The mystery and controversy over the April 26, 2021 death of Robert Shuey in Blue Jay has deepened, with law enforcement authorities restricting ever more tightly information with regard to exactly how his demise came about, while further information, speculation and conflicting accounts surface on an almost daily basis.
Most provocative of the emerging accounts is that Shuey, who had a criminal record literally as long as his arm, was serving as an informant, and was cooperating with at least one and perhaps several law enforcement agencies. That alone touched off a round of variegated speculation. Suggested by the circumstance was that Shuey had been killed by a local drug dealer in his orbit who has long been active in the San Bernardino Mountains communities, Johnny Garcia. It is also deemed possible that he might have been rubbed out by a Mexican drug cartel believed to be involved in the importation of methamphetamine into Southern California. Others think it is not beyond the realm of the possible that the highly volatile Shuey was killed by an element within the region’s law enforcement structure over concern that he possessed too much information about the oftentimes shady interlocking nature of San Bernardino County’s law enforcement establishment and both organized and solitary criminal elements, one that are subject to investigation, arrest, prosecution and which, nonetheless,  inexplicably coexist unmolested by the powers that be.
Shuey’s life was both daring and violent.
In his 30 years, Shuey was charged with 13 separate felonies and more than 20 misdemeanors stemming from 17 different cases/arrests in San Bernardino County alone. He was convicted on seven of those felonies and 11 of the misdemeanors. At the time of his death, two felony charges stemming from a single incident on May 21, 2020 were pending against him, those charges being first degree burglary and assault by means of force likely to cause great bodily injury.
Since turning 18 years old, Shuey was sentenced to prison or jail terms totaling seven years and 257 days.
Among the felony convictions Shuey sustained were for drug dealing, theft, assault, burglary and weapons charges. Several of his misdemeanor charges involved fighting or assault. At the time of his death, the district attorney’s office was considering filing charges, either as misdemeanors or felonies, relating to two physical assaults – indeed severe beatings – he had administered.
Shuey loved to fight and had engaged in far many more physical assaults than he had been criminally charged with. In recent years, he had bragged that he had put over a dozen people into the hospital.
In 2016, an inebriated Shuey beat a uniformed security guard working the grounds of the Lake Arrowhead Marina, Pedro Chavez, to a pulp, because he said, Chavez was flirting with his girlfriend.
Shuey’s savage attack on Alex Opmanis in January 2019 precipitated the July 2019 fatal shooting of Shuey’s friend, Sammy Davis. Indeed, Shuey’s infamy escalated as a result of his role as a catalyst in the death of Davis, 28. Shuey fled the scene after the shooting, gathering up what some believe was crucial evidence that might have served to exonerate Opmanis. Shuey’s involvement in Davis’s death came to public light in the aftermath of Opmanis’s arrest and the filing of murder charges against him.
The events which triggered the July 11, 2019 shooting of Davis went back some six months prior to that. In January 2019, Opmanis, then 27, who had previously made the acquaintance of Shuey through their mutual interest in dirt bike riding, was at the Dogwood bar in Blue Jay. Shuey, who lived not too distant from the bar, invited Opmanis, who had been drinking heavily, to come to his home. Opmanis at some point vomited while he was at Shuey’s house, after which a fight ensued. Opmanis was beaten severely and required hospitalization as a result, losing a portion of his vision in his left eye from the trauma Shuey had inflicted. The doctors treating Opmanis considered it necessary to insert a plate in his head because a portion of his skull had collapsed.
Encouraged by his family, Opmanis filed a civil suit against Shuey. The filing of the suit antagonized Shuey, an avid motorcyclist and gang member with a reputation for stabbing people. During the February-to-June 2019 timeframe, Shuey made repeated threats against Opmanis and his family, on occasion in public places and situations. In reaction, Opmanis obtained a handgun, a Glock 27 .40 caliber, which he routinely carried in his vehicle, a black 2000 Mercedes SUV.
