here has been an unanticipated convergence of partisanship and an outcropping of interpersonal tension between two formerly-affiliated members of the San Bernardino City Council just as the candidates in that city’s June municipal have come into focus.
It is perhaps too dramatic to state that the character of the city and the county are at stake in how the contretemps between current Councilman Fred Shorett and former Councilman Henry Nickel will be resolved, but whether the 5-to-3 split among the mayor and San Bernardino City Council favoring the Democratic Party reverses to the 5-to-3 balance in favor of the GOP that existed four years ago might hinge on the two amicably settling their differences.
As the county seat and the county’s largest city population-wise and its oldest and most mature municipality, the City of San Bernardino remains in many ways a bellwether and a microcosm of San Bernardino County, the largest such jurisdiction geographically in the lower 48 states.
Once the host of Norton Air Force Base, which pumped $2 billion annually into the local economy, San Bernardino still, moving on to 32 years after
the Department of Defense shuttered the base in 1994, has the highest concentration of governmental facilities – federal, state and county – among all areas and cities in the county by a substantial margin. Despite a three-decade-lasting epidemic of closures of commercial and retail establishments which resulted in its being surpassed first by the City of Ontario and later by the cities of Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and Victorville as the county’s largest recipient of tax revenue, San Bernardino still has a large number of mercantile operations within its far-flung 59.2-square mile city limits, which generate enough sales tax to keep the city out of immediate danger of having to once more file, as it did in 2012, for Chapter Nine bankruptcy protection. Throughout most of the 20th Century, San Bernardino, at the east end of the San Bernardino Valley, was the unquestioned economic, political, social and cultural center and capital of the county. Over the last three to four decades, it has been challenged in that role by the cities of Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga, which lie toward the west end of the county and are closer to the Los Angeles megalopolis. San Bernardino possesses, nonetheless, crucial leverage in how the county and the Inland Empire aligns with the power brokers in Sacramento and Wsshington, D.C. and with the financial powerhouses in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Of note is that San Bernardino has been since 1966 and remains a Republican-oriented jurisdiction. From the 1960s until 2009, registered Republican outnumbered registered Democrats throughout the county’s 20,105-square mile expanse. In 2009, the number of those registered as Democrats eclipsed the number of Republicans. Despite that change in numbers, the Republican Party retained control of the lion’s share of elected offices throughout the county. Ever since 2009, with only short periods of deviation in the immediate aftermath of Republican voter registration drives, the Democrats have widened their lead in that regard.
At present, throughout the entirety of San Bernardino County, there are 1,244,993 registered voters. Of those, 481,174 or 38.6 percent affiliate with the Democratic Party. Almost 100,000 fewer, 381,569 or 30.6 percent are registered Republicans. Another 274,276 or 22 percent of those registered to vote in San Bernardino County have no party affiliation or declared to state it on their voter application documents. The remaining 8.7 percent of the county’s voters are registered as members of the Peace & Freedom, Libertarian, Green, American Independent or other more obscure parties.
While Democrats convincingly outnumber registered Republicans in the county by a margin of 5 to 4, when it comes down to actual elections and the campaigns in the run up to them, the Republicans consistently have proven themselves to be far more engaged and they simply outhustle their more numerous Democratic counterparts. Virtually without exception, they raise more in political donations than do the Democrats, they more skillfully use the funds they have to run more effective campaigns that involve television spots, radio advertisements, newspaper ads, mailers sent out to support Republicans, mailers sent out to attack Democratic candidates and post saturate neighborhoods and commercial districts with political signs. Consistently, roughly 80 to 90 percent of registered Republicans show up to vote while only 50 to 60 percent of registered Democrats turn out at the polls or mail in their postal ballots.
This is reflected in which party is control of the governmental apparatus in San Bernardino County. Of the five positions on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, four are held by Republicans. On the 22 city and two town councils among the 24 incorporated municipalities in San Bernardino County, 17 have more Republican members than Democrats. While the Democrats hold their own against Republicans in the state and federal legislative arenas of the California Senate, Assembly and the U.S. Congress, representing San Bernardino County, that is only because several of those districts straddle San Bernardino County and areas in Los Angeles County, where Democrats are predominant.
