The 2024 political season is advancing toward its most intensive stage, with packages from the San Bernardino County Registrar of voters containing sample ballots for the November 3, 3036 election, mail-in ballots and the voter handbook due to start landing in registered voters’ mail boxes within the next two weeks. In Apple Valley, there is a growing perception that what were formerly loosely knit set of affiliations among the town’s elected officials are in the process of evolving into a more sharply defined network. If the mayor and two members of the city council up for reelection this year are returned to office and a school board hopeful tied to them through their campaign manager/consultant is also successful, it is the perception of some that 2026 will mark the rise of a political machine in the municipality of 74,614 that will become exceedingly difficult to root out going forward.
Scott Nassif, a local business owner, was first elected to the Apple Valley Town Council in 2002 and has remained in office as a town official for 24 years. Previously, when the Apple Valley mayor was not directly elected by the town’s voters but selected from among the council members by the council, Nassif was appointed to that honorific on three occasions. In 2022, the town changed over to having a mayor elected directly to two year terms. Nassif was successful in his run for mayor that year and was reelected mayor in 2024, making him, historically, the only directly elected mayor in the 38 years the town has been in existence as a municipality as well as the longest serving member of the council.
Curt Emick, a pharmacist, was first elected to the town council in 2010 and was reelected thrice thereafter, and is up for reelection this year. He served as appointed mayor in 2013 and 2021.
Art Bishop, formerly the fire chief with the Apple Valley Fire Protection District, and Larry Cusack, a local business owner, were first elected to the Apple Valley Town Council in 2012. They have been reelected every four years since and are not up for reelection this year. Cusack was the mayor in 2015 and again in 2019. Bishop was the mayor from December 2017 to December 2018.
Kari Leon, a local real estate professional, was first elected to the Apple Valley Town Council in 2018. From December 2021 until December 2022, she served one year as mayor, the last one appointed by the council before the position was directly voted upon by the town’s residents.
This year, David Dencker, a construction safety coordinator, and Robert Andrew Lucero, an artist, are running against Nassif. Ted Bohannon, a retiree, is competing against Leon in District 3. In District 4, Matthew Rutledge, a teacher, is running against Emick. In the Apple Valley Unified School District, Kendall Pontier, a retired teacher; Tanya Ortegon, a nonprofit director; and Kevin Skelton, a teacher, are challenging incumbent Governing District Two Board Member Amanda Buchanan. In Governing District 4, the incumbent, Maria Okpara, is facing Roman Aguilar, a parent and Ruben Hermosillo, an information technology manager.
Governing District Five Board Member Rick Roelle is not seeking election in this year’s election and Josh Justice, a eCommerce director; Mike Ricotta, a teacher; Angela Rincon, a therapist; and Marc Lacey, an assistant school district superintendent are run to replace him.
This summer, in the timeframe during which Nassif, Emick and Leon filed candidacy papers with the town clerk to get on the November 3 ballot, indicating they were seeking reelection, internet postings/handbills began to crop up on-line or in the town, announcing fundraising events for the Nassif and Leon campaigns. Simultaneously, similarly designed handbills/postings for a fundraiser for Marc Lacey, the assistant superintendent in the Silver Valley Unified School District and Apple Valley Unified School Board Governing District 5 hopeful were making the rounds. The advertisements for the Leon and Nassif events sought to interest prospective attendees in putting up $500 to achieve Bronze sponsorship status, $1,000 to qualify as a Silver sponsor and $2,500 to claim participation as a Gold sponsor, while the Lacey fundraiser advertised $500 Bronze, $1,000 Silver and $2,000 Gold sponsorships. In all cases, those wishing to attend were able to do so short of becoming official sponsors for an entrance fee of a mere $99 per person or $150 per couple. The designs of the fliers were similar. The fundraiser for Nassif took place at the Rusty Bull, located at 13685 John Glenn Road in Apple Valley. In the cases of the Leon and Lacey fundraisers, the handbills stated that the address of the event would be provided upon RSVP. CJ Porter listed was the RSVP contact on fundraisers. Eric and Cynthia Schmidt were shown as the hosts of the fundraiser for Lacey.
