Who She Is
By Carlos Avalos
Acquanetta Warren was born July 1, 1956, in Compton, California, to parents who had come west from Birmingham, Alabama. She attended Locke High School in the Watts section of South Los Angeles from 1971 to 1974, then crossed the city to Eagle Rock, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and urban studies at Occidental College.
Her early career was in private banking. She worked as a product manager at Lloyd Banking Group from 1981 to 1986, then spent roughly five years as a vice president at First Interstate Bank. In 1991 she moved into public administration, becoming deputy director of public works for the City of Upland, where she oversaw the infrastructure department.
Warren relocated from Compton to Fontana in 1993. By her own later account, the move was met with alarm inside her family, given Fontana’s history, a city that in living memory had been associated with cross burnings and racially segregated neighborhoods. Less than ten years after arriving, she became the first Black city councilmember in Fontana’s history, serving as co-chair of the city’s General Plan Advisory Committee and chair of the Village of Heritage Development Landscape Committee before her council appointment in 2002. She was reelected to the council in 2004 and 2008.
In 2010, Warren was elected mayor of Fontana, defeating Bobbi Jo Chavarria with 54.72 percent of the vote to Chavarria’s 14 percent, becoming the city’s first Black mayor. She was reelected in 2014 with 60.76 percent against a field led by former U.S. Congressman Joe Baca, who took 18.9 percent; in 2018 with 58 percent against Jesse Sandoval’s roughly 18 percent; and in 2022 with 47.75 percent in a three-way race against Sandoval (29.03 percent) and a third candidate, O’Brien (23.09 percent). She has now held the mayoralty for more than fourteen years and has never come within single digits of losing a general election.
Over that period, a nickname affixed to her by a political action committee “Warehouse Warren” has followed her into most subsequent coverage, a reference to the scale of logistics-facility development approved during her tenure and the political money that development has generated. What follows is a chronological record of that coverage, drawn from public reporting between 2010 and 2024.
The Record, Article by Article
February 15, 2010 — Daily Bulletin, “Blacks reflect on legacy of Fontana.” Ahead of the 2010 mayoral election, Warren discussed her 1993 move from Compton to Fontana and her family’s reaction to it, framing her rise to city councilmember as a marker of the city’s racial transformation from its segregationist past.
November 4, 2010 — Black Voice News, “Acquanetta Warren Becomes Fontana’s First Black Mayor.” Coverage of Warren’s mayoral victory characterized her as a longtime advocate for making Fontana more inclusive and business-friendly, positioning her win as the culmination of work already underway through her council-era committee roles.
October 11, 2013 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren’s Advocacy For Donor In Appointed Role Raises Legal Questio ns.” The Sentinel reported that Warren’s simultaneous roles, Upland’s assistant public works director and Fontana’s mayor created a conflict, since both cities held franchise waste-hauling agreements with Burrtec Waste Industries, a company whose principals and employees ranked among Warren’s largest political donors across her council, mayoral and Assembly campaign accounts. The article raised the question of whether her advocacy for Burrtec in one government role while accepting its political money in another crossed a legal line.
November 15, 2013 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Public Employee Union Contract Negotiation Issue Widens Warren Conflict.” A follow-up report detailed how Warren’s dual status elected official in one city, unionized public employee in another became newly problematic during a round of public-employee union contract negotiations, expanding the conflict-of-interest questions raised a month earlier.
October 17, 2014 — untitled Fontana reelection coverage, “Warren Credits Her Leadership With Complete Transformation Of Fontana.” Ahead of her 2014 reelection bid, Warren campaigned on her record, citing the “Healthy Fontana Program” and the city’s parks investment as evidence of a leadership record she argued merited another term.
January 10, 2015 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren Quits As Upland Public Works Director.” Warren resigned her Upland post after years of criticism over holding two government positions simultaneously. The article noted a defense offered on her behalf that her regional government board work as Fontana’s mayor had also benefited Upland without resolving the underlying conflict-of-interest criticism that had dogged the arrangement for two years.