The Democrats in Democrat-dominated Sacramento would like to break the Republicans’ hold in San Bernardino County. One place where the political battle has been joined is in the county seat, San Bernardino. Over the years, the mayoral post has been held alternately, between standard bearers for both parties. In the early 2000s, the city’s mayor was Judith Valles, who effortlessly, it seemed, bridged the Democrat/Republican gap. Her political success was at least partially attributable to the campaigning skill of her younger brother, Mike Valles, a formidable campaign consultant and political manager, who early in his career worked nearly exclusively for Democrats but later took on Republican clients and toward the end of his life, was more closely identified with Republicans. At the same time, Judith Valles’ network, while more heavily weighted with Democrats, also involved those closely affiliated with the Republican Party. She was succeeded by Patrick Morris, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Morris was succeeded by Carey Davis, a Republican. In the 2018 election, Davis was unseated by John Valdivia, a fellow Republican. In 2022, after a single term, Valdivia was ousted by Helen Tran.
Tran is not just any old Democrat but, indeed, a darling of the state’s Democratic establishment, someone who is perceived to represent what the party consists of at the moment but the party’s future. The first Vietnamese American woman to be elected mayor of a major American city or any American city, Tran is being groomed for higher office, with her next move up the political evolutionary chain thought to most likely be a position in the California legislature, either the Assembly or State Senate. Her most passionate supporters and promoters have dared suggest that California’s governorship is not beyond her eventual reach. Attractive, well-dressed and articulate, she has held high-ranking municipal positions – those being identical posts of human resources director with San Bernardino and the City of West Covina. Indeed, Tran forwent remaining in the much higher paying human resources job with West Covina when she became mayor in 2022. Her experience as a municipal administrator prior to her political career, such that she is conversant with the practical challenges of governmental operations, is considered a strong advantage by the Democratic Party in general and those who are currently in state party leadership positions.
While the position of San Bernardino Mayor is a prestigious and high profiled one, well suited as a launching pad for an attempt at even higher office and further advancement as a career politician, it also presents challenges for its holder. For 111 years, the San Bernardino Municipal Charter put in place in 1905 set the tenor of government in the county seat. Under the 1905 Charter, the mayor had two lines of authority, one being administrative and the other being political.
In the San Bernardino mayoralty was invested substantial administrative control. Along with the city’s appointed manager, a professional municipal executive who was not elected but hired on a vote of the mayor and city council, the mayor was empowered to make hiring decisions, most notably those of the city’s department heads, such as police chief, fire chief, engineer, public works director, planning director, finance director and so forth. This made the mayor and the professional city manager co-regents of the city.
On the political side, the at-large elected mayor presided over the seven-member city council meetings, having direct control over what items were to come before the council for discussion and a vote, wielding the gavel and thus controlling the ebb and flow of discussion and debate. On most items, however, with the exceptions of hirings, firings and litigation and a vote ending in a 2-to-2 or 3-to-3 tie, the mayor did not have a direct vote. The mayor did have veto power on matters which ended in a 4-to-3 or 3-to-2 votes, which translated into, by one interpretation at least, the mayor having two votes on certain crucial issues and ones over which the council, and presumably, the citizens of San Bernardino, were divided. Still, not having a vote up front on the issues that came before the council attenuated the mayor’s political reach to a degree. To actuate his or her political reach, the San Bernardino mayor had to cultivate positive relationships with the members of the city council, each of whom represented one of the city’s wards, of which there were seven, each comprising roughly one-seventh of the city’s land area and one-seventh of its population. By building trust among the council members, lining up support for one or another of the council members ideas or initiatives among at least a majority of the other council members, engaging in backroom horsetrading, and utilizing his or her administrative authority to assist the members of the city council attain their objectives, the mayor was able to achieve the support he or she needed to achieve his or her goals.
