The legal challenge filed by former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and a bevy of environmental concern advocates to the two-thirds of a million square foot merchandise processing facility at San Bernardino International Airport approved by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2019 met a significant roadblock on November 18.
A 2-to-1 decision by a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a consolidated petition for review filed by Becerra, the Sierra Club, Earth Justice and other ecological/environmental advocacy groups that maintained the environmental impact study commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration for the project was woefully inadequate. The petition sought a ruling by the court that would set aside the operating permit for the Eastgate Air Cargo Facility, which despite the legal challenge, is already up and operating. At that sorting facility, located west of Victoria Avenue and south of Third Street on the far eastern side of San Bernardino, Amazon employees load and unload aircraft and sort packages for delivery.
San Bernardino International Airport, built on the grounds of the former Norton Air Force Base, caters to cargo-carrying aircraft in large measure, and features no commercial passenger flights, though it does have some minor passenger activity involving corporate jets and a few charter flights.
U.S. Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay joined with U.S. District Judge Eugene Siler, who wrote in his prevailing opinion that the petitioners did not make a convincing showing that the Federal Aviation Administration failed to meet its obligation to give adequate consideration to the environmental impacts of the freight-handling and distribution operation through what was alleged to have been inadequate weighing of the overall and cumulative effect of emissions from vehicles and machinery located near residences, schools and other places where individuals sensitive to that pollution live or frequent.
Ultimately, the operations at the facility will be ongoing on a 24-hour-per-day, seven-days-a-week basis.
According to Siler, the Federal Aviation Administration in examining the facets of the project made an adequate evaluation of air quality impacts on the facility’s environs and mapped out in detail the method by which it carried out the evaluation, and accounted for the amount, degree and physical characteristics of the emissions that would come from the operation and their effect on nearby properties.
Siler said the plaintiffs did not prove that the Federal Aviation Administration had skipped out on its duty as required by the National Environmental Policy Act when it made a finding by means of an environmental impact analysis that the facility would have “no significant impacts.”
Judge Bumatay concurred.
The third member of the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Johnnie Rawlinson, however, strongly dissented, writing that the Federal Aviation Administration had trod all over the competing interests of impoverished minorities living proximate to the facility who are being put upon to bear the brunt of the health-threatening impacts of the pollution-generating operations at the facility. The Federal Aviation Administration giving short shrift to those living in the shadow of the facility who will be subject to the air pollution generated there “reeks of environmental racism,” Rawlinson stated in her dissent, and she stridently asked, making reference to Jeff Bezos, if the project would have been given approval if it had been “sited anywhere near the wealthy enclave where the multibillionaire owner of Amazon, resides? Certainly not. The same standard should apply to the residents of San Bernardino Valley, who have already borne for many years the heavy cost of pollution resulting in a quantifiable detriment to their health.”
Rawlinson took issue with the stated conclusion in the environmental impact report carried out by the Federal Aviation Administration asserting no damage to the health of nearby residents will result from the project. Rawlinson said the finding that the facility “will have no significant environmental impact on the already overly polluted San Bernardino Valley does not pass muster,” given the standards of the yardstick being applied, that being the National Environmental Policy Act.
Weighing in with his concurrence with Judge Siler’s conclusion, Judge Bumatay said that Judge Rawlinson had read into the situation a “racial animus” that did not exist, as racial or ethnic discrimination was not an element of the challenge to the project.
Judge Bumatay said that Judge Rawlinson’s interjection or imputation of a racist motivation into the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval of the project was “unfair to the employees of the Federal Aviation Administration.” Judge Bumatay said Judge Rawlinson had “accused [Federal Aviation Administration officials] of condoning racist actions without [giving them] a chance to defend themselves.”
Amazon began operation at its regional air hub near San Bernardino International Airport in April.
Becerra spearheaded the legal challenge in early 2020, while he was still California attorney general, prior to his selection to serve as secretary of health and human services in the Joseph Biden Administration earlier this year.
Becerra together with local environmental activists and justice advocates and both California-based and national environmental groups filed the lawsuit in federal court last year, roughly a month after the Federal Aviation Administration signed on to allowing Amazon to have an operating license for the logistics center at the airport. Collectively, the plaintiffs put forth arguments that in considering the project and giving it approval, the Federal Aviation Administration, together with the San Bernardino International Airport Authority and the master developer they were working with, Hillwood Enterprises, ignored or paid insufficient attention to the health risks the movement of massive amounts of cargo into and out of the facility would impose on the San Bernardino community.
