Leaders who as the dregs… flow through public scorn as mud from a muddy spring, rulers who neither see nor feel nor know but leechlike to their ebbing power cling ‘til they drop without a blow … as a two-edged sword to all who wield.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

With the close of 2025, the San Bernardino County Establishment finds itself on the eve of what is to due to play out in 2026 as a major test of its political credibility.
Embedded in the convoluted mishmash of competing principles and the self-interest of current officeholders is whether those who have the upper hand at the moment are going to reverse course and in spirit deviate from the principle their party has long stood for so they can extend their own personal control of the machinery of local government or whether they will stand down and pass the scepter to the next generation.
At the heart of the matter is the political machine that the county’s Republicans constructed some six decades ago and which remains to the present the dominant force on the San Bernardino County political scene. Of parallel importance is the concept of term limits, which originated in San Bernardino County and elsewhere in California as a means by which Republicans hoped to hold in check the growing influence, hold and hold and now the dominance and monopoly the Democrats have over politics in the Golden State. Through attentiveness and energy, hard work, determination and vigilance and, increasingly, sleight-of-hand and bareknuckled exploitation of the lack of coordination on the part of their counterpart Democrats, the Republicans have maintained their ascendancy in San Bernardino County.
In 1936, Harry Sheppard, a former railroad executive and the president and owner of the King’s Beverage Company of Los Angeles, at the age of 51 ran for Congress as a New Deal Democrat, defeating the Republican incumbent, Sam Collins in the race to represent the California’s 19th Congressional, encompassing the lion’s share of San Bernardino County. This shifted political control over San Bernardino County into the hands of the Democrats, who remained in charge for three decades. Sheppard served as San Bernardino County’s primary Congressman in the House of Representatives from January 1937 until January 1965, representing California’s 19th Congressional District in the 1930s, the state’s 21st Congressional District in the 1940s, its 27th Congressional District in the 1950s and the state’s 33rd Congressional District in the 1960s. He likely would have remained in office beyond that but for a major faux pas he engaged in during January 1964 when, over a two-day period, he made 27 separate $10,000 deposits into 27 different banks and savings and loan institutions in Washington, D.C., and communities surrounding the nation’s capital in Virginia and Maryland, in each case one cent below the mandatory IRS reporting threshold that banking institutions were bound by. Reports pertaining to the deposits reached the nation’s newspapers. He claimed that he was merely making prudent deposits of his life savings, which he had formerly kept in a safe deposit box and in his bedroom closet. Though he was at that point the dean of California’s Congressional Delegation, one of the two most powerful members of both the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee and considered the most influential member of the CIA Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, instantaneously he was no longer an asset to President Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats but rather a liability. On February 20, 1964, he announced he was retiring from Congress after the completion of that term. He was succeeded in January 1965 by another Democrat, Kenneth Dyal, but the financial scandal Sheppard had embroiled himself in greatly damaged the Democratic Party and in 1966, Dyal was replaced by Jerry Pettis a Republican, who came into office in the same election cycle when Ronald Reagan was elected governor.
Over the next four decades, San Bernardino County remained a Republican stronghold, even as by the dawning of the Third Millennium the state as a whole fell back under the sway of the Democratic Party. Despite the state’s leftward trend, right up until 2009, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats in San Bernardino County. During the gradual GOP declension throughout the state, the Republicans had latched onto a number of approaches and strategies in an effort to remain, if not dominant, relevant politically. One of these included championing term limits, preventing New Age Democrats from becoming entrenched in office over the course of multiple decades in the way that Democrats such as Sheppard had in the middle of the 20th Century. Republican politicians such as Governor Pete Wilson and one-time Assemblyman and Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum campaigned vigorously for the passage of term limits on statewide office, while Democrats, perhaps most notably Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, opposed them. The Republicans’ calculation was that members of their party, supported by wealthy large corporate and smaller entrepreneurial interests, stood a better chance of being elected to office if they were not opposed by Democrats who could remain in office decade after decade while accumulating and compounding donations coming their way through the advange of incumbency.
In San Bernardino County, term limits were championed by County Supervisor Paul Biane, who acceded to both vice chairman and chairman of the board of supervisors while simultaneously serving as vice chairman and chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. In 2006, Biane sponsored Measure P, which, while raising the salary members of the board of supervisors received by over $50,000 from $99,000 yearly to $151,000, imposed on them being limited to three four-year terms in office.
In 2009, the number of registered Democrats in San Bernardino County eclipsed the registered Democrats. In the more than 16 years since, the Democrats have widened that registration advantage. At present, 479,303 or 38.7 percent of the 1,238,861 total voters in the county are registered as Democrats, while 380,694 or 30.7 percent identify as Republicans, with 272,051 or 22 percent declaring on party affiliation and the remaining 8.6 percent registered with the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freed or other more obscure parties.
Despite the Democrats 8 percent registration advantage over the Republicans, Republicans remain as the dominant party in San Bernardino County politically. In California, all of the constitutional state offices from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner to state controller in California are occupied by Democrats. In the state’s lower legislative house, the California Assembly, 60 of 80 members are Democrats. In the upper house, the California Senate, 30 of 40 members are Democrats. In California’s Congressional Delegation, both Senators are Democrats and of the state’s 52 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 43 are Democrats and nine are Republicans. San Bernardino County bucks the statewide trend significantly. While five of its eight state senators are Democrats, that is because large portions of three of those districts lie in neighboring counties dominated by the Democrats. Five of the district’s ten assembly members are Republicans. Two of the district’s four members of Congress are Republicans. In seventeen of the county’s 22 cities and two incorporated towns, Republicans hold a majority of the council seats. Four of the five members of the county board of supervisors are Republicans.
In 2017, the Red Brennan Group, a nonpartisan government reform committee, sought to place a series of reform initiatives relating to San Bernardino County government on the June 2018 ballot. The board of supervisors effectively used its control over the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters and the office of county counsel – the county’s stable of in-house attorneys – to administratively and legally block those initiatives, despite the Red Brennan Group having obtained a sufficient number of voters’ signatures to qualify the measures for a vote. Despite later determinations that the county’s bureaucratic maneuvering was legally invalid, the delays that were created as a consequence of the challenges succeeded in keeping the measures off the 2018 ballot because the printing deadline for the ballot had elapsed. Despite that setback, the Red Brennan Group redoubled its efforts and once again qualified another reform measure for the November 2020 election, one that redefined the county supervisors’ posts as part time ones, reduced the yearly total remuneration for the supervisor position to $60,000 and imposed on them a single four-year term in office. Despite legal and administrative efforts by the supervisors, the county’s administrators and the office of county counsel, the Red Brennan Group succeeded in gathering sufficient signatures to place the measure on the ballot. Designated as Measure K, it passed on November 3, 2020 with 516,184 votes or 66.84 percent in favor and 256,098 or 33.16 percent opposed.
Shortly after the measure passed, the board of supervisors took the extraordinary step of directing the office of county counsel and retaining three attorneys – Bradley Hertz, James Sutton and Nicholas Sanders of the Los Angeles-based Sutton Law Firm – to file on its behalf a lawsuit against its own employee, Lynna Monell, who was the clerk of the board, in an effort to legally block Measure K from being implemented. The filing of the suit resulted in both the salary reduction and term limit provisions of Measure K being put on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
Then-County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and then-San Bernardino County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez arranged to have the lawsuit maneuvered into the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Don Alvarez, who was known to be both beholden and sympathetic to the county’s governmental hierarchy.
Judge Alvarez made a finding invalidating the entirety of Measure K on the grounds that its secondary provision limiting supervisors to a single four-year term was unconstitutional and that the term limitation element of the measure was not separable from its salary and benefit reductions. This, Judge Alvarez ruled, rendered Measure K unenforceable.
The Red Brennan Group appealed Judge Alvarez’s finding and obtained a ruling from the 4th District Court of Appeal in the summer of 2022 reversing his invalidation of the measure. The lawsuit challenging Measure K bought the board of supervisors two years of time, during which the county government placed on the November 2022 ballot what it represented as its own government reform initiative, Measure D, which restored each individual supervisor’s total annual compensation to roughly $255,000 to $275,000 – roughly 80 percent of what is provided to a Superior Court judge – while imposing on the supervisors term limits of three four-year terms, essentially equivalent to what had been the wage-scale and number-of-years-in-office rules that had been in place before Measure K’s passage. Measure D passed by a margin of 241,894 votes or 58.22 percent to 173,582 votes or 41.78 percent in the November 2022 election.
In the meantime, the county lodged an appeal of the 4th District Court of Appeal’s ruling validating Measure K. In 2023, the California Supreme Court let the Fourth District Court of Appeals’ ruling upholding 2020’s Measure K stand. Nevertheless, it was the position of the county board of supervisors and thus the county’s position that Measure D superseded Measure K and that not only was the remuneration level for the supervisors restored, but that the members of the board of supervisors were once again permitted to serve three four-year terms.
Given that Measure D, technically, is applicable going forward and is not retroactive, there are those who now take the position that the incumbents in place when it passed – Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman, who was first elected to the board in 2014, reelected in 2018 and reelected in 2022; Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, who was appointed to the board in 2018, elected in 2020 and reelected in 2024; First District Supervisor Paul Cook, who was elected to the board in 2020; and Fifth District Supervisor Joe Baca Jr, who was elected to the board in 2022 – are bound by the three term limitation only as of elections that occurred after 2022. In addition, according to those of this mindset, Second District Supervisor Jesse Armendarez, who was elected in the same November 2022 election in which Measure D passed but who ran for election before it passed, is likewise not subject to the three term limitation until after the term he is now serving ends. By this interpretation, Hagman is now at liberty to run for reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034, such that he would be barred from seeking reelection in 2038. Further, Cook, Baca and Rowe would count the term they were elected to in 2024 as the first of the three terms to be counted under the term limit rule now in effect, such that they can seek reelection in 2028 and 2032 if they choose to, and Armendarez can, like Hagman, serve out his current term and then have the three four-year term limit kick in, allowing him to seek reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034.