Beginning in 2014 and running through 2015 and into 2016, however, there was discussion and then a growing movement toward altering the 1905 San Bernardino Municipal Charter. A committee to redraft the charter was appointed and the redraft debated, hashed out and arrived at. In its final form, the charter eliminated both the elective city clerk and city attorney positions and did away with the strong mayor concept. Gone was the mayor’s administrative authority in that the decisions on hiring city department heads specified in the proposed new charter was left entirely with the city manager, giving the mayor no say. At the same time, the proposed new charter did not enhance the mayor’s political power by giving him or her a vote on routine matters brought before the council. The proposed charter retained the mayor as the presiding officer at council meetings, allowed the mayor to continue to be able to place items before the council for discussion, debate, decisions and votes, left the mayor’s veto power intact but did not make him or her an equal voting member of the council on routine matters, such that the only time a mayor voted was to break a tie or weigh in with the other members of the council on hiring or firing decisions. The mayor remained as the chief spokesman or spokeswoman for the city but, by the interpretation of many, had been rendered into a figurehead.
On November 8, 2016, San Bernardino’s voters approved jettisoning the 1905 Charter and replacing it with the new one that had been drafted by the charter review committee.
What was from that point onward required of anyone privileged with being elected San Bernardino mayor in order to have any impact was that he or she exhibit tremendous political skill and power of persuasion to influence enough votes among the seven members of the council to effectuate policy or policies. The need to engage in backroom horsetrading, to line up votes on items of importance to, at the very least, a majority of the city council members, to exhibit extreme sensitivity to what those members of the council wanted and the nuance that attended their priorities, to act as a broker between the council members and facilitate each one getting what he or she wanted in exchange for the others getting what they wanted and remaining patient in the face of obstructions, misunderstandings, rivalries and personality conflicts had become, for the person holding the position of San Bernardino mayor, paramount. In short, San Bernardino’s mayor was in the position of controlling and directing how the votes on the city council were to go, all without having the authority to vote himself or vote herself.
That is a tall order. Davis, who was mayor when the new charter was being incrementally put into place, did not remain as mayor, losing to Valdivia in the 2018 election. While there were many factors in Davis’s loss to Valdivia, one factor was the erosion of mayoral authority he was faced with.
Valdivia, the first mayor to come into office and have to live from the onset of his mayoral tenure with the wall-to-wall limitations of the office, spent the first three-and-a-half years he was mayor casting about for a way to get around the limitations before giving up. Upon becoming mayor in December 2018, he was in the position of having to work with the city manager, Andrea Travis-Miller, who had been installed in that post by his predecessor, Davis. All of the administrative authority that under the 1905 Charter resided with both the mayor and city manager, was now exclusively in Travis-Miller’s hands. There was no way, Valdivia recognized even before he was sworn in as mayor, that he was going to be able to cozen Travis-Miller into surrendering back to him as mayor, some of that administrative authority.
Immediately upon becoming mayor, Valdivia was looking to get rid of Travis-Miller. He succeeded in doing so in April of 2019, elevating Travis Miller’s second-in-command, Assistant City Manager Teri LeDoux, into the city manager’s spot. Valdivia then endeavored to arrange with LeDoux to have her surrender to him, quietly and unofficially but in actuality, the lion’s share of the administrative authority that was at that point the exclusive purview of the city manager. Perhaps that ploy might have worked if Valdivia had managed to keep some semblance of control over the five members of the council who were aligned with him when he came into office as mayor – First District Councilman Ted Sanchez, Second District Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Third District Councilman Juan Figueroa, Fifth District Councilman Henry Nickel and Sixth District Councilwoman Bessine Richard – he might have been able to achieve his goal. But before all of the days in the 2019 Calendar had been run through, Valdivia was losing touch with or on the outs with Nickel, then Ibarra and Sanchez, such that there were five votes on the council by early 2020 – Sanchez, Ibarra, Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett, Nickel and Seventh Ward Councilman Jim Mulvihill – to oppose any power play Valdivia might attempt. LeDoux proved willing to allow Valdivia to call the shots only insofar as he had the votes of a majority of the city council to support him, an increasingly infrequent circumstance as time progressed.
