In a further indication that the behind-the-throne architects of the January 2023 Yucaipa City Hall Coup that drove then-City Manager Ray Casey into retirement have been discredited and separated from the reins of power in the 57,000-population city, the Yucaipa City Council voted on March 9, 2026 to rescind Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448, the approvals that would have enabled large-scale development along the Interstate 10 corridor.
The action comes after a widespread grassroots uprising from throughout the community that resulted in Yucaipa residents, working under the auspices of the Yucaipa NOW and Friends of Live Oak Canyon, qualified two referendums for the upcoming June ballot subjecting Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448 to a vote on whether they should be rescinded.
By voting to decertify the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan update that they voted to put into place in August, the members of the city council rendered the issues relating to Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448 moot, and voided the need to hold the referendum.
Ray Casey, a Princeton graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering, worked in the private sector for nine years as a consulting engineer and as a construction company project manager, thereafter working in the public sector as the principal engineer in the City of Temecula’s land development department, as the highway engineer and road commission manager for the Isabella County Road Commission in Michigan, the development services deputy director and city engineer for the City of San Bernardino. In 2003, he was hired by Yucaipa as city engineer. After nearly five years in that capacity, he was elevated to Yucaipa city manager in 2008. During his more than 14 years as city manager, Casey had evinced, based in large measure on his expertise as a civil engineer, an understanding that any incoming development had to be matched with adequate infrastructure, the cost for which had to be defrayed either by the developer or the city’s taxpayers. In his role as city manager, Casey demonstrated that he was capable of serving as not only an honest broker between pro-development and anti-development forces and sentiments within the community but advocating for and insisting that project proponents be financially responsible for the infrastructure and off-site improvements that must accompany their development efforts. In essence, Casey, while not shutting the door on development in Yucaipa and in fact welcoming it, nevertheless insisted that landowners whose property was to be developed, real estate speculators, finance companies investing in real estate and the developers responsible for the construction taking place on that land defray the cost of the infrastructure that had to be built to mitigate the impact of that development rather than the city or its residents/taxpayers.
Shortly after Casey moved into the city manager’s post, the Yucaipa City Council, in November 2008 at Casey’s recommendation, adopted applicable development standards and blueprint for land use and its intensity in the 1,242 acres along the freeway and surrounding areas in Yucaipa under what is known as the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan. The planning document allowed for the construction of up to 2,447 residential units on 424.7 acres and up to 4,585,779 square feet of nonresidential uses on 242.7 acres within the designated area, pursuant to the project proponents building at their own expense, or contributing in development impact fees enough money to pay for, adequate infrastructure to accommodate each project.
In 2022, two longtime members of the city council, Greg Bogh and David Avila, opted against running for reelection. In their stead, two newcomers – Matt Garner and Chris Venable – were elected.
In January 2023, the month following Garner and Venable’s swearing-in as members of the council, a plan by pro-development forces that had been gestating for years was actuated. Then-Councilman Bobby Duncan, a real estate agent active within Yucaipa, joined forces with Garner, who had a building material supply company that did $3 billion worth of business annually, and Justin Beaver, who had first been elected to the city council in 2020 and was elevated to the position of mayor in December 2022 by the proclamation of the council, delivered an ultimatum to Casey: resign as city manager or be terminated. Casey, upon being given an assurance the city would honor his employment contract through its expiration date of June 30, 2024, went quietly into the good night. Upon Casey’s agreement to depart, Beaver, Garner and Duncan fired City Attorney David Snow. Jon Thorp, who had likewise first been elected to the council in 2020, and Venable were blindsided by the powerplay and in essence opposed to it, but lacked the political muscle to keep it from occurring. Thereupon, the troika of Beaver, Garner and Duncan acted with alacrity, indeed so, as the moves had been choreographed in advance, to hire Chris Mann as city manager and Steven Graham as city attorney.