It is nonetheless, unclear as to exactly what restrictions currently apply on the terms to be served by the members of the county supervisors, as there exists a competing theory with regard to when the clock began to run on the three terms specified in Measure D. Under that alternate theory, Hagman’s first term in office, which initiated after his 2014 election, counts toward his three allotted terms, the term he served following his 2018 reelection counts as his second allotted term and his current term, to which he was elected counts as his final term in office. In applying this theory to the remaining members of the board of supervisors, Cook, Baca and Rowe are now serving the second of three terms they can be elected to and they are entitled to seek reelection in 2028 if that is their will, but all three would be barred from seeking reelection in 2032. Armendarez, under this interpretation can run for reelection in 2026 and in 2030, and would be termed out when his third term concludes the first week of 2035.
Of immediate focus is Supervisor Curt Hagman, as he is currently the longest serving supervisor and the term limit issue is therefore relevant to the upcoming June 2026 primary election. If the first interpretation is applied and Supervisor Hagman is permitted under the way in which the county applies the three term rule contained in Measure D to seek reelection next year, that will serve as the precedent to allow Cook, Rowe and Baca to remain on the board of supervisors, conditional upon their decision to do so and the willingness of the voters to sustain them in office, until January 2037 and Armendarez until January 2029.
Key to which interpretation will prevail is Laura Feingold, who was elevated to the position of county counsel last month after what was either the willing or forced departure of Tom Bunton earlier this year. If, indeed, Hagman opts to seek or at least attempts to seek reelection as 4th District supervisor in the June 2026 primary election, Feingold will be called upon, either by the board of supervisors or the public at large, to render a decision as to whether under the term limits imposed by 2022’s Measure D, Hagman is eligible to run for reelection.
When Curt Hagman was elected to the board in 2014, the restrictions of 2006’s Measure P were in effect. Under Measure P, he was eligible to serve three terms as supervisor and after being reelected in 2018 and 2022, ineligible to run for 4th District supervisor in 2026. Measure P, however, was rendered null and void by the passage of 2020’s Measure K. Measure K never went into effect and has been, apparently, superseded by Measure D, which became effective following the 2022 election and subjected the supervisors once more to three four-year terms.
The question has now become whether Measure D went into effect as of the certification of the November 2022 election such that it obviated any previous limitations on the terms of service and began the clock anew on how many terms the supervisors could serve post 2022. Feingold will be asked whether Supervisor Hagman, who had his three bites at the apple under Measure P, has also had three bites at the apple under Measure D and, as such, is to be termed out of office after the term he was elected to in 2022 ends. In addressing that question, Feingold will also be called upon to determine, simultaneously and conversely, whether Measure D erased all previous term limitation rules or considerations and is only applicable going forward and not retroactively, such that Supervisor Hagman is now eligible to run for reelection in 2026, 2030 and 2034.
This week, the Sentinel addressed questions to both Hagman and Feingold.
It sought from Hagman whether he intends to seek reelection as Fourth District supervisor next year.
The Sentinel inquired of Feingold which interpretation of the applicability of Measure D is correct and if, in her legal opinion and that of her office, Supervisor Hagman’s course as Fourth District supervisor will have run at the end of 2026, making him therefore ineligible to run for reelection in the June 2026 primary and November2026 general elections or whether he is at liberty to run for reelection as Fourth District supervisor in the 2026 election cycle and by extension in the 2030 election cycle and the 2034 election cycle.
Neither Hagman nor Feingold responded to the Sentinel by press time.
It is of some note that Hagman, a Republican who was formerly a councilman and mayor in Chino Hills, served six years in the California Assembly between 2008 and 2014, at which point he was termed out of office and ran for supervisor. Before doing so, he maneuvered himself into the position of chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. In that capacity, he bought into and embodied the principles of the national and state GOP, which included support for term limits. At this point, as county supervisor, Hagman is provided with an annual salary of $193,555.79, further remuneration of $42,089.76 and benefits of $86,122.97 for a total annual compensation of $321,768.52.
To remain loyal to the Republican Party principle of embracing term limits he formerly espoused, as both an elected member of the California legislature, as a Republican Party member and the leader of the Republican Party in San Bernardino County, Hagman will need to forego that $321,768.52, subject to cost-of-living increases, he stands to make annually from, potentially, 2027 until the end of 2038, which would total $3,861,222.21, without those cost-of-living increases being calculated. Whether Hagman is going to live up to that principle when doing so would come at such a steep personal financial cost will become known on March 6, 2026, when the filing period for supervisorial candidates closes.
Just like Hagman has a lot of money riding on whether he will seek to remain in office as 4th District supervisor, Feingold has a personal financial interest in which way she renders her legal opinion how the term limit provision in Measure D should be interpreted.
As county counsel, Feingold serves at the pleasure of the board of supervisors. Unlike the two previous county counsels in San Bernardino County – Michelle Blakemore, who served four years as the county’s top staff attorney, and Bunton, who last likewise four years in the post before retiring – Feingold is nearly a decade younger than what her predecessors were when she assumed the position. Given her relative youth, she could remain as county counsel for as long as a decade. By rendering a legal opinion that would allow Cook, Baca and Rowe to begin counting the number of their permissible terms in office as of those they were elected to in 2024 and Hagman and Armendarez to begin the countdown on the number of terms they can be elected to as of the 2026 election, Feingold stands to accrue a degree of favor and ingratiate herself with those who are in a position to see that she remains for as long as they remain in office in a position which at present provides her with no less than $326,500 in annual salary, another $27,250 in perquisites and pay add-ons and $150,500 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $504,250.

A decade after Los Angeles agreed to return ownership of Ontario International Airport to the City of Ontario, an obscure debate is ongoing in the back halls of power throughout the county as to whether the change benefited or damaged the community.
While the ownership and management transition undeniably restored local control over what is arguably one of, if not the most valuable of San Bernardino County’s man-made assets, there is a case to be made that its placement into the hands of a consortium of provincial, less sophisticated, inexperienced and self-focused civic leaders has curtailed the facility’s growth potential over the next several foreseeable generations and obliterated the possibility of effectuating a rational approach to regional transportation [asset] operations and function.
Featured in that debate is the relative truth or falsity of the self-serving assertions of those who now hold sway over the airport that they are to be credited with having restored passenger levels at the medium hub facility to what they were 18 years ago, when, under the guidance of the political and administrative megalopolis to the west, the now 102-year-old aerodrome achieved its record ridership level.
Questions persist as to whether the reestablishment of local control over the airport has been and is a benefit to the city, its residents, the region, the airport itself or the flying public, as the change of title has resulted in expenses that have made it into one of the world’s most costly airfields to fly out of on the West Coast, the country and, on a comparative basis, the world.
Among those close to the current situation and those who were once intimately involved in the airport’s operations when it was under the management of Los Angeles World Airports, the corporate arm of the City of Los Angeles which operated Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario International Airport and Van Nuys Airport, there are accounts of how the politicians who have been entrusted with overseeing the airport and the quasi-governmental, quasi-corporate entity which operates it have used their authority to “shake down” companies or entities with service franchises or vending, service provision or consulting contracts at the aerodrome for what are, in essence, kickbacks, which has resulted in no-bid or skewered-bidding contracting processes by which work is performed at an increased cost.
During its first forty-plus years of existence, from its outset as the private Latimer Field in 1923 and its conversion to a public facility and name changeover to Ontario Airport in 1929, the ensuing Great Depression, World War II, its rebranding as Ontario International Airport in 1946 due to the trans-Pacific cargo flights originating there and the postwar prosperity that saw the largely agricultural Inland Empire, including the roughly 10,000 acres of vineyards that surrounded the airport gradually converted to industrial, commercial and residential use, the airport existed as a small regional airstrip. In 1967, at which point Ontario Airport had fewer than 200,000 passengers passing through its gates per year, the Ontario City Council entered into a joint powers agreement with the City of Los Angeles in which the larger city’s Department of Airports was to take over aviation operations in Ontario. Los Angeles officials, with their control over gate positions at Los Angeles International Airport, was able to induce a multitude of airlines to fly into and out of the smaller facility. Los Angeles, through its Department of Airports and airport-operating corporate division, Los Angeles World Airports, also known by its acronym LAWA, made investments in the facility, paving its sand flea-infested gravel parking lot and modernizing, restructuring and gentrifying its basic facilities such as its terminal, passenger walkway, tower and walkway.
By 1969, flights out of Ontario had dramatically increased and would continue to do so as, Los Angeles World Airports and Los Angeles city officials used their influence with various airlines. Continental Airlines, PSA, United, American Airlines, Hughes Air West, and Delta established routes to and from Ontario. Though a benchmark of 10 million passengers at the airport by 1975 was not achieved, Los Angeles World Airports still assiduously promoted Ontario International. Under the management and care of Los Angeles officials, in 1981, a modern, second east-to-west runway at Ontario International was built, necessitating the removal of the old northeast-to-southwest runway.