Upon LeDoux leaving the city, Valdivia redouble his efforts to take control of San Bernardino’s governmental structure, and made some key headway in that direction by commandeering the selection process of a city manager to succeed LeDoux. Entrusted with leading the city manager recruitment effort and conducting interviews of interested applicants, Valdivia arrived at a selection for the position, Riverside County Assistant Executive Officer/Economic Development Director Robert Field, he was able convince the members of the city council to support. Field was hired into the position in September 2020.
Field, who had first been approached by Valdivia about taking the city manager’s job, who had initially been interviewed by him and who had been chaperoned through the selection process by him, assumed that Valdivia, as the mayor, was comfortably in command in San Bernardino. He had no inkling, really, of the degree to which Valdivia was politically isolated at that point, able to count upon the votes of just Figueroa and Richard among the seven council members. Upon Field arriving in San Bernardino, Valdivia labored to keep under wraps the past disagreements on policy issues he had with the majority of council, simultaneously isolate Field from the council and pursue have Field use his executive authority to institute policies and changes that Valdivia was dictating.
2020 was an election year, and after the November election and its results went into the books, the city council found itself with three new members – Benjamin Reynoso, who replaced Nickel; Kimberly Calvin, who replaced Richard; and and Damon Alexander, who replaced Mulvihill.
The circumstances of Field’s hiring had kept him pretty much in the dark about the degree of enmity between Valdivia and members of the council. Valdivia’s deepest and most passionate opponents on the council were Shorett and Mulvihill. Yet, Shorett had strongly supported hiring Field, which left Field with the impression that Valdivia and Shorett were allies. Field had not missed that Mulvihill had a decidedly low opinion of Valdivia. When Mulvihill was unseated in the November 2020 election and replaced by Alexander, Field had concluded that Alexander was a Valdivia ally.
Thus, for months both before and after the November 2020 election, Field, believing Valdivia was providing him instructions that were in accordance with the overall intent of the city council, willingly executed the policies Valdivia was advocating. In multiple cases, this involved making tentative commitments toward contracts with specific service providers and vendors, initiating action or loading into the municipal pipeline programs that benefited Valdivia’s campaign donors or political patrons, and then providing recommendations in staff reports that the contracts or arrangements involved be approved by the city council. Over an extended period of time, exceeding six months, the members of the council were not aware of the degree to which Field was doing the mayor’s bidding and allowing Valdivia to control day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month municipal operations. It was not until the late winter/early spring of 2021, that Field came to realize that Valdivia was not acting with full or even majority council support. Even then, Valdivia was able to convince Field that the wall of opposition he was facing was not really all that formidable and that when push came to shove he could count on a solid three and in other cases, depending on the issue at stake, four or even five votes. With his veto power, Valdivia assured Field, he was yet the preeminent political figure in the city.
By that point, based on the way the city council’s votes went on issues that were near and dear to Valdivia’s heart as well as the exchanges that took place during closed door executive session discussions of the city council outside the view and earshot of the public, which he as city manager was privileged to attend, it was beginning to dawn on Field that Valdivia’s size-up of the situation was more wishful than factual. If Field yet entertained any delusion that Valdivia was the head man in charge of San Bernardino, he was disabused of that notion on December 1, 2021 when the city council vote 7-to-0 to censure him for a whole host of actions unbecoming to mayor, the mayor’s office and the city. At that point, Valdivia was no longer able to fool Field, and his partially successful, partially failed strategy of psychologically dominating the city manager to get him to hand over administrative control of the city became inoperative.
In 2022, six candidates emerged to challenge Valdivia for mayor, including Tran, former City Attorney Jim Penman and Nickel. Despite the power of incumbency and Valdivia having more money in his political war chest than all six of his opponents combined, he managed only a weak third place finish in June 2022 primary election and did not qualify for the run-off. In the November 2022 election, Tran comfortably outdistanced Penman to become San Bernardino’s 35th mayor.