According to the consolidated lawsuits, the Federal Aviation Administration should have more thoroughly and comprehensively considered the air quality impacts the facility would generate from constant plane flights and truck trips, which would “add to the burden” of pollutants flowing into nearby neighborhoods in which residents “already breathe some of the most polluted air in the nation.”
The San Bernardino International Airport Authority is a joint powers authority consisting of the County of San Bernardino and the cities of San Bernardino, Highland, Colton and Loma Linda committed to operating San Bernardino International Airport. Hillwood Enterprises is a Texas-based, global real estate development company of which Ross Perot, Jr. is chairman.
The lawsuit sought from the court an injunction against the operation of the facility until such time as a comprehensive environmental review of the project was undertaken, and for the approval of the $200 million project to be set aside, as the vote to approve it involved “an abuse of discretion,” and was “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.”
-Mark Gutglueck

With the Redlands City Council’s decision on Diversified Pacific’s proposal to develop most of the grove portion of the historic T.Y. England Estate into a new residential neighborhood, 352 current city residents have gone on record as signatories to a letter charging the development company with willfully allowing the trees in the grove to perish.
Jeff Burum, one of Diversified Pacific’s principals, rebuffed the accusation, and pointed out that the company is adhering to the preservationists’ insistence that the entire assets of the estate be maintained intact so the city’s options with the property are not limited. He said city water department records would verify that the grove is being irrigated.
Diversified Pacific, which is headed by Burum and Matt Jordan, in June 2019 acquired the entirety of the 8.8-acre England Grove Estate.
Thomas Y. England began cultivation of naval oranges on a lot at the corner of Palm and Alvarado avenues in Redlands in 1891, constructing on the property a Victorian Style home facing Palm Avenue, behind which he erected a barn, or carriage house, as well as a Queen Anne cottage facing Alvarado Street. The property was acquired by Guy Hunter, who converted the house on Palm Avenue into a prairie style home. The entire estate was sold to James and Annie Atwood in 1922. The Attwoods in turn passed it along to their daughter, Mary Attwood Heeney, and her husband Thomas J. Heeney, who continued to operate it as a citrus-producing grove. It was the Heeneys’ grandson and his wife who sold the estate to Diversified Pacific after they rejected, at various times over the past twenty years, offers by preservationists such as the Redlands Conservancy to purchase the property who had expressed the intent of restoring the estate’s structures and preserving the grove and its original gravity-fed irrigation system, one of the last three remaining such water conveyances in the state.
Burum, Jordan and Diversified Pacific have applied with the city to convert six of the England Grove Estate’s 8.8 acres into 28 2,000-to 2,600 square foot homes on what are mostly 6,200-square-foot lots.
The Redlands Planning Commission after considering the project at its May 11, 2021 and June 8, 2021 meetings, on June 22, 2021, voted 5-to-2, with Dr. Angela Keller and Matt Endsley dissenting, to recommend that the city council provide the project with a mitigated negative declaration allowing it to proceed, with a proviso that roughly 56 of the trees would be retained and a kiosk erected that recites the history of the England Estate and its significance to Redlands.
The project was scheduled to come before the Redlands City Council for consideration and approval at its July 20, 2021, September 7, 2021 and November 16, 2021 meetings. The property slated for development lies within one of the city’s ten sometimes overlapping historic zones, designated as the West Highland Avenue Historic and Scenic District. The council held hearings relating to the project at its July 20 and September 7 meetings, during which it heard from elements within the city who are opposed to the project’s destruction of the grove, which produced navel oranges marketed for decades under the Pure Gold label. At the conclusion of those meetings, the council held off on making a decision. The council canceled and postponed the hearing slated for November 16.
On November 15, the mayor and city council were provided with a letter signed by 352 Redlands residents which stated that the orange trees on the England Estate were suffering “death by neglect,” defined in the letter as “a refusal to adequately water the trees.” The letter stated that “neighbors bordering the grove have recorded that the last time the entire grove was watered by the owner was August 2020. Over the past months, the trees have begun to show distress at the lack of water provided. More trees than ever are losing leaves after drying up, more branches are falling, and the leaves are curling.”
The letter maintained, “We have been told by code enforcement [ i.e., a city employee or employees in the city’s code enforcement division] and a representative from Diversified Pacific that the irrigation system is broken and thus they are unable to water the grove. However, that is preposterous given the extraordinary monetary ability the developer has to fix the alleged break. This is death by neglect, and it breaks the agreement the developer made with neighbors that they ‘would make sure to keep the grove in the condition it was in when purchased.’ Further, it is code enforcement’s job to make sure that properties are adequately taken care of, especially if there is any potential risk or danger to properties not being maintained.”
