By Mark Gutglueck
With the FBI scrutinizing virtually every element of his political existence, Ontario Councilman Alan Wapner has abandoned his challenge of Mayor Paul Leon and will instead run for reelection to the city council for the eighth consecutive time in the upcoming November 3 election.
Leon and Wapner are two of San Bernardino County’s longest-serving local elected officials. Wapner was first elected to the city council in 1994. Leon was appointed to the council in 1998.
Wapner, who has stated on numerous occasions, in numerous contexts and to numerous individuals privately and publicly that he considers himself to be comprehensively superior to Leon with regard to every consideration the voters should make in selecting a mayor, seriously contemplated running for mayor in the special election that took place in June 2005 after former Mayor Gary Ovitt was elected to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in November 2004 with two years remaining on his term. Leon, however, beat Wapner in filing to compete in that race, and Wapner opted against making it into a race between two incumbent council members. Leon prevailed in the special election against former Ontario City Attorney Sam Crowe, who had also served on the city council in the 1960s. Wapner contemplated running against Leon in 2010, but again deferred to the reality that Leon, given his Spanish surname, had an electoral advantage over him in a city in which upwards of 60 percent of the population is Hispanic. Privately, Wapner lamented that Ontario was being poorly and inadequately represented by Leon who was doing a disservice to the city’s residents by monopolizing the mayor’s position. Nevertheless, he chose, again in 2024, 2028 and 2022 to run for city council rather than mayor, and even arranged to run as a troika with Mayor Leon and Councilman Jim Bowman, who together shared the same election cycle in which they were due for reelection in California’s gubernatorial election years. The three ran as members of the so-called Team Ontario, claiming in mutually-funded election material that they were responsible for the economic development in their city that had rendered Ontario into the most lavishly funded municipality in San Bernardino County. Despite this public show of comity, Leon and Wapner in actuality loathed one another. Continue reading →

With the deadline for elected public office candidacies for most of the municipal positions to be contested in the November 3 general election eclipsing at 5 p.m. today, a clearer picture of who is vying for mayoral and council positions in San Bernardino County’s cities and towns has emerged.
In Barstow Sonia Compton, Valerie Lee, Kelly M. Parker are vying to represent the city’s District 1, which is currently filled by Councilwoman Carmen Hernandez. Hernandez is not seeking reelection. Bartow District Two Councilman James Noble is seeking reelection and is being challenged by Latron Lester.
In Needles, incumbent Mayor Janet Jernigan is being challenged by former Mayor Jeff Williams
and incumbent council members Henry Longbrake and Jamie McCorkle are seeking reelection with Wayne Colburn, Sandra Queen Noble and Charles Dressler competing against them.
In Apple Valley, incumbent Mayor Scott Nassif is running this year and David Dencker, and Robert Lucero and Angelita Valles are running against him. In District 4, incumbent Curt Emick is seeking reelection, with Brian Cochrane and Matthew Rutledge vying against him. In District 3, incumbent Kari Leon is facing challengers Ted Bohanon and Evaggelia Markov.
In Adelanto, incumbent Mayor Gabriel Reyes is seeking to remain in office while facing a challenge from incumbent Councilwoman Stevevonna Evans and Ronald Beard. Incumbent Councilman Angelo Meza and incumbent Councilwoman Amanda Uptergrove are vying for reelection and Edward C. Reyes and Taisha Brown are running against them. Continue reading →

A man who lives in Summit Valley in the rugged area south of Hesperia was attacked by a group of people after they came onto his property on August 6.
The man survived two ineffective attempts to kill him. Thursday night, just before 8 p.m., residents of a home located in the isolated Summit Valley area in the unincorporated area outside the Hesperia City Limits saw several individuals in a vehicle, described as a gray Chevrolet Traverse drive onto their approximately 37-acre property. When they confronted them, the Traverse left, but less than 15 minutes later a black Jeep Cherokee came onto the property, located in the 4600 block of Summit Valley Road. It is not known whether those in Jeep Cherokee were the same group in the Traverse. The driver of the Cherokee angled the 4X4 SUV at, and attempted to hit, one of the residents, who managed to avoid being run down. At least one of the Jeep’s occupants then fired at least two gunshots at the man before driving away.
After sheriff’s deputies were summoned to the scene, they came across two 9mm bullet casings believed to have been ejected from the gun used in the shooting attempt, were found on the ground near where the two murder attempts occurred.