Once in office, Tran ran into the same difficulties that confronted Valdivia and Davis before her: extremely limited political reach and no administrative authority. She had no vote on the vast majority of issues that came before the city council, while she was under the gun to lead the city in having the city council adopt policy and give direction to the city manager to administer the city in a way that was beneficial to residents, not inhibiting to existing businesses and encouraging of further economic development. She found herself even more hamstrung than Valdivia. Following her election and before she was sworn into office, Field, facing the reality that he had essentially whored himself out to Valdivia, recognized that he would be unlikely to ever gain Tran’s trust or confidence. He resigned.
Thus, from day one, Tran, who did not have administrative authority of her own, lacked any administrator whatsoever. She would not be able to accomplish anything at all, whether it was in accordance with her wishes and direction or whether it embodied the vision of the city council collectively if there was no city administrator. There followed a seemingly interminable period where the city could not get a fully-functional, full-fledged permanent city manager in place. Over a period of nearly three years, San Bernardino burned through four city managers, one of whom did not actually serve as city manager as much as a single day, yet walked away with an $850,000 paycheck.
Initially, San Bernardino convinced former City Manager Charles McNeely, who had run the city from 2009 until he bailed in the months just ahead of the city’s August 2012 bankruptcy filing, to return to the helm while an effort to find another city manager was ongoing. As that search was being carried out, the city was hopeful that Harry Black, the one-time city manager of Cincinnati and at that time the city manager of Stockton, might be persuaded to come to San Bernardino to take on the top administrative assignment. That fell through, however, and the council, or six-sevenths of the council, settled on luring Steve Carrigan to San Bernardino from his then-current position as Salinas city manager. A delay in doing so ensued, however, and word leaked out that Carrigan had been offered the post and had accepted it. Carrigan, who had yet to officially break off his relationship with Salinas, had second thoughts, deciding he would remain in Salinas, informing San Bernardino of his decision just six days before the city council was to finalize his hiring. At that point, the Salinas City Council, miffed with Carrigan, unceremoniously terminated him. Having gone from having his pick of two city management jobs to none, Carrigan threatened to file a lawsuit against San Bernardino for having, he maintained, leaked word of his hiring in San Bernadino prematurely, resulting in his loss of that position. Eventually, San Bernardino settled with Carrigan by conferring $850,000 on him. Meanwhile, San Bernardino turned to Charles Montoya, the one-time city manager in Watsonville as well as Avondale, Arizona and the town manager in Florence, Arizona, hiring him in October 2023. Montoya’s hiring, done in the lurch following the Carrigan debacle, was not universally supported by the city council, with Councilwoman Calvin and councilmen Reynoso and Alexander dissenting in the choice to hire him. Seven months later, Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett had incubated doubts about Montoya’s suitability for the job and all seven of the council members voted to terminated Montoya without cause, conferring on him a payment of $325,000 to leave. The council then elevated Rochelle Clayton, whom Montoya had hired as deputy city manager just five weeks before, into the interim city manager’s post. Over the course of the summer of 2024, as the city council acclimated itself to Clayton, a consensus evolved that she should be permanentized into the city manager post. In October 2024, as had been the case with Carrigan in September 2023, the council delayed finalizing the contract with Clayton, putting off until the following month the vote to enter into the employment contract with her. Just as had been the case with Carrigan, in the weeks and days just ahead of the city manager contract being finalized issues developed and the council held off on closing the deal with Clayton. By November 2024, there was a clear divide on the council, with Calvin and Reynoso strongly in favor of Clayton’s hiring and Sanchez and Shorett strongly opposed. Ibarra and Figueroa were at that point lukewarm at best toward the idea. Alexander, who had been voted out of office earlier that year along with Calvin and Reynoso and was due to leave the council dais together with them in December 2024, found himself unwilling to engage in a vote to saddle the three incoming council members with Clayton, believing they should be given an opportunity to participate in the vote to choose the city manager they would need to work with over the next four years. Tran, who was strongly in favor of hiring Clayton as city manager and get city government into a functional mode, was beside herself with anger toward Sanchez and Shorett, and growing intensely dismayed with Ibarra and Figueroa.
