After two decades of simmering reciprocal disdain and contempt masked by a thin veneer of uneasy collegiality, the relationship between Ontario Mayor and Councilman Alan Wapner this month descended into open hostility, carrying with it the potential that a host of secrets pertaining to the convoluted and graft-encrusted internal workings of San Bernardino County’s wealthiest municipality will be exposed in what promises to be a spectacular political Donnybrook during the 2026 electoral cycle.
Alan Wapner, was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994 and is, behind Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa and Fontana City Counilman John Roberts, the third-longest serving local elected official in San Bernardino County. In 1998, Paul Leon was appointed to take the place of Gary Ovitt on the city council when Ovitt moved into the mayoral position with two years left on the term he had been elected to in 2016. From that point forward, Wapner and Leon were council colleagues. For the most part, at that time they got along.
Three “accidental” or “situational” factors put each of them on the good side of the other for what was then the time being.
The first such factor was they found themselves as members of the ruling coalition that then predominated in Ontario, one which included then-Mayor Ovitt. In order to accomplish anything beyond the normal day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month municipal operations outlined in and provided for in the city’s yearly budget, three votes on the council were needed. To fulfill their promises to their constituents and, more importantly, their campaign donors, they needed to add the votes of two other council members to their own to achieve passage on a motion they might float or to gain passage of a project proposal put forth by a developer, award a service or supply contract to a vendor or approve a city franchise contract with a company. By going along with the other members of the council when they needed support for some council action one or more of their colleagues wanted, both Wapner and Leon could assure that when either of them wanted the council to take some action, the votes of the others would be there to support either of them.
The second factor was Leon, by being appointed as Ovitt’s replacement on the council, inherited, while he was in the role of councilman, the timing of Ovitt’s previous election cycle. Council and mayoral terms in Ontario, as virtually all other cities in San Bernardino County, run for four years. Wapner was elected in 1994 and was thus scheduled for reelection in 1998, 2002, 2006 and so on. As a councilman before he was mayor, Ovitt had been elected in 1996 to a term that was scheduled to end in 2000. In this way, Wapner and Leon found themselves seeking election in staggered election cycles, such that they did not need to vie for office at the same time. They therefore did not need to wage campaigns in which attacking the other would be useful, beneficial, desirable or necessary. In this way, they avoided, for a time, creating any personal enmity.
The third factor was Debbie Acker, who vied for the city council successfully in the 2000 election, getting herself elected in the same election cycle that Leon was retained on the council. Acker, as the only distaff member of the council, one with no previous experience in office and a reformist attitude that left her at best skeptical of carrying on the public’s business as usual and inclined to question the precepts and assumptions of the good ol’ boys network. The Ovitt Administration, which at that point had fully empowered Greg Devereaux as city manager, sought for a time of relatively short duration to accommodate and humor Acker, but soon came to regard her as a wrongheaded obstructionist who needed to be both aced out and iced out before she brought too many questions to bear that would complicate governance in Ontario beyond reason. Ultimately, the four men on the council – Ovitt, Wapner, Leon and Councilman Jerry Dubois – voted to implement a resolution of censure against Acker.
Wapner’s is a strong personality who wants things done his way in virtually all respects. He is capable of being quite insistent and takes refusal very hard, seeking to dominate conversations and discussions, while being acidly dismissive of competing ideas or what he calls interruptions. Nevertheless, throughout the first six-plus years Wapner and Leon were on the council together, no major areas of disagreement between them cropped up and they enjoyed a relatively positive relationship.
The first hint of major discord came as a consequence of Ovitt’s successful 2004 county supervisorial electoral effort.
Following Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election to California Governor in conjunction with the 2003 recall of Governor Gray Davis, then-San Bernardino County Fourth District Supervisor Fred Aguiar was appointed to Schwarzenegger’s cabinet as secretary of state and consumer affairs. That appointment was made too late to vacate the Fourth District supervisorial post in time to set up a special election corresponding to the March 2004 California primary to elect Aguiar’s replacement for the last two years and nine months of the term he had been elected to in November 2002. Consequently, the board of supervisors in January 2004 chose to appoint Patty Aguiar, Fred’s wife and a member of the Chino Valley Fire District Board of Directors, to replace her husband for eleven months and to schedule a special election corresponding to the November 2004 General Election to find someone to hold the Fourth District supervisorial slot for the two years from December 2004 until December 2006.
Jumping into that race were Ovitt along with Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa and Maurice Ayala, a school board member from Chino and the son of former San Bernardino Supervisor and California State Senator Ruben Ayala. The race presented a real challenge to prognosticators and political handicappers, as there was no primary contest to give a preview of the voting patterns, and the race was difficult to assess, with its outcome in doubt right up to the finish. As it would turn out, the controlling [factors] proved to be the more substantial political war chests the two mayors were able to bring to bear and the way in which having two candidates with Hispanic last names split the Latino vote, such that Ovitt prevailed, capturing 40,359 or 49.06 percent of the total 82,269 votes to Ulloa’s 30,152 or 36.65 percent, Ayala’s 11,641 votes of 14.15 percent and the 117 votes or 0.14 percent claimed by write-in candidates.
While Wapner had awaited the outcome of the Fourth District supervisorial race, unsure, like everyone else, of which candidate would emerge victorious and accordingly unwilling to presume upon Ovitt’s victory and ready himself to step into the mayoral post lest his preparations be seen as a move to usurp the mayoral crown from Ovitt, the ostensible leader of the Ontario City Council coalition, Leon found himself in the thick of things, out on the hustings as he was running for reelection to the city council in 2004. In that 11-candidate race, Leon proved the top vote-getter by a country mile, as he garnered 13,971 or 25.96 percent of the total 53,819 votes cast, putting him well ahead of the second-place finisher, Jason Anderson, who captured the only other position on the council being contested that year with 8,555 votes or 15.90 percent.
In this way, as the need to fill the vacant mayoral spot materialized, Leon was fresh off an overwhelming victory and a campaign which by virtue of the mailers, newspaper and radio ads and ubiquitous yard signs provided him with wall-to-wall, across-the-board instant and ongoing name recognition, a key [factor] in the formula for and makings of yet another electoral victory. When, in the aftermath of Ovitt’s departure to become supervisor, the council discussion turned to what should be done about replacing him and filling the mayoral post, rather than acceding to the concept of having the city council make an appointment from among its ranks, in which defaulting to elevating the longest serving member of the council would result in Wapner’s selection might be considered the most logical solution, Leon steered the council toward holding a special election.
Prepared and positioned like no one else on the council at that point, Leon immediately leapt into the breach, declaring he was a candidate for mayor. Simultaneously, Sam Crowe, who had been a member of the city council in the 1960s and who had later gone on to become the Ontario city attorney, likewise declared his candidacy. Leon had outhustled and outmaneuvered Wapner. Wapner knew the angles. The previous year, he had watched Ovitt capture the Fourth District supervisor’s slot in a race that saw the Hispanic vote split because he was up against two opponents with Latino names. Now, for Wapner to get into the Ontario mayoral contest, he would create for Leon a similar advantage to what had carried the day for Ovitt, as he faced the prospect of splitting the non-Hispanic vote by joining with Crowe in the run against Leon. Believing with all his soul that he was the better man for the job but recognizing that in a city where more than 65 percent of the population was Latino, he resigned himself to remaining in place as a councilman until a better opportunity to move up the political evolutionary chain to mayor would present itself. Still, he deeply resented Leon, whom he considered to be his inferior in virtually every way, for having cut him off at the political pass.
While Leon basked in the glory of being mayor, Wapner stewed. Rapidly, thereafter, the make-up of the city council shifted, and alliances formed. The ruling council majority that predominated during Ovitt’s tenure as mayor evaporated. The death of Dubois, followed by the addition of Sheila Mautz to the council precipitated a change, as did the 2006 election of Jim Bowman, who had previously served on the city council from 1986 to 1988 and again from 1990 to 1998 and had been employed with the Ontario Fire Department for sixteen years, the last five as fire chief. A loose coalition consisting of Leon, Anderson and Mautz had formed. Wapner and Bowman formed the opposition. For roughly two years, while the council voted in unison on upwards of 90 percent of routine operational and housekeeping issues at City Hall, on those matters of policy where Leon and Wapner differed, Leon held sway, and the mayor scored a string of minor and not-so-minor victories that supplied him with forward momentum that imbued him with an aura of political invulnerability.