On July 11, 2019 Shuey and another avid motorcyclist, Shane Codman, then 28, had ridden their motorcycles down from the mountain communities first to Corona and then to a “Bike Night” in Riverside, where they met up with Sammy Davis around 6 p.m., in the course of which they were consuming alcohol. The three left Riverside around 8 p.m., riding their motorcycles to return to the mountains. They intended to stop at Goodwin’s Market in Crestline to purchase hamburger and beer before going to Shuey’s home in Blue Jay for a late night barbecue.
Meanwhile, Opmanis had gone to Goodwin’s Market, located on Lake Gregory Drive in Crestline. An external security camera at Goodwin’s Market operated by Scottsdale, Arizona-based Clear Protection Services, Inc. captured a video of the confrontation between Davis and Opmanis, footage which indicated that Shuey at one point moved in to assist Davis in administering a thrashing to Opmanis, and then backed away to use his cellphone to capture a video of Davis pounding on Opmanis. Ultimately, Opmanis managed to retrieve the Glock from his vehicle, with which he fatally shot Davis at the 9:14 p.m. point on the Goodwin’s Market video.
The video shows Codman and Shuey mounting their motorcycles and taking their leave of the parking lot after the shooting, but not before Shuey gathered several items on the ground near the scene of the shooting.
Opmanis is yet awaiting trial in the shooting of Davis, who had spent a considerable portion of the previous decade in prison, having been released shortly before the shooting incident after serving a sentence for assault.
It was anticipated that Shuey was going to be called to testify during Opmanis’s trial. He was considered to be a key witness for both the prosecution and the defense. There have been indications that Mark Geragos and Alexandra Kazarian, who are representing Opmanis, intend to make an issue at trial of the severe beating Opmanis had suffered at the hands of Shuey roughly six months before the shooting of Davis, as well as Shuey’s participation in the assault upon Opmanis on July 11, 2019 just seconds before Davis was fatally shot to establish that Opmanis had a reasonable fear for his safety that justified the discharge of his weapon.
Shuey was yet facing the charges of burglary together with assault with a deadly weapon resulting in great bodily injury relating to the incident he was involved in on May 21 of last year in Blue Jay. Shuey was arrested by San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies working out of the Twin Peaks sheriff’s substation in the aftermath of that incident.
Shuey had drug-related convictions including drug-trafficking, in particular dealing methamphetamine. There is indication that he was involved in the importation of methamphetamine manufactured in Mexico and that he was associating with a drug dealer working in the San Bernardino Mountains communities, Johnny Garcia. Garcia was formerly involved in the distribution of methamphetamine and more recently began trafficking in fentanyl. Unverified reports are that there were six fentanyl-related deaths in the mountains between early April and mid-May of this year.
There have been contradictory versions of how Shuey died. Initially, it was reported that he had been killed inside his home by a single gunshot to his face. That version was supported by the initial entry into the sheriff’s call/dispatch log referencing the matter as a 187, that is, a showing that the sheriff’s department considered the matter to be a homicide, Penal Section 187, specifically murder, defined as the intentional killing of another. In a highly irregular development, the sheriff’s department’s call/dispatch log was altered to reference the matter as a “DB,” i.e., a dead body. An indication that the department initially considered the matter to be a homicide consists of a screen shot the Sentinel possesses showing the log as it was originally posted prior to its alteration.
More recently, the unofficial story circulating in the mountain communities is that Shuey died at his own hand, either purposefully as a suicide or unintentionally from a drug overdose.
The Sentinel is reliably informed that Shuey expired on the night of April 26 within his home in Blue Jay. The home was locked, and inside it was his now-nearly four-year-old daughter. Sheriff’s department investigators did not arrive on the scene or gain access to the house until the morning of April 27, the Sentinel has learned, which is contrary to a previous report in the Sentinel that investigators arrived at the home on the night of April 26.