The Twentynine Palms City Council on July 28 failed to reach a consensus on pursuing a grant to work with the Sanctuary Church to establish a comprehensive emergency services/disaster response center, resulting in the city now being unable to meet the filing deadline for the grant.
Since 2011, the Sanctuary Church, has run the Hope Center out of an Adobe Road building, receiving food from the FIND Food Bank in Indio and the US Department of Agriculture in San Bernardino and providing it free Twentynine Palms residents in need weekly through the Feed the Need program. It has traditionally held giveaways at 5 p.m. every Tuesday. At least since 2025, the City of Twentynine Palms has participated in that program by augmenting its operations with $10,000 per year. Those heavily involved in the Hope Center include Bishop Perry Ford of the Sanctuary Church, the Hope Center’s community outreach director, Shanese Risper and Sylvester Cullum, the business administrator at The Hope Center.
In recent years, the Red Cross has had a presence in Twentynine Palms as a consequence of summer monsoons and resultant flooding that left residents in low-lying areas homeless, at least temporarily. Dialogues between the community volunteers led to a suggestion that the shuttered Rite Aid building acquired by the city could be converted into a so-called community resilience center.
A community resilience center is a local hub that supports everyday community needs and transforms into a resource center during emergencies to enhance what is termed “neighborhood resilience.” Such centers normally involve indoor space intended as a forum for to give local residents daily or weekly access to available social services and the serve as a shelter during disasters such as fires, extreme heat, earthquakes, or floods. Continue reading →

(ONTARIO–August 6) In a bid to assist Alan Wapner in his mayoral effort, Ontario Councilwoman Daisy Macias is jumping into the November 3 race.
At the behest of Wapner, who has offered her assistance in funding what both have agreed will be a token campaign not intended to succeed in getting her elected but rather to divide the city’s Hispanic vote, Macias took out mayoral candidacy papers, Ontario Assistant City Clerk Claudia Isbell confirmed on August 4.
Wapner was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994, and had contemplated running for mayor in the 2005 special election to replace former Mayor Garry Ovitt after Ovitt left the mayoral position to serve as Fourth District San Bernardino County supervisor following his election to that post in 2004, but did not do so when Paul Leon, who had been on the city council since 1998 beat him to the punch by declaring he was going to seek the office. Leon prevailed in that contest over Sam Crowe, Ontario’s former city attorney and former city councilman.
Wapner and Leon thereafter found themselves on the same electoral cycle, such that each was up for reelection, Leon for mayor and Wapner for councilman, in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. At each juncture, Wapner deferred his ambition to become mayor to some future point. Wapner was hampered from achieving the city’s highest elective post by the consideration that Leon held the upper hand of being the incumbent and the even more important advantage of his Spanish surname, which redounded to Leon’s benefit in a city which at that time had a population that was then 63 percent Latino and which in the last 21 years has transitioned into being 68.8 percent Hispanic.
At various times during their combined tenure as city leaders, the relationship between Leon and Wapner has broken down and broken into open hostility. In 2009, their enmity reached what was previously a nadir, when Wapner joined with two other members of the council to reduce the mayor’s stipend by $30,000 to match what was paid council members and he hired attorney/private investigator Loerena Nesci to dig up dirt on Leon, and then had Nesci trumpet to the community that Leon was carrying on with Diana Huizar, an executive secretary working at the Ontario Convention Center. Wapner had hoped the matter involving Huizar would damage Leon’s reputation sufficiently to dim the mayor’s prospects for reelection in 2010 or convince him to discontinue in office entirely. When a pollster who took the pulse of the community reported back to Wapner that the Huizar affair had not made sufficient inroads on Leon’s popularity with the city’s electorate and that polls showed Wapner losing to Leon in an head-to-head contest, Wapner opted out of running for mayor in 2010. Instead, he engineered a rapprochement with Leon, and Leon, Wapner and Jim Bowman, another incumbent councilman who shared the same re-election cycle, represented themselves as “Team Ontario,” the trio of dedicated and competent city fathers who were responsible for Ontario being the most economically successful of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities. All three were reelected, and in the election years since, Leon and Wapner remained in their respective mayoral and council lanes, endorsing one another for reelection, along with Jim Bowman.
In 2024, the veneer of civility that had existed between Leon and Wapner began to crack when Wapner poached Daisy Macias from Leon as one of his allies. Leon had long been grooming Macias as a potential member of the city council, having hired her to work as a secretary at the church where he is pastor, then assisting her in getting positions in the real estate industry, including most recently a high-profile and lucrative position with Community Renaissance, an affordable housing developer founded by Jeff Burum, who has proven over the years to be one of the deepest-pocketed donors to San Bernardino County politicians, including Leon and Wapner. In a move to begin a redraft of Ontario’s political landscape, Wapner transferred $40,000 out of his political war chest to Macias to assist her in what was to Leon a surprise run for the city council in Ontario’s recently-formed Fourth Council District. Wapner then arranged for a host of donors he had come to rely on to fill out his own campaign coffers to make donations to Macias. In this way, Macias proved successful and was elected Fourth District councilwoman. Once in office, she aligned herself with Wapner.
Last year, when Leon downplayed the concerns expressed by some of the city’s residents about the aggressive tactics of federal law enforcement officers with the onset of Donald Trump’s second term as president, in particular Border Patrol and Department of Immigration and Customs rounding up undocumented aliens, Wapner perceived that to be a major stumble on the mayor’s part, one that would alienate him from a portion of his natural constituency. He seized the day, making statement to the effect that he was horrified by the Leon’s insensitivity to the Latino community. He then reformulated his campaign committee, which was formerly intended to raise money for his 2026 council reelection campaign, instead declaring that he was seeking the mayoralty. Wapner then moved to secure the backing of all of Ontario’s municipal employee unions, including AFSCME, SEIU, the Firefighters Association, the Ontario Police Officers Association and the Ontario Police Management Association. In addition, Wapner, who over the three decades he had been in office had already established himself as the most prolific fundraiser among local elected officials in San Bernardino County history, outhustled Leon in preparing for the 2026 election. From January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, Wapner took in $326,100 in political donations. In the same timeframe, Mayor Leon collected $48,600 in contributions. In the first six months of this year, Wapner brought in another 323,199.08 in donations. Leon was able to touch his supporters for $47,849 from January 1 until June 30, 2026. In this way, Wapner was able to obtain $652,248.08 in political donations to fuel his effort in the 2026 mayoral contest, which was 676 percent of the $96,449 in political contributions Leon put together.
With his endorsements and monetary lead, Wapner was confident that he would be able to overcome the two advantages Leon possessed, namely being the incumbent and the readiness of Ontario’s predominantly Hispanic population to embrace a Latino as mayor rather than a Caucasian.
Wapner, however, encountered a major speed bump in the race to become mayor on July 28, when the FBI served search warrants at his home and business office, as well as at the headquarters of the Ontario International Airport Authority, where he is the president of the airports board of directors, as well as at the homes and offices of two of his closest associates, San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is a member with Wapner of the airport authority board, and Wapner’s personal attorney, Frank Lizarraga. Word on the street was that the FBI already had strong indication that Wapner and Hagman were taking bribes and receiving kickbacks, and that in serving the search warrants the federal agents were looking for even more damning evidence in that regard.
Seeing what had occurred as a major setback to Continue reading →