By the early 1980s Los Angeles had met all the performance criteria laid out in the 1967 joint powers agreement. The City of Ontario was at that time led by Mayor Robert Ellingwood, who was resistant to the concept of Ontario complying with the terms of the 1967 pact and turning ownership of the airport over to Los Angeles. In 1985, during Ellingwood’s brief absence from the city, four members of the Ontario City Council as it was then composed voted to deed Ontario Airport to the City of Los Angeles for no consideration, pursuant to what was considered a public benefit transfer that most local officials, with a few notable exceptions such as Ellingwood, believed would improve the airport.
Indeed, over the four decades from 1967 until 2007, the relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles vis-à-vis the airport proved highly advantageous. All told, Los Angeles instituted some $550 million worth of improvements to the airport, including quadrupling its parking capacity, modernizing its runways, including the widening of taxiways and the addition of storm drains. Ontario Airport’s landing and take-off paths were converted into the longest such civilian facilities in Southern California, and Los Angeles erected a state-of-the-art control tower, and constructed two ultra-modern terminals at a cost of $270 million, augmented with a world class concourse. The number of airlines using the airport had grown to 14.
Throughout the massive financial lull of the Great Recession, however, air travel dropped off significantly and airlines, in an effort to shield themselves from the continuing economic decline, began cutting back on flights, particularly to locations outside the most heavily concentrated population centers. Beginning in late 2007 and until early 2014, passenger traffic at Ontario International declined steadily. The number of passengers at Ontario International retreated from a record 7,207,150 in 2007 to 6,232,975 in 2008 to 4,861,110 in 2009 to 4,812,578 in 2010.
In 2010, Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner initiated a campaign aimed at prying control and ownership of Ontario International Airport away from Los Angeles. Wapner approached this task by initiating a series of personal and vindictive attacks on Los Angeles officials, most prominently Los Angeles World Airports Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey, claiming, spuriously, that they were responsible for the decline in ridership at Ontario Airport. LAWA and Lindsey were deliberately manipulating the situation to raise costs at Ontario International and thereby minimize both ridership and revenues there as part of a plot to increase revenue and gate numbers at Los Angeles International Airport, Wapner alleged. His city council colleagues echoed these accusations.
Even as Wapner was pursuing this strategy, passenger numbers at Ontario continued to fall, to 4,540,694 in 2011. Los Angeles World Airports executives sought to redress the situation, but were hamstrung by the consideration that the key to increasing ridership at Ontario International was keeping the airlines flying into and out of it in place and adding more. With the contraction of the airline industry generally in the face of the economic downturn, a number of airlines had already pulled up stakes and left Ontario and more were contemplating doing so. It took the best efforts of Los Angeles World Airports airline relations staff to convince two of the seven airlines that remained at Ontario, which were on the verge of leaving themselves, to stay in place.
LAWA managers asserted that the airline executives’ decisions relating to where flights needed to be directed to maintain their corporations’ profitability were the driving factor in the dwindling passenger levels at Ontario International. This softened no soap with Wapner, who along with other Ontario officials rejected such explanations as implausible excuses meant to mask the Los Angeles World Airports’ ill intent to promote Los Angeles International Airport at the expense of Ontario. Ridership at Ontario International continued to decline in the face of the growing contretemps between Ontario and Los Angeles, falling to 4,296,459 in 2012 and hitting rock bottom at 3,971,136 in 2013. Amidst this, the City of Ontario joined with San Bernardino County in forming the Ontario International Airport Authority in 2012, designating Wapner as the president/chairman of the authority’s board of directors. What Ontario officials clearly had in mind was that the authority would oversee the airport when Los Angeles was out of the picture.
In 2013, Ontario, represented by the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, sued Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, claiming neglect and negligence, breach of contract and misfeasance in the operation and management of Ontario International Airport, along with damages.
In 2014, however, as the economy began to rebound and air travel in general started to pick up around the country, ridership at Ontario International Airport zoomed to 4,127,280. That did not result in Ontario officials rethinking the wisdom of litigating against the megalopolis that had assisted it in building Ontario Airport into what was certainly one of the leading hubs in the country and arguably the nation’s most noteworthy subregional airport. Nor did they desist in the vitriolic attacks on Los Angeles and its officials.
Of note was that despite suing Los Angeles over the airport, Ontario remained entirely dependent on Los Angeles for the facility’s management and operation. The smaller city had nothing in the way of personnel or operational expertise to keep the extremely sophisticated and complex systems, departments, equipment and facilities an airport entails functional or safe.
In 2015 Ontario Airport continued on the road to recovery, with the number of passengers reaching 4,209,311. That August, Los Angeles moved to settle the lawsuit Ontario had brought against it, agreeing to return the airport, lock, stock and barrel to the smaller municipality to its east, conditional upon Ontario covering operational, improvement and financing costs that the taxpayers in Los Angeles had been absorbing for decades.
In December 2015, Los Angeles and Ontario signed an agreement finalizing the transfer as of November 1, 2016, with Ontario paying Los Angeles $60 million out of its various operating funds and another $30 million taken out of its reserves, and committing to make payments of $50 million over five years and $70 million in the final five years of the ten-year ownership transition. In addition, Ontario absorbed $60 million of the airport’s bond debt.
As part of the settlement worked out between Los Angeles and Ontario, Los Angeles graciously agreed to continue its management/operational oversight of the airport until noon November 1, 2016.
In 2016, ridership at Ontario Airport continued to go up, to 4,251,903.
Of note, when Ontario brought in its own management team for the post-November 1, 2016 era of Ontario International Airport’s existence, it in large measure cannibalized management and operational personnel from Los Angeles World Airports.
In the interregnum between the settlement of the lawsuit in August of 2015 and Ontario’s full reassumption of ownership of the airport in November 2016, the Ontario International Airport Authority in January 2016 exercised its nescient power as the overseer of the airport to bring in Kelly Fredericks, the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation and the manager of T.F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island to serve as Ontario International Airport’s executive manager. Fredericks was to acclimate himself to Ontario during the final nine months of Los Angeles World Airport’s operation of Ontario International Airport and take over upon Ontario’s assumption of the facility once more.
The department heads and submanagers at the airport under Fredericks both pre-November 2016 and post-November 2016 were Los Angeles World Airports veterans. As things developed, Fredericks and his political masters on the Ontario City Council and the Ontario International Airport Authority did not see eye-to-eye and he departed from his post at the airport in July 2017.
The airport authority turned to another former executive with Los Angeles World Airports, Mark Thorpe, to replace Fredericks.
When push came to shove and Ontario’s political leadership needed the necessary talent to keep planes taking off and landing at Ontario International Airport, they turned to the very people they had claimed were running the airport into the ground.
Under the combined guidance of Fredericks and Thorpe, ridership at Ontario International Airport increased in 2017 to 4,552,225. With Thorpe as the titular leader of the airport, Ontario saw the number of passengers continue to increase, hitting 5,115,894 in 2018 and 5,583,732 in 2019.
Though Wapner, some of his council colleagues and those in their orbit sought to credit the jump in ridership at the airport to Ontario reasserting itself and seizing the aerodrome from Los Angeles, the reality was that the recovering economy had boosted air flight across the board. Indeed, a comparison to Los Angeles International Airport’s passenger numbers at the same time demonstrates that the Southern California region was a popular departure and destination venue, and that Los Angeles officials did a better job of capitalizing on that opportunity than did their counterparts in Ontario.
In 2015, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 51.56 million. In 2016, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 54.2 million. In 2017, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 58.07 million. In 2018, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 87,533,177. In 2019, the number of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport was 88,068,013.
In 2020, Wapner and the rest of the Ontario City Council and the Ontario International Airport Authority were given a stern lesson in economic reality and the way in which causation and factors that account for that reality can be willingly misinterpreted to be wielded against reality’s bystanders. That year, the coronavirus/COVID pandemic resulted in a reduction of air travel even greater than what occurred during the Great Recession. At that point, however, Wapner and his city council colleagues were in complete charge and control over the airport, and could not blame the drop in total ridership at Ontario International Airport to 2,538,482, a decline of 54.54 percent over the previous year, on the City of Los Angeles.
By 2022, lockdowns and quarantines had been discontinued. In the years since, the economy has pretty much restored itself.
Nevertheless, Ontario Airport officials do not have any leverage they can utilize to convince carriers to fly into or out of Ontario International. The growth that has taken place at Ontario International Airport since Ontario took possession of it, while not insignificant, is a fraction of the rate of growth that occurred historically when Los Angeles ran it. Eleven airlines at present have established gates at Ontario International, three fewer than was the case in 2007. Still, the airport is host to 20 airlines that make either regular or semi-regular flights into Ontario, those being Aeromexico; Air Canada; Air France; British Airways, Alaska Airlines and its affiliate Alaska Sky West; American Airlines and its affiliate American Eagle; China Airlines; Delta Airlines and its affiliate Delta Connection; Frontier Airlines; Hawaiian Airlines; Iberia; KLM; Korean Air; LATAM; Qatar; Southwest Airlines; United and its regional network affiliate United Express; Virgin Atlantic; Volaris; and West Air. In addition, another 19 airlines – Alaska Horizon, Alaska Sky West, Avianca, Avianca El Salvador, Copa Airlines, Dreamline Aviation, Emirates, Flexjet, Jet Linx Aviation, Jet Out, Jet Blue, Lufthansa, Netjets, Porter Airlines, Silver Air, Solairus Aviation, Starlux, Vista America and WestJet – fly into and out of Ontario on an irregular, infrequent, pass-through, special or promotional basis.