According to the letter, “As it stands, after an extraordinarily hot and dry summer with temperatures often soaring past 100 degrees and almost no water afforded the trees, the grove is sitting tinder in our dry ‘Santa Anas’ climate. This poses a risk to all surrounding neighbors and their homes. It is the responsibility of code enforcement to actually respond to the requests for action received from residents. We have repeatedly been given excuses and ignored in what appears to be an appeasement to the developer.”
The letter goes on to intone, “The city is already named in a lawsuit about the loss of citrus, and if the suit is decided in the petitioner’s favor, it could impact the future liability of the city to ensure the developer maintains the groves until a final determination has been made about the future of the England property. It is therefore vital that the property owners be required to give the grove the best care possible. That includes watering, fertilizing, and keeping the weeds down in the furrows so that the water can reach all of the trees.”
Jeff Burum said the accusation that Diversified Pacific was not watering the trees was not true.
“If you check with the city, you will know that is not accurate,” he said. “We are using the existing antiquated and broken irrigation system to water the trees. The existing historical watering system is made up of concrete flumes which gravity flows water to the trees. We use it, but it is broken, inefficient and extremely wasteful in a drought challenged state. We use city water from our water shares. Our [water] usage can be verified by the city. People will say things that they know nothing about, especially if it leads to a selfish benefit, and that’s just sad.”
Burum said, “That grove has been dying for some time. It makes no sense to save an ancient water system that is no longer functioning and never functioned efficiently, especially in light of the drought and challenge to our state’s water availability.”
He, his partner and his company were being maligned, Burum said, by elements of the Redlands community which want the historical England Grove Estate fully restored at no cost to them or anyone who is advocating that outcome, which he said is financially unfeasible.
Burum remarked on the irony he perceived in that Diversified Pacific alone has stepped up with a strategy to keep those traces of Thomas Y. England’s legacy to Redlands intact.
In actuality, Burum said, prior to his company’s acquisition of the property there had been a protracted period while the Heeney Family, the owners of the land, had sought to make a sale of the estate to an entity or entities committed to its preservation, but could not come to terms with anyone.
“I would be willing to take no profit and sell the property at my cost to anyone willing to buy the property who wants to maintain it as an historical property and is capable of doing that,” Burum said. “The reality is that no one can do that. The only way for anyone to save the historical nature of the estate is to buy the property and use the surplus land to build something that can be marketed and sold so you can use the money to save the historical structures, the two houses and the barn. There is no one in the community that can do that.”
Burum said he and Diversified Pacific had “done the best that can be done with that property.” He expressed dismay at the vitriol he and his company are being subjected to by some in Redlands for having made that attempt. “We have spent millions of dollars because we believed in Redlands and making something worthwhile for the community,” he said, “We are not being treated nicely.”
–Mark Gutglueck

A team of seven burglars acting in a coordinated fashion and using a crying baby as a diversion tactic succeeded in pulling off a creative blitz robbery of a market in the western unincorporated county area of Fontana on November 15, netting some $57,000 to $60,000.
There are reliable reports that the team has used the tactic elsewhere.
Seven women, all wearing masks in apparent compliance with COVID-19 precautions, filed two by two out of a white Dodge van without license plates that had pulled into the parking lot of the Village Ranch Market located at 15091 Merrill Avenue in the Fontana area on Monday, November 15 around 8.45 p.m., fifteen minutes before the market’s closing. One of the women carried a crying baby.
The Village Ranch Market is a store selling all order of edibles, including meat, vegetables, dairy products, other perishables, as well as canned, boxed and packaged goods. Located within a district heavily populated by Hispanic residents, the enterprise serves as a type of local de facto bank, cashing checks for known neighborhood residents, including payroll checks, stimulus checks and federal credit checks.
The market’s proprietor, Harvinder Sandhu, at that point had begun to tally the store’s proceeds for the day. With the crowd of people coming into her establishment, Sandhu quickly gathered up the checks, consisting of between $39,000 and $42,000, and $18,800 in cash, and hastily set it onto her desk and into drawers in the store’s office. She returned to deal with the influx of customers.
The woman who was carrying a baby made a point of explaining that she and those she was with were Armenian and new to the area. She expressed to Sandhu a degree of urgency relating to her baby, who was crying.
