Greg Franklin’s effort more than six years after his retirement to move into elective politics heading the same municipal organization he was employed by for more than two decades was met with resistance earlier this election season.
Franklin is seeking election to the 1st District city council position in Yucaipa, which post is held at present by Bob Miller.
To some, the 1st District post, which was formed and voted upon in 2018 after Yucaipa converted from at-large city council elections to district election in 2016, appears to be cursed. In 2022, longtime council member David Avila opted out of running for re-election. Four hopefuls vied for the position, including Mark Taylor, Erik Sahakian, Sherilyn Lon and Matt Garner. Garner prevailed. At what would be his second council meeting after being installed on the panel, Garner joined with then-Mayor Justin Beaver and then-Councilman Bobby Duncan to outright terminate City Attorney David Snow and deliver, during a closed session, an ultimatum to City Manager Ray Casey, who had been city manager since 2008, that he resign or face termination himself. Upon being offered an assurance that his contract, which was to run through June 2024 would be honored, Casey complied.
Beaver, Duncan and Garner accompanied what was essentially Casey’s sacking with the hiring of Chris Mann, who at that time was the city manager of Canyon Lake but whose primary claim to fame was that he was a developer and the representative of development companies. Mann was able to get the city council to go along with hiring Steven Graham Pacifico, who was the city attorney in Canyon Lake, as the city attorney to replace Snow in Yucaipa. Similarly, he succeeded in bringing Ana Sauseda, who had been the city clerk in Canyon Lake, to Yucaipa to serve as city clerk. And Mann scored a trifecta, installing his choice of Joe Pradetto as Yucaipa’s director of government relations/city spokesperson.
Yucaipa residents became convinced that Beaver, a law enforcement professional, and Duncan, a real estate agent, and Garner, who was employed by a company that sold over $3 billion worth of construction materials per year were involved in some order of a scheme to step up the pace of development of existing partially completed and new neighborhoods in the 28.3-square mile city of 54,989 population by doubling, tripling and quadrupling the permitted density in the city’s residential zones, thereby transforming Yucaipa into wall-to-wall houses similar to many communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties and elsewhere in San Bernardino County. The trio were, a handful and then later dozens, scores, hundreds and thousands of Yucaipa residents maintained, seeking to boost the profits of the landowners on whose property the homes were to be built and negatively impinging on the quality of life of the city’s residents.
A fair cross section of Yucaipa residents undertook vigorous protests of Casey’s firing and began gathering signatures to qualify ballot measures to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner from office.
Mann quarterbacked resistance to the recall. Through a variety of strategies that utilizing Graham-Pacifico, Sauseda and Pradetto in key rules, he managed to keep those pushing to have Beaver, Duncan and Garner removed from office engaged with overcoming legal, procedural and reputational obstacles, and stymied the recall effort.
Those community activists upset over the substitution of Mann for Casey were not dissuaded, and they redoubled their efforts, resolving to relaunch the recall campaigns. In reaction to the citizen backlash, Mann through There were delays, which resulted in the animated Yucaipa activists, functioning under the name of Coalition to Save Yucaipa, made a command decision to time the recall vote against Garner for the 2024 election, when Beaver and Duncan were scheduled to run for re-election, By taking this approach, the Coalition to Save Yucaipa was able to focus on an effort to keep Beaver and Duncan from being re-elected rather than gathering signatures to qualify the recall efforts against them for the ballot. Simultaneously, the Coalition to Save Yucaipa intensified its targeting of Garner.
Duncan, faced with the prospect of his District 3 constituents being convinced by the Coalition to Save Yucaipa’s arguments that he had sought to make huge giveaways to developers to gain for himself profits as a real estate agent through more commissions on home sales by getting rid of Casey and hiring Mann, opted out of running for reelection. Beaver rolled the dice and ran for reelection.
In the 2024 election Judy Woolsey was elected to the 3rd District city council post. Beaver was reelected. Garner was recalled from office.
The city council in December 2024 decided against holding an election to fill the gap on the council created by Garner’s removal. Instead, they considered individuals living within the 1st District whom they might appoint to that post. They settled on Bob Miller, a member of the Yucaipa-Calimesa School Board. Miller, a retired law enforcement professional who had spent most of his career with the Colton Police Department and had risen to police chief there, was favorably looked upon by Beaver, who had previously worked as a sheriff’s deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and is now employed by the Azusa Police Department, and Councilman Jon Thorp, a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
With Duncan and Garner no longer on the city council, an arrangement was arrived at by February 2025 for Mann to leave as city manager. Joe Pradetto also departed soon thereafter as the city spokesman and government relations manager. Sauseda remained as city clerk and Graham-Pacifico stayed as city attorney.
Garner was resentful of his removal from the council. He continued to monitor ongoing actions at City Hall after he was forced out of his elected post. He took note of votes made by the city council over the course of the first eight months that Miller was serving in his appointed capacity as a councilman. Some of those votes related to $46,000 in payments made to Miller’s wife Kathleen for her work as a consultant to the city’s after-school S.T.A.R.S. program, an acronym variously credited as standing for Science, Technology, Arts, Recreation for Success or Students Taking Action and Responsibility for Success, which was technically disbursed while Miller was serving a a member of the city council. The city had committed to the program and Kathleen Miller’s involvement in it, based upon her status as a former principal with the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District, prior to Bob Miller becoming a member of the city council. In voting to approve the 2025-2026 Yucaipa budget, he had signed off on a line item relating to the city’s sponsorship of S.T.A.R.S.
Garner accused Miller of having withheld disclosure of his wife’s contract with S.T.A.R.S. when he applied to be considered for the council position appointment and asserted Miller’s vote to approve the city budget constituted a violation of California Government Code Section 1090, insofar as the city’s provision of money to his wife constituted a criminal conflict of interest.