Moreover, Shuey’s three-year-old daughter was apparently in the house at the time of his death, and she remained there with her father’s corpse for at least ten and perhaps more than 12 hours until sheriff’s personnel arrived. Further, the Sentinel is told, when investigators arrived and took stock of the situation, they arranged to have a child psychologist/child and family services expert speak to the girl, and she said that the night before a man she did not know had come to the house to speak with her father, and that her father had told her to hide before he engaged with that individual.
This emerging information would seem to indicate that the initial account of Shuey’s death, by homicide, is accurate and that the later suggestion that he had expired by suicide or by an unintended drug overdose is inoperative. The sheriff’s department has not officially embraced the suicide or overdose explanation, but its actions would suggest that it wants or at least previously wanted the public to assume the matter to be a suicide or overdose. The alteration of the call/dispatch log to indicate department personnel were responding to the report of a dead body might be consistent with an effort to prevent any possible suspect in the case from being alerted to specifics that might complicate a de facto homicide investigation.
Of note is that earlier the department stated that it was awaiting the result of toxicology tests. Inquiries about the outcome of those tests by the Sentinel and others have yet to yield a response from the department, more than six weeks after Shuey’s death.
Speculation has run rampant as to what actually happened to Shuey.
If, in fact, he was serving as an informant and he was involved with a Mexican cartel importing methamphetamine to California or if he was involved in Garcia’s drug dealing operation, that might explain his death.
There are contrary indications as to whether Shuey was an informant or not.
Despite his multiple arrests and convictions, Shuey appeared to have dodged having to serve a great deal of time in prison. His accumulated sentences over the years on his convictions totaled more than seven years. Nevertheless, his actual time incarcerated was well under half of that.
In this way, Shuey seemed to be leading a charmed life, oftentimes not being held accountable for what he had done. Within the district attorney’s office, one prosecutor previously expressed frustration at not being able to put Shuey away for a decent interim, at least a decade or more, to keep him off the streets until he had aged to the point where the edge was taken off his aggressiveness and his propensity for violence, and those he was continuously hurting had some measure of protection or isolation from him. With Shuey’s demise, that is a moot point now, but the prosecutor at one point openly stated that the way in which Shuey remained at large was inexplicable to her.
Shuey’s ability to minimize the time he spent in captivity, nevertheless, might not have been a result of his cooperation with law enforcement. His attorney, Gary Wenkle Smith, on at least two occasions kept him insulated from the often rough-edged wheels of justice through skillful lawyering and outmaneuvering the district attorney’s office.
Smith told the Sentinel that it was highly unlikely that Shuey was an informant or cooperating with law enforcement authorities in any way.
“I can’t imagine Rob being a rat,” Smith said. “I don’t respect informants and I don’t represent them. More than that, the sheriff’s department had arrested him and he had been charged by the district attorney with assault with great bodily injury. They weren’t going to dismiss that. They were planning on going for it. If he was an informant, he would not have been arrested at all. They would have found some way to not charge him.”
Smith said, “I knew Rob his entire life, from the time he was born. I didn’t see this one coming. He was known to be violent. There’s no hiding that. Last year, he got busy with some guy who tried to steal his motorcycle. In the motorcycle world, if you steal someone’s bike, that can be a death sentence. That’s what comes with that. In this case, the guy got his ass kicked. But to say Rob was an informant, all the signs are contrary to that. I would never believe it.”
Meanwhile, there has long been a plethora of individuals, victims of Shuey’s violence or criminal activity, who might have held a deadly grudge against him. The Sentinel this week was regaled with the tale of a man who had recently been jailed for a short period of time on a relatively minor crime and then died after his release from the county jail. During his brief incarceration, the Sentinel was told, the man had lamented to his fellow inmates how Shuey had beaten his son, nearly to death, and was not being held to account for it. Furthermore, Shuey’s alleged involvement with Garcia, the methamphetamine-turned-fentanyl-dealer whose product is widely believed to have resulted in a wave of overdose deaths in the San Bernardino Mountains communities recently, could have induced some bereaved entity to make sure that Shuey paid the ultimate price for the misery he had doled out.
-Mark Gutglueck

Four-and-one-half years after the voters in California passed Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, the attitudes of most of San Bernardino County’s political leadership has not caught up with the spirit the outcome of that vote embodied.