Isaac Elias Carrillo, a 28-year-old instructional assistant at Condor Elementary School in Twentynine Palms has been charged with two counts related to sexual abuse of a child.
Carrillo, who lives in Twentynine Palms, will not be returning to resume his work assignment with the district when the new school year begins later this month.
Carrillo has been charged with sexually abusing a developmentally disabled student under age 14 at Condor Elementary School.
The five foot-eight inch, 200-pound Carrillo was taken into custody on July 1 at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s headquarters in San Bernardino, where he had apparently consented to speak with investigators, a interview which turned into an interrogation.
In court July 8, he pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse with a child 10 or younger and sexual penetration or oral copulation with a child 10 or younger.
According to information available to the Sentinel, in May, a mother of a child who had attended Condor Elementary School approached the police department in Oceanside in San Diego County and told a detective there that her child had been sexually abused at the Twentynine Palms School. The child told the mother the abuse had taken place during school hours. She related what the child said to the Oceanside police investigator, who relayed that information to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department personnel in Twentynine Palms.
On May 13, Oceanside police notified the Morongo Basin sheriff’s station about what the mother had said and forwarded a report of the interview with her.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department probe into what occurred was handled by Deputy A. Stumbo, who works as a resource officer with the Morongo Basin Union School District, and Detective Wendy Winegar, a member of the sheriff’s Crimes Against Children Detail. They identified Carrillo as a suspect.
Carrillo has been employed by the Morongo Unified School District since 2018 and has worked at multiple schools throughout the Morongo Basin, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Continue reading →

Federal Express is going to going to shutter its shipping center in Victorville, in September, which will entail laying off 54 employees.
The current operation at 12212 Industrial Boulevard is the 16th largest employer in Victorville, offering a range of FedEx shipping services, including express and ground drop-off, package pickup, packaging supplies, and international shipping. It also provides in-store services such as getting shipping labels, holding packages for pickup, and offering Saturday service.
Federal Express will maintain a presence at the location, rebranded as a FedEx Office, after September 27, but it will be reduced to customer interface with a skeleton crew.

By Mark Gutglueck
A decade after the marijuana meltdown in Adelanto which resulted in Adelanