Former Adelanto City Councilman Jermaine Wright was found guilty by a jury of federal criminal charges for accepting a $10,000 cash bribe and hiring a man to burn down his restaurant so he could fraudulently collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance proceeds, the Justice Department announced today.

      Wright, 46, of Riverside, was found guilty late Wednesday afternoon of one count of bribery of programs receiving federal funds and one count of attempted arson of a building affecting interstate commerce. Wright was remanded into federal custody following the verdict’s announcement. Continue reading →

Below is a PDF of the June 17 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

The official conclusion of this year’s election that resulted in the reelection of five countywide incumbents was not in compliance with the county’s charter, two lawsuits filed last week contend.
According to a lawsuit filed by Robert Conaway on his own behalf and another Conaway filed on behalf of sheriff candidate Cliff Harris, San Bernardino County’s charter, as adjusted ten years ago in 2012, requires that the five countywide positions elected in the years corresponding with California’s gubernatorial elections – sheriff, district attorney, treasure/tax collector/auditor controller, assessor/county clerk and county superintendent of schools – are to be held in the November general election. According to Conaway’s and Harris’s suits, the county’s practice of declaring a candidate for any of those five offices to be Continue reading →

There is concern among both San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia’s constituents and his political supporters that a significant amount of the more than $850,000 he amassed into his electioneering fund is being diverted to what will eventually become his personal use.
Valdivia, who has held elective office since 2012 following his 2011 election to the city council and who has been the mayor of what is both San Bernardino County’s largest city and its county seat since 2018, has himself contemplated being, and been considered by others as, a potential candidate for higher office, such as U.S. Congressman or a position in the California legislature. On June 7, however, he finished in third place for reelection as mayor, an event which instantaneously transformed him into a lame duck. Moreover, the nature of his loss and the events surrounding him and what led up to his defeat knells, a large number of the county’s more sophisticated political observers have indicated, the end of his viability as a politician, at least locally. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
Redlands City Officials’ mad rush to approve the redevelopment project on the site of the shuttered Redlands Mall may very well have resulted in a further decade-long or more delay in that project coming to fruition, meaning that the 11.15-acre site at the heart of one of San Bernardino County’s most resplendent cities, which has already been dormant for over a decade, will have lain fallow for a quarter-of-a-century before the project hastily approved last month will materialize.
At the root of the massive faux pas was the determination of city officials to prevent height limitations on buildings within the city that a committed core of city residents is purposed to impose on future development from being applicable in the downtown area and the developers who have cultivated a rapport with the city’s municipal establishment. The project approved last month is to entail residential structures at least four stories high and perhaps a parking facility six stories in height. In their desire to Continue reading →

Though the results are not official, San Bernardino Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra’s come-from-behind victory in the June 7 balloting seems virtually assured.
Ibarra, a community activist who was first elected to the city council in 2018, had to battle through two contests that year – the June primary and the November general election – to land a berth on the council. In 2018, Benito Barrios was the incumbent Second Ward councilman. He was challenged by Ibarra and Cecilia Miranda-Dolan. Barrios’s incumbent status did him no good, as Miranda-Dolan prevailed in the June balloting with 699 votes or 39.6 percent, outdistancing both Barrios, with 525 votes or 29.75 percent, and Ibarra, who outpolled Barrios as well, with 541 votes or 30.65 percent. That November, Ibarra Continue reading →

Linda Reich, who has most recently been serving in the role of community services director, has been chosen to replace Matt Ballantyne as Chino’s city manager.
Reich is to begin in the position on August 1.
Chino, which at 103,416 residents is San Bernardino County’s seventh largest city populationwise and at 29.7 square miles the 15th largest in terms of area, never previously, since its 1910 incorporation, employed a woman as city manager.
Reich possesses a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science from Michigan State University, a master’s degree in public administration from California State University, Northridge and a doctorate in public administration from the University of La Verne. Continue reading →

Reportedly, El Monte Police Corporal Michael Paredes and El Monte Police Officer Joseph Santana, who were killed in the line of duty on Tuesday, June 14, 2022, both resided in Upland.
Paredes and Santana were gunned down by 35-year-old Justin Flores after El Monte police were summoned at around 4:30 p.m. to the Siesta Inn, a motel on Garvey Avenue, in response to a report of a possible stabbing.
Flores’ widow, Diana Flores, with whom Justin Flores had a child, in a statement to reporters indicated that the 911 call relating to the stabbing emanated from a threat Justin Flores made, which she implied was to her. She had not actually been stabbed, however, and there was no indication from the El Monte Police in the aftermath of the incident that anyone was stabbed.
Paredes and Santana arrived at the motel at roughly the same time. They, along with a sergeant from the Continue reading →

Wayne Gray, who like most of us led a life of mixed joy and sorrow, has at last found peace.
He passed away at 1:34 a.m. on April 13, 2022, from complications that ensued during his recovery from open heart surgery.
He was born in Pomona on June 8, 1955 to his mother Dorothy June Gray and his father Ira C. Gray.
As a child, he lived with his family, which included his older brother Gary and his three sisters Nancy, Sandy and Wanda, in the West End district of San Bernardino County. He attended Howard Elementary School and played baseball as a kid at West End Little League. Continue reading →

In front of man, God and everyone else, the San Bernardino City Council this week gave everyone a clear demonstration of the degree to which the city’s marijuana-related business permitting process has been tainted by graft, corruption, favoritism, misrepresentation, bribery and every unsavory influence imaginable.
Like virtually the rest of San Bernardino County’s reactionary civic leaders of the late 1990s, throughout the first decade of the Third Millennium and well past 2010, San Bernardino’s mayor and members of the San Bernardino City Council refused to yield to the liberalization of California law pertaining to cannabis when California’s voters passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, in 1996. Proposition 215 allowed marijuana to be used for medicinal purposes in the Gold State, conditional upon a user obtaining a prescription from a licensed physician. Continue reading →