With the anomaly of the pandemic and its 18-to-20-month paralysis from the imposed societal shutdown aside, Ontario’s ownership and management of Ontario International Airport has corresponded with an expansion of the local, state and national economy. That economic advancement was reflected in the 6,430,033 passengers the airport serviced in 2023 and the jump to 7,084,864 passengers there from January 1, 2024 until December 31, 2024.
Ontario International’s 2024 numbers are a 10.2 percent improvement over 2023 and 27 percent more than pre-pandemic 2019. Citing those statistics, airport officials on January 23 put out a statement that Ontario International is “the fastest growing among medium- and large-size airports in California. The 2024 count also represents a 67 percent increase since 2016, when Ontario International Airport was transferred to local control from the City of Los Angeles.”
In addition, for 2024 at Ontario, the number of domestic travelers totaled 6,645,968, an increase of 10.5 percent year-over-year, while the number of international fliers grew by 5.1 percent to 438,896, the highest in the airport’s history.
Passenger traffic in 2025 is on a trajectory to reach a number just slightly below that achieved at the airport in 2007.
Ontario officials have hailed this as a milestone, one that will match the airport’s passenger achievement in 2024.
Still, there is a very real sense among those with more than a passing acquaintance with the facts of the matter that had Ontario officials stayed the course by maintaining the ownership/management arrangement for the airport with the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, the 7.2 million passenger mark at Ontario International would have been eclipsed two years ago and ridership in 2025 would have neared or surpassed 8 million.
Los Angeles International Airport is host to 93 different airlines and accommodates 76 of those on a daily basis. Los Angeles International Airport, which averages 1,578 take-offs and landings daily compared to Ontario International’s 146 take-offs and landings, on average, daily. Had Ontario International Airport maintained its affiliation with Los Angeles International Airport, LAWA would have remained inclined to use its leverage with air carriers, trading [preferable] gate positions at Los Angeles International and other advantages, to induce airlines to schedule flights to the inland airfield.
The inability of the City of Ontario and the Ontario International Airport Authority to offer airlines the same corporate perquisites and operational edge at Los Angeles International Airport that LAWA could is only part of the reason why airlines are reluctant to fly into and out of Ontario International. That part of the story goes deep into the culture of Ontario politics over the last three decades and the rampant corruption that has infested city government there. The impact of this corruption manifests in more than one way, two of which have been made increasingly apparent to ever more airlines’ corporate officers.
One of the disincentives influencing the decision of airline executives to forego having their companies fly into and out of Ontario International is cost – consisting of an added financial burden on the air carriers and higher ticket prices for passengers. For some 8 million residents of Southern California – those living in the inland areas of Orange and Los Angeles counties and all of those living in San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties – Ontario Airport represents a far more convenient flying option than Los Angeles International Airport, given its easier and swifter accessibility because of the gridlock on Los Angeles’s streets and freeways.
For Angelenos who live as few as ten to fifteen files east of Los Angeles International Airport, depending on the time of day and freeway conditions, they can drive to Ontario International Airport, which is some 40 miles distant, in less time and undergo far less hassle, difficulty and general inconvenience than what they need to endure to get to the larger airport. Despite that, the vast majority elect to fly out of Los Angeles because of the prohibitive expense of airline tickets in Ontario.
According to air traveler guides, flights out of Ontario International cost roughly $90 more on average than those out of Los Angeles International. In some cases, the cost differential on flights to the same destination on the same airline run to as much as $219 more.
That price differential is a function of the costs borne by the airlines for the services provided to them by airports, which include charges for the use of the runway and landing facilities, the tower, the terminal, refueling, routine external and internal plane inspection, ground handling, baggage and cargo management, aircraft marshalling, cabin cleaning, passenger service, baggage tracking, baggage handling, immigration and customs clearance, passenger information, air cargo handling, passenger amenities and coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration. Those costs are passed along to the flying customers.
The inflated ticket prices this year alone resulted in thousands, indeed tens of thousands, of travelers who otherwise would have flown from Ontario to elect to fly instead out of Los Angeles. That reduction in customers has served as a factor in the decisions of airlines already functioning out of Ontario to refrain from increasing the number of routes or flights departing from Ontario. The steeper operating charges at Ontario International has, at least with a handful of airlines, impacted on their decision to not offer customers flights out of Ontario.
The reason behind those higher charges to airlines at Ontario is a mystery to some of those aware of it, been speculated at by others contemplating it and is known by more than a handful of city and airport insiders and close observers.
Even before Ontario reassumed ownership and operation of the airport in November 2016, the city had sway over many services and franchises that pertain to the airport itself or the airport’s surroundings, such as taxi service, towing, car rentals and the like. With the ownership and management transfer, city officials and/or the Ontario International Airport Authority inherited authority over even more critical elements of an aviation facility’s operation and the provision of services and functions. Included in this melange are the constant supply of aviation fuel, its storage and the equipment and machinery to dispense it; runway/tarmac maintenance; concourse upkeep; terminal operation and maintenance, which in the case of Ontario International pertains to three separate terminals and includes physical repair, janitorial services, baggage conveyors, maintenance of extensive ventilation, heating and air conditioning systems; grounds and landscape maintenance; advertising venues such as signs and electronic billboards in and outside the terminal; the concessions inside the terminal including those for food and merchandise. In addition, the City of Ontario and the Ontario International Airport Authority took over the administrative, corporate and management functions that had previously been the province of the Los Angeles Department of Airports and Los Angeles World Airports. This entailed a host of functions and services and the employment of staff and contracts with vendors and service providers and consultants.
Ontario politics had already been fraught with political patronage, whereby donors to the city’s politicians’ electioneering accounts – primarily the mayor and city council – were rewarded with lucrative city contracts that went to them or their companies. There were rampant rumors and even some tangible indications that those receiving favorable treatment by the city or blessed with franchises approved by the mayor and city council had been providing those politicians with money or inducements other than funding for political campaigns.
With Ontario’s assumption of the airport’s ownership, a remarkable number of the mayor’s and certain city council members’ political backers found themselves employed at the airport or with the Ontario International Airport Authority, hired as consultants by the airport authority or had a stake in or outright owned companies given contracts or franchises relating to the airport. In more than one case, the bidding process for those contracts had been dispensed with and no effort was made to determine if the same service could be provided at a lesser cost. In some cases, it was not clear what service or advice was being provided and what value to the airport, the airport authority, the City of Ontario or the Ontario community the service rendered or advice actually was.
Those contract or consulting services do, however, represent added costs to the airport and the airport authority, ones which are ultimately defrayed or recouped through higher airport service charges to the airlines, which in turn are reflected in higher ticket prices for air passengers flying out of Ontario International Airport.
Buried within this avalanche of untoward implication is what is said to be the refusal on the part of some airline executives to engage with representatives from the Ontario International Authority in a discussion relating to their airlines operating at Ontario International because of reports they have received with regard to members of the authority’s board of directors previously seeking to shake down aviation industry officials for monetary support in the form of political donations to their campaign funds.
With the creation of the Ontario International Airport Authority in August 2012, the Ontario City Council appointed Councilman Wapner and Councilman Jim Bowman to its board and shortly thereafter Wapner was selected to serve as that panel’s president. Throughout the board’s entire 13-plus year history, Wapner and Bowman have remained on the board and there has been no other board president than Wapner. In that same 13-year timeframe, Wapner has proven to be the most prolific recipient of political donations among all of San Bernardino County’s local elected officials, taking in more than $1.2 million.
After 31 years in office as a city councilman in Ontario, earlier this year he announced that next year he will run for Ontario mayor, taking on the incumbent, Paul Leon, who has been mayor since 2005 and served seven years on the city council prior to that.
In seeking the mayoralty, Wapner intends to campaign, with even greater emphasis than he utilized in his city council campaigns in 2022 and 2018, on the contention that he is the person most responsible for wresting Ontario International Airport from the clutches of Los Angeles.
Most certainly, that assertion is a true one, as it is indisputable that Wapner was the prime mover in the successful series of maneuvers to have Ontario reclaim its namesake aerodrome. Such a campaign holds promise, as to the casual observers and the uninitiated, Ontario taking control of the airport’s destiny is, at least superficially, a positive development for the Ontario community and San Bernardino County.
Nevertheless, actuality is far more complicated and convoluted than appearances. Leon, who for thirteen years has deferred to Wapner on virtually every matter, issue and item relating to the airport and has remained, if not entirely out of, at least rather removed from the informational loop regarding operations there, has his ear to the rail and is peripherally aware at this point of the highly questionable decision-making process that has been ongoing at the city’s most visible and valuable asset. He, like only a relative handful of others, recognizes that had Wapner been less vituperatively offensive in dealing with the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, Ontario might have preserved the positive relationship it had with those who had transformed Ontario Airport from the small regional airfield with fewer than 200,000 people passing through its gates in a single year to one which handled 7.2 million passengers annually. He can make a credible case that but for Wapner’s scorched earth approach, the airport and its management would yet have a cordial and mutually beneficial ties with the nation’s second busiest airport and by extension access to the top executives of the world’s 60 largest airlines, such that Ontario International Airport by the end of 2025 would have easily had upwards of 8 million passengers flying into it and out of it and approaching 9 million by the end of 2026.
