By Mark Gutglueck
As the candidacy filing period for positions up for election in 22 of the 24 municipal elections in San Bernardino County this year approaches, the major operative question in Colton is whether either or both of Mayor Frank Navarro’s two rivals on the city council will oppose him for reelection.
Navarro has been Colton’s mayor since 2018, when he convincingly beat Mark Garcia with 77.37 percent of the vote. He was reelected mayor in 2022, when he again trounced Garcia, although not quite as lopsidedly, with 69.28 percent of the vote. Previously, in 2012, he had been elected to the city council representing the city’s Third District, having unseated then-incumbent Vincent Yzaguirre in that contest by polling 56.74 percent of the vote. In 2016, he defeated Kelly Chastain to remain as the Third District councilman. Chastain had previously been mayor and was previously Third District councilwoman.
Navarro had been a founder and among the most active participants in Citizens for Colton First, a grassroots political reform and fiscal watchdog group. The organization was formed to advocate for municipal transparency and fiscal responsibility, ensured through government monitoring. The group scrutinized city budgets, sought what was referred to as fiscal responsibility and advocated for cost-cutting measures such as eliminating perks to city officials such as auto allowances for city council members. Citizens for Colton First and its members also filed complaints with the Fair Political Practices Commission to enforce transparency laws, while targeting dark money and unregistered political action committees serving as major donors in local elections and eliminate or expose backroom dealings. Citizens for Colton First’s political activism took place in an atmosphere in which no fewer than five elected Colton officials – former Mayor Karl Gayton, former Mayor/Councilman Abe Beltran, former Councilman Don Sanders, former Councilman James Grimsby and former Councilman Ramon Martinez were charged with acts of political corruption by federal and state prosecutors and ultimately convicted.
Prior to his election to the city council in 2012, Navarro served four years on the Colton Planning Commission.
In 2018, Colton’s voters, by a relatively close 54.35 percent to 45.65 percent margin, voted to reduce its governing system from a mayor elected at large and six council positions to a mayor elected at large and four council posts.
Kelly Chastain was first elected to the Colton City Council to represent what was then the city’s District 3 in 1996, displacing then-Councilman Abe Beltran, who was consumed with scandal. She continued to represent the old District 3 until 2006, when she became mayor. In 2010, she was soundly defeated in her mayoral re-elective effort after a series of prosecutions of her colleagues on the council by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office and scandals that grew out of revelations relating to pay-for-play politics and conflicts of interest in which both former City Manager Daryl Parrish and former Assistant City Manager Mark Nuami were implicated. Some of the ethical lapses that surfaced during that period was Nuami’s arrangement to convey money from developers to Chastain while he, Nuami, was simultaneously serving as Fontana mayor.
In 2022, as Colton was finalizing its reduction from six council districts to four council districts, Chastain made a return to the city council city by being elected to a two year-term to represent the city’s redrawn Second District. In 2024, she was reelected to a four-year term representing the Second District.
In November 2020, John Echevarria was elected to represent Colton’s Fifth District, which still existed under the previous six-district electoral system, with districts 3, 5, and 6 up for election in 2020 for two-year terms. Echevarria’s first term ran from December 2020 to December 2022. In 2022, he was re-elected, running in that instance to represent the newly formed District 4.
During Navarro’s second term as mayor, he has been bedeviled by actions taken by the council majority of Chastain, Echevarria and First District Councilman David Toro that have run counter to the reforms he championed as a member of Citizens for Colton First and as a member of the council and then as mayor when he had sufficient votes to do so.
A major issue in this regard was the city’s past tendency, during the mayoral regimes of George Fulp, Karl Gaytan, Deirdre Bennett, Chastain and Richard DeLaRosa, to forego open and competitive bidding procedures on city contracts and franchises. Fulp narrowly avoided the fate of Gaytan, Beltran and, Sanders, who were named in a federal indictment pertaining to their acceptance of bribes, primarily because he had been recalled from office in 1996, and the alleged crimes he had engaged in fell beyond the statute of limitations.
In 2023, the Colton City Council on a 3-to-2 vote, with Bennett, Echevarria and Toro prevailing and Navarro and Councilman Luis Gonzalez dissenting, voted to extend the city’s existing trash-hauling franchise with refuse handler CR&R, which was set to end in 2026, until 2036. Bennett, Echevarria and Toro supported giving CR&R the extension without conducting a competitive bid involving other trash haulers, despite CR&R having inherited the franchise from its corporate predecessor, Republic Services, shortly after Republic Services was itself given a no-bid ten-year extension of the franchise prior to its 2016 expiration in 2015 and despite the original franchise with Republic Services’ corporate predecessor Taormina Industries having been secured through what an investigator hired by the city concluded was a rigged process.
In 1996, when a competitive bid was held to select a franchise trash handler for Colton in the aftermath the city’s dissolution of its in-house sanitation department, Burrtec Industries won that competition. At that point, however, Mayor Fulp and councilmen Beltran and Sanders, working behind closed doors, conspired with then City Manager Malik Freeman and Deputy City Manager Daryl Parrish to rescind that decision and award the franchise to Taormina Industries. Subsequently, Police Chief Bernie Lundsford and City Attorney Julie Biggs arranged for the hiring of former Riverside County Deputy District Attorney Mark McDonald to examine the circumstances under which the franchise had ultimately been awarded.