For more than a century, marijuana being used for its intoxicative effect was illegal in the Golden State, and tens of thousands of people had gone to prison for growing it, possessing it, smoking it or trafficking in it during that time. In response to marijuana’s legalization with the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016, San Bernardino County’s governmental structure and that of its two incorporated towns and and eighteen of its twenty incorporated cities resisted going along with the new trend. Only five cities made any shift, with San Bernardino, Adelanto and Needles consenting to allow the plant to be commercially grown and altered into edible and otherwise applicable palliatives and salves, distributed and sold at both the retail and wholesale levels. Barstow has made preparations to permit sales. Hesperia has allowed businesses distributing and delivering the product to exist within its confines.
The continuing prohibition of marijuana and its commercialization elsewhere in San Bernardino has resulted in those looking to profit by cultivating and selling it, either under or outside of the regulatory schemes governments are permitted to engage in under Proposition 64, to try their hand at becoming marijuana cultivators or entrepreneurs. Recognizing that there is a tremendous appetite for the drug and that the collective resolve of San Bernardino County officials together with officials in the towns of Apple Valley and Yucca Valley and the cities of Chino Hills, Chino, Montclair, Ontario, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, Rialto, Colton, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland, Redlands, Yuciapa, Big Bear, Twentynine Palms and Victorville to prevent its production and restrict its availability is artificially boosting its price, daring indivduals have undertaken to cultivate it in small medium and large and gargantuan quantities in many places where they believe they can do so undetected. As a consequence, unlicensed marijuana farms over the last several years have flourished in the more remote areas of the county, in particular the vast reaches of San Bernardino County’s Mojave Desert.
Put upon by these operations, residents in those areas have made objections to them. Beginning earlier this year, the sheriff’s department has stepped up its enforcement and eradication efforts against those enterprises.
While the department has succeeded in raiding dozens of operations and uprooting literally tens of thousands plants, the sheriff’s department’s energetic efforts in this regard have resulted in few substantive criminal prosecutions. This has created some degree of controversy.
Sheriff John McMahon came before the Apple Valley Town Council at its meeting on Tuesday this week to offer what he said was an “update” of his department’s actions, and explain the legal limitations and challenges his department faces in carrying out its efforts.
“We’ve heard from residents primarily in the more rural and unincorporated areas that are feeling the impact of these illegal marijuana grows,” McMahon said. “You’re fortunate in the town, and I know you have a great ordinance in place to penalize financially those that are growing illegally. Code enforcement and our folks here work very closely with one another and your primary issue here is indoor grows. [There are] very few outdoor grows in the Town of Apple Valley, and you’re really aggressive in making sure that you send a message that they’re not allowed. What’s happened in the unincorporated area and the more rural areas of the county is we saw a number of grows start poppin’ up here and there, and I will tell you, they grew faster than we could keep up with. We have one marijuana enforcement team in the county made up of five personnel. There’s just simply no way they can keep up with it, although last year, we did a special operation called Operation Weedwhacker with a bunch of folks from other parts of the county that came together, and they did serve 400 search warrants on illegal marijuana cultivation operations in the unincorporated county area, and we were able to take those grows down.”
McMahon said, “We’re at a point now where there’s about 860 grows that we’re aware of and ready to go after that were illegally being operated, and there’s probably at least another 200 if not more that we just haven’t got to yet and haven’t identified, don’t have coordinates for or addresses for. So, it’s over a 1,000, I guarantee you, throughout the county. It starts in Twentynine Palms and goes completely across the desert through Johnson Valley, Lucerne Valley, through the north part of the desert here, all the way over to Phelan, Pinon Hills and just keeps rollin’ over right into L.A. County. You may have seen some news coverage. LA. County’s got the same problem that we do, and they’re doing a big operation, and we’re assisting them, and ultimately they’re going to assist us here in the next month or so with some other grows that we have here in our part of the county.”