March 19, 2016 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Before Quitting Upland Post, Fontana Mayor Warren Purged Her Hard Drive.” More than a year after her resignation, the Sentinel reported with confirmation from Upland city officials that Warren had deleted all data from her Upland work computer immediately before resigning in January 2015. No public explanation for the deletion, or its contents, has been reported since. The timing, a full data wipe executed in the same window as a resignation that followed two years of conflict-of-interest reporting — is a fact that remains on the record without further clarification from Warren or Upland.
January 15, 2017 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Move To Recall Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren Afoot.” A recall campaign gathered more than fifty signatures against Warren, alleging she had not performed her mayoral duties in her constituents’ best interest and had wasted taxpayer money in service of her own political ambitions.
January 28, 2017 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren Recall Proponents Offer Rationales For Effort To Remove Fontana Mayor.” The Sentinel noted that Republicans and Democrats in Fontana found rare common ground in wanting Warren removed from office the same reporting that first widely popularized the “Warehouse Warren” nickname, coined by the Inland Empire First PAC. The Press-Enterprise had separately disputed the specific factual basis offered by the PAC for the recall.
October 21, 2017 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Sandoval Cites Warren’s Partisan Ambition In Declaring His Fontana Mayoral Bid.” Councilman Jesse Sandoval, announcing his 2018 mayoral challenge, criticized Warren’s stewardship as marked by a lack of transparency and unresponsiveness to residents’ basic requests — describing constituents being repeatedly redirected between departments without resolution.
March 15, 2019 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warehouse Warren And Her Machine Get Another Project Passed.” Coverage of a Bloomington-area warehouse approval documented resident opposition citing property-value and quality-of-life concerns alongside San Bernardino County’s formal objection that the project’s environmental impact report failed to adequately disclose or mitigate traffic, air-quality, noise and drainage impacts, in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act’s baseline disclosure requirements.
May 2019 (reported retrospectively, July 2021) — Hunt confrontation. According to later Sentinel reporting, Fontana City Manager Ken Hunt confronted Warren in May 2019 with evidence he had gathered suggesting that city contracts she had voted to approve and had induced three council colleagues to approve had not gone to the lowest bidder. Hunt’s confrontation is reported as the origin point of the severance dispute detailed below.
October 4, 2019 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren’s Assurance Census Won’t Aid ICE Is Unreliable, Illegal Alien Advocates Warn.” Warren urged Fontana residents to participate fully in the 2020 census, stating that city officials were not immigration enforcement agents. Immigrant-advocacy groups publicly challenged the credibility of that assurance, citing Warren’s documented relationship with then-President Donald Trump, including a personal meeting with him in Washington, D.C.
2020 — American Society of Landscape Architects, “Air Quality, Placemaking and Spatial Equity: The Fontana Urban Greening Master Plan.” An award-recognition analysis of Fontana’s urban greening plan documented that city residents were exposed to some of the poorest air quality in the nation, a condition the analysis attributed to the region’s wind patterns trapping ozone, volatile organic compounds and fine particulates against the surrounding mountains the same basin dynamics implicated in later warehouse-siting disputes.
February 5, 2021 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Republican Warren On Brink Of Losing Her Hold On Democratic Fontana.” The article described the first visible fracture in Warren’s political machine, tracing it to protégé Jesse Armendarez’s unsuccessful 2020 run for Fifth District County Supervisor a bid Armendarez pursued in
defiance of Warren’s preference that fellow Republican Cliff Young carry the seat.
April 30, 2021 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Mayor Warren Chalks Up Another Warehouse, This One In South Fontana.” Continued warehouse approvals drew renewed opposition from residents citing low-wage, low-benefit logistics jobs, heavy diesel truck traffic, associated emissions, and worsening traffic congestion as recurring costs imposed on host neighborhoods.