Wapner was resolved to undo Leon and take his place as the primary political personage in Ontario. Such a task was not one that might be effectuated in one go, he recognized. He set about achieving his end incrementally, one to two steps at a time.
In the November 2008 election, both of Leon’s council allies, Mautz and Anderson, had to stand for election and reelection, respectively, to remain in office. Accordingly, Wapner’s first move was one not aimed, at least ostensibly, at Leon but rather at his support network. A close friend to Bowman was Debra Dorst-Porada, a registered nurse and member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board of Trustees. Prior to his election to the city council, Wapner had been an Ontario-Montclair School Board member himself. It was clear that Dorst-Porada saw the school board as a stepping stone to the council. She had made a run for the city council in 1998 and 2004. Wapner, who has proven during his 31-years as city councilman to be the most prolific political fundraiser among municipal officeholders in San Bernardino County history, together with his donors and supporters closed ranks behind her, using a combination of skill, intensity, cunning and stealth to bankroll her electoral effort without major fanfare to prevent Anderson from seeing the juggernaut coming his way until it was too late. When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, Anderson’s grip on his council position, which had already been loosened without his knowledge, was lost. Dorst-Porada, with 19.49 percent of the vote in a seven-candidate race captured second place, while Anderson, with 16.95 percent place fourth. Ontario’s perennial political candidate, Paul Vincent Avila, who had been vying for every post he could in virtually any race that took place since he had returned from Army duty in Vietnam in the 1970s – from school board, to city council, to state legislature to Congress – finished third as the top vote-getting also-ran with 18.70 percent.
Mautz, as the first-place candidate with 22.95 percent, remained in office. But for the first time since 2005, the numbers were against Leon and in favor of Wapner. Wapner at that point had the backing of Bowman and Dorst-Porada, such that on any issue of substance on which Wapner and Leon disagreed, Wapner had the upper hand.
Still, Wapner was not satisfied to let it go merely at that. He began maneuvering to weaken the mayor even further, while simultaneously circling for kill.
Wapner militated to deprive Leon of whatever special benefits were accruing to him as mayor, ones which provided him with an advantage over his rivals and served as an incentive for him to remain as mayor.
In 2007, while Leon was riding high, the city council had increased the mayor’s annual stipend from $25,000 to 55,000. In 2009, the council voted 3-to-2, with Wapner, Bowman and Dorst-Porada prevailing, to rescind that raise.
In 2008, together with Bowman, Wapner arranged to retain the services of Loredana Nesci, a former police officer and private investigator, who had passed the California Bar in 2005, and over the course of nearly four years had garnered a reputation as a ruthless attorney who would go to virtually any lengths required for her clients.
The assignment Wapner and Bowman handed to Nesci was one that was simultaneously easy and difficult, simple and complex: dig up enough damning dirt on Leon to destroy his political career and then expose it in a dramatic fashion that would achieve that goal.
Nesci did as she was told, going over Leon’s campaign finance documents and his city expense accounts with a fine-toothed  comb, shadowing him as he made his rounds as mayor at official events such as groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings, attended council meetings and those of governmental joint powers boards of which he was a member, examining his votes as members of those panels for potential or actual conflicts-of-interest where his own personal or familial financial interests might have been entangled with those companies or individuals favored by his votes and surveilling the mayor as he went about in his function not just as mayor but in his capacity as the pastor of Hope Chapel, the church he led.
Armed with a compendium of her findings, the Leon Dossier as it were, Nesci began showing up at city council meetings. Rather than highlighting what she had learned about graft at City Hall or the pay-to-play ethos that predominated there, which extended as much or more to Wapner than it did to Leon, Nesci dwelled upon the far more titillating and salacious fruits of her research: Mayor Leon was, she declared, a predator, one who was using his vaunted position as a mayor and pastor to impose himself on women, whether or not they wanted his attention or not. Exhibit A in this regard were photographs and video snippets of Leon and Diana Huizar, the executive assistant to the general manager of the Ontario Convention Center.
For her part, Huizar pointed out that the Ontario Convention Center is owned and operated by the City of Ontario and serves as a key public venue for conventions, conferences, and trade shows that were being sponsored, in some cases, by the city as part of a strategy to boost local economic development and attract visitors as well as attention and positive publicity for the city. She said that in her role as the top clerical employee within the convention center’s administrative office and the liaison between the convention center and the city, she routinely came into contact with city officials. She publicly stated that there was no “impropriety” between her and the mayor.
Though Nesci steadfastly declined to identify who her Ontario client[s] was or were, Bowman agreed to acknowledge having retained Nesci to shield Wapner and prevent Leon or his surrogates from discrediting Nesci’s charges by characterizing them as spurious political attacks that originated with Wapner because of his rivalry with the mayor. Nonetheless, Wapner’s hidden hand in the orchestrated attacks on Leon were patently obvious to everyone knowledgeable about internal politics at Ontario City Hall.
Despite Wapner and Leon being on staggered electoral timetables when they were councilmen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Leon made the transition to mayor, they found their [electoral schedules] synchronized. As had always been the case, the voters in Ontario voted on who would hold the council seat Wapner occupied and who was to be their mayor during the November general election when California gubernatorial vote took place. California’s gubernatorial elections are staggered from the presidential elections, which take place during leap years. Thus, beginning in 2006, Leon, running for mayor, and Wapner, running for city council, found themselves on the same ballot.
For Wapner, this represented a dilemma. In Ontario, a candidate cannot run for both mayor and city council during the same election. Thus, if Wapner were to run for mayor, he must forego running for city council that year. Whereas a member of the Ontario City Council elected in an election corresponding to a presidential election year could run for mayor and lose, yet remain on the council because his or her council term would not elapse for another two years, such was not the case with Wapner. If he chose to run for mayor and did not succeed, he would no longer be on the council the month after the election ended when the newly-elected or newly-reelected members of the council were sworn into office.
It was Wapner’s hope that events were on a trajectory which would result in a cacophonous scandal by the 2010 election cycle that would simply convince Leon to not to seek reelection or which would leave him so wounded that he would lose if he did run. In either scenario, Wapner stood to be the obvious beneficiary as the heir apparent to the wielder mayor’s gavel.
Two, however, could participate in the game Wapner was playing. Leon soon joined in.
Wapner’s family had served as the host for a foreign exchange student, a teenage girl from Brazil. In communications back home and with some of her contemporaries, the girl expressed feeling somewhat uncomfortable with regard to living within the Wapner household, in particular as related to being around Wapner himself, whom she characterized as “creepy.” When the girl’s time in America was drawing to a close, Wapner accompanied her on a flight back to the East Coast, from where she was to fly back to her native country.
While on the east coast, Wapner and his young charge ended up in a hotel room together. The girl, concerned about Wapner’s intentions, communicated her misgivings in a text message to one of her contacts. When word reached her parents, they made an international call to local authorities. Two police officers were dispatched to do a welfare check at the hotel in which Wapner and the girl were staying. A “door knock” was made at the room which Wapner and the girl occupied.
Ultimately, the police report pertaining to Wapner and the girl surfaced in Ontario, and came into the possession of both members of the Ontario Police Officers Association and Leon.
As the calendar progressed into the 2010 election year, a Mexican standoff ensued. Wapner was unable to bring the matters contained in the Leon Dossier compiled by Nesci to bear while Leon and others who were dead set against Wapner acceding to the mayoral post knew what they did about the exchange student. It turned out that in 2010, Wapner and Leon both stayed in their respective lanes: Leon sought reelection as mayor and Wapner chose not to run for mayor but instead sought reelection to the council seat he already held.