“She said, ‘The baby’s hungry and I need formula,’” Sandhu said, quoting the woman. When Sandhu showed her where the formula was, the young mother continued to engage with her, insisting that she wanted formula that was sold in small single use quantities. This struck Sandhu as odd, since she recognized that formula packaged in that fashion is not sold but made available to new mothers by hospitals upon being discharged from a maternity ward, intended as an immediate postpartum convenience to mothers so they can feed their newborns during the first week or so after they return home.
While the mother and child were monopolizing Sandhu’s attention, one of the other women used the opportunity this diversion created to military crawl into the store’s office, where she then allowed one of her accomplices inside, and the duo stole what was reportedly $50,000 in cash and checks.
While this was ongoing, two of the other women positioned themselves in the aisle next to the office as if to stand guard or give warning to the two women in the office if Sandhu should give indication she heard anything amiss or made a move toward going into the office. Meanwhile, the woman with the child said she would seek the formula she was looking for at a department store where she believed that product was available. At that point, two of the other women came to the sales counter to make purchases of less than ten dollars worth of merchandise, primarily candy.
The two women inside the office, who had found the cash and checks on the desk and in the drawers, also ransacked Sandhu’s purse, which was in the office, leaving it open, and then exited the office while Sandhu was engaged in making the candy sales.
At that point, the women, with the baby and the loot, exited the store and fled in the unmarked white Dodge van they had arrived in.
Shortly thereafter, Sandhu said, she went into the office, and discovered the cash and checks missing. In her words, she made a “panicked call to the sheriff’s department.”
She was able to piece together what had occurred later by reviewing the store’s security video system.
Sandhu made an immediate effort to contact the customers whose checks she had cashed but not yet processed though her bank to have them arrange to have payment on them canceled, a precaution she took even though those who have possession of the checks will need identification to cash them again.
An extensive report of the incident was made to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which secured medium resolution security camera video footage depicting the perpetrators, from which stills have been obtained. Because the women were wearing face coverings extending over their mouths and noses, no specific identifications have yet been made.
Sandhu made an effort to draw as much attention to what had occurred, posting an account of what had befallen her on the Village Ranch Market’s Facebook page, including photos of the team of thieves. Sandhu subsequently received phone calls and contact from other merchants who were victimized by the team. One of those was a store in Burbank, which was hit in October. Another call came in last night, Thanksgiving, from another merchant in Thousand Oaks. In the Thanksgiving heist, the women were accompanied by a man.
Sandhu made what is probably a futile plea to those who had victimized her for them to return the checks they had taken, since they cannot be converted to cash, so she can use them to make at least some recovery of the $57,000 to $62,000 she lost on November 15. “Just drop them off somewhere where they can be be returned to me,” she asked, in the hope that one of those who robbed her might read this account in the Sentinel.
An investigation is ongoing and detectives are yet attempting to determine if the application of face recognition technology to the videos can produce anything fruitful.
-Mark Gutglueck

Neither the National Transportation Safety Board nor the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has identified the victim of a plane crash that occurred in the San Gorgonio Wilderness on November 20.
Initial reports were that plane wreckage involving a two-seat Glasair III that went missing Saturday was found roughly 40 miles east of Big Bear City.
While that report said the plane, carrying a single pilot, was in “mountainous terrain,” a point 40 miles east of Big Bear City is in the desert roughly five miles north of Twentynine Palms. More recently, the Sentinel was informed, the plane came down roughly 1.23 miles west of San Bernardino Peak in the San Gorgonio Wilderness area about 5 miles east southeast of Angeles Oaks.
The pilot was killed in the impact.
The plane left Camarillo Airport in California on November 20, with a destination of Phoenix-Deer Valley Airport in Arizona. It was reported as having gone missing on Saturday, November 20.
The Glassair III, a single-engine craft, was described as an “experimental” model.
It is unclear how it was known that the airplane crashed where it did, though based on available information, a report of the crash was relayed to the both the San Bernardino County Fire Department and Sheriff’s Department early Sunday morning. It took personnel with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s search and rescue team six hours of hiking in difficult terrain to reach the crash, after which a sheriff ’s helicopter was vectored to the location. While that aviation unit hovered above the crash location, a National Transportation Safety Board official was lowered to the ground with San Bernardino County Fire Department personnel and a sheriff’s investigation team.
The fire department personnel assisted in the effort by finding, securing and safely establishing landing zones for other aircraft involved in the operation.
The pilot’s remains were in the custody of the coroner’s office in San Bernardino on Tuesday, at which time work to positively identify the corpse was under way.
The pilot was the sole occupant of the plane.
The preliminary indication from the Federal Aviation Administration was that the crash was an “accident,” with pilot error the likely cause.
-Mark Gutglueck