July 2, 2021 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren Arranged $1.1 M Severance To Silence Hunt About Her Bribetaking.” This is the most serious allegation in the public record concerning Warren. Building on the May 2019 confrontation, the Sentinel reported that Hunt had come into possession of evidence he believed confirmed Warren was accepting kickbacks from companies doing business with the city. Rather than a public rupture, the paper reported that Warren arranged a negotiated separation: Hunt was kept on Fontana’s payroll through January 2020, reaching his 30-year public-employee milestone, drawing $194,755 in pay over that six-month period. He was then provided a further year of salary and benefits, totaling $464,584.53, plus a settlement stipend of $468,038.47 — a combined post departure payout of $932,623, for a grand total of $1,127,378 paid to Hunt by the city after he stopped working for it. The Sentinel’s framing, reflected in its headline, treats the payment as hush money; that characterization is the paper’s editorial conclusion rather than an adjudicated legal finding, and no criminal charges against Warren arising from these allegations appear in the public record reviewed here. The dollar figures and the sequence of the payout, however, are reported as a matter of record.
July 24, 2021 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Despite Reports Of Warren Shakedown, Hunt Lands Job As Rutherford’s Office Honcho.” Restating the same
underlying allegations, this article reported that despite the unresolved shakedown claims surrounding his departure from Fontana, Hunt subsequently secured a senior position in a county-level official’s office — a placement the Sentinel treated as noteworthy given the unresolved nature of the allegations he had raised against Warren.
September 24, 2021 — untitled, “Overtaken By Scandal, Mayor Warren Unable To Dominate Fontana As She Did Previously.” The article quantified the scale of Warren’s development-industry financial support, reporting that builders, contractors, investors, developers and landowners had collectively contributed more than $350,000 to her political accounts by 2020 — a sum described as having made her effectively unchallengeable in prior cycles, contrasted against a weakened 2021 political position amid mounting scandal coverage.
November 5, 2021 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Mayor Warren & Colleagues Daring AG To Look Into Fontana Warehouse Graft.” Coverage of a warehouse-project appeal cited resident concerns, supported by outside research, linking air pollution from logistics facilities to elevated cardiovascular disease risk in nearby populations, and to the health effects of long-term elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide exposure, concerns raised specifically regarding harm to children in adjacent neighborhoods and schools.
March 11, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “To Scotch Bribery Reports Warren Poaches Chino City Manager.” As the 2022 election cycle approached and graft and corruption reporting continued to accumulate, Warren recruited Matt Ballantyne away from his post as Chino’s city manager where he had run a comparatively well-regarded, “sedate” 91,403-population city for a decade to run Fontana’s municipal operations. Fontana’s compensation offer represented an increase of nearly $100,000 over his prior pay, pushing his total compensation beyond half a million dollars annually. The Sentinel framed the hire as a deliberate effort to change the narrative around Fontana City Hall ahead of the election.
March 25, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren Gerrymanders Fontana Electoral Map To Keep Rival Out Of This Year’s Council Race.” After the city considered several redistricting configurations based on 2020 Census data, the council arrived at its final decision with three map options, all of which had reportedly been shaped to protect Warren’s principal council ally from a strong challenge by a former local officeholder regarded by political analysts as his most credible potential opponent.
April 19, 2022 — ABC7 Los Angeles, “Fontana warehouse project to move forward
after lawsuit, but with environmentally friendly features.” A 200,000-square-foot warehouse proposal, built less than 100 feet from a high school, proceeded after a San Bernardino County Superior Court-approved settlement secured several developer concessions.
Resident Liz Sena, who had helped lead the litigation, characterized the settlement as a partial victory despite the project’s ultimate approval.
April 19, 2022 — KVCR News, “Fontana settles lawsuit with California AG over warehouse and environmental concerns.” The same day, KVCR reported the resolution of a separate, related action: the California Attorney General’s office had accused Fontana nine months earlier of violating the California Environmental Quality Act in its approval of a 205,000-square-foot warehouse neighboring Jurupa Hills High School. Attorney General Rob Bonta stated that unchecked warehouse development in Fontana had for years left the city’s most vulnerable communities bearing the costs of dirty air, traffic and round-the-clock industrial noise.