McMahon said his department is scrambling to address the issue but is overwhelmed with the enormity of the cultivation activity that is ongoing.
“The primary reason for these illegal grows is just simply the money and the lack of consequences,” he said. “So, oftentimes what’s happening is these people are buying a plot of land, which oftentimes is relatively cheap out in the middle of nowhere, and you can describe it as in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you fly it with a helicopter and you’ll see lights and a grow way out where you would think there’d never be anything. They’re sinking a well, generally, if there’s water available. They’re getting a permit to sink a well. They’re hiring a well-driller. I was in Newberry Springs not long ago, and a well-driller actually got up and addressed the crowd, told us exactly what he’s doing, and he’s sinking wells. He’s getting permits just like everybody else. And those folks that buy that piece of property, sink a well legally, they’re entitled to whatever the acre-feet are deeded to that piece of property, and in some cases in Newberry Springs, it’s ten acre-feet a year. So, they have that right to use that water. And then they set up the hoop houses, and they start growin’ marijuana, and they turn it in about three or four months, and they start another crop. Under Prop 64, not a lot of people caught it, but almost at that last page of that proposition on the ballot was converting, growing, commercially growing or cultivation of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor. So, we catch somebody at one of those grows, they get prosecuted for a misdemeanor and a $500 fine. All we can do is take down the plants and haul those away, because that’s the criminal activity. The hoop house, all the other things we see there are not criminal in nature and have to be followed up by code enforcement. And to be quite honest, the county has limited resources as it relates to code enforcement.”
Current laws as defined under Proposition 64 has restricted government’s ability to deal with the expansion of marijuana production, McMahon said, opining that there is a need for draconian legislation.
“So, we’re tryin’ to work with the county to come up with an ordinance that will help give us the authority and certainly the deterrent to prevent some of this,” the sheriff said. “It’s going to have to be similar to what you guys have where you fine people. Needles has the same thing. The county’s going to have to develop an ordinance, and they’re workin’ on it with all the department heads, to fine these guys that are growin’, and whether it be a thousand dollars a plant, or $5,000 a plant, or $10,000 is up for the county to decide. But the misdemeanor and $500 fine is not going to deter these guys. It’s just not going to do it. They’re going to continue to grow. When we take it down, they either move to another location, or they wait for a month or two, replant and they regrow on the same site. And so, it’s just tough to keep up with the increase. There’s so much money to be made. So, the only way we’re going to deal with it is an ordinance that fines them, and then if they don’t pay, then they lien the property and, you know the rest of the story. So, I think that will be effective.”
McMahon said a move in that direction is already being made.
“Today, [Third District] Supervisor [Dawn] Rowe at the board of supervisors [meeting], introduced a resolution to send to Sacramento to change it from a misdemeanor to a felony again,” McMahon said. “Apparently that can be done in the legislature with a two-thirds vote, even though it was voted on by the people. So, that’s what they were talkin’ about this morning at the board of supervisors. Assemblymember Thurston Smith as well as Tom Lackey both came out, rode in the helicopter with our folks and videoed the grows in the desert, and I think they were just as amazed as anybody as to the number and the size. They took that video back to Sacramento, and I think they’re going to use that to try to help get it reversed, and change it back to a felony. With any luck at all that will happen. It may slow down some of it, as well.”
With or without a new law, McMahon said, his department is going to maintain its current efforts, and will indeed intensify them, perhaps as much as five-fold.
“But in the meantime, today at the board of supervisors meeting, they authorized additional funding for us,” he said. “Historically, they’ve provided a million dollars in crime suppression money for us to use to address gang-related, violent crime, whatever it might be. Today they authorized $4 million, so we’re going to use it for that traditional criminal activity with gangs and violent crime and that type of thing, but also use it to ramp up our marijuana enforcement. We’re going to go from one five-member team to five teams. We’ll spread throughout the entire county, and just do more of the search warrants, and try to keep up with this ever-increasing illegal cultivation.”