Leon has access to information and the stump from which to expose that it is Wapner’s doing that the cost of airline tickets for flights out of Ontario International Airport run anywhere from ten percent to 25 percent higher than for tickets to comparable destinations when the flier travels from Los Angeles. Along the way, Leon will be able to work into that narrative that a primary factor leading to those higher ticket prices is Wapner’s willingness to accept campaign donations in exchange for lucrative positions of employment or contracts with the airport authority.
Perhaps most significantly, Leon is position to explain to Ontario’s voters that in his headlong pursuit of taking control over Ontario International Airport, Wapner interrupted what was on track to be a rational and mutually beneficial coordination of how the eight primary commercial passenger airports in the Southern California – Los Angeles International Airport, San Diego International Airport, Ontario International Airport, Palm Springs International Airport, John Wayne Airport, Long Beach Airport, and Hollywood Burbank Airport and San Bernardino International Airport – are to share passengers and airlines that eliminate unnecessary and extended travel on the freeway system.
In this way, the 2026 Ontario mayoral election has the potential of becoming a referendum on whether the Wapner-led campaign to return the airport to local control represents a boom or bust.
Wapner is ready to contest that viewpoint.
Ontario International Airport was in a downward spiral a decade ago, and local leaders took bold steps to bring it back home,” Wapner said. “Today, Ontario International Airport is thriving – a vital economic engine for the Inland Empire and a source of pride for our entire region.”

Both the Donald Trump Administration and California’s senior politicians are anxiously awaiting a determination by Federal Judge Christina A. Snyder and Magistrate Judge A. Joel Richlin with regard to the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in November which seeks to block the enforcement of two state laws restricting federal agents from hiding their identities during immigration law enforcement operations.
In September, the California legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 627, known as the California No Secret Police Act, and Senate Bill 805, the No Vigilantes Act. Set to take effect January 1, 2026, the No Secret Police Act prohibits law enforcement officers in California, with the exception of the California Highway Patrol/California State Police from wearing masks or facial coverings that hide or obscure their identity while on duty. The act is intended to promote accountability, and grew out of concern over masked federal agents enforcing immigration law. Assembly Bill 627 makes it a crime for most local and federal law enforcement officers to wear concealing masks or facial garb such as ski masks while on duty with exceptions for those engaged in special weapons and tactics [SWAT] operations or undercover work and for medically-related purposes.
Senate Bill 805, the No Vigilantes Act, is set to go into effect on January 1, 2026 as well. It requires law enforcement officers, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Boarder Patrol agents in the state to visibly display clear identification, including their name and badge when not I uniform to prevent impersonation and enhance public trust. It further bans bounty hunters from participating in immigration enforcement operations.
In November, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against California, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Attorney General Robert Bonta challenging both the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act, saying they constituted unconstitutional attempts to regulate federal law enforcement officers.
“Both laws violate long-settled principles of the Supremacy Clause, under which states have no power to ‘in any manner control[] the operations of’ the federal government,” the lawsuit states, citing the Supreme Court’s 1819 decision in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland as well as the 1943 case of Mayo v. United States as precedent case on the matter.
Asserting the Supreme Court’s landmark language in the McCulloch case that “[T]he activities of the Federal Government are free from regulation by any state,” the lawsuit states, echoing the U.S. Supreme Court plurality opinion expressed in the 1990 North Dakota v. United States case that “The intergovernmental immunity doctrine is an outgrowth of this principle, and a state law violates intergovernmental immunity if it ‘regulates the United States directly or discriminates against the federal government or those with whom it deals.’ The No Secret Police Act and No Vigilantes Act directly regulate the federal government by dictating permissible uniforms for federal agents and forcing federal agencies to adopt specified policies. But the federal government, not California, has authority to control its own agents and activities.”
According to the U.S. Justice Department, “Not only are the laws illegal attempts to discriminate against and regulate the federal government, but, as alleged in the complaint, the laws threaten the safety of federal officers who have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment, doxxing, and even violence. Threatening officers with prosecution for simply protecting their identities and their families also chills the enforcement of federal law and compromises sensitive law enforcement operations. The danger is acute.”
According to Attorney General Pamela Bondi, “Law enforcement officers risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe, and they do not deserve to be doxed or harassed simply for carrying out their duties. California’s anti-law enforcement policies discriminate against the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents. These laws cannot stand.”
“The Department of Justice will steadfastly protect the privacy and safety of law enforcement from unconstitutional state laws like California’s,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
“Assaults against federal agents have exploded over the last few months, thanks in part to recklessness political rhetoric aiming to delegitimize our brave agents,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California. “Unconstitutional laws such as this one further endanger our brave men and women protecting our community. Our immigration enforcement will continue unabated and unhindered by unconstitutional state laws enacted by irresponsible politicians.”
On her first day in office following President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Bondi, anticipating resistance from state governments around the country, most notably in California, instructed the Justice Department’s Civil Division to identify state and local laws, policies, and practices that facilitate violations of federal laws or impede lawful federal operations. The lawsuit challenging the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act filed in the Central District of California in November was a manifestation of the effort begun in January at the federal level and the controversy that erupted when in April the federal government initiated operation Alta California, the federal government’s undertaking to make good on President Trump’s commitment and that of his immigration czar, Tom Homan, to identify, find, apprehend and process for deportation the 2.2 million illegal aliens they say were present in the Golden State in January 2025.
The issue of immigration law enforcement has exposed a wide philosophical divide among Americans, with two major camps having formed. One of those is President Trump’s supporters, which included a substantial number of the nation’s Republicans, a significant number of independent voters unaffiliated with any party and a smattering of citizens who identify as Democrats or members of the country’s more obscure political parties. They are generally of the opinion that any foreigners who engage in a violation of the nation’s immigration law is by definition a criminal. Most further presume that a substantial number, perhaps even a majority of the undocumented in the country are making use of social benefits to which they are not entitled, detracting from those available to American citizens. They hold that those disobeying U.S. immigration law are unwelcome in the country and that under the law, they can be and should be deported.
The vast majority of the president’s political opponents, consisting primarily of Democrats and liberal unaligned voters and some members of the country’s more obscure political parties, either do not consider the failure of foreign nationals to register their presence in the United States to be a crime or believe it to be a de minimus offense that does not merit an enforcement effort. They are adamantly opposed to the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law against anyone who does not qualify as a “violent offender.”
Several California’s cities, including its larger ones such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, and Sacramento have actively resisted the Trump Administration’s immigration policies by filing lawsuits challenging federal action with regard to immigration law enforcement. They have declared themselves “sanctuary jurisdictions,” passed local protective ordinances and organized, allowed and encouraged large-scale protests against immigration raids to take place. In addition, some of the state’s major political leaders, including Governor Gavin Newsom, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have led, inspired or sponsored administrative, legislative and legal efforts to shield residents from aggressive federal enforcement action. The California legislature, during the first Trump Administration, passed Senate Bill ???, the California Values Act, which prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from assisting federal authorities in enforcing immigration law.
At present in California, all of the constitutional state offices from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner to state controller in California are occupied by Democrats. In the state’s lower legislative house, the California Assembly, 75 percent of its members – 60 of 80 – are Democrats. In the upper house, the California Senate, likewise 75 percent of its membership – 30 of 40 senators – are Democrats. In California’s Congressional Delegation, both Senators are Democrats and of the state’s 52 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 43 are Democrats and nine are Republicans. In this way, California’s political establishment is solidly at odds with the Republican president and his administration. While during the first Trump Administration there was an unmistakable degree of tension between Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, during the second Trump Administration there is a constant spectacle of federal law being at odds with California law.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta – California’s highest ranking law enforcement official – has repeatedly characterized the action of federal law enforcement officers and immigration officials in their efforts to enforce federal law as crossing the line into illegality and unconstitutionality, threatening in some cases to have some federal agents arrested and prosecuted under state and his prosecutorial authority.
With regard to the need for both the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act, “Bonta is on record as having said, “It’s problematic when Californians can’t tell the difference between a law enforcement officer who is charged with protecting them and a criminal who is attempting to cause them harm. The FBI itself has warned that the practice of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents obscuring their identity has led to a rise in copycats committing crimes, threatening public safety and eroding trust in law enforcement.”
Even though Bonta speaks and acts as the face of state law and the People of California while overseeing a staff of 138 lawyers and a full complement of support staff including paralegals, secretaries and investigators, his primary bailiwick is the Superior Court of California. The federal court system is not one he is unfamiliar with or, necessarily, intimidated by either, but the federal court system remains the principal prosecutorial province of the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. For those entities, steeped in functioning within the realm of criminal law and statutes, they are no slouches when it comes to civil law, in particular federal civil procedure.
Those representing the U.S. Justice Department in the lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles challenging the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act include Assistant U.S. Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, who oversees the office’s civil division;
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth, who supervises the civil division; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton, who is assigned to the Los Angeles office’s civil division; Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Tiberius Davis Sean Skedzielewski; First Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Central District of California Bilal A. Essayli; Alexander K. Hass, the director of the U.S. Attorney’s Central District of California office; Jacqueline Coleman Snead, the assistant director of the U.S. Attorney’s Central District of California office; and both Elizabeth J. Neylan and Cristen C. Handley, trial attorneys in the civil divisions federal programs branch.
Assigned to make a determination of the issues raised in the lawsuit, including whether the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act are indeed, as the federal government maintains unconstitutional and contrary to basic law and federal law are Judge Christina A. Snyder and Magistrate Judge A. Joel Richlin. Since November, they have been fully briefed as to the substance of Senate Bill 627 and Senate Bill 805, and all applicable rulings relating to state laws in conflict with federal law and federal administrative authority throughout American history going back to the late 18th Century, as well as the state and federal standards that attend the operational and security/safety protocols for law enforcement officers.