Indeed, Wapner and Leon in 2010 not only did not badmouth one another, they actually made a point during the electoral season of celebrating, in their respective appeals to the city’s voters, what a well-run city Ontario is and both attributed that to the quality of the city’s elected leadership. This was a tacit endorsement, as far as it went, of each other, as well as of Bowman.  As things turned out, all three incumbents – Mayor Leon and councilmen Wapner and Bowman – were handily reelected in 2010, with Leon capturing 75.69 percent in a two-man race and Wapner and Bowman, respectively, capturing 32.01 percent and 26.02 percent in a six-person race.
In 2012, Leon’s political position eroded yet further, while Wapner, at least relatively, appeared to gain strength. Both Mautz and Dorst-Porada stood for reelection in a field of nine candidates. Leon failed to maintain the status quo in which he enjoyed Mautz’s support during losing 3-to-2 votes in which Wapner’s coalition prevailed. Dorst-Porada rode to a comfortable first place showing, capturing 23.08 percent of the vote. Maust, however, was shut out, finishing, like Anderson had four years previously, in fourth place, well off the pace with 13.70 percent. Her place on the council was taken by Paul Vincent Avila, who captured 18.93 percent of the vote. And another candidate, Ruben Valencia, with 14.67 percent, had outdistanced her as well to capture third place.
For a short time, in the weeks after the election, governmental affairs in Ontario slid into neutral, as members of the council and the community alike labored to understand just where Avila was going to fit into the existing and future scheme of things. Even before he assumed a seat on the council dais, however, he channeled public attention away from the Wapner/Leon clash and almost, but not quite, convinced Wapner and Leon that their rivalry was immaterial.
First, as a member of the Ontario-Montclair Elementary School District Board of Trustees elected in 2005 and again in 2010 when that entity had gone to even-number year elections, he refused, in defiance of California law relating to incompatibility of office, to resign from that panel to take on the council post. Not until the California Attorney General was on the verge of stepping in to undertake a quo warranto inquiry that might have ended with his election to the council being declared null and void did Avila relent and resign from the school board.
It soon became clear that the quirky addition to the council had neither the sophistication nor the wherewithal to join with either the Wapner nor the Leon camp, and that he lacked even a rudimentary understanding of the basic principles of municipal operations, public finance and accounting or the give-and-take of governmental compromise. Within a virtual fortnight of joining the council, he found himself in a clash of personality with the bossy Wapner, which hinted at the possibility that he might form an alliance with Leon. The potential for that was soon foreclosed, however, as Avila’s utter lack of understanding of parliamentary protocol, which had entirely eluded him despite his seven years as a member of the school board, brought home to Leon that aligning himself with Avila to secure his single vote in an atmosphere on the council in which their were constantly three votes on Wapner’s side of the ledger would prove of no use in the short term and potentially disastrous in the long term.
Even though no real thaw in the Wapner/Leon relationship took place, the sheer irritation of Avila’s presence on the council, served to distract both Wapner and Leon from their enmity with one another. Avila’s status as an elected councilman conferred upon him the privilege of being present during, and participating in, closed session discussions of the council, the city manager, the city attorney and on occasion city department heads from which the public was excluded. In both those closed door settings as well as the public sessions of the council, Avila could not avoid seeing the degree to which Wapner, by virtue of his control over Bowman’s and Dorst-Porada’s votes, was the dominant personality on the council, the actual leader of the city, despite Leon’s status and title of mayor. Avila, misinterpreting Leon’s resignation to the reality that as far as the situation on the council went that Wapner outmuscled him politically and resistance was useless, began to refer to Leon as Wapner’s “puppet.” Avila referred to Wapner as “old camel gut.”
As the 2014 election approached, during which Wapner, Bowman and Leon would need to stand for reelection once more, Leon and Wapner found themselves once more in a temporary marriage of convenience, as maintaining the status quo – with the three of them hanging onto the political offices they held – to be in their individual best interests. At the core, they had noting but contempt for one another. Still, they both had impressive political fundraising machines at their command, Wapner more so than Leon, primarily because he was so much more aggressive than the mayor. And he was more methodical, as well. He would monitor the donors who were giving money not just to himself but to other local municipal politicians such as those in Montclair, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and Pomona. When he saw a local business owner who was writing out $1,000, $2,000, $2,500 or $5,000 checks to Leon or the mayors or council members in nearby cities, he would make call to him. Wapner would mention that he was aware of the business owner’s generosity to those other politicians and he was not shy about suggesting that the donor might want to consider, seeing as the business owner was in a giving mood and all and so interested in keeping the right kind of people in office who have the right attitude about business expansion and economic development, spreading some of that largesse his way to help him stay in office to make sure that local businesses continue to succeed. The tactic was highly successful. Records show that in the 31 years that Wapner has been on the city council, he has received over $3.2 million in donations. That puts him well ahead of Leon, who in the 27 years he has been on the city council and mayor, has brought in $2.1 million
In his heart of hearts, Wapner wanted to be mayor. He believed that he, far more than Leon, deserved that accolade. He was, as far as he could see, the city’s true leader. In the political jungle they both occupied, Wapner sincerely believed, he was the alpha male. Indeed, it was Wapner who was leading the charge in the effort to wrest Ontario Airport back from the City of Los Angeles. Back in 1967, when the two of them were 11 years old and not yet living in Ontario, the Ontario City Council entered into a joint powers arrangement with the City of Los Angeles to have that city’s Department of Airports assume management of Ontario Airport, which at that time had just 200,000 passengers a year passing through its gates. Los Angeles, with its ownership of Los Angeles International Airport and the ability to control gate position and other elements of the operation there, used that leverage wielded by Los Angeles World Airports, the corporate entity running the Los Angeles Municipal Department of Airports, used its influence with various airlines to convince more and more of those airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. Under the management and care of Los Angeles officials, in 1981, a modern, second east-to-west runway at Ontario International was built, necessitating the removal of the old northeast-to-southwest runway.
In 1985, with Los Angeles having met all the performance criteria specified in the 1967 joint powers agreement, the Ontario City Council as it was then composed voted to deed Ontario Airport to the City of Los Angeles for no consideration, pursuant to what was considered a public benefit transfer.
All told, Los Angeles instituted some $550 million worth of improvements to the airport, including paving its parking lot, modernizing its runways, including the widening of taxiways and the addition of storm drains. Ontario Airport’s landing and take-off paths were converted into the longest such civilian facilities in Southern California, and Los Angeles erected a state-of-the-art control tower, and constructed two ultra-modern terminals at a cost of $270 million, augmented with a world class concourse.
In 2007, the number of passengers at Ontario International reached 7,207,150 in 2007, an increase of over 3,600 percent from its 1967 numbers. Though the relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles vis-à-vis the airport could not have been more positive or cordial during those 40 years. As a result of the massive financial lull of the Great Recession which began with the economic downturn of 2007, air travel dropped off significantly and airlines, in an effort to shield themselves from the continuing economic decline, began cutting back on flights, particularly to locations outside heavy population centers. Beginning in late 2007 and until early 2014, passenger traffic at Ontario International declined steadily.
In 2010, Wapner, initiated a campaign aimed at prying control and ownership of Ontario International Airport away from Los Angeles. Wapner approached this task by initiating a series of personal and vindictive attacks on Los Angeles officials, most prominently Los Angeles World Airports Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey, claiming, spuriously, that they were responsible for the decline in ridership at Ontario Airport. Los Angeles World Airports and Lindsey were deliberately manipulating the situation to raise costs at Ontario International and thereby minimize both ridership and revenues there as part of a plot to increase revenue and gate numbers at Los Angeles International Airport.