Both Mann and Graham at the time of the move were serving as the city manager and city attorney of the City of Canyon Lake in Riverside County. Mann, however, was not a mere public sector managerial and administrative professional, but one who uniquely served simultaneously as a development industry representative across a wide swathe of Southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Mann was the principal of Mann Communications, which according to the company’s website, assists its clients to “effectively communicate with the public… effect change at the ballot box… delivering… messages through both traditional and innovative means… identifying supporters one by one.” Mann headed, the Mann Communications website boasted, a team of “practiced political strategists,” who “have a track record of success utilizing strategies and tactics such as voter targeting, direct mail, live and automated phone banks, opposition research, earned media, polling, issues management, and grassroots mobilization including door-to-door outreach” to not only promote individual development project but ensure the election of pro-development political candidates who would vote to approve such projects. Mann Communications specializes in, the firm’s website states, making sure that “elected officials are… provided the political cover they need in order to support good projects” to “provide our clients with a wealth of knowledge and experience and a winning approach to land use entitlement. Mann Communications Principal Chris Mann has been an active partner in numerous development projects in California, Nevada and Arizona. Having worked both as an elected official and as a developer, he uniquely understands the development process from both the public and private perspectives. Understanding the practices and motivations of each side better than most, he is able to provide tremendous value to the entire development process, making Mann Communications an invaluable member of any project team.”
When members of the community, alarmed at the sacking of Casey and concerned that the hiring of Mann meant the city was abandoning it “controlled growth” policy of many years standing for an accelerated round of development expressed concern, Beaver, as the mayor, perceived ringleader in forging the city’s redirection and the city spokesperson utilized a series of communications prepared by Mann to assuage the public. He, Duncan and Garner had settled on Mann as city manager to replace Casey, Beaver said, because Mann was already a trusted member of the Yucaipa community as both a Yucaipa resident and the president of the Yucaipa Valley Water District Board of Directors, he was knowledgeable about the city and the challenges facing I and, the mayor asserted, Mann “has the right relationships to help our city work collaboratively throughout the region for the benefit of Yucaipa residents.”
The misgivings that a few dozen Yucaipa residents had the night of January 9, 2023 meeting where Beaver, Duncan and Garner without any prior warning strong-armed Casey in the backroom and then announced his resignation as a done deal during the public session of the proceedings within less than two weeks mushroomed into a full-blown apprehension across the community. Hundreds and then thousands of Yucaipa residents were at once convinced they were being sold out, that Duncan and Garner, through their professional ties to the real estate and building industries stood to rake in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars when the developmental frenzy that Mann was ushering Yucaipa into took place. What Beaver stood to gain was less clear, but by his attitude in promoting Mann and embracing the developmental imperative, speculation spread among the populace that he was on the take, and that there was no logical explanation for his action other than that he had been greased either with political donations from those in the development community or was being provided with kickbacks and bribes by the developers, landowners and real estate speculators. The inevitable outcome of the Mann takeover of City Hall, the collective analysis held, was that Yucaipa was on its way to being transformed from the 11th least dense of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities with 2,068.017 people per square mile across the city’s 27.89 square miles into a city that was wall-to-wall houses and indistinguishable from virtually all others in the ultra-urban Southern California metropolis.
That triggered the founding of the Coalition to Save Yucaipa, which pursued a recall effort to against Beaver, Duncan and Garner. Mann at once rallied to save his political masters’ bacon, masterfully using the governmental machinery at his command to protect the three members of the city council who had conferred upon him a $240,000 salary, perquisites and pay add-ons of roughly $23,000 and approximately $80,000 in full benefits for a total annual compensation of around $343,000. He instructed Ana Sauseda, whom he brought from Canyon Lake to serve as city clerk in Yucaipa, to retain, at city expense, the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm and two of tis attorneys, Bradley W. Hertz and Eli B. Love, to draw up a lawsuit challenging the recall effort on the basis that the recall proponents could not prove their allegation that a Brown Act violation had occurred with the forced departure of Casey and that the recall proponents’ separate accusations against Beaver, Duncan and Garner that each had acted toward terminating Casey and Snow was not true since no single one of them had such authority and that the actions to relieve Casey of his city manager’s post and fire Snow were ones taken collectively by the entire city council body. The lawsuit was presented to Sauseda, who consented to acting as the plaintiff in the suit, which referenced her authority as Yucaipa’s chief elections officer under the auspices of a recently passed law, AB 2584, allowing her to contest the accuracy of the stated grounds for a recall. Sauseda’s suit, was filed against all 194 of the recall proponents.