An early expectation was that a decision would be rendered before January 1, 2026, when the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act were originally due to go into effect. Judge Snyder and Magistrate Judge Richlin are by no means required to meet that deadline, however, and they are at liberty to make as full of an analysis of the circumstance, law and legal precedent as they deem necessary to make a correct and binding determination.
As is commonly the case, while policies and laws are under legal challenge, as in this instance Senate Bill 627 and Senate Bill 805, their implementation is held in abeyance until a legal determination is made. As such, the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act will not be enforced until and unless Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin make their determination that they in fact pass constitutional muster.
It is of some note that both Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin are Democrats. It is equally noteworthy that in an earlier case that came before the Federal Court in California, other judges considered to fall or fall primarily in or within the liberal/progressive/Democratic camp – U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong at the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit consisting of Justices Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould who were tasked with determining whether the tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol in carrying out immigration enforcement in California and Southern California in particular were in keeping with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
After the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel took up the cause of three immigrants, a single U.S. citizen and a dual U.S./Mexican citizen who had been taken into custody by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year, Judge Frimpong in July 2025 concluded that “masked” federal agents had erred and violated the constitutional rights of those they had arrested by utilizing their place of work, their presence in a particular place, their ethnicity or race, the type of work they were engaged in and their language or accent as the basis of probable cause to detain, question them and ultimately take them into custody. Judge Frimpong ruled that blanket detentions and/or arrests are illegal and that laws relating to specific crimes, such as violating immigration statutes, cannot be applied broadly but must be applied against each defendant specifically, with a credible recitation of the crimes alleged to have been committed by the arrestee and the grounds for making the stop and the arrest. Judge Frimpong opined that the federal agents were engaging, essentially, in racial profiling by questioning those who were speaking a language other than English, engaging in “roving patrols” in areas where those government agents believed undocumented aliens might be present, patrolling places such as big box hardware store parking lots where day laborers congregated or raiding businesses where in the past undocumented foreigners were known to have been employed. She ordered that the federal officers desist in making the arrests based upon the criteria they were using.
Penultimately, when the Trump Administration appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the panel consisting of Justices Berzon, Sung and Gould upheld Judge Frimpong.
Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal ruled 6-to-3 rejected that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” accepting the Trump Administration’s assertion that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the use of Spanish to be a criteria distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
With Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the balance of the Supreme Court rejected Judge Frimpong’s conclusion that any consideration of race or ethnicity in the evaluation of what constituted reasonable suspicion with regard to the commission of a crime, in this case a violation of U.S. Immigration Law, was unreasonable and unconstitutional. The Supreme Court majority held that a suspect’s race or ethnicity could be a factor when considering it within the context of other factors.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled that roving patrols by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are neither a violation of the Constitution nor racist and that they should be allowed to resume.
Given the trend and guidance inherent in the Supreme Court’s September ruling relating to immigration enforcement standards in California, Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin are slightly less likely than Judge Frimpong and Justices Berzon, Sung and Gould to hew to the conclusions favored by the politicians in Sacramento. Whatever determination Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin reach, either before, on or after January 1, it is anticipated it will be appealed to 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, meaning the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act will not be implemented until well into 2026, if at all.

The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and Searles Valley Minerals have reached a comprehensive settlement of the legal actions each had outstanding against one another, clearing the way for a water conservation, sharing and distribution arrangement impacting the westernmost extreme of the Mojave Desert and the northwestern tip of San Bernardino County.
The settlement reduces, but does not eliminate the procedural and legal complication which attends the struggle with regard to water availability in one of the driest areas of California.
Searles Valley Minerals is a 152-year-old company, now owned by Mirma Limited, located in Trona, a San Bernardino County community immediately adjacent to the Inyo County line and proximate to Kern County. Searles Valley Minerals uses solution mining, which involves soaking portions of the company’s dry Searles Lake in San Bernardino County with water to precipitate brine which is then extracted and processed to produce boric acid, potash, sodium carbonate, sodium sulfate, several specialty forms of borax, and salt. The litigation between Searles Valley Minerals grew out of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s application of previously nonexistent water use fees on water used by the company despite the company having the the longest-standing claim on water rights and water use of any entity in the region. In response to the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s imposition of those water use fees, Searles Valley Minerals filed a lawsuit against the groundwater authority, which responed with a countersuit. That litigation dragged on for several years.
In 2014, in the face of a persistent drought, then-Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency with regard to California’s water situation and then signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which classified 21 groundwater basins in the state, including the one in Indian Wells Valley, as being in a state of critical overdraft, i.e., a circumstance in which the amount of water being used exceeds the amount of water coming into the area naturally, predominantly through rainfall.
That designation triggered the creation of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority, a joint powers agency overseen by a board comprised of one voting representative from Kern County, the City of Ridgecrest, Inyo County, San Bernardino County, and the Indian Wells Valley Water District, as well as two non-voting members representing the U.S. Navy/China Lake Naval Air Station and the United States Bureau of Land Management.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority took as its charter the commitment to ensure a sustainable water supply for the region by overcoming the depletion of the groundwater basin and its aquifer which underlies 597 square miles and includes the northwest tip of San Bernardino County, the southwest tip of Inyo County and the northeast corner of Kern County.
Based upon a survey of water usage patterns undertaken by an engineering consultant, Carlsbad-based Stetson Engineers, the authority and the Indian Wells Valley Water District sought to derive a strategy for both reducing water use in the valley and increasing groundwater recharge to reach a balance of both that will end the overdraft. Several different plans, or models, were contemplated. Basically, the concept was to decrease the drafting of water from the regional aquifer through conservation, increased recycling of water and perhaps the minimization of evaporation, augmented by the importation of water from outside the valley to achieve, no later than 2040, a balance of water coming in with the amount of water usage, such that the depletion of the aquifer will end.
Stetson Engineers was designated the water resources manager for Indian Wells Valley, and the authority’s board in January 2020 passed a tentative proposed groundwater sustainability plan and voted to submit it to the state. Thereafter it made adjustments to the plan, which contained water use limitation elements and water replenishment measures. The plan incorporated a farmland fallowing option as well as an increase in the monthly assessment or fee that was imposed on the extraction of water by major pumpers. That fee had been previously collected to cover the costs associated with the administrative activity of the groundwater authority.
After a survey of water use by well owners both collectively and individually was made, the authority assigned water use allowances to the region’s well owners. Excess use fees, referred to as augmentation fees, were formulated for application to those well owners who pump above their allowances as well as on any farmer whose use exceeds his respective share of the water supply set aside for agricultural usage. Money generated in this way is used to purchase imported water and pay for the infrastructure needed to bring in the imported water.
In September 2020, Searles Valley Minerals, based in the San Bernardino County community of Trona, represented by Eric Garner, Jeffrey Dunn and Maya Mouawad with the law firm of Best Best & Krieger, filed a lawsuit in Kern County Superior Court against the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority in an effort to protect what Garner, Dunn and Mouwad asserted are the company’s groundwater rights within the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin, and to stop the collection of what they characterized as an illegal and unfair groundwater replenishment fee and a tax disguised, they assert, as an “extraction fee.”
The disputes over water in the Indian Wells Valley Region were assigned to the Orange County Superior Court to avoid bias that might manifest if the hearings were held in a court in Kern, Inyo or San Bernardino counties.
In a separate suit, other entities impacted by the groundwater replenishment fee, Mojave Pistachios, Sierra Shadows Ranch, John Thomas Conaway and the Nugent Family Trust collectively sued the groundwater authority and the Indian Wells Valley Water District as the lead agency in that joint authority, contesting the imposition of the fees.
In reaction to the Searles Valley Minerals suit, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority contended that there was a hierarchy of water use and that in accordance with the limitations on water availability and that hierarchy, all entities utilizing water in the Indian Wells Valley had to participate in the effort to end profligate use, engage in responsible stewardship of the available water and share in the cost of and effort to achieve a balance of water table recharge and water use to end the overdraft.
One issue complicating the matter is that both the Bureau of Land Management and the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, as federal entities, are exempt from the groundwater sustainability plan and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Accordingly, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority was moving toward exempting the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station from the restrictions to be imposed in the finalized groundwater sustainability plan. The China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station encompasses two ranges and totals over 1,100,000 acres or 1,719 square miles, much of that within Indian Wells Valley. While the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station made strides over the previous decade in reducing its water use, it 2021 it was still drafting some 1,600 acre-feet of water from the aquifer annually.
Garner, Dunn and Mouawad took issue with the fashion in which the China Lake Naval Air Station was not subject to the restrictions in the plan nor its fees.
“Searles Valley Minerals’ right to pump water in the basin for domestic uses is senior to any water right reserved to [the] Weapons Station, and because [the] water district’s groundwater pumping began no earlier than 1955, its appropriative right, if any, to basin water remains junior to Searles Valley Minerals’ right,” according to the lawsuit. “The authority falsely asserts in its groundwater sustainability plan that any pumping allocations under the groundwater sustainability plan will be ‘consistent with existing groundwater rights and priorities.’”
Garner, Dunn and Mouawad asserted the groundwater replenishment fee was both unprecedented and exorbitant, and would increase the company’s water costs by 7,000 percent or $6 million per year – pushing Searles Valley Minerals out of business after more than 140 years of operation, thereby threatening the livelihood of the company’s 700 employees.”
