ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME CASE
NUMBER CIVSB2411873,
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS: Petitioner: Terri A Parker, filed with this court for a decree changing names as follows: TERRI A PARKER to ELDER TJ LIPPENSKI, THE COURT ORDERS that all persons interested in this matter appear before this court at the hearing indicated below to show cause, if any, why the petition for change of name should not be granted. Any person objecting to the name changes described above must file a written objection that includes the reasons for the objection at least two court days before the matter is scheduled to be heard and must appear at the hearing to show cause why the petition should not be granted. If no written objection is timely filed, the court may grant the petition without a hearing.
Notice of Hearing:
Date: 06/11/2024, Time: 08:30 AM, Department: S31The address of the court is Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino, San Bernardino District-Civil Division, 247 West Third Street, San Bernardino, CA 92415, IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a copy of this order be published in the SBCS Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County California, once a week for four successive weeks prior to the date set for hearing of the petition.
Dated: 04/30/2024
Judge of the Superior Court: GILBERT G OCHOA
Published in the SBCS Rancho Cucamonga on 05/10/2024, 05/17/2024, 05/24/2024, 05/31/2024

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME CASE
NUMBER CIVSB2413259
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS: Petitioner JOYCE CHEONG filed with this court for a decree changing names as follows:
JOYCE CHEONG to JOYCE JOKO CHEONG FU
THE COURT ORDERS that all persons interested in this matter appear before this court at the hearing indicated below to show cause, if any, why the petition for change of name should not be granted. Any person objecting to the name changes described above must file a written objection that includes the reasons for the objection at least two court days before the matter is scheduled to be heard and must appear at the hearing to show cause why the petition should not be granted. If no written objection is timely filed, the court may grant the petition without a hearing.
Notice of Hearing:
Date: 06/18/2024
Time: 08:30 AM
Department: S28
The address of the court is Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino San Bernardino District-Civil Division 247 West Third Street, San Bernardino, CA 92415 IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a copy of this order be published in the San Bernardino County California, once a week for four successive weeks prior to the date set for hearing of the petition.
Filed: 05/07/2024
Mariah Mora, Deputy Clerk of the Court
Judge of the Superior Court: Gilbert G. Ochoa
Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on May 10, 17, 24 & 31, 2024.

Continue reading →

Over the objections of the father of one alleged victims, Judge Jon Ferguson late this morning accepted a plea settlement in the criminal case against 18-year-old Sebastion Bailey Villaseñor worked out by Deputy District Attorney Deborah Ploghaus and defense attorney Daniel DeLimon in which the five attempted murder charges filed against the youth were dropped in exchange for his guilty plea on a single county of intimidating a witness.

By Mark Gutglueck
The San Bernardino City Council voted on Wednesday evening to terminate City Manager Charles Montoya, more than six months after his October 2023 hiring. The vote to do so was made unanimously, citing no cause for the action.  Pursuant to Section 11.7 of his employment contract, his termination without cause entitles Montoya to collect a specified severance equivalent to 12 months of his base salary, or $325,000.
Montoya’s sacking comes less than four months after he unilaterally signed a letter of intent with the San Francisco-based bond underwriting firm Stifel Financial Services in preparation of the issuance of some $120 million in municipal bonds to be utilized for various improvement and infrastructure projects in the city, including the seismic retrofitting of City Hall, which has been shuttered since 2017.
Previously employed as the city manager of Watsonville in California and the town manager of Florence, Arizona, as the city manager of Avondale, Arizona, the finance director and treasurer with the Town of Castle Rock in Colorado, and the chief financial officer for both Centennial, Colorado and for Jefferson County, Colorado, Montoya was hired in October after a city manager recruitment effort in the spring and summer of 2023 that attracted 57 applicants. That headhunting effort was marred by multiple glitches, including some shifting attitudes with regard to ending the recruitment altogether and settling on hiring the interim city manager who had managed the city previously, Charles McNeely. McNeely’s early sentiment against taking the permanent position, followed by his change of heart to wanting to step out of retirement to again take on the top administrative role in the city he left in 2012, along with the commitment the council had made to not hire the interim city manager into the full-time post thwarted his belated candidacy.
An effort by Mayor Helen Tran to have the council accede to hiring her one-time boss when she had been the human resources director in West Covina, former West Covina City Manager David Carmany, for a time interrupted the city manager hiring process. The council as early as July seemed to have reached a consensus to hire Stockton City Manager Harry Black, but a lack of security with regard to the information entrusted to the firm the city hired to carry out the recruitment, Berkeley-based Koff & Associates, led to Black being identified as an applicant for the San Bernardino post, prompting him to withdraw from consideration. Continue reading →