In 2012, the Ontario International Airport Authority was formed as a joint powers authority between the City of Ontario and the County of San Bernardino. It was that entity which was to assume the administration of the airport from Los Angeles World Airports when the anticipated transfer of the airport from Los Angeles to Ontario was to take place. Moreover, it was to be the airport authority that would become the driving force in the effort to force Los Angeles’s hand in surrendering ownership, control, management and administration of the airport while it was still technically in the hands of Los Angeles. Despite concerns about the approach Wapner was taking and his aggressive bull-in-a-China-shop strategy by which he seemed determined to offend Los Angeles officials, who were, after all, far more powerful, financially-enabled, resource-rich and connected than the provincials in Ontario, into relinquishing the airport, Leon, politically outgunned on his own council, surrendered control over the issues relating to the airport. Wapner was made the president of the Ontario International Airport Authority Board and one of the city’s two voting board members. The other board slot occupied by a representative of the city went to Bowman. The county was given a seat on the board. Ovitt, the former Ontario mayor who had headed the ruling coalition on the council that included Wapner and Leon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and who was at that point the supervisor of San Bernardino County’s Fourth District, which encompasses the cities of Chino Hills, Chino, Montclair, Ontario and southern Upland as well as the Carbon Canyon, Velano, Yorba, West End, Prado, Narod, Ballou, Racimo and Guasti sections or neighborhoods, was entrusted with that post. The remaining members of the board were Ron Loveridge, the former Mayor of Riverside, as the representative of the Inland region’s governmental entities and Lucy Dunn, who represented the region’s private sector/business interests, In this way, with three of the five board positions held by individuals from Ontario, the city ensured in had control of the airport.
From the outset, even before Ontario’s retaking of the airport was effectuated, questions emerged about the true intent and propriety of what was occurring. The fashion in which the airport authority and its board was set up, the stacking of the board which was dominated by Wapner has raised eyebrows repeatedly. In the nearly 13 years of its existence, Wapner has remained the only president of the board and Bowman has been the only representative on the board other than Wapner representing the City of Ontario.
In 2014, Ovitt opted out of running for reelection to the board of supervisors in 2014 and was replaced as Fourth District county supervisor in that year’s election by former Chino Hills Mayor and then-Assemblyman Curt Hagman. Upon replacing Ovitt as supervisor, Hagman took on the role of county representative on the airport authority board.
In 2015, after Hagman settled in as Fourth District supervisor, he hired Wapner as his policy advisor. Many found these incestuous ties – in which Wapner was the top dog on the airport authority which included Hagman as a member while Wapner’s boss at the county was Hagman – to be troubling and loaded with both actual or potential conflicts of interest. These conflicts and the perceptions of them were exacerbated when Wapner and Ovitt began making trips to both Chinas – capitalist Taiwan on the Island of Formosa and the communist People’s Republic of China on the mainland, in pursuit of what they insisted were economic development opportunities, including investments by foreign companies in property adjacent to Ontario International Airport or purchases of what Wapner was characterizing as “surplus” airport property.
In 2013, the City of Ontario, represented by the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, sued Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, claiming neglect and negligence, breach of contract and misfeasance in the operation and management of Ontario International Airport, along with damages. Wapner, speaking both in his capacity as an Ontario city councilman and as the president of the Ontario International Airport Authority, went on record as stating that Los Angeles should be willing to simply return the airport to Ontario at no consideration, forgiving Ontario with regard to all of the investments Los Angeles had made in transforming the aerodrome into what was arguably the world’s premier secondary regional airport. In 2015, just before that lawsuit was to go to trial, Los Angeles agreed to settle the matter by returning
Ontario Airport to Ontario in a transfer that involved Ontario immediately paying Los Angeles $60 million out of its various operating funds and another $30 million taken out of its reserves, and committing to make payments of $50 million over five years and $70 million in the final five years of the ten-year ownership transition. In addition, Ontario absorbed $60 million of the airport’s bond debt. As part of the settlement worked out between Los Angeles and Ontario, Los Angeles graciously agreed to continue its management/operational oversight of the airport until noon November 1, 2016.
In the interregnum between the settlement of the lawsuit in August of 2015 and Ontario’s full reassumption of ownership of the airport in November 2016, the Ontario International Airport Authority in January 2016 exercised its nascent power as the overseer of the airport to bring in Kelly Fredericks, the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation and the manager of T.F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island to serve as Ontario International Airport’s executive manager. Fredericks acclimated himself to Ontario during the final nine months of Los Angeles World Airport’s operation of Ontario International Airport and Ontario’s full assumption of the facility’s title, administration, operations and management. Even before November 1, 2016, Wapner was pressuring Fredericks to make an inventory of the airport property to ascertain what acreage their could be sold off to the private sector. Fredericks, believing that the airport authority divesting itself of property which, while then idle, could conceivably be transformed into active aviation use in the future to be imprudent, resisted that pressure. Those affiliated with airport operations and members of the public would learn that the entities Wapner had in mind as purchasers of the property were companies and corporations which had made substantial donations to his political war chest. As mid-2017 approached, it had become clear that Fredericks and his political masters on the Ontario International Airport Authority Board did not see eye-to-eye with regard to the concept of selling off “surplus” airport land, and Fredericks departed from his post at the airport in July 2017. The airport authority turned to a former executive with Los Angeles World Airports, Mark Thorpe, who had been Fredericks’ assistant, to replace Fredericks.
Wapner took up with Thorpe where he had left off with Fredericks in seeking to get him to facilitate the sale of airport property that at that point wasn’t being utilized for aviation purposes.
The terms Wapner put it in to not only Thorpe but anyone that was paying attention was that Ontario Airport was to be “a magnet for economic development.” That meant selling off the airport property, preferably to a buyer that passed muster with Wapner. Two companies that had been pre-approved by Wapner were the Sares-Regis Group and Lee and Associates. Documentation showst that since April of 1998 and running up to the present, Sares-Regis, including principals John Hagestad and Peter Rooney as well as Larry Lukanish, Kenneth Coatsworth, Patrick Russell, Vincent Ciavarella and William Thormahlen, have provided Wapner with at least $123,444 in political donations. Similarly, since December of 1999, Joe McKay, Mike Wolfe and Carol Plowman of Lee & Associates have supplied Wapner with $95,596.07 in campaign funding.
Wapner made clear to Thorpe that he should make sufficient acreage from the airport’s land inventory available for sale to fill the Sares-Regis Group’s and Lee and Associates’ needs. Such a move, Thorpe believed, would be a mistake. Once the land was developed and in the hands of private owners and companies, it would be virtually impossible to reclaim for airport use, based upon its value and the building that would take place on it. For a time, he played along, considering having the authority sell off some of the land most distant from the airport grounds where actual aeronautical activity is ongoing. But those parcels were insufficient for the uses envisioned by the companies, it was made clear to him. .
Thorpe began looking at the prospect of not selling the property, but rather leasing it. A 25-year lease would encumber the property and render it unusable for aviation purposes for a quarter century. That might preclude expansion of the airport, though not indefinitely. If such a lease could be effectuated and timed correctly, the airport and airport authority might have the best of both worlds, generating income off of the airport’s dormant property, yet preserving the possibility of utilizing the property for airport expansion at some designated point decades hence.
Thorpe managed to put Wapner and his board colleagues off longer than Fredericks had, for more than three years after he had succeeded Fredericks, which was more than twice as long as Fredericks had been able to remain as executive director. By 2020, however, Wapner had enough of Thorpe’s stalling. On the table was a $101 million offer for the purchase of 198 acres Wapner was now insisting was “surplus” airport property, one that had originated with Sares-Regis/Lee & Associates. Make the sale, Wapner demanded. When Thorpe did not pull the trigger, Wapner maneuvered to have, Atif Elkadi, the airport/airport authority’s assistant executive director, to function as the de facto executive director. o remained in name’s
By the spring of 2021, Thorpe was the Ontario International Airport’s chief executive in absentia. Beginning in July, he was no longer in attendance at the Ontario International Airport Authority board meetings, with his second-in-command, Elkadi, filling in for him. Still, he had not be terminated from his official position as the executive director and he worked, behind closed doors and initially with exacting stealth, to prevent the $101 million sale to Sares-Regis/Lee & Associates from taking place.
In October 2021, Thorpe set the airport authority on a trajectory to commit the disposition of a sizable portion of airport property not to Sares-Regis/Lee & Associates’s speculative use, but with another entity, a venture formed by San Antonio, Texas-based USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group of Newport Beach known as CanAm Ontario LLC. By naving the airport authority accept a non-refundable $10 million deposit, Thorpe conferred an exclusive negotiating arrangement with USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group that closed the door on Sares-Regis/Lee & Associates. The deal that was worked out pertained not to a land sale, but a lease.