Garner’s accusations drove a wedge between Miller and the members of the city council, with whom he previously had positive relationships. The council took the position that Miller should resign, which he refused to do. A complaint routed to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office over the matter was consolidated with a similar complaint to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, which declined to initiate a full investigation into the matter after it was demonstrated a) the members of the city council were fully cognizant of the city’s subsidization of the S.T.A.R.S. program and that b) the city’s financial subsidization of the S.T.A.R.S. program had begun prior to Miller’s presence on the city council.
Miller had been submitted to obloquy nonetheless and the incident did much to damage his formerly cordial relations with his council colleagues.
Miller resolved to not run for election this year, and thus will not remain as Yucaipa’s 1st District councilman after December.
Running for city council in the 1st District to succeed him are District 1 residents Chelsea Ramirez and Greg Franklin.
Franklin was employed by the City of Yucaipa from 1991 until 2019 in in various administrative roles, including finance director and assistant city manager. His campaign celebrated his experience in that capacity as attributes which qualified him for a position on the city council.
As the election season was warming up earlier this month, Franklin was made the subject of a minute-and-a-half visual and audio presentation by a videographer identified only by the moniker “Glass Gavel.”
In the video, a narrator notes Franklin is using the slogan “fix our finances” in his election bid.
“But what if the man stepping up to save the city’s money was the very same official who oversaw its financial collapse?” the narrator asks before offering a synopsis of scandal Martha Amarylis Avalos scandal that rocked Yucaipa in 2019, when an administrative employee was found to have waltzed off with a substantial amount of money from municipal coffers and accounts.
“Let’s rewind to late 2019,” the narrator intones. “Greg Franklin abruptly retires from overseeing City Hall administrative finances just weeks after an office assistant of eight years is arrested for embezzling over $300,000 of taxpayer money. Greg didn’t catch the theft. The outside auditors did. An independent audit covering the 2019 Fiscal Year exposed massive internal failures under his watch. Auditors discovered that the city had not completed a single bank reconciliation for almost an entire year, stretching from June 2018 all the way to May 2019. This failure increased the risk of unreliable accounting records. Auditors revealed incoming mail was funneled to a single location without payments ever being logged or recorded before distribution. That meant a single employee could intercept envelopes packed with city checks and cash with zero oversight, leaving the door wide open for over $300,000 to vanish undetected. The employee who stole the $300,000? She walked away with just two years of probation. Meanwhile, Greg walked away into a comfortable early retirement. Now, he’s back. His campaign signs promise to fix the city’s budget. The public record shows what happened the last time he oversaw it. Can we really trust the architect of the disaster to be our savior?”
When contacted by the Sentinel, Franklin offered a 12-point dispute of the video’s contents and defense of his performance as city finance director and assistant city manager.
“A video surfaced last weekend on social media that casts a significant shadow on my personal credibility and my ability to lead and serve,” Franklin said. “It attempts to influence voters by making me out to be responsible for an embezzlement that occurred prior to my retirement, in an effort to discredit me. With some unflattering pictures, twisted truths and dialog narrated by an AI [artificial intelligence] voice, it is serving its purpose well. Yet, no one is taking responsibility. This is an example of a political hit piece, that had been rumored for a couple of weeks, to smear my reputation as a candidate.”
Franklin said, “To clarify, there was an embezzlement at City Hall. It occurred between 2016 and 2019. Without inappropriately getting into the human resources elements of the issue, I want to make the following statements:
“1. The video was posted by an anonymous source who has twisted any truth and fabricated statements.
“2. I have never been accused of embezzlement of any type. I enjoyed a lengthy career with the City of Yucaipa and developed a very healthy reputation as an honest and responsible manager, finance director and assistant city manager.
“3. When I was made aware of the theft issue, I dealt with it immediately and turned it over to law enforcement, as appropriate. The employee was terminated and the case was handled by the appropriate law enforcement authorities.
“4. The employee did not work for the finance department, nor did she report to me. She reported to a different department director, in a different division of the city.
“5. Each department was responsible to receive payments for their services rendered and prepare them for deposit to the finance department, which would then deposit them to the bank.
“6. The employee was intercepting checks written to the city, to the department in which she worked, and depositing them in her personal bank account and not to the finance department. The finance department would not have a record of this type of irregular payments, for that department, until they were given to the finance department for deposit, similar to other departments. That particular revenue stream was inconsistent in that each payment would have been for fines unique to certain properties and the timing of each would vary depending upon circumstances surrounding each property’s violations. If the Finance Department did not receive the payments, we would have no record of them.
“7. The finance department would be able to monitor the revenue account in the general ledger system and track it against the budget for reference. But, there were not large variances in the general ledger account that would have otherwise raised suspicions.
“8. The video makes the statement that it was the auditors, not me, who identified the problem. That too is false. The city’s bank contacted a member of my staff to report the unusual activity. We then informed our auditors, for the record.
“9. There is no good, or appropriate time, for an embezzlement. It is also unfortunate that it came as I was preparing for retirement. It definitely put a blemish on my retirement. But, my retirement was already in process to occur at the end of 2019, by the time this issue was exposed.
“10. My retirement was not the result of the issue, nor was it impacted by it, as some have suggested. I did not abruptly retire as the video alleges.
“11. The video indicates “massive failures under his watch”. This is just not true. There was a finding about bank reconciliations and that is one of very few “findings” in 30 years. Most of the management letters over decades had zero findings of internal control weaknesses. This is an unfair and uninformed allegation. It further implies the risk of accounting errors increased. That is false.
“12. I saw to it that the city had appropriate insurance for dishonest actions by city officials, and to the best of my understanding, the city was made whole financially.”