McMahon said, “As you are probably aware, there’s only two places in our county that cultivation of marijuana is legal, other than [growing six plants for] personal use, and that’s Needles and Adelanto.”
McMahon omitted mention of the City of San Bernardino, which has transitioned to allowing all order of marijuana and cannabis-related operations to function within its jurisdiction.
“Adelanto has the same issue in the surrounding area and a little bit inside the city limits, illegal grows as well,” McMahon said. “That’s in direct conflict and competition with the legal growers that are paying taxes and paying fees to the city to operate. It is obviously impacting their business, as well. Needles sees the same thing. Needles has an ordinance where they fine, I believe it is $10,000 a plant, if it’s an illegal cultivation operation. That seems to be effective in Needles and seems to be working. So, with any luck at all we can do something like that at the county level, also. So, just to remind everybody, cultivation or growing of marijuana for personal use is legal under Prop 64. You can have six plants for personal use. You can have one ounce of finished product for personal use. The grows that we’re seeing in the rural areas and unincorporated areas where there’s hoop houses and 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 plants: absolutely illegal. Not authorized by the county, and its illegal if it’s not authorized by the county. It’s still the misdemeanor section. That’s the challenge for us. But in the meantime, while we’re waiting for the ordinance at the county and while we’re waiting to see if they change it from a misdemeanor to a felony as it relates to the prosecution piece, we will continue to do everything we can to take these down. It’s a serious quality of life issue. There’s water issues. [There are] those that are stealing water – which is happening – [and] those that are buying water. [In] Lucerne Valley, when I was there at a couple of meetings, there [were] people at the meeting who were selling water to the growers. I don’t believe that’s illegal. I’m not sure who enforces the water rules, but I don’t think that’s illegal. They can sell water from their well if they want to. So, they’re doin’ it, which is continuing to feed the need of the growers. So, that may be a challenge, maybe something they can deal with in that regard, and ultimately work closely with the DA’s office. And there’s some environmental crimes I think the DA’s office is looking into. Obviously, they’re using pesticides and they’re using fertilizer, which potentially could be percolating into the groundwater. I don’t know much about that, but they’re working with the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to see if there’s something they can do in that regard.”
McMahon said, “We’re trying everything we can, but we’ll keep the pressure on. We’ll continue to take these grows down. We have the additional personnel that will be coming July 1. We’ll keep the pressure on and do what we can to try to control this.”
McMahon indicated there were further criminal issues that sprang from the illicit marijuana cultivation enterprises.
“In Newberry Springs, we’ve had two incidents where the guys that are at the grows are armed,” McMahon said. “They’re protecting the grows. They’re carrying rifles and they are confronting people on the road, on the dirt road, trying to figure out who they are and, additionally, they fired at our folks twice. One case, a round went through the windshield of one of our patrol cars. We traced it back and it was an armed guy at one of the illegal grows. Now, I don’t believe he was shooting at the cop car because he knew it was a cop car, a deputy. I think he was worried more about being robbed. They’re really not that afraid of us, because they know that the penalty and prosecution is so small. They’re worried about some bandits coming and stealing from them. So, that’s why they have armed guards there. So, that’s part of the issue.”
Furthermore, McMahon said, the cultivation operations involve “Trash, dust, the water trucks goin’ back and forth. Now, when we did our operation in Lucerne Valley, we partnered up with the CHP. They brought their commercial enforcement guys out. They pulled over all of those trucks haulin’ water, most of which were overweight, unlicensed. The drivers certainly wasn’t licensed to be carrying the weight they were carrying. So, they dealt with that on that side of it as a commercial enforcement officer and we dealt with the grows itself, taking ‘em down. Labor intensive, but it’s important. With any luck at all, we’ll get some of those changes that I spoke about. Maybe with that additional prosecution and penalties for those guys that are growin’, we can slow this down. It’s nearly every community in the rural area of the county, and we’re not the only county that’s having the same problem. If you read the paper, you can see it’s happening in Siskiyou County. It’s happening in Kern County. It’s happening in Fresno County. Anywhere where there’s a large amount of open space where they can set up a growing operation, they’re doing it. It’s simply a lot of money being made.”