Under the lease terms, the airport authority leased for 55 years 198 acres of so-called surplus property located east of Haven Avenue, north of Jurupa Avenue, south of Airport Drive and west of Carnegie Avenue to CanAm Ontario LLC for development consistent with CanAm’s plans for it. The $10 million deposit was to be used toward CanAm Ontario paying the airport authority $25 million the first year and $25 million per year over the following four years. During the second five years, CanAm is to pay the airport authority $30 million per year, such that at the end of the first ten years, the airport authority will have received $275 million. Over the remaining 35 years of the lease, CanAm will pay the authority an average of $10 million per year.
The fulfillment of the deal is contingent on the property, upon the City of Ontario, which has land use authority on the property, approving the development projects Can Am will undertake.
In December 2021, after Thorpe ensured that the terms of the deal were given public exposure such that Wapner could not orchestrate a sale of the property to his campaign donors at what was less than one-sixth the amount of money the authority stood to receive through the lease, the airport authority board voted to approve the lease arrangement.
In what was essentially Thorpe’s last effective act as the airport authority’s executive director, he had outmaneuvered Wapner, preventing him from selling off the 198 acres at the bargain basement price of $101 million, obtaining through a lease arrangement, nearly six times the selling price, not adjusted for inflation, while have the airport authority retain title to the land. The following month, Thorpe resigned as the airport’s executive director.
2014, another election year in which Wapner, Leon and Bowman had to run to retain their respective seats on the council dais, would turn out to be very eventful for Wapner. His daring gambit to immortalize himself within the pantheon of Ontario’s leading citizens by championing the return of the airport was proceeding, though at that time it was yet a gamble that remained in doubt. With that issue unsettled, he felt the timing was not right to challenge Leon for mayor. He made the choice to vie, along with Bowman, for reelection to the city council.
Simultaneously, issues relating to the central element of his success in politics – his prodigious fundraising capability, were beginning to manifest. Those close to the political scene and some of his constituents were beginning to question where his first loyalty lay, with those who had elected him or the business owners with matters pending before the city council who had supplied him with the political donations to conduct the campaigns that had convinced the voters to back him. The most vociferous of those asking those questions was Ruben Valencia, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who in 2012 had finished in third place in the city council race won by Dorst-Porada and Avila. Now, Valencia was running for council again. This time, he set his political sight on the most logical target: Wapner. For the first time in two decades, Wapner found himself with a committed, indeed a relentless and implacable foe in the personage of Valencia. Significantly, it was not just Valencia that Wapner had to deal with, but Valencia’s network of supporters. Among those were some residents of Wapner’s own neighborhood, ones who had a decidedly low opinion of him, along with some tangible evidence to support what they were saying.
Multiple salvos were hurled at Wapner that political season. One consisted of video footage captured on a private residence’s security video, which depicted an incident involving Wapner, his wife and their then-15-year-old daughter on February 4, 2013 in the area of East Hazeltine and South Pleasant Avenue. In the video, Wapner could be seen on a sidewalk along the side yard of a residence as he became physically aggressive in dealing with his recalcitrant daughter, striking her several times in what appeared to be an effort to discipline her. When the residents of the home emerge to see what the commotion is about, Wapner’s wife can be heard yelling at them to get back into their house.
As the campaign season progressed, the video was posted to the internet, whereupon it went viral, inviting widespread media coverage, including that of at least three Los Angeles-based television stations.
The Ontario Police Department became involved, with department detectives taking witness statements and securing copies of the video. Wapner and his daughter were interrogated. A report on the incident was submitted to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.
Suddenly, Wapner’s political future appeared to be in jeopardy.
Wapner and his political advisors and operatives acted quickly to sidestep some of the controversy and diffuse or counteract the rest. Part of that strategy was to limit the number of eyes seeing the video and then divert attention from its contents to accusations about who, exactly, was responsible for posting the video on the internet.
Wapner’s hired operatives and then Wapner himself accused Valencia, as his primary opponent in the ongoing election, of being responsible for the video being posted, then jumped to accusing J. Steve Garcia, a member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board who was running at that time for a board position with Chaffey Joint Union High School District, as Garcia had mounted the video on his campaign’s Facebook page. Next, Wapner threatened legal action against Valencia, Garcia and the owners of the home with the security system that had captured the video.
The intimidation worked. Unwilling to go to the expense of defending itself in the face of the threatened legal action, Youtube took took the video down October 22, 2014 13 days before the November 4, 2014 election.
For his part, Leon, who for the election season had entered into a truce with Wapner and Bowman while they inundated voters with campaign literature informing them of what a well-run municipality Ontario is and how that was primarily a function of the incumbent politicians who merited being retained in office, made a conscious decision to steer clear of the daughter-beating video controversy and not opportunistically pile on in the attacks Valencia and others were making on Wapner.
As it went, the spectacle did minor damage to Wapner, but not enough to keep him, with his overwhelming campaign funding advantage, from being elected. Indeed, he yet managed, with 31.92 percent, to top Bowman, the second-place finisher with 29.19 percent. Valencia finished a distant third, with 18.17 percent, ahead of both of the other also-rans, who totaled 20.72 percent together. In the simultaneous mayoral contest, Leon, with 69.53 percent of the vote, trounced Avila, who polled 16.09 percent, and former Councilman Rudy Favilla, who managed to claim 14.38 percent.
Despite having come up short in 2012 and 2014, Valencia persisted, tossing his hat in the ring once more in 2016. With a number of factors favoring him at the point, the two most prominent being that he had garnered considerable name recognition with his 2012 and 2014 candidacies and that Wapner’s enmity toward him was diffused and perhaps even overwhelmed by his even greater disdain for Avila, who was the recipient of the lion’s share of attacks from Wapner. The ten-person 2016 Ontario City Council race also featured two former Ontario political figures, former Mayor Gus Skropos and former Councilman/City Attorney Sam Crowe. Valencia proved to be the top vote-getter, with 19.59 percent. Dorst-Porada, as the incumbent, was reelected by finishing in second, with 16.98 percent. Crowe, in third place with 13.15 percent, failed to capture one of the two seats up for grabs, as Avila finished convincingly off the pace in fourth, with 11.5 percent, slightly ahead of Skropos, with 11.14 percent.
Though he was pleased to have rid himself of Avila as a colleague, Valencia’s win had been a wake-up call to Wapner. Valencia represented a quantum leap in sophistication over Avila, both in terms of politics and understanding of governance and municipal issues. Valencia was, as Wapner had been, a law enforcement officer, one with connections on multiple levels throughout the profession. Valencia was not tied into the astoundingly broad financial support network of political donors that was a major source of Wapner’s strength as an officeholder who had been consistently reelected for two decades. While this left Valencia, perhaps, less reelectable in the future than Wapner, it made Valencia independent of the corrupt pay-to-play system that Wapner, Leon, Bowman and Dorst-Porada were an intrinsic part of in which money is given to politicians to sustain them in office in exchange for those politicians’ votes to approve development proposals or goods/service contracts or franchise arrangements by which those donors or their companies profited.
Valencia would be present at the council meetings where such votes were made and he would have access to the inner sanctum at City Hall and would be present in the closed sessions of the city council where and at which backroom maneuverings and deals were being made. Wapner still held the upper hand by virtue of the three votes he yet controlled – his own, Bowman’s and Dorst-Porada’s. Still, there was no predicting what the future might hold. If an alliance were to form between Leon and Valencia, control of the council might flip to Leon if Bowman were to be defeated in an upcoming election or leave the council for some other reason. Wapner was equally conscious that Dorst-Porada’s first allegiance was not to him, actually, but to Bowman and that he in this way was the beneficiary of her supportive votes because of his relationship with Bowman. Wapner knew what many inside City Hall and in the circle of local politicians, their support network and their hangers-on and many of those on the street in Ontario knew: Bowman is a lifelong alcoholic, one who was highly functional and even aggressive in his young and middle manhood but who was now experiencing the ravages of both age and his intemperance. Wapner understood Bowman was on an arc toward an ever-speedier self-destruction, and there was no predicting when it might manifest. Overnight, Wapner was painfully aware, he could become a political irrelevancy.