Christopher “CJ” Porter is the policy director for First District San Bernardino County Supervisor Paul Cook, providing, in that capacity, legislative support for the Fifth District, representing Supervisor Cook at select community meetings, and serving as a liaison on various boards and commissions. In addition, Christopher Porter is the principal, founder and owner of Porter Public Strategies. Through Porter Public Strategies, Porter is the leading campaign consultant to Leon’s campaign, serving essentially, as her campaign manager, campaign disclosure documents, known as California Form 460s, filed in July by Leon show. Porter, again through Porter Public Strategies, is serving as the consulting manager of Councilman Curt Emick’s reelection campaign, his 460 documents filed earlier this year show.
Mayor Nassif’s campaign disclosure documents filed this year, unlike those of Leon and Emick, show no payments made by the mayor’s campaign to Porter or Porter Public Strategies. Nevertheless, Nassif’s fundraising materials and electioneering materials generated for this year’s campaign reference Porter and Porter Public Strategies.
Eric Schmidt served on the Hesperia City Council from December 4, 2012, until December 6, 2016. Schmidt and his wife, Cynthia, moved to Apple Valley in 2022. Eric and Cynthia Schmidt are listed as key officers and directors of Dicas Inc., a corporation based in Apple Valley, which is describes as providing finance & administration/consulting services, financial management, administrative support, and/or consulting services to clients.
Immediately after the close of the candidate filing period in July, Porter’s fundraising activity on behalf of Nassif, Leon and Lacey began, most prominently with the distribution of the on-line and printed invitations to their three fundraisers, The recurrence of similar fundraising structures and the same RSVP contact for all three led some Apple Valley residents to ask whether Nassif, Leon and Lacey were involved in separate and independent campaigns and were simply using the same political consultant or fundraising professional or whether they reflected a more organized and sophisticated effort to influence or seek/seize control of two of Apple Valley’s major public institutions. When it emerged in the aftermath of the filing of Emick’s and Leon’s California Form 460 campaign disclosure documents that Porter was working as a paid consultant for them, taken together with collective statements of mutual support among the candidates, proof of the connections was manifest.
While none of the postings or handbills or any known campaign activity established that Porter, Eric Schmidt, Mayor Nassif, Councilwoman Leon, Councilman Emick or Lacey had engaged in unlawful activity, growing numbers of Apple Valley residents were coming to believe that there was more than sufficient evidence available publicly to suggest political collusion was afoot, vis-à-vis coordinated fundraising in which supporters were being called upon to contribute money to multiple candidates, a shared consultant, and a general merging of political activity. That perception was exacerbated by the amount of money being solicited, extending up to $2,500 to participate in a single fundraiser in a community where the average annual household income stands at $81,000. At the very least, a good number of Apple Valley residents were saying by early August that those overlapping relationships should invite greater and more comprehensive scrutiny before the November election.
Buttressing the suspicions with regard to political collusion was Porter’s status as Supervisor Cook’s policy director/advisor, which was perceived by some as not unrelated to his simultaneous effort to create a network of individuals who are tied together and coordinating public policy impacting on Apple Valley at multiple levels. Some of those subscribing to this theory characterized Porter as the ringleader, while simultaneously pointing to the existence of a crowd of other influential individuals and current and former officeholders as being part of this effort. Support of Lacey offered by Schmidt, previously a council member in Hesperia, was seen as significant. Moreover, the mutual endorsements among Nassif, Emick and Leon, which were aimed at preserving the status quo at Town Hall which has been solid for nearly eight years running, is widely accepted as an indication of an internal accommodation among the town’s political establishment intended to perpetuate itself.
Some see in this as a somewhat cynical effort to manipulate public perception in Apple Valley, a deep-red, majority-Republican community, going toward the November election. Though in California elections for local governmental offices are considered to be nonpartisan, Nassif, Emick Leon and Lacey have made no secret of their affiliation with the GOP. Cook, formerly a member of Congress and prior to that a California Assemblyman, is likewise a Republican, and Porter is a Republican political operative. A central element of the Nassif/Emick/Bishop/Cusack/Leon political machine has been the manner in which each has celebrated embrasure of conservative values to get elected in the past.
Their conservative label however, is belied by a some of their actions at the helm of Town Hall, which, by fair analysis, do not conform to the definition of fiscal conservatism. In some of the more impactful of those decisions, the guiding principal driving Nassif, Emick, Bishop Cusack and Leon appeared to be their need to hang together in the decision-making process and make a show of loyalty to one another, rather than engaging in independent thought, thorough analysis and hard-edged debate.