Subsequently, in December 2024, with Kim Knaus replacing Reynoso representing the city’s Fifth Ward,  Mario Flores replacing Calvin in the Sixth Ward and Treasure Ortiz supplanting Alexander in the Seventh Ward, it seemed as if Tran had sufficient votes lined up to get Clayton in as city manager. Ortiz was strongly in favor of Clayton’s hiring. Flores, a Democrat and Tran’s protege, was ready to vote right down the line with her in getting Clayton in place and Knaus, likewise a Democrat, appeared to be poised to go along with the program to get a city manager on board with Trans’ agenda and move the city forward. That bottomed out, though, when it became apparent that Clayton could not be hired, as, at best, there were only four votes to hire Clayton, given that Sanchez, Ibarra, Figueroa and Shorett were implacably against her. Knaus’ vote for Clayton, it turned out, was by no means certain and even with it, the resultant 4-to-4 deadlock would not have been sufficient to approve Clayton’s contract.
In February, Clayton took an offer from Barstow to become city manager there.
It was as if Tran was cursed insofar as getting the city’s city administration/management situation straightened out. For more than six months, the city limped along with Tanya Romo, the city’s deputy city manager and neighborhood & customer service operations manager and then former Brea City Manager William Gallardo serving in the capacity of interim city manager. In August 2025, at last, the entirety of the city council, with the exception of Ortiz, agreed to hire a Eric Levitt, then the city manager of Fullerton, as its city manager.
At that point, more than two-and-a-half years of Tran’s time in office had been squandered, with the city wandering aimlessly in the desert, it seemed, with no consistent or concerted management or administration, no one planning, organizing, directing or and controlling operations, so that a policy, any policy formulated by either the council, the mayor or combination thereof could be executed. Through a combination of events, circumstance, the lack of mayoral political reach, the lack of mayoral administrative authority and fate, Tran had no record of accomplishments as mayor of California’s 18th largest and the United States’ 107th largest city which could be used as the basis for here candidacy for higher office. Tran was under the most probable of circumstances going to need to seek reelection as mayor this year, given that the most logical office for her to pursue is that of State Senator in the 29th District, where Senator Eloise Gómez Reyes will be termed out after 2028, and she stands a far better chance at capturing that seat if she can run as San Bernardino’s incumbent mayor. Still, things would have proven far more auspiticious for her if she had been able to hit the ground running when she first came into office.
As it stands, she is being challenged this year by her predecessor as mayor, Valdivia, along with planning commissioners Ivan Garcia and Ronnika Ngalande.
Of note is that San Bernardino is considered a prize by both major political parties. As stated previously, San Bernardino County remains a bastion of Republicanism in Democratic Party-dominated California, one of just five substantial geographic areas around the Golden State where the GOP is in ascendance. As the county seat, San Bernardino is a trendsetter or bellwether as to how things are to play out politically. By measure of the party affiliation of its citizenry, San Bernardino is an overwhelmingly Democratic place. Of the city’s 109,129 registered voters, 48,901 or 44.8 percent are Democrats and 24,791 or 22.7 percent are Republicans. Republicans in San Bernardino are outnumbered by the 25,557 voters or 23.4 percent who have no political affiliation.