Valencia was sworn into office in December 2016, a month after his election. At the very next council meeting, Wapner brilliantly orchestrated a realignment/re-alliance that was simultaneously, depending upon the sophistication of those doing the observing, subtle though direct, a gesture of generosity using public money, a show of humility, camouflaged and patently obvious, self-serving and key to his political future and viability. Wapner arranged to have the council consider rescinding the action it had taken in 2009 when it had reduced the mayor’s stipend from $55,000 per year to $25,000. As a consequence of Wapner’s proposal, the mayor’s pay was boosted to $57,000 per year.
Wapner timed the move toward what was not so much rapprochement with Leon as detente as a means of limiting, or heading off, the possibility that some form of alliance would form connecting Leon and Valencia. Over the next year and a half, Wapner followed that up with digs at and dismissals of Valencia, particularly when he would make any show of independence from the “Team Ontario” mentality that pervaded City Hall.
By 1997, Ontario had established itself as the most financially well-fixed of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities. With the advantage of hosting an international airport and the Ontario Mills shopping mall along with multiple commercial zones within the then-37.1175-square mile city, Ontario brought in more revenue in terms of property tax, sales tax, state-and-federal pass-throughs and subventions and grants than either of its closest competitors within the county at that time, the cities of Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino. In 1997, the city council lured then-Fontana City Manager Greg Devereaux away from that former steel town, and Ontario over the next dozen years benefited by his sophisticated approach toward economic development and enhancing revenue, which to a considerable extent consisted of inducing large corporations engaged in retailing products or materials to set up their corporate headquarters in Ontario, qualifying it as the recipient of sales tax revenue those companies generate from their sales all over the State of California. Ontario’s income intensified throughout the remainder of Devereaux’s tenure as city manager as a consequence of its 1998 annexation of 12.8125 square miles of the former Chino Agricultural Reserve, boosting Ontario’s city limits to encompass 49.93 square miles. Under Devereaux, the city made plans to eventually construct 31,000 homes on the former agricultural preserve land, along with five million square feet of retail space. In the 27 years since that annexation, a good portion of that planned development has taken place, boosting Ontario’s revenue even further, such that it now has an annual budget of more than $1 billion when the totality of its various municipal accounts are tallied. This figure exceeds the combined total budgets of the next two largest cities in San Bernardino County, which in recent years have varied between Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and Victorville.
Both Wapner and Leon have aggrandized their city and themselves by making constant reference to Ontario as the wealthiest of the county’s municipalities, and each is fond of pointing out that they have been on the council for the more than a quarter of a century while Ontario has been in this vaunted economic position. An accompanying item of pride they reference is that Ontario’s employees are the best paid of local government work force in the entirety of Southern California.
In this way, they both propound, each no less than the other, that Ontario is the premier city of the Inland Empire, and that it is the combination of farsighted and dedicated political leadership, first rate municipal management and a dynamic city staff – Team Ontario – which makes it possible for Ontario’s residents to live in paradise.
Valencia soon fell into the role of being the skunk at the garden party. In Ontario, as in virtually every other city, far in excess of nineteen-twentieths of the what the city council deals with falls into the category of routine municipal operational matters about which there is virtually no controversy or question. On such issues, Valencia’s votes and voting patterns proved indistinguishable from his council colleagues. With regard to a limited number of decisions, in particular those involving policy decisions or ones extending to extending favor upon an established set of franchise holders, vendors, contractors or project/program proponents, Valencia would offer questions, sometimes expressing reluctance, and occasionally making a show of resistance or opposition, dissenting from the majority, making for 4-to1 votes on occasion.
Both Wapner and Leon found particularly repugnant Valencia’s suggestions or outright assertions that they were on the take and that their donors were buying their votes. They rallied Bowman and Dorst-Porada to their defense, by noting that whatever approvals Valencia was complaining about had been made with not two but four votes. Valencia’s dissent was an attack, they said, on the integrity of all four members of the council, the city staff, which had authored the staff reports recommending those approvals, and the entire city.
By 2018, two years after Ontario had reclaimed Ontario International Airport as its own, both Wapner and Leon were riding high. Wapner, as the prime mover and architect of the strategy that had worked, was recognized by those in the know as the hero in the airport reacquisition narrative. To the multitudes, it was under Leon’s mayoral administration that the historic transition occurred, so to him fell the lion’s share of the credit and glory. In this way, comity rather than enmity suited them both. Moreover, it was another election year for them, and the reelective formula that had evolved in which all three incumbents – Leon, Wapner and Bowman – publicly celebrated Ontario’s status as San Bernardino County’s leading city and asserted it was the collective wisdom of the three wise and reliable men on the council who were up for election that year that had created reality was being applied once more. This time, the camaraderie and cooperation went even further, as they shared resources in paying for polling, phone banking, securing their places on slate mailers sent out by companies specializing in such materials posted to voters as well as on a collective mailer in which they were represented as running as a team.
Consequently, by that year the factionalism on the council had hardened, with Mayor Leon and council members Wapner, Bowman and Dorst-Porada on one side and Valencia on the other. The potential that a Leon-Valencia alignment might materialize had dwindled to nothingness. Wapner was yet convinced that he was the city’s true leader, as was evinced by his visionary effort in returning the airport to it rightful owner, and that Leon’s continuing grip on the mayoralty was an outgrowth of his Spanish surname and incumbency rather than his talent and gravitas. At the same time, he recognized that the bird he gripped firmly in his hand – being city councilman – was not worth risking for the illusory birds in the bush – the mayor’s gavel for which he would have to compete without any guarantee of victory. He stayed the course, supported Leon and Bowman, and all three registered easy victories in the November 2018 election, including a repeat of Leon’s 2005 vanquishing of Sam Crowe, former Councilman Rudy Favila and a newcomer, Richard Galvez.
Over the next two years, Valencia’s relationship with his council colleagues deteriorated further, which consequently brought Wapner and Leon closer.
Beginning in 2014, a collection of five lawyers from areas in California outside San Bernardino County – Rex Parris, Milton Grimes, Kevin Shenkman, Matthew Barragan and Scott Rafferty – began using a provision in California Law, specifically the California Voter Rights Act of 1982, to pressure cities in San Bernardino County and elsewhere in California to dispense with their traditional at-large city council elections and go to district or ward voting. Based on the assertions by Parris’s, Grimes’, Shenkman’s, Barragan’s and Rafferty’s assertions that the at-large voting methodology deprived Hispanic voters of an opportunity to be represented on their city councils by Latino politicians, they forced the cities of Highland, Upland, Chino, Hesperia, Chino Hills, Redlands, Big Bear Lake, Fontana, Barstow, Twentynine Palms and Victorville and the towns of Apple Valley and Yucca Valley, one-by-one to change to district elections for its city council members. The last to accede to that demand was Ontario, which managed to put off until 2020 adopting a resolution to begin the districting process and delaying until the 2024 making the transition to the first two by-district elections. The council waited until December 2022 to approve a district map for the city, which determined the district boundaries and which districts would hold their elections in presidential election years and which would be held in gubernatorial election years. When that map and election schedule was set, Wapner and Leon worked together, along with Bowman and Dorst-Porada, to ace Valencia out of office. Valencia had been elected to the council for the first time in 2016, the same year that Dorst-Porada had been re-elected to the council for the second time. In 2020, both Dorst-Porada and Valencia stood for reelection and were successful. Thus, they were both next scheduled for reelection in 2024. In drawing the electoral map, the Ontario City Council created four districts, designated 1, 2, 3 and 4. Dorst-Porada lived within District 1. Valencia’s residence fell within District 2. In setting the electoral schedule, the council set 2024 as the maiden election year for districts 1 and 4. It scheduled the first elections for districts 2 and 3 in 2026. In this way, Dorst-Porada was extended the right/privilege/courtesy of being in office at the time she would next seek reelection. In Valencia’s case, the term to which he had been elected at-large in 2020 was to come to an end in 2024. As a resident of District 2, however, he would not be able to seek reelection that year, because the District 2 council seat was not up for election until 2026. He was thus being forced from office.