To augment that effort, Mann had Joseph Pradetto, whom he had hired to serve as Yucaipa’s director of governmental affairs and official spokesperson, intensify the intimidation level against the recall proponents. Pradetto hinted that every one of the 194 people who had signed onto the recall effort were on the verge of being prosecuted for having violated Elections Code section 18600 for having circulated and obtaind signatures on a recall petition that intentionally misrepresented the circumstance or contained falsehoods.
Faced with the distraction of the lawsuit and stood off by Pradetto’s threat to have them jailed for persisting with the recall effort, recall proponents fell far short of gathering, by the August 16, 2023 deadline, the minimal 1,826 valid signatures from among District 1’s 7,303 registered voters to qualify a ballot item on recalling Garner, the minimal 1,478 valid signatures of the 5,912 registered voters in District 3 to qualify a ballot item on recalling Duncan and the minimal 1,623 valid signatures from among the 6,492 registered voters in District 4 to qualify a vote on recalling Beaver.
The intensity of the collective community’s enmity toward the council trio did not diminish with the failure of the recall, but rather intensified. That movement took on greater steam when the San Bernardino County Grand Jury looked into the goings-on in Yucaipa and concluded that “the 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.” Moreover, when Colleen Wang, one of those recall proponents named in the lawsuit filed by Sauseda filed a countervailing legal action, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Sachs, who considered the matter, concluded that the city clerk’s legal suit was indeed questionable.
The three members of the city council, meanwhile, engaged in further action that pushed large numbers of the members of the community to conclude that they were engaged in a pay-to-play manipulation of the city’s political and decision-making processes when in February 2024 the city council voted to raised the political donation limit its members can receive from any single contributor from the State of California’s generic standard of $5,500 to $10,000. This was widely perceived as a move that would permit Duncan and Beaver, who were up for election later that year, to have their political war chests take in an amount of money from the development industry and real estate interests that would leave them in a position where they could conduct election campaigns – consisting of billboard signange, lawn and window signs, television spots, radio ads, newspaper advertisements, handbills, mailers promoting their candidacy and mailers attacking their opponents – which would serve to convince the city’s voters to keep them in office.
Because of the public reaction, the original post-Casey game plan that was masterminded by Mann was that developers intent on constructing residential subdivision after residential subdivision packed with ten, twelve and fourteen homes to the acre collapsed. This forced the network around Mann, Beaver, Duncan and Garner to go to Plan B, which entailed promoting not residential but commercial development and compromising the city regulations that were in place under Casey pertaining to ensuring adequate accompanying infrastructure and limiting or mitigating the impacts of that development on traffic circulation, air and water quality, while ensuring that the project did not detract from the quality of life of the residents of the city prior to the project being completed so that the landowners and developers involved in those projects saw a substantial return on their investments.
A handful of projects that were proposed and approved, taken together with development proposals within the 1,242-acre Freeway Corridor Specific Plan area prompted calls for the specific plan’s adjustment. Seventeen months ago, the Palmer, Robinson, and Issa families sought permission to construct warehouses along Live Oak Canyon.
While then-Councilman Bobby Duncan and then-Councilman Jon Thorp were willing to let the projects proceed, then-Mayor Justin Beaver and then-Councilman Matt Garner, having been chastened by the intensity of resident reaction toward their development-at-any-cost attitude, resisted giving carte blanche go-ahead to those projects. They were joined by Councilman Chris Venable. The projects, while not denied outright, were sent back to the city’s planning staff for further tweaking and adjustments that would allow them to proceed.