Perhaps the strongest example of the town council’s groupthink was the town’s legal action in the case of Town of Apple Valley v. Apple Valley Ranchos Water, in which the town council in 2016, prior to Leon becoming a member, voted to utilize eminent domain authority to condemn the town’s primary water system, historically known as the Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company, which was then then owned by Carlyle Infrastructures Partners. Immediately after the filing of the eminent domain action, Carlisle sold the water system to Liberty Utilities, a wholly owned subsidiary of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corporation, a Canadian publicly traded diversified utility company.
The matter was conducted as a bench trial in which Judge Donald Alvarez alone heard the case and issued the verdict, without reliance upon a jury. Following proceedings that spread themselves over 67 days between late 2019 and early 2021, a statement of decision was rendered in August 2022 in which Judge Alvarez found that the Town of Apple Valley did not have the right to acquire the water system, nor the means to operate it. Judge Alvarez reached the conclusion that Apple Valley residents would be better served if Liberty continued to own and operate the system, and worse off if the town took ownership. He awarded Liberty Utilities $13.2 million in attorney’s fees and costs to cover the amount of money Liberty paid the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which represented it at trial. This did not include the $8,355,556.45 that Apple Valley paid its law firm, Best Best & Krieger, in representing it in the failed water system takeover effort.
The Town appealed Judge Alvarez’s ruling to the Fourth Appellate District, Division Two, which reversed the trial court’s decision, whereupon the case was appealed to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately held that the trial court must exercise independent judgment when reviewing a utility taking, and remanded the case back to Judge Alvarez for further proceedings under a different legal framework than he previously applied. The town is now on the verge of making a decision on how to proceed, facing the dual prospect of the court ultimately granting the city’s buyout of Liberty’s interest in the water system, which will prove expensive, or relitigating the matter at further substantial expense and coming away without achieving the goal of the town taking ownership of the water system.
A sizable number of Apple Valley residents consider the procedural, legal and financial misadventure of the eminent domain action targeting Carlisle/Liberty/Algonquin to have been diametrically antithetical to true conservatism. Porter’s ploy in presenting Nassif, Emick and Leon as the personfications of conservative values to be augmented by another rock-ribbed Republican, in this case Lacey, with his emphasis on traditionalist principles in the public education venue is seen as predictable manipulation that has worked previously.
While the current circumstance in Apple Valley in which three incumbents are running as what appears to be a slate is not endemic to the town, such that politicians in multiple other cities in San Bernardino County alone have endorsed one another in their electoral and re-electoral bids, there are political purists who hold such affiliations are improper and limit the ability of those such as Councilwoman Leon, Councilman Emick and Mayor Nassif to think for themselves and adhere to the interests of their constituents rather than furthering the goals of the political network they have joined.
Porter’s assumption of the role of political consultant while he is simultaneously employed by the government has become something of a controversy in and of itself. There are some who contend that those in influential governmental positions should get one bite, and one bite only, at the apple in terms of impacting governmental activity. Thus, at the federal level, there is the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from becoming involved in political campaigns. California has no equivalent law. Nevertheless, there are those who believe it improper for someone such as Porter, who functions in an influential role at the county level, to be engaged in further influencing political events at another local level or other local levels, such as in this case the town or the school district.
The Sentinel asked Porter if he contested the notion that in assisting Mayor Nassif, Councilman Emick and Councilwoman Leon in their efforts to remain in office, he was getting a second bite at the apple and that in assisting Mr. Lacey he was taking a third such bite. The Sentinel further sought from Porter a cogent response to those who maintain that serving as a political consultant while he is simultaneously employed in the role of a governmental official represents a conflict-of-interest.
Porter ventured no response.
In emails, the Sentinel inquired of Leon and Nassif whether they could refute the assertion that when candidates for office on the same body, such as the Apple Valley Town Council, affiliate or align themselves politically with one another, they compromise their independence. The Sentinel also asked both if the creation of a political network such as the one involving the Apple Valley Town Council and Apple Valley School Board, themselves, Councilman Emick and Lacey limited their ability and that of the others to think for themselves and adhere to the interests of their constituents rather than furthering the goals of the political network they are a part of. Neither Leon nor Nassif responded.
The Sentinel was unable to reach Emick.
-Mark Gutglueck