The council did not vote on adopting the electoral map and its accompanying schedule until December 2022, after the 2022 election. Valencia, however, knew well in advance what was coming. He knew that the council had the purview to set the electoral map in any way it chose as long as the borders were reasonably straightforwardly drawn and not gerrymandered and the population within each of the four districts was relatively equivalent. He knew as well that the council had complete discretion in determining which two districts would be scheduled to have their first elections in 2024 and which two would first elected council members in 2026. He knew however the map would be drawn, whatever district he ended up in would not hold its first election until 2026. Both Leon and Wapner working together, he knew, would make certain of that. He thus took the logical step of vying against Leon for mayor in 2024.
Valencia made a spirited go of it. At the beginning of the year, he had $115,780.48 in his campaign war chest. Over the course of the year, he received 159,428 in contributions. He used that money to wage his campaign, spending $233,424.89 in total. His effort included one of the most, if not the most, pervasive sign campaigns in Ontario history. Sign-wise, Valencia outgunned Leon.
Leon started the year off with a smaller cash balance in his campaign fund than Valencia – $73,901.25. Initially, he was somewhat complacent, partially as a result of his string of past electoral successes and because he was facing not just one but two opponents: Valencia and Christian Garcia, who had little name recognition. Leon knew that statistically, facing multiple opponents gives an incumbent an edge, as the officeholder in any election is more likely than not to benefit by the splitting of any anti-incumbent vote that exists within the electorate. Leon was hit with a tremendous personal loss before the campaign began in earnest when his brother died. This distracted him for a time, but as it became clear that Valencia was intent on giving him a run for his money, Leon moved into full candidate mode, and his eight-cylinder political machine, with its layers of consultants and operatives at the ready and in place, chortled to life. Over the course of the year, $412,237 in donations poured into the Paul Leon for Mayor of Ontario coffers. Simultaneously, he coordinated with Wapner and Bowman, sharing polling data, phone bank resources and mailers, including slate mailers. Over the course of the campaign, he spent $459,612.
Leon comfortably prevailed in his race, garnering 53.42 percent of the vote. For Valencia’s efforts and the expense he went to, he managed to poll 34.72 percent, the best showing against Leon in a race for mayor since Crowe had garnered 41.08 percent in their initial head-to-head contest in 2005.
As always before, Wapner and Bowman were reelected, as well.
Even before the outcome of the 2022 election was officially recorded, the reality of the coming situation was registering with both Wapner and Leon. With Avila long gone and Valencia on his way out, the common enemies that had brought them into the fold together were dissipating and they began the process of defaulting once more into their underlying enmity. Moreover, the death of his brother had Leon contemplating his own mortality, and beyond that, his legacy. He was 66-years old, and would be, like Wapner, a septuagenarian in the next election in 2026. He was turning back Valencia’s challenge, but in the course of the campaign, multiple uncomfortable truths were surfacing, and not just ones brought up by Valencia and others, but ones that were manifesting from his own conscience full blown. It was undeniable that he had clawed his way to the top the political heap in Ontario, in which the pay-to-play ethos that dominated San Bernardino County was at its most intense. Both he, Wapner and Bowman, in that year’s election, just as they had in the past several elections, purchased their victories using the money given to the them by donors who wanted something in return: their votes as the city’s ultimate decision-makers. The pool of donors in Ontario was a relatively limited universe composed primarily of business interests. While Wapner had proven more adept at milking those donors for more money than Leon or other members of the council had, the mayor recognized, even if it was only at the subliminal level, what the optics were if not the reality. Privately, he began to intimate that this was going to be his last hurrah, that when his term came to an end in 2026, he would give up the mayor’s gavel after a record 21-year run and retire from politics. If he would be unable to accomplish as much in his four years as mayor as he had in the previous 17 or in his total of 24 years as an elected official in Ontario, he vowed, he would do more good for the city than he had previously by making use of the bully pulpit that had been entrusted to him and his employing his insider’s knowledge to rip the front cover off the festering corruption at City Hall.
In early March 2023, Leon had a cardiac episode that resulted in his hospitalization. This meant a reprieve for Wapner, as the mayor’s doctor and family members were insistent that he had to assiduously avoid stress. While those closest to him were willing to allow him to remain in his [role] as mayor, the grand exposition of Wapner and the corruption he was at the center of was put on indefinite hold.
On his side of the equation, it appears possible that Wapner had an inkling of what Leon was up to, based on the mayor’s gathering of information and documentation in the months and weeks leading up to his hospitalization. Irrespective of what Wapner knew or suspected about Leon’s next initiative, he was faced with the discomfort he had been living with for nearly 18 years: He was being held back from his political destiny by a man he perceived, indeed knew, was his inferior. Wapner looked reality in the face and stared it down: He would never be Ontario mayor as long as Leon monopolized the office. Both would eclipse their 70th birthdays in 2026, the next year a mayoral election was to take place in Ontario. He had temporized long enough. He would need to act before time and opportunity turned forever against him.
A priority was outhustling Leon for the support of those with the biggest dogs in the hunt: the Ontario municipal staff employees and their unions. There were no bigger prizes, in descending order, for a politician than the union of firefighters, the police unions that represent both the officers and police management and the union that represents the line employees at City Hall. Not only would the fire and police union donate money to the candidate they backed, but large numbers of firefighters and police officers would follow suit, making personal donations to the candidate the union said was most likely to be in favor of granting them wage and benefit raises when their contracts were next being negotiated. In addition, firefighters especially, and to a lesser extent police officers, would often prove willing to walk voting precincts on behalf of the candidate or candidates they endorsed, knocking on doors in the month and weeks ahead of an election and telling the residents who answered that a vote on behalf of the politician that public safety officers were supporting would be appreciated. While the support of the union for the regular city staff employees is traditionally considered less important than the police and fire unions, getting the backing of that union is still considered a major coup for an ambitious politician, due to the monetary support that entity will provide along with giving the candidate the opportunity to incorporate a statement in his or her campaign literature that those who best know what is going on at City Hall – the employees who run things and know what is going on in the city – trust that candidate more than his or her opposition. In reality, government employees and their unions routinely care less about the integrity of an elected official and the quality of his decision-making than his willingness to ensure that they are to receive regular salary and benefit increases. To the average voter, however, that key city employees or city employees in general endorse a candidate can be an influential factor in whom he or she is to vote for.
Statistics overwhelming indicate that unions favor incumbents. This is because incumbents in general win far more than they lose, based on both name recognition among voters and a fundraising edge with donors along with other factors. And while a union endorsement in and of itself can prove advantageous to a candidate, if a union gambles against the house – against an incumbent – and loses, the incumbent is very likely to not be in a generous mood when the time comes to dole out taxpayer money on the employment contracts that particular government agency enters into with the union representing the employees that did not endorse him. Thus, it would seem, in the competition for the Ontario Police Officers’ Union, the Ontario Firefighters’ Union and the Ontario City Employees’ Union, Leon as the incumbent mayor had an edge over Wapner. Still, that advantage was slim and not absolute. Wapner was also an incumbent, an incumbent with no fewer and no more votes on the city council than Leon had, and four more years on the city council than Leon.
In addition, Wapner was a retired former public employee, indeed former Ontario Police Department officer/detective/sergeant and a pensioner, a participant in the benefits system as the city’s current employees. In his contact with union officials and city employees, he would constantly point that out. He would remind them that Ontario’s city employees were the best paid municipal workers in San Bernardino County and virtually all of Southern California. That was not Leon’s doing, Wapner told them, but rather his.