There were at that time two mindsets with regard to the warehouse issue.
Those in favor of aggressive development wanted a more generous allotment of land to be eligible for light and medium industrial use, which extends to warehouses. That group wanted property within the mouth of Live Oak Canyon that falls inside Yucaipa’s borders to be eligible for conversion to warehouses.
There were others who believed that warehouses represent far too intensive of a land use in rustic Live Oak Canyon.
Both camps agreed in one respect: They wanted the then-16-year-old Freeway Corridor Specific Plan scrapped. Those intent to see the natural aspect of Live Oak Canyon preserved wanted the specific plan altered to prohibit light and medium industrial uses in the canyon and for the city to encourage that kind of land use to take place elsewhere within acreage along the periphery of the 10 Freeway. In September 2024 and the months thereafter, the council receded from dealing with the calls from both sides to revamp the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan.
Simultaneous to all of the discussion with regard to warehouse development, the Coalition to Save Yucaipa was not daunted, and it reinitiated a recall campaign against Garner, who was not due to stand for reelection until 2026, and began to gear up for intensive campaigns against Beaver and Duncan.
Duncan, faced with the prospect of a concerted effort to see him removed from office at the ballot box, opted out of seeking reelection in 2024. The Coalition to Save Yucaipa succeeded in qualifying the recall vote against Garner for the November 5, 2024 election.
That recall effort against Garner succeeded. Duncan was not a candidate, and District 3’s voters chose Judy Woolsey from among three candidates to succeed him. Beaver, who was well financed in his campaign, managed to be reelected.
While the complexion on the city council had changed, there was yet a movement afoot, one that was compromised by the events of 2023 and 2024 in which the pro-development forces and the reputations of Beaver, Duncan and Garner had taken a shellacking, to liberalize the City of Yucaipa’s traditionally conservative controlled-growth approach into one that was more accommodating of development, one that would not require landowners, real estate speculators and developers to shoulder all of the infrastructure costs of their projects. Making such a change was not considered acceptable by a substantial percentage of Yucaipa’s residents and certainly not by the members of the Coalition to Save Yucaipa, who recognized that doing that would not only impact the quality of life of those living in the city but increase the project proponents’ profits on the development projects that would take place in Yucaipa, thus intensifying the developmental imperative. They continued to push back with regard to that agenda. In February 2025, three months after the election in which Beaver retained his seat representing the city District 4, Woolsey replaced Duncan and Garner was recalled and two months after the four members of the council chose Bob Miller to serve as District 1 councilman and replace Garner, an agreement was reached to confer a $279,045 payout on Mann and extend his family’s medical coverage for a year in exchange for his resignation as city manager.
With the Palmer, Robinson, and Issa families pressing ahead with their designs on constructing warehouses along Live Oak Canyon and the City of Yucaipa’s planning division consistently seeking to accommodate their overtures, on August 25, 2025 the Yucaipa City Council’s was presented with an update of the city’s Freeway Corridor Specific Plan that was indulgent of the Palmer, Robinson, and Issa families’ intentions, a development ordinance and a parallel proposal, Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448, to construct two large warehouses within that designated area. The council by a 4-to1 vote, with Councilman Chris Venable dissenting and now-Mayor Thorp, Councilmen Beaver and Miller and Councilwoman Woolsey prevailing, approved the specific plan update and the development proposals. Two weeks later, on September 8, 2025, the city council gave a so-called second reading, i.e., confirming passage of the action it had taken on August 25, rezoning the 1,242 acres along the 10 Freeway from Live Oak Canyon Road to County Line Road for “planned development,” essentially opening the property up for “light industrial” or warehouse development.