July 15, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Postmus Using Warren & Cothran To Muscle In On Fontana Weed Franchise.” Reporting alleged that Fontana’s cannabis licensing regulations had been drafted with exclusions specifically tailored to avoid disqualifying Bill Postmus — a convicted felon with a documented history of controlled substance abuse from participating in the city’s cannabis franchise, despite that history otherwise being disqualifying under normal licensing standards.
September 2, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “In Launching Council Bid, Gonzales Calls Cothran Jr Warren Puppet.” Council candidate Gonzales, announcing his campaign, characterized his opponent as a proxy for Warren’s political operation and stated he was self-funding roughly 90 percent of his campaign specifically to avoid dependence on large donors.
October 7, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren Using Clay Pigeon Candidates In Effort To Divide Fontana’s Hispanic Vote.” The Sentinel alleged that Warren’s campaign apparatus had recruited multiple Latino candidates to run in several electoral zones for the specific purpose of splitting the Latino vote, in combination with gerrymandered district lines intended to protect her preferred candidates a strategy that, if effective, would leave affected residents without a competitive choice of representation for a full six-year council cycle.
November 11, 2022 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Warren & Company Maintain Her Vice Grip On Fontana’s Municipal Scepter.” Warren and two incumbent allies won reelection without significant difficulty in the 2022 municipal election, a result the Sentinel described as unsurprising given the structural advantages built over the preceding cycles.
July 27, 2023 — Los Angeles Times, “Fontana rejects massive warehouse proposal amid public outcry and pollution complaints.” In one of the only documented instances of Warren’s handpicked council majority breaking with her publicly, the council voted down a large warehouse proposal following sustained community opposition and pollution-related objections.
October 27, 2023 — San Bernardino County Sentinel, “Immigrants’ Reaction To Fontana Sidewalk Vendor Law Does Not Prevent Its Passage.” The council voted to confirm a street-vendor ordinance first approved on October 10, prompting protest that spilled from the council chambers into the Civic Center grounds and onto the street where Warren personally resides, resulting in the arrest of the protest’s organizer and his bodyguard by Fontana police.
January 29, 2024 — MSN (syndicated), “Fontana’s Black mayor is cracking down on Latino street vendors. Is it racist or just good business?” Under the new ordinance, unlicensed street vendors faced misdemeanor arrest and impoundment of their goods and equipment. Warren defended the crackdown publicly, stating the city had exhausted efforts to help vendors obtain legal licensing and that it was time for stricter enforcement. Critics in a majority Latino city characterized the policy as discriminatory, with resident objections at council meetings describing the enforcement’s downstream effects on affected vendor families as severe.
Reading the Record
No single article in this record, standing alone, proves official corruption. Several, the Burrtec franchise overlap, the hard-drive deletion, the Hunt severance, the 2022 redistricting are documented facts whose legal significance remains, as reported, unresolved; Warren has not been criminally charged in connection with any of them, and the “bribetaking” and “shakedown” characterizations belong to the Sentinel’s own editorial framing rather than to any court finding.
What the fourteen-year record does establish, without interpretation, is a consistent structural pattern: a mayor whose electoral durability has been financed substantially by the development industry she regulates; a warehouse-approval record significant enough to draw direct intervention from the California Attorney General’s office on CEQA grounds, twice; a six-figure separation payment to a former employee who alleged bribery, paid out under terms that allowed him to hit a pension milestone; and an electoral map redrawn, on the record, to insulate her allies from their strongest challengers. Each of these facts is independently sourced and
dated. Together, they describe a machine that has functioned, for more than two decades, largely as designed.
Sources: San Bernardino County Sentinel (2013–2022), Los Angeles Times (2023), ABC7 Los Angeles (2022), KVCR News (2022), San Bernardino Sun (2014, 2018), Fontana Herald News (2022), Black Voice News (2010), Daily Bulletin (2010), MSN/syndicated wire (2024), American Society of Landscape Architects (2020), MEAWW (biographical). Figures and dates are drawn from the cited sources.