In 2024, as the first by-district election Ontario ever held was approaching, with Valencia having been outmaneuvered through the rest of the council’s district gerrymandering ploy, two positions on the council were up for election – the position representing District 1 in the city’s densely populated northwest corner and the position representing District 4 on the city’s northeast and central east side. Given that Bowman and Dorst-Porada lived proximate to one another in District 1, the septuagenarian Bowman gracefully bowed out, allowing Dorst-Porada to run against what turned out to be the token and ineffective opposition of Valencia’s daughter and two other neophyte politicians. In District 4, Leon encouraged Daisy Macias, who for a short time had worked for his church, to vie for the position. The race was a wide open one, as there were no incumbent council members residing in the district. Wapner, suspecting that Leon’s promotion of Macias was part of an effort on the mayor’s part to establish an eventual ruling coalition on the council that might manifest if Macias indeed prevailed and Leon in 2026 succeeded in his reelection bid and was able to get a candidate in District 3 aligned with him elected voted into office. For a time Wapner contemplated and even mentioned finding a candidate of his choosing that he would back and bankroll with loans or transfers from his own political war chest to block Macias’s ascendancy and load the council with his own supporters. Ultimately, however, he sized the situation up, and decided that Macias stood a good chance of winning. It would be better to co-op her than fight her, he calculated. Instead of fielding his own candidate in District 4, shortly after the Ontario City Clerk and the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters certified her candidacy, Wapner made a $40,000 donation to her campaign in the form of a transfer of funds from his electioneering fund.
In the election, Macias relied not just on her monetary advantage over the other four candidates in the race but advice given to her by Leon, Wapner and their political consultants and operatives. Macias carried the day, capturing 36.41 percent of the vote to Celina Lopez’s 26.72 percent, Andrea Galván’s 24.43 percent, Norberto Corona’s 10.99 percent and Jose Nikyar’s 1.45 percent.
Once Macias was installed in office in December, Wapner began to fully reap the advantage of her presence on the council. Macias worked for one of the real estate development and land acquisition companies owned by Jeff Burum, who historically and presently is one of San Bernardino County’s most prolific political donors. Burum is tied to both financiers and others active in the Inland Empire development industry who are likewise connected with Wapner. In addition, Burum is involved in a major project in Ontario, an $800 million hotel that is a companion piece to the Ontario Convention Center Expansion. Burum is also the owner of the Empire Strykers, an indoor arena soccer team that plays its home games at the Toyota Arena in Ontario. Macias is determined to establish herself as a major participant in local real estate acquisition, speculation and development, and over the last six months the dynamism of the relationship between Wapner and Macias has become apparent. During that time, on issues of consequence wherein there is a difference between Leon and Wapner, Macias has sided more often with Wapner than with Leon on votes regarding those matters. Sources have told the Sentinel that Macias will endorse Wapner over Leon in 2026 race for mayor.
Of note is that for the first 15 years that she was on the city council, Dorst-Porada fell clearly on the Wapner side of the Leon/Wapner divide. This was an outgrowth of Dorst-Porada’s close friendship and association with Bowman and Wapner’s affiliation with Bowman. In 2024, however, Dorst-Porada’s advocacy of certain initiatives put her at odds with some of Wapner’s major political donors, precipitating a break between her and Wapner. This has paralleled the rift that simultaneously was reopening between Wapner and Leon, such that in recent months, an alliance, which previously seemed entirely unlikely, has developed linking Dorst-Porada with Leon.
As a consequence of Dorst-Porada’s hewing toward Leon and Macias’s growing accommodation of Wapner, Bowman’s alliance with Wapner and his pending departure from the council in 2026 as a consequence of the Ontario council district election sequencing is looming large. There is talk, sketchy and tentative, that sometime in the first six months of 2026, Bowman, who will then be 81 years old, will switch his official residence from his house on Armsley Square to a unit in an apartment complex built on land in the old Chino Agricultural Preserve annexed by Ontario in what is now District 3, so that he can run again and remain on the council.
Last month, Wapner seized upon what he saw as a major faux pas when Leon sought to downplay the concerns of a 14-year-old Ontario girl who addressed the city council at its June 17 meeting. Introduced and identified by Leon only by the name Ariana, she said she was alarmed and concerned about operations by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents, who had “been wrongfully arresting many of our residents without criminal backgrounds.” She said that members of the community were being “racially profiled” and were being deprived of their rights based on “our skin color. With ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] now in our city, I ask: I want to know what your plan is to help us residents feel safe and have peace of mind.”
Leon reacted by trying to reassure her, stating that “ICE is a very sensitive subject. You probably don’t want me to say anything. Everybody up here is gasping. I’m Hispanic. She’s Hispanic,” he said, pointing to Macias. “They’re Hispanic,” he said, pointing to City Manager Scott Ochoa and City Attorney Ruben Duran. “I don’t walk in fear, even though I know some people are. I’m very sensitive to this.” He noted that in downtown Ontario there were people protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions. “If they are peacefully protesting, why do I care? The peaceful protesting is what it is all about. It’s when people act up that I still take it as my job to keep you safe from people acting up. ICE is not necessarily – You can say whatever you want because legacy media wants us to believe whatever they say. You have to be intelligent and get information in other places. I believe if we just behave and don’t cause a problem, I’m not getting profiled jut for being around. I think we’ve seen some instances on television where people should have been a little bit more peaceful themselves. If things get out of control here, we have t respond, but they haven’t. So, I’m calling on the people of Ontario, Ariana, to be peaceful in the way you behave and act , and you won’t have any issues. To think that they’re coming after you just because of profiling you from the way you look, I just haven’t seen that happen in this town. So, I just encourage us all to be law abiding citizens.”
Even as the mayor was yet speaking, joy and gratitude moved in continuous waves across Wapner’s countenance, as he was gripped by the certitude that Leon had just delivered into his hands the Ontario Mayoral gavel some 17-and-a-half months hence.
League of United Latin American citizens Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice Indivisible Inland Empire, which is chartered to “oppose fascism” and “stop ICE overreach,” Greater Ontario Democratic Club condemned and blasted by a wide cross section of those in the Ontario community as “out of touch … insensitive… [and] a coconut – brown on the outside but white on the inside.”
Wapner piled on, telling the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, “I was really put off by what I heard that evening.”
It was in the midst of the hoopla, which came as he had nailed down commitments from the city’s three safety employee unions – the Ontario Firefighters Association, The Ontario Police Officers Association and the Ontario Police Management Association – and a tentative indication that the Teamsters Union, which represents Ontario’s municipal employees was leaning toward providing him with its endorsement, that Wapner announced he was running for mayor in 2026 and had formed a political committee to do just that.
Wapner is charging hard, having rolled up the two police union and fire union endorsements, and is pressing the Teamsters Union, which represents the non-safety-related employees at the city to join with their labor organization brethren in backing him. He is hoping that Leon’s family members and friends will prevail upon His Honor to simply call it a career and drop out of city politics before he gives himself another cardiac episode, thereby turning the keys to the city over to Wapner.
In doing all of this, Wapner is gambling that Leon will be unwilling to exploit Wapner’s glaring Achilles heel: the more than three decades of graft at Ontario City Hall in which Wapner is thoroughly enveloped and encrusted. Wapner’s calculation is that Leon will be unwilling to expose the the breadth and depth of the corruption at City Hall – the political horsetrading, the violations of public trust, the conveyance of insider information to associates and family members, influence peddling, the patronage, the dirty deals, the pay-offs, diversions of funds, embezzlement, bribery and overall abuse of public power for private gain – that has gone on during the mayor’s 20-year tenure as the city’s leader and his 27 years in public office because it will reflect on Leon equally.
Politics is defined as the wielding of power. One dimension of the political dynamic Wapner might be overlooking is the magnitude of resentment his approach to politics – his wielding of power – generates in those he routinely cuts off at the knees. Few of those Wapner has walked over possess the intimate knowledge of his backroom actions and public treasury plunderings as does Leon nor were any of those in a position to publicize them as is the mayor. As Wapner nears D-Day and the actual opening of a ruthless political campaign in which he will need to demonize the incumbent mayor and destroy his reputation and good name to defeat him, he approaches the inevitable prospect of backing a long established political animal with a long memory into a corner, where Leon will have nothing to lose by responding in kind.