David Matuszak, the president of Friends of Live Oak Canyon, a core group of Yucaipans mounted an effort to counter what the council had done. Friends of Live Oak Canyon called upon all of those members of both the Yucaipa, Redlands, San Bernardino County and Riverside County communities who value the atmosphere and tranquility Live Oak Canyon to come together in action and prevent the loss of “a lifestyle we commonly value.”
In a very short period of time, Friends of Live Oak Canyon and a companion group, Yucaipa Neighbors Opposing Warehouses, circulated two petitions, one declaring their opposition to warehouse development in Live Oak Canyon that was approved and the other calling for a referendum to undo the council’s August 25/September 8 vote to alter the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan, to which 5,232 registered voters in Yucaipa affixed their signatures. That safely exceeded the 3,618 valid signatures of city voters needed to force the city to put the referendum on the ballot.
Throughout December and into early January, the council found itself facing a political reality it had come up against previously but which it had not fully assimilated. Of the city’s 35,552 voters, 5,232 of them had given strong indication they were not in favor of liberalized and aggressive warehouse development in the community. Among the city’s remaining 30,220 voters, chances were that there was at least some similar sentiment against unbridled warehouse development. Thorp, Beaver, Miller and Woolsey, who wanted to accommodate the development community, were hopeful that landowners, real estate speculators and developers might put on a strong enough campaign against the measures to defeat them and allow the projects approved in the August and September votes to move toward completion.
At its January 12, 2026 meeting, the city council voted to place the measures on the June primary election ballot.
The cost to the city of holding that election was to run to over $200,000. Polling indicated that both measures would pass by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin. Thorp, Beaver, Miller and Woolsey mad a sobering assessment of the situation. They could spend a fifth of a million dollars in city money to take the question with regard to the intensity of warehouse development o the people, in which case there was only a long shot chance that the city’s residents would smile kindly on the Palmer, Robinson, and Issa families and intensified warehouse development in general or they could vote to rescind their rescind the council’s August 25/September 8, 2025 and January 12 votes, thereby undoing the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan update and the warehouse approvals, cancel the appearance of the referendums on the June ballot and save the city $200,000 in the process. Doing so would erase, to a limited degree, the impression that the majority of the city council was in the pocket of the development community and decrease the supercharged political atmosphere throughout the city.
To do this, the city council needed to act expeditiously, prior to the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters finalizing the format of the June ballot. The deadline for doing that would come a week following the close of the extended candidate filing period for this year’s election, which fell on March 11.
A mere two days before that deadline, at its March 9 meeting, the Yucaipa City Council considered and passed an item which canceled the referendum election and halted the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan update.
Chris Robles a spokesman for Yucaipa Neighbors Opposing Warehouses, attributed the effective reversal of the city’s course toward saturating the frontage around the 10 Freeway and the property at the periphery of Live Oak Canyon Road with warehouses to “a powerful grassroots campaign. This is a classic David versus Goliath victory. Residents stood up to powerful developer interests and a city government that refused to listen. The people of Yucaipa made their voices heard, and we won.”
Robles noted that it was “residents who forced the issue. Community volunteers collected thousands of signatures in less than 30 days to qualify referendum petitions challenging the council’s approvals. Facing the prospect of losing at the ballot box, the project’s developer and landowners withdrew their support, forcing the council majority to abandon the project.”
A multitude of forces came into play in the lead-up to the denouement of March 9. Resident anger toward members of the city council who were intent on advancing the interests of landowners and developers over the concerns expressed by community members that the aggressive building of warehousing would negatively impact the city’s livability was one factor. Another was the growing perception that the city’s elected officials – the council members – had a venal motivation in siding with the developers. During the Casey sacking/Mann hiring episode, those suspicions were bootstrapped up into calls for the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Public Integity Unit and the FBI/U.S. Attorney to look into specific allegations of bribery. The council vote to ratify Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448 resurrected those suspicions and demands for an investigation.