In October 2025, it was announced that the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and Searles Valley Minerals had come to a tentative agreement to end the litigation they were involved in against one another.
In November, Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and Searles Valley Minerals filed with the court comprehensive settlement and mutual release agreement by which both entities permanently dropped – i.e., “dismissed with prejudice” – all pending lawsuits filed against each other.
According to the groundwater authority, “The agreement is intended to support cooperative planning, management and implementation of projects that enhance the long-term groundwater sustainability in the Indian Wells Valley basin” and “creates immediate environmental benefits by incorporating reclaimed water into Searles’ operations, taking pressure off the overdrafted basin. By moving to reclaimed water for its industrial operations, Searles can stop pumping roughly 2,000 acre-feet per year of drinking-quality groundwater from the basin.”
Under the agreement, the groundwater authority has relinquished its option on approximately 2,000 acre-feet per year of reclaimed water from the City of Ridgecrest so that supply can be made available to Searles Valley Minerals on mutually agreeable terms. The agreement specified that Searles Valley Minerals will attempt, where feasible, to prioritize using the reclaimed water before exporting additional groundwater from the basin, so to reduce drafting of local groundwater resources.
“By establishing a framework for cooperation with the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority, this agreement advances responsible groundwater management in the basin. Both parties view this outcome as a mutual benefit that supports local jobs, regional economic stability, and a more secure water future for the Indian Wells Valley,” according to a statement by the groundwater authority announcing the lawsuit resolution.
“We are very pleased to work in partnership with Searles Valley Minerals to achieve a sustainable water future not just for Searles, but for all the residents of the valley and Trona,” said Ridgecrest City Councilman Scott Hayman, the chairman of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s board of directors.
As part of the agreement, the groundwater authority certified that Searles Valley Minerals will be eligible to receive imported water in the future through the authority’s planned pipeline. In return, Searles Valley Minerals stated it recognized the regional benefits of bringing non-native water into the basin and committed to not oppose implementation of the pipeline project.
In announcing that the agreement with Searles Valley Minerals had been reached, the groundwater authority revealed that a similar settlement had been obtained with Mojave Pistachios with regard to the litigation that company had brought against the authority.
“It has always been our goal to shift from conflict to collaboration,” said Keith Lemieux, general counsel for Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority. “Last year we reached agreement with Mojave Pistachios, concluding our disputes with the farming community. With the Searles’ dismissals, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority has now resolved its differences with every private-party pumper in the basin. Ironically, the only remaining lawsuit is the Indian Wells Valley Water District’s action against other pumpers. We hope today’s resolution renders that lawsuit moot so all parties can collaborate to solve our water problems.”
A sidelight to the matter, alluded to in Lemieux’s statement, is water rights litigation initiated by the Indian Wells Valley Water District that was initiated in 2021 by the Indian Wells Valley Water District, titled Indian Wells Valley Water District v. All Persons Who Claim a Right to Extract Groundwater in the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin.
Both the Indian Wells Valley Water District, which serves as the region’s local water company, and the groundwater authority are intent on achieving a balance of water use and water recharge within the valley by 2040. Nevertheless, some differences between those two entities emerged on how to best achieve that goal.
Based upon the mandates contained in the Groundwater Management Act and its survey of the pattern of water usage by local entities, the annual natural recharge into the water basin through annual precipitation and the resultant then-current overdraft and projected overdraft into the foreseeable future, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority came to the conclusion that the most viable solution to the water shortage was to limit ongoing water use, impose the groundwater replenishment fee and ultimately use the proceeds to construct a 50-mile pipeline extension from Indian Wells Valley to the California Aqueduct in California City in Kern County so water could be imported and used to recharge the aquifer. That pipeline would need to extend from where the Antelope Valley East Kern County Water Agency’s furthest extension of facilities importing water from the California Aqueduct ends near California City to Ridgecrest.
The Indian Wells Valley Water District, along with numerous local entities including the Ridgecrest Area Association of Realtors, the Ridgecrest Chamber of Commerce and the Indian Wells Valley Economic Development Corporation consider that proposed project/solution to be prohibitively expensive and believe it would likely cause economic harm as well as double the rates paid by the Indian Wells Valley Water District customers for their water.
To a greater extent, the voting board members of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority representing Kern County, the City of Ridgecrest and Inyo County were on board with the water importation concept, as was San Bernardino County to a lesser extent. The Indian Wells Valley Water District, however, was concerned that the cost of the water importation infrastructure would raise the cost of water beyond what its customers could reasonably sustain. It pressed for alternate solutions to redress the water shortage, including water use efficiency, recycling and measures to lessen evaporation, as well as purchasing water from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has already constructed a pipeline conveying water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles through the area.
In 2021, based upon its contention that the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority formulated its strategy to overcome the basin overdraft without having first completed a scientifically sound survey of the extent of the overdraft and the full range of methodologies that could be applied to overcome it, the Indian Wells Valley Water District’s initiated Indian Wells Valley Water District v. All Persons Who Claim a Right to Extract Groundwater in the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin in Orange County Superior Court in an effort to adjudicate water rights throughout the Indian Wells Valley basin.
That legal action took place in the context of other water use management/water conservation measures being instituted which imposed limits, hardships and expense on companies and corporations in the area involved in agricultural and industrial production and the lawsuits brought by Searles Valley Minerals, Mojave Pistachios, Sierra Shadows Ranch, John Thomas Conaway and the Nugent Family Trust.
This led to the rather remarkable circumstance in which the two major entities in the region devoted to the management of water resources found themselves working at cross purposes.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority objected to the water district’s water rights adjudication effort, asserting that the adjudication interferes with the groundwater authority’s efforts to manage and reduce the overdraft and that the adjudication will have the effect of benefiting certain agricultural interests and Searles Valley Minerals, who they claimed were the most profligate users of water in the basin, while threatening, or at least challenging, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake’s federal reserved water rights.
Attitudes of the public with regard to the legitimacy of the groundwater authority’s water management/conservation/importation plan or the water district’s adjudication effort was a matter of personal perspective. To some, the water district was being obstructionist and blocking a joint powers authority from moving forward with what seemed to be a practical, if somewhat costly, solution to an intractable problem. To others, the water district was taking a time-honored approach in seeking to ensure that all parties, large and small, powerful and weak, connected and unconnected, governmental and private sector were dealt with fairly and were given no greater or lesser entitlement to the elixir of life, and simultaneously seeking to ensure that a combination of governmental agencies were not embarking on a project that was going to impose an enormous financial burden on residents, landowners and businesses.
One issue that was taken up as part of the water district’s adjudication effort was the fashion in which the groundwater authority had presumed that there was no mechanism in the law, administrative processes or the Groundwater Management Act to include the China Lake Naval Air Station in the water use limitations or subject it to financial participation in the proposed solution to the overdraft dilemma, i.e., constructing the pipeline to the California Aqueduct and they paying for the importation of water from the State Water Project to Indian Wells Valley for injection into the water table.
As it turned out, the water district’s raising of that matter resulted in a judge’s determination with regard to water allotments and fair water distribution that the Navy cannot simply monopolize a significant portion of the desert’s water without regard to the water needs and rights of other entities there.
The matter of Indian Wells Valley Water District v. All Persons Who Claim a Right to Extract Groundwater in the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin was divided into two phases. The first phase, which was heard earlier this year by Orange County Superior Court Judge William Claster, hashed out what water rights the Navy has. The second phase, which will go before Judge Claster next year, will make determinations as to the water rights of the other entities in Indian Wells Valley.
On July 31, 2025, Judge Claster ruled that the China Lake Naval Air Station is entitled, under the water rights adjudication the Indian Wells Valley Water District is requesting, to far less water on an annual basis than the Navy had previously asserted. The Navy had requested the court to recognize that it is entitled to 6,783 acre-feet of water per year.
An acre-foot is the amount of water that covers an acre of ground to the depth of one foot, i.e., 43,450 cubic feet or 325,851.4 U.S. gallons.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority had supported the Navy in that claim. The City of Ridgecrest, which has roughly 6,500 inhabitants employed at the China Lake Naval Air Station, held that the Navy should be provided with even more water than the military service had asked for, stating in a filing with the court that it should be free to pump up to 7,988 acre-feet per year.
Searles Valley Minerals participated in the first phase of the adjudication trial conducted over seven days between April 28 and May 14, 2025 before Judge Claster, and its expert witness testified that according to the numbers he had run, the Navy is entitled to no more than its most recent 10-year average of 1,644 acre-feet per year, consisting of 1,536 acre feet for all base uses plus 108 acre-feet reserved for firefighting.
Meadowbrook Dairy, a major agricultural concern in Indian Wells Valley, made a similar argument, but conceded through its expert witness that an increase in the China Lake Naval Air Station’s water allotment to about 2,000 acre-feet per year was not unreasonable.
Ultimately, Judge Claster found that 2,008 acre-feet of water should be reserved for the Navy’s use at the air station yearly.
In filings with the court for the adjudication, the groundwater authority has stated its analysis has determined that average natural annual recharge of water into the Indian Wells Valley basin is 7,650 acre-feet per year. The Indian Wells Valley Water District has disputed that estimate as scientifically unsound and that the amount of water coming into the basin on average is closer to 14,000 acre-feet per year.
The groundwater authority’s previous willingness to allow the naval air station to monopolize without question more than 80 percent of the entire valley’s annual recharge of water was a major factor in the legal and procedural resistance water users in the valley were mounting the authority’s water importation solution to the overdraft.
