
Holcomb, however, was mayor and leader of the city council that ignored stricter seismic standards enacted after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and rushed the construction of the San Bernardino City Hall and prevented it from incorporating engineering improvements as a result of its 1972 completion. A 2016 study confirmed that as a result of the use of the outdated standards, the building was unsafe and likely to fail in a 6.0 or greater magnitude quake, leading to its being vacated in 2017 and standing unused ever since.
Patrick Morris, who grew up in Needles, became an attorney and a distinguished prosecutor with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, in which capacity one of his earlier cases was that against the infamous husband murderer, Lucille Miller. Later, he practiced law in a firm he formed with his brother, Phillip. Both he and Phillip became San Bernardino County judges and Patrick acceded to the position of presiding judge. One of his accomplishments in that role was the creation of the county’s drug court. It was upon his retirement from the bench that Morris successfully ran for San Bernardino mayor. It was his misfortune that as he was nearing the close of his second term, the city’s structural deficit left city officials no choice but to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, marring Morris’s otherwise impressive record of accomplishment.