Though the residents of Manhattan across the continent or those living in Chicago on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan would laugh at the thought that the Inland Empire is home to high rise buildings, and dismiss most of the structures in this region as falling below the standard for mid-rises, by local standards there are a smattering of tall buildings scattered about 20,105-square mile San Bernardino County.
The county seat, San Bernardino, accounts for the most tall buildings in the county and claims the title of having the greatest number of overall stories, as well, along with four of the six tallest structures, although not the actual tallest building. Loma Linda, Redlands, Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario and Victorville have a few tall buildings, and in Upland, where in recent years some three story residential units have sprung up, a seven-story building is to grace the skyline near the 210 Freeway in the not-too-distant future.
In recent weeks and days there have been developments with regard to existing and proposed high rises that merit public attention.
In April, the Redlands Planning Commission made a recommendation that Village Partners Ventures LLC be allowed to transform the largely vacant 11.15-acre Redlands Mall, which formerly hosted the Harris’ department store, into a melange of mixed-uses including residential, retail, office professional quarters, restaurants, recreational facilities and a six-story parking structure around a pedestrian plaza and swimming pool, with multi-story residential buildings of three, four and five vertical levels.
In September, the grassroots group Friends of Redlands, working in conjunction with Redlands for Responsible Growth Management, began gathering signatures to force a vote on what the allowable height limit on Redlands buildings is to be. The proposed Friends of Redlands’ initiative calls for disallowing buildings taller than two stories next to single-story homes without the consent of the owner of the single-story home, limiting the height of buildings downtown, which involves the University of Redlands Transit Villages Area, to no more than 50 feet, and the permitting of buildings to a height of no more than 62 feet – tantamount to four stories – in the New York Street/ESRI Transit Village Area. The initiative would further require that the city council unanimously approve making any density intensifications on projects, and it would layer greater parking provision requirements on developers seeking project approvals. To qualify the initiative for the ballot in 2022, the petitioners needed ten percent of Redlands’ 42,000 voters to affix their signatures to the ballot application. To force the election to be held this year, within 109 days of the requisite number of signatures being verified, Friends of Upland needs 15 percent of the city’s voters – 6,409 – to sign the petition.
On Monday, June 7, 2021, representatives with Friends of Redlands and Redlands for Responsible Growth Management, including 95-year-old former Redlands Mayor Bill Cunningham, wheeled into Redlands City Hall three huge boxes containing petitions calling for a special election to stop tall and dense development to which 7,715 signatures were affixed. Those petitions were turned over to City Clerk Jeanne Donaldson.
One of the activists opposing development in Redlands, John Berry, told the Sentinel, “stopping hi-rise development is a huge — and visceral! — issue throughout Southern California. Since we started collecting signatures in September, we have heard from many residents from many SoCal cities who have expressed their frustrations and battles with developers and city councils ruining their cities. Only because of Redlands’ Bill Cunningham fighting these battles since 1978 did Redlands ever become the city we love. Without him, Redlands would have become just another SoCal condo canyon city. Many people who’ve signed told us they moved to Redlands for its charm and small-town feel.”
Donaldson is to count and verify the signatures to determine if the referendum on high rises will take place this year or next year.
Meanwhile, the City of Redlands, which for years has been seeking an economical way to deal with the overcrowded quarters in its police and fire departments, has arranged to purchase, for $500,000, an option on the Redlands Federal Bank Building built in 1981.
Reportedly, the option will lock in the city’s opportunity to purchase the tallest building currently in Redlands, located at 300 East State Street downtown, for $16 million. The half million dollars paid to secure the option will go toward the purchase if the acquisition is made before the option’s expiration. The building is large enough to house both the fire department administration and all of the police department, as well as parts or all of some other city departments.
In nearby Loma Linda, officials with the Loma Linda University Medical Center are striving toward securing the certificate of occupancy for the six additional stories that have been constructed on the existing medical center building, originally built with 11 floors in 1967. The current project has been ongoing since 2016. It is anticipated patients will be accepted into the new hospital quarters by September 2021, if all issues with regard to occupancy permits are resolved in a timely manner.