Prior to the 2020 election, San Bernardino’s mayor and six of its council members – Valdivia, Sanchez, Figueroa, Shorett, Nickel, Richard and Mulvihill – were Republicans. Following the 2020 election, the numbers shifted. The mayor and four of its council members – Valdivia, Sanchez, Figueroa, Shorett and Alexander – were Republicans. Following the 2022 election, the mayor and three of the city’s council members – Tran, Ibarra, Reynoso and Calvin – were Democrats. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the mayor and four of its council members – Tran, Ibarra, Knaus, Flores and Ortiz – are Democrats.  A push is on by the Democratic Party to keep the San Bernardino City Council balanced in favor of the Democrats, the concept being that as San Bernardino goes, so goes, eventually, San Bernardino County. There is countervailing determination on the part of the Republicans in San Bernardino County to undo the current 5-to-3 majority in favor of the Democrats.
The Republicans’ objective is complicated by a few considerations.
One of those is that Sanchez is reportedly toing with the idea of changing his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
A set of complications consists of the divergence in candidate preference in the race for mayor between current Councilman Fred Shorett and former Councilman Henry Nickel. Both are not only Republicans but members of the local GOP establishment in that each is a current elected member of the San Bernardine Bernardino County Central Committee.
With Valdivia, Garcia and Ngalande – Republicans all – competing against Tran this year, the question for those controlling the county Republican Party is which candidate are they going to back in the effort to unseat her to put a Republican at the head of municipal government in the county seat.
Given Valdivia’s immersion in scandal and his inability four years ago to do any better than third in the mayor’s contest, the party is understandably reluctant to put its money on him this time around. For both Shorett, who is a member of the central committees inner sanctum executive committee, and Nickel, from personal experience as members of the city council with Valdivia when he was Third Ward councilman and mayor, they have further reason to be opposed to Valdivia.
Their alternatives consist of Ivan Garcia, who is a member of the San Bernardino Planning Commission representing Ward 3, and Ronnika Ngalande, also a member of the San Bernardino Planning Commission, in her case representing Ward 5.
As it turns out, Shorett did his analysis and came to the conclusion that Ngalande is not only the best choice for mayor but has the best chance of defeating Tran. Last night, Thursday March 12, at this month’s San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee meeting, a decision to confer the party endorsement on Ngalande was made.
That development clashed, rather mightily, with Nickel’s preference in the mayoral race, Garcia.
According to Nickel, if the Republican Party were to get behind the right candidate, hitch up all of the horses to the same side of the political wagon and pull in unison, removing Tran as mayor would be possible.
“Ivan is the right candidate,” Nickel said. “He is everything our party needs – an articulate, charismatic Hispanic. He is the model of the type of candidates we should be backing  throughout this state to make it red again. He is far and away a superior choice to Ronnika. Endorsing her just through a wrench into the whole process.”
Shorett, Nickel said, is to blame for what happened.
“Fred orchestrated this,” Nickel charged. “He called other central committee members, ones who are not familiar with San Bernardino, and he pushed Ronnika on them. They took his word for it because he’s on the city council and a member of the executive committee. The rest of the executive committee failed to make a thorough review of its options. If they had, there is no way they would have bypassed Ivan. He should not have been mistreated that way.”
Nickel, who was once aligned with Shorett while they were on the council, was quite uncharitable in his characterization of him.
Referencing Shorett’s age – 77 – and the number of years he has been on the council – 17 – Nickel suggested he is cognitively impaired.
“He’s the Joe Biden of the 2026 council race,” Nickel said. “He completely embarrassed the GOP. He shamed us. I think he’s lost his marbles. He’s a loose cannon. Ivan came to him and said he was thinking of running for mayor and Fred said he should run for Second Ward councilman against Sandra Ibarra. When Ivan said he didn’t want to do that and wanted his endorsement for mayor, Fred told him to go pound sand. Fred is like that. He gets upset and goes off the rails and burns down the house.”
According to Nickel, Shorett “misused his status” as an executive committee member to force the endorsement of Ngalande.
Nickel said he will attempt, as a member of the central committee, to convince the executive committee and the committee as a whole to “collectively rethink this and walk back the endorsement before it gets out there. We should make a reconsideration of what our endorsements should be and give Ivan the opportunity to be heard. This [the San Bernardino mayoral] is an important race. We need to put the best candidate possible forward not the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. It time for Fred to shut up.”