City leaders are hopeful that Bobby Clemmer, who was just selected as the Victorville Fire Department’s eighth fire chief since 2017 and seventh since its 2019 resurrection as a municipal entity, will give the department some permanency in terms of its leadership.
Officials believe Clemmer, who grew up in the High Desert and is an Apple Valley High School graduate, will prove a good manager of fire safety and emergency medical response operations in Victorville.
Some are saying that the department, once considered the premier fire prevention agency in the Victor Valley, was cursed by the move more than a decade-and-a-half ago to dissolve it, despite the department’s revival five years ago.
Victorville, which in 1962 was the third of San Bernardino County desert cities to incorporate following the 1913 creation of Needles and the 1947 founding of Barstow as municipal entities, at that time was indirectly dependent upon the county fire department, which provided supervision of the team of volunteer on-call firefighters that composed the newly-formed city’s fire department, which had existed pre-incorporation in one form or another since 1926. In 1976, the city recruited Rudy Cabriales, a one-time border patrol agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service who had transitioned to a career as a firefighter in his hometown of Calexico before rising to become the fire chief of Coachella in Riverside County, to relocate to Victorville and become fire chief of an operation morphing from being a county-supervised team of volunteers to a professional department. Cabriales built that organization into what some considered to be a model fire protection agency. He retired after 21 years as fire chief in 1997.
In 2000, Cabriales was elected to the city council. Continue reading →

The City of Fontana has passed an ordinance imposing a monetary burden on political candidates of dubious constitutionality which will have the practical effect of benefiting the city’s well-fixed incumbent officeholders and disadvantaging those seeking to unseat them, some of the city’s residents and a civil rights/free speech lawyer have opined.
Going forward, those running for elective office, either in Fontana or for local, county, statewide or national office, will need to lay out a potentially refundable $1,000 deposit if they plan to display campaign signs within Fontana’s current 42.4-square mile city limits.
According to the resolution the city council approved on May 14 in putting the ordinance in place, the city is merely “implementing a campaign sign deposit,” which “has been identified as a measure to ensure accountability among candidates and reimburses the city for costs associated with removing non-compliant campaign signs.”
In the run-up toward the passage of the ordinance, according to the city, all legal requirements for previewing and the regulation and enforcement of the policy was met when “the city council called a public hearing for March 26, 2024, for informational purposes and to receive public comments on the proposed fees. Notice of the public hearing was given by publication in a newspaper of general circulation within the city.” Continue reading →

By Steve Loe
In September 2013 alarmed retired Forest Service employees (Gary Earney and myself), who had worked for the San Bernardino National Forest for over 50 years combined, raised a concern about the taking of so much water from Strawberry Creek, at an elevation above 5,000 feet in the San Bernardino Mountains, during the most severe drought in over 300 years. Nestlé was diverting all of the natural spring flow from the most productive springs in the watershed under a long-expired special use permit with few protective measures.
The public was being forced to ration water during this drought, while Nestlé was taking every drop from the springs that shared some of the same groundwater as the mountain communities of Crestline, Lake Gregory and Lake Arrowhead. Flows downstream to the San Bernardino Valley and Bunker Hill Basin for domestic use were being reduced by Nestlé while the Valley residents were rationing water.
Many threatened, endangered and sensitive Forest Service species are currently and were previously located in the Strawberry Creek drainage and are dependent on year-round water. The habitat for these species, including the southern rubber boa, the least Bell’s vireo, the southwestern willow flycatcher, the mountain yellow-legged frog, and the California spotted owl has been significantly degraded by Nestlé, its corporate predecessors and its corporate successor, BlueTriton, for over 90 years. Imperiled native fish species have been wiped out in large part due to removal of such large amounts of water in the summer months. Strawberry Creek was home to the Santa Ana speckled dace and likely the Santa Ana Sucker and the Arroyo Chub. Speckled dace were eliminated from the stream in 2003 in large part from spring water removal and lack of summer flows, after being there for thousands of years. Other more common species such as deer, bear, songbirds, rare plants and insects have been adversely affected by the spring and stream diversion.
Drying the vegetation below the communities by taking all the water from the upper watershed is increasing the fire threat to the communities. Continue reading →

18-year-old Rudy Garcia, Jr. has entered not guilty pleas to murder, attempted carjacking, attempted robbery, two attempted murder and two assault with a semi-automatic firearm charges stemming from the violent rampage he engaged in on Monday night, May 20 in Twentynine Palms, which left Robert McDonald, a Marine, dead.
McDonald was shot in the culmination of a flurry of acts that took place just after sunset that evening.
According to the sheriff’s department, Garcia was one of a group of four or five young men who were consuming alcohol and creating a disturbance in the vicinity of Alpine Road and Old Dale Road. Around 7:49 p.m., they belligerently confronted a resident, at which point the man testily responded, provoking Garcia, who produced a gun and fired several shots at the man but missed.
After the gunfire, the group scattered, with most of the others heading north and west and Garcia running southeast toward nearby Knott Sky Park. McDonald was parked in his vehicle with his dog near the dog park at the south end of Knott Sky Park near El Sol Avenue and Foothill Drive. Garcia came up on McDonald and, according to the sheriff’s department, “without provocation” and in an apparent effort to steal his car, shot the 35-year-old gunnery sergeant in the head. Continue reading →