Existing facilities housed in the current medical center structure’s round towers will be moved into the six new floors. This means an expansive new operating room suite and a significant increase in the number of intensive-care beds. Brand new and state-of-the-art cardiovascular labs, including ones providing all needed equipment and facilities for heart surgeries, will be housed in the expansion area, along with other surgical, perioperative and pre-operative suites.
Paralleling the expansion of the project is an upgrading of the hospital’s seismic system, carried out by Turner Construction Company of New York City. The building foundation is now set upon 126 base isolators, huge springs which will allow the building to sway in what is predicated to be a 10.4 Richter Scale earthquake without buckling, collapsing or sustaining structural damage that would compromise the building’s integrity. The most intensive earthquake on record was one in Chile in 1960 that reached 9.4 on the Richter Scale.
At 17 total stories, of which 16 are above ground to a height of 267 feet, the Loma Linda University Medical Center building is now the tallest hospital in earthquake-prone California, and San Bernardino County’s tallest building.
In the City of San Bernardino, six-story City Hall remains vacant after nearly five years. It is unclear whether city officials there will seek to reclaim it by engaging in a seismic hardening of the facility or raze it.
In the early 1970s, San Bernardino officials committed to building a new City Hall in Downtown San Bernardino, on property reclaimed from a longstanding historic section of the city, where nearly a score of buildings had been demolished to undertake an urban renewal effort that was to include government-sponsored capital improvements entailing a new civic center.
César Pelli, a highly accomplished Argentine American architect who emigrated to the United States in 1952, married Diana Balmori, a landscape and urban designer, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1964, was commissioned to design the edifice. Pelli was one of the world’s leading architects, particular with regard to designing majestic buildings as well as some of the world’s tallest structures, including the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which were for a time the world’s highest buildings, as well as the World Financial Center complex in downtown Manhattan, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the Sao Paulo Corporate Towers, Xuzhou Central Plaza in Xuzhou, the Unicredit Building in Milan, and scores of others around the world.
In the early morning of February 9, 1971, the San Fernando Earthquake, also known as the Sylmar Earthquake, occurred in the west foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The unanticipated thrust earthquake had a moment magnitude of 6.5 or 6.7 on the Richter Scale. The quake did damage to the San Fernando Valley and other densely populated areas north of central Los Angeles, causing several buildings to collapse. This demonstrated the inadequacy of the building standards that had been put into place in California following the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933. California lawmakers acted quickly to develop legislation related to seismic safety, tightening construction standards.
Already at that point, architects and engineers had introduced the concept of incorporating rollers into the foundation of high rise buildings, which would allow the foundation to roll or shift with a seismic disturbance. Two decades later, rollers would be replaced by massive vertical springs in the foundations of large buildings. But San Bernardino City Hall had neither of those features. What is more, the contractor on the San Bernardino City Hall project would utilize pillars composed primarily of concrete, nearly a dozen of them, to support the building.
Rather than hold off on the construction of the building until the State of California formulated new standards based on data available from the Symar quake, San Bernardino city officials, rather irresponsibly, rushed to complete the city hall project before those standards were mandated by law.
Some 43 years after the completion of the project, then San Bernardino City Manager Mark Scott was informed that it is anticipated that a 7.0 magnitude or greater earthquake is likely to occur in Southern California within the foreseeable future. If such an event were to emanate from a point proximate to San Bernardino, Scott was told, the concrete pillars supporting the six-story City Hall structure would would be likely to powderize, and the building would collapse. Out of what he said was an abundance of caution, Scott ordered the building to be cleared of city operations. It has remained vacant ever since.
In Upland, developer Jeff Burum is working toward the completion of a seven-story residential structure. That project is not likely to be completed prior to 2025.

Dominic Vaca

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Sentinel 06-04-21

06-04-21 Legal Notice Supplement