Shorett, noting that Nickel was not present at the March 12 San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee meeting, disputed his assertion that he had orchestrated Ngalande’s endorsement.
We invited all Republicans who are candidates to give a brief three-minutes I think it was, presentation. They all had a chance to speak if they are Republicans and if they are running for office, from governor down to dog catchers. Everyone who asked for consideration was considered. All members of the central committee who are current on their dues were eligible to participate in the vote, which was held in a closed session. I cannot disclose anything that was said during the closed session. But everyone had an opportunity and no one was denied a chance to speak.”
Shorett said, “I am very aware of who Ivan Garcia is. Henry might be right. He could be very good as a candidate for several different offices. He’s Hispanic, and it is rare to have Hispanic Republicans in office, but it is occurring more often. It is rare to have African American Republicans in office. But we are a big tent in the Republican Party, as they say. I don’t believe in identity politics, per say. I would rather look at the individual and where he stands on the issues, or she, as the case may be. But I am all for broadening our party’s appeal. Both of those people [Garcia and Ngalande] certainly have something to offer. The vote was straightforward. It was done by electronic devices. The number of votes shows upon a screen. There was an opportunity for those in the room to make an argument to endorse or not endorse. That was subject to the closed session rules. The results were made public. Ronnika did get a significant number of votes, enough that the committee was in favor of her getting the endorsement.”
Shorett stopped short of saying that Nickel was overestimating Garcia, but indicated he believed Nickel was underestimating Ngalande.
“I believe Ronnika is more qualified,” Shorett said. “I know them both, but I would not say I know either one really well. My opinion, in getting to know Ronnika is she is pretty much everything we are looking for in a candidate. She is knowledgeable and had been involved.”
Shorett responded to Nickel’s complaint that on one occasion during a council meeting Ngalande’s criticism of the city and city officials had grown so pointed and vociferous that she was escorted by security away from the podium.
While acknowledging something like that might have occurred, Shorett said, “There have been plenty of things in our city and actions or statements by our city council for people to get upset about. We have people in the audience and people on the dais spewing nonsense. That is something that will make anyone with any sense or brains at all get upset. I’ve reacted to things in ways I shouldn’t have. I’ve done some things I regret or wished I had behaved differently. I’m not going to hold her getting passionate about something against her. Hell, when Henry was on the council there were times when he got carried away, probably for good reason. There was a time when he was speaking so loudly that it was drowning out everyone else and he was almost falling out of his chair. So yes, it’s true. I went to a meeting where Ronnika was pretty verbal, but she was right. I didn’t disagree with what she was saying.”
Shorett declined to quibble with Nickel over whether Garcia matches the ideal of a young and articulate candidate who can go toe-to-toe with Tran in a verbal showdown.
“I am telling you I don’t have a problem with him,” Shorett said. “I just don’t think he has what Ronnika has. The fight now is not between Ivan and Ronnika. The fight now is against Helen Tran. That’s where the battle needs to be taken. Look at what we are up against: a Vietnamese female backed to the hilt by the Democratic Party. She made mincemeat out of Jim Penman, an old white guy. To get there, she had to beat John Valdivia, the incumbent, who was aggressive, smart and had all kinds of money. A lot of this city’s voters saw him as an experienced and qualified Hispanic. He had some drawbacks and problems, some real vulnerabilities, but he had those advantages and she beat him. Our focus as Republicans at this stage has to be on beating her. Henry is really excited about Ivan and I will admit I don’t know Ivan’s views all that well and he may have a great future, but right now, in addition to getting into position to run my own campaign, I’m concentrating on what we can do to beat Helen Tran. This fight that Henry wants to create between Ivan and Ronnika is nothing other than a distraction. I see an African American female [Ngalande] giving her [Tran] a real run. I’m not guaranteeing she will win. I just happen to think that she has the best chance of the candidates in the race. I did not recruit her. She came to talk to me, just like Ivan did. In my discussions with her, I had the impression that she could be a team player on the council.”