While lawyers for both the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and Searles Valley Minerals made no such official or on-the-record statements relating to what factors had led to the settlement agreement between their clients, it has widely circulated that Judge Claster’s determination that the China Lake Naval Station is entitled to less than 30 percent of the water the groundwater authority was prepared to grant it, set the table for the settlement to take place.

By Kevin Kiley and Mark Gutglueck
The California State Auditor earlier this month released a report that offered an assessment of the expenditures by what are categorized as the state’s high risk agencies which indicates the state government is potentially squandering in the neighborhood of $76.5 billion.
The nonpartisan audit, released December 11, 2025, went beyond being outright gloomy to alarming in spotlighting California’s use and distribution of pandemic relief funds, its spending on social-welfare programs, homelessness programs and major infrastructure projects in a way that underscore misgivings long expressed by Governor Gavin Newsom’s critics about the way he is managing the most populous state in the Union.
Of immense fiscal consequence, according to the report, is the way in which $32 billion in COVID-19 relief funds was misspent or in some measure fraudulently applied through various emergency aid programs overseen by the Department of Finance; $2.5 billion was improper spent or utilized within CalFresh, the state’s food-stamp program; $18 billion was thrown into the state’s high-speed rail project without any scheduled spans of track actually being laid down; and a completely unaccounted-for amount of money of at least $24 billion and as much as $37 billion having been utilized to eradicate or otherwise address homelessness without any significant inroads against the problem being realized, while the incidence of homelessness throughout the state has risen some 20 percent.
In contrast, Governor Newsom, who has insisted in the past that California sets the standard for efficient, responsive and accountable government throughout the country, continues to maintain that he and the Democrat Party-controlled apparatus in Sacrament are apply sound fiscal management tools California’s operations.
In this year’s report pertaining to what the auditor’s office identifies as high-risk state agencies, State Auditor Grant Parks said he was broadening the number of agencies he defines as “posing a high-risk of serious detriment to the state or its residents. To be considered high risk, an agency must not only exhibit serious waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement, but must also have failed to take adequate, corrective action.”
Though the auditor’s office is considered to be nonpartisan, Parks, who was appointed to the post by Governor Newsom in 2023, is a Democrat by party affiliation. For that reason, his scathing analysis of fiscal misdirection under the supervision of Newsom is considered to be telling.
Park identified eight separate state agencies as high risk, four of which were moved into the at-risk category during the Newsom Administration, which came into being on January 7, 2019, following his first election as governor in November 2018. One of those agencies is the Department of Social Services.
Among the findings of why the eight agencies are considered high risk is that massive payment errors in the Cal-Fresh Program could cost the state $2.5 billion in federal funds. Another ongoing problems is determining the eligibility of recipients for Medi-Cal benefits. Medi-Cal is California’s version of the federal Medi-Care program. According to Park, there are persisting problems in determining who is eligible, which extends to Medi-Cal continuing to make payments to people who do not meet the income threshold or who have left the state entirely. This has put over $2 billion in federal money that would otherwise come to the state at risk. Continued fraud and overpayment with unemployment insurance benefits are continuing to cost the state as much as $13 billion per year. This is in addition to $32 billion in fraud during the COVID years. The state has missed six straight deadlines for its annual comprehensive financial report, which puts the state’s credit rating as well as federal funding in jeopardy. The auditor’s report documents IT projects that languished for months or for years as antiquated systems beleaguer the state’s bureaucracy, despite Silicon Valley being a stone’s throw away. There are state entities that continue to “fall short of minimum standards for information security,” putting state government’s and private citizens’ data at risk to exposure, as well as leaving data relating to the state’s physical infrastructure vulnerable to hacking. The auditor found that there are 49 dams throughout the state that pose “an extremely high risk to life and property.” This risk is increasing, according to the auditor’s office. In the last two years the number of dams rated poor or unsatisfactory has increased by 73 percent.
Of the state’s 1,472 dams which play crucial roles in flood management, water storage and hydropower generation, 39 of them are in San Bernardino County.
According to the audit, the quality of government service is unacceptably low. With the California Department of Employment Development and Disability there is ongoing, continuing and mounting fraud and overpayments, while some of those entitled to legitimate payments have difficulty accessing the payments they are entitled to. The auditor found that a typical legitimate claimant had to call the Department of Employment Development and Disability two to five times per week to get assistance. The Department of Employment Development and Disability has failed to meet federal benchmarks for timely benefits for payments to those deserving benefits while there are thousands of examples of those who are defrauding the system who seem to have no trouble obtaining money to which they have no real claim.
According to the auditor’s report, “The Employment Development Department continues to struggle with improper payments, claimant service, and eligibility decision appeals. The Employment Development Department’s efforts to reduce unacceptably high levels of improper payments including fraudulent payments in its unemployment insurance program are not yet adequate. The Employment Development Department has not provided state residents with sufficient customer service, resulting in significant challenges to claimants obtaining unemployment benefits. The Employment Development Department has consistently failed to meet the federal standard for first payment timeliness. Many of the Employment Development Department’s unemplyment eligibility decisions are not upheld on appeal. The Employment Development Department’s eligibility decisions continue to be frequently overturned on appeal to the appeals board, which contributes to some unemployment insurance claimants waiting much longer for decisions than federal standards consider acceptable. In 2023 and 2024, the appeals board overturned or modified in favor of the claimant more than 43 percent of the issues claimants appealed.”
During the COVID years, the Department of Employment Development and Disability ordered 7,224 mobile devices consisting of hot spots and cell phones for employees who were not reporting to state offices so they could could continue to work. The state continued to pay for the mobile devices after the end of the pandemic while they were no longer being used costing the state millions of dollars.
According to the auditor’s office, one California Air Resources Board employee in particular was paid $171,446 in salary for 15 months after he or she was no longer working.
The auditor founded rampant nepotism within the Department of General Services and the California Department of Transportation relating to hiring practices. There were instances where managers gave interviewees answers to interview questions in advance of the oral phase of the hiring process to assist them in getting the jobs they had applied for.
With regard to California’s High Speed Rail project, accoring the California Auditor’s Office, the anticipated cost of the project has escalated to $128 billion, several more times than the original anticipated cost. No track has been laid for the project despite the state having spent $18 billion of the $128 billion thus far.
In highlighting the “systemic issues” plaguing the state, the report states “The state’s management of federal COVID-19 funds continues to be a high-risk issue. Late financial reporting remains a high-risk issue. The Department of Health Care Services has not adequately demonstrated progress to resolve problems with Medi-Cal eligibility determinations. The state’s information security remains a high-risk issue. The California Department of Technology has not made sufficient progress in its oversight of state information technology projects. California’s deteriorating water infrastructure and climate change may threaten the lives and property of its residents and the reliability of the state’s water supply.”
According to the report, the California Department of Social Services evinced “a high rate of errors in calculating CalFresh benefits” at a cost of up to $2.5 billion annually if not corrected and the issues with dams and water project delivery could become critical by 2043 if infrastructure needs are not addressed. e issues to avoid further financial and infrastructure challenges.
While Republicans cite the audit as a confirmation of “dysfunction” in the Newsom Administration, in which the state budget has grown by 50 percent, or $124 billion, in the last five years with a regression in the quality of government service, Newsom’s office, while acknowledging ongoing challenges in the Department of Social Services, asserted that with regard the auditor’s issues of concern, reforms are already under way and patience is required to train staff and finalize strategies for improvement.
Kevin Kiley is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s 3rd Congressional District. Mark Gutglueck is the publisher of the Sentinel.

Authorities from numerous states are closing in on the mad dog serial murderer now known as the “Sour Cream Killer” in light of a fourth major breakthrough in the investigation.
It is the current Christmas festivities that have allowed detectives working across a wide geographical area to piece together further information that will lead to the sociopath’s full identification and capture.
For years, what were to all appearances unrelated homicides were occurring throughout the country, though primarily within the four-state Southwest, with more than two-thirds of those occurring in Southern California.
The first major advance came with the recognition that many of the killings were related. That realization led to what was a second crucial discovery: many or nearly all of the victims were individuals who had in some way become involved in the intermixture of sour cream with Mexican food. Those dying were those who ate, ordered, served or prepared tacos, burritos or nachos which incorporated sour cream.
The third significant investigative advance came when several of the sour cream deaths were connected with a new set of victims – those who indulged in pizza topped with pineapple.
A major segment of the population has been ruled out as suspects, and early in 2025, based on the locales where many of the murders took place and a process of elimination based on the whereabouts of those who had come under suspicion at the times when the murders occurred, all but 186,000 have been eliminated as suspects.
A profile made by psychologists working with the FBI holds that the perpetrator is likely a male ranging in age from 39-to-54, quite possibly a military veteran and/or the graduate of a private junior military academy and/or the product of a very strict upbringing by disciplinary parents or a guardian.
Now comes further word that victims include those who eat, make, sell, purchase or distribute pineapple tamales, which are popular in some households, particularly ones in Southern California, during the Christmas season.
“What we have here is someone who has a very low tolerance for specific types of culinary variety,” said one homicide detective working the case.
In the meantime, until the perpetrator is apprehended, it is advised that people eating in or taking out from pizzerias avoid the pineapple topping and that goes double for those frequenting fast food or sit down restaurants, who are warned that sour cream on standard south-of-the-border cuisine should be avoided.
While the average person’s chance of encountering the Sour Cream Killer at Taco Bell or Del Taco is statistically low, there are several people who are no longer alive who fell within that margin of numerical anomaly, and you really don’t want to set this guy off.