Ultimately, McDonald delivered his findings, which became known as the McDonald Report, which scathingly identified a fixed bidding process marred by Taormina’s provision of inducements, which McDonald characterized as “tantamount to bribes” to Fulp, Beltran and Sanders, as well as conduct on the part of Fulp’s hand-picked city manager, Freeman, abetted by Parrish, which resulted in the contract being steered to Taormina despite a consultant, R.W. Beck’, hired by the city to evaluate the applicants for the franchise making a first straightforward determination that Taormina’s proposal was inferior to that put forth by Burrtec and another trash company, Waste Management, Inc. That money had been laundered to Fulp, Beltran and Sanders through a consultant hired by Taormina, Gil Lara, according to McDonald.
“Taormina, with the help of Gil Lara and others, successfully exerted influence upon certain willing Colton City officials, such that Taormina had a lock on the contract before the bid process ever began,” according to the McDonald Report.
McDonald stated in the report that Parrish acknowledged he recognized rigging the awarding of the contract in such a way that the franchise was given to a company that had been outperformed by two of its competitors was highly improper but that he had gone along with what had been done because he had “mouths to feed” and could not afford to lose his job.
In 2023, members of the community importuned the Colton City Council to consider the full implication of extending a franchise with a company, the corporate predecessor to which had obtained the franchise through bribery. Those Colton residents further asked the council to hold a competitive bid for the franchise rather than creating a circumstance by which the franchise holder would be able to keep the contract for hauling trash for four decades without having the rates it charged customers and the level of its service subjected to a comparison to other providers of refuse hauling. Chastain, Echevarria and Toro spurned those requests, which triggered accusations that they, like Fulp, Beltran and Sanders before them, were on the take. Long dormant memories with regard to the corruption and depredations that occurred during Chastain’s first go-round as an elected official in Colton from 1996 until 2010 began registering with older residents of Colton. Questions about Echevarria, a police sergeant and now a lieutenant in neighboring San Bernardino who should have been more sensitive to the prospect of the mob muscling in on city government than he seemed to be, surfaced. Toro made a set of ill-advised statements, asserting that he did not think the competitive bid process is beneficial to the community.
Referring to competitive bids using the municipal parlance of request for proposals, using its acronym form of RFP, Toro pronounced, “I personally do not have confidence in the RFP process.” Toro explained that a company he owned had failed to capture a contract it had tendered a bid on and that he was convinced his company was the most qualified applicant to provide the needed service but that it had lost out because another company was willing to do so at a lower cost. “I’ve been through an RFP process in my personal life and saw what happened,” he said.
Colton residents and business owners have expressed the view that by holding the competitive bid for the trash franchise, the city could have ensured that whichever company came away with the franchise, the trash fees paid by homeowners and businesses would have been reduced by millions of dollars over the coming decade.
Chastain, Echevarria and Toro all insist that they had pure motivation in voting to extend CR&R’s franchise without the company having to compete to keep it. Some residents, at least, say they believe Chastain’s troubling history in officer leaves open the possibility CR&R’s generosity to her might have influenced her vote. Among those residents are ones who say they find it difficult to believe that Toro would be take money in exchange for his vote to favor CR&R, but that he is sufficiently naive to believe that avoiding a confrontation with the company by putting it through its paces to force it to lower its profit margin in Colton is somehow in the city’s best interest. Some knowledgeable city residents and business owners said they, too, doubted that Echevarria is on the take. His motivation in voting for the CR&R franchise rollover did not consist of him getting money from the trash hauler for himself but rather ensuring that the company keep the franchise because his girlfriend was employed by CR&R.
To Navarro, the reason why his three council colleagues voted to extend the trash hauling franchise without conducting a competitive bid is less important than the consideration that in doing so, the council collectively failed to look after the best interests of those he and the rest of the council were elected to serve – the city’s residents.
Two years ago, Navarro was on a trajectory to leave as mayor following the end of his current term. At that time he was 79 years old and after devoting four years to being a member of the planning commission, six years as a city council member and almost six years as mayor, he felt he should end his commitment to the city, which went beyond merely attending and presiding over city council meetings twice a month and included attending as a member meetings of the Inland Valley Development Agency Board of Directors, the San Bernardino International Airport Authority Board of Directors, the OmniTrans Board of Directors and the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority Board of Directors, while also attending Colton Community Development Block Grant Committee meetings, Colton Finance Committee meetings, Colton Traffic Safety Committee meetings and serving as a representative to the Southern California Association of Governments. His intent was to end all of those distractions so he might spend time with his wife, Mary.
In February 2025, Mary died.
Thereafter, Navarro decided to recommit to staying in place as Colton mayor.
Chastain, who was elected to a four-year term representing the Second District in 2024, can run for mayor this year, with little or no risk. If she does not win, she will remain on the council to complet the remaining two years in her current term as councilwoman. If she wins, she will need to resign her Second District post, at which time the council would have the option of replacing her by appointment or calling for a special election.
Part of the calculation for Chastain is that she does not risk her current hold on the Second District council seat and she would gain even greater name recognition than she already enjoys by running this year. That name recognition would be of assistance to her in 2028, when she is due to run again in the Second District. Another part of the calculation is that her effort would most likely be in vain. In 2016, in a head-to-head match against Navarro in what was then the Third District, where in the past she had been the incumbent and had won three elections, she drew 700 of 1,827 total votes or 38.31 percent to Navarro’s 1,127 votes or 61.69 percent. The last time she ran for mayor, in 2010, with the advantage of incumbency, she yet managed to lose, garnering 3,289 votes of 8,185 cast or 40.18 percent to David Zamora’s 4,896 votes or 59.82 percent.
Echevarria is also running for mayor this year. For him, the proposition is riskier. Unlike Chastain, he was last elected in 2022, to a four-year term. He is thus due to stand for reelection in the Fourth District this year. He cannot run for both mayor and Fourth District councilman. If he loses his bid for mayor, he will give up his status as an elected official.