During the March 9 meeting, several council members made remarks residents described as dismissive and condescending toward community members.
Council Member Judy Woolsey mocked community concerns, characterizing residents voicing opposition to tree-huggers who were saying “no to industrial growth, no to any commercial growth, no to housing,” while seeking to “protect the open space and save the cows.”
Woolsey, whose comments betrayed that she has been co-opted by the same network that engineered the January 9, 2023 Coup, accused members of the community, including longtime residents, of having a drawbridge mentality, such that now that they are inside the castle gates and have a nice piece of Yucaipa for themselves the want to raise the drawbridge and deny others entrance to the community. Those against future growth in Yucaipa have already bought homes in the city and “don’t want anybody else to be able to do that.”
Woolsey further claimed that the opposition movement was largely funded by outsiders, stating that “the majority of the people in that group don’t even live here.”
Beaver, Thorp and Miller were far more restrained and somewhat cautious with regard to expressing such overtly pro-development attitudes, as they are somewhat more familiar and experienced with the consequences of getting on the wrong side of the juggernaut of public sentiment than Woolsey.
Indeed, in recent weeks, the council, led by Beaver, who has seen his public reputation most damaged by the perception that he is a shill for the development industry, have been pursuing a highly visible effort to upbraid the State of California and the California Department of Housing and Community Development for its aggressive housing construction mandates and strategies, which includes stripping local jurisdictions of their land use authority. The state mandates have been highly beneficial to the building industry, as they have compromised the autonomy of some counties, cities and towns in limiting the density of residential subdivisions or preventing developers from proceeding with projects that might be out of character with their surroundings or be built to lower standards than local residents and some local officials would prefer.
The Yucaipa City Council’s sudden and recent change of attitude from the intensive pro-development stance the Beaver/Duncan/Garner-dominated council took in which it welcomed state mandates that cities accommodate companies intent on high-density residential development to what has manifested in the last several weeks has been remarkable.
Those efforts, which included having City Manager Sean Moore write a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom excoriating him for what the state’s build-houses-at-any-cost directive is doing to Yucaipa, have served to counteract the impression that Beaver has been illicitly induced by elements within the development community to carry their water for them while holds a position of trust bestowed upon him by the voters of the city’s District 4. For Beaver, a law enforcement officer, it is in his personal, political and professional interest to shed the mantle of a corrupt politician who cuts crooked deals in the back room he donned when he, Duncan and Garner cut Casey off at the knees.
Robles said what went on with the approval of the Freeway Corridor Specific Plan update and two warehouse projects in August and September and how the council was looking forward to the development community to expend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat the referendums is an indicator that political leopards don’t change their spots.
“Let’s be clear about what happened,” Robles said. “The council didn’t suddenly start listening to residents. They rescinded the project because the developer’s polling showed they were going to lose.”
Despite city residents having indicated they were not supportive of saturating the city’s freeway corridor with warehouses, Robles said the city council bulled ahead with Resolution 2025-54 and Ordinance 448 anyway and then belittled and denigrated those residents who objected.
“When elected officials talk down to the very people they represent, it reveals a deep disconnect between City Hall and the community,” Robles said. “That is why residents lost trust in the city’s leadership. “For months residents spoke at meetings, organized petitions, and asked the council to listen. Instead of respecting the community, the council doubled down and dismissed the concerns. The only reason this project was rescinded is because the developer realized they were going to lose.”
The city council should seize the day and renounce substituting what’s in the financial interest of the city’s landowners, real estate brokers and agents and the developers looking to work the city for policies that are intended to preserve the living and social environment the city’s residents currently enjoy.
“This victory belongs to the residents of Yucaipa,” Robles said. “Now it’s time for city leaders to reset the tone. The public should never be treated as an obstacle—we are the people they represent.”
Robles called for a more transparent planning process that respects the character of the community and the voices of residents.
“Yucaipa deserves development decisions driven by the people who live here—not by outside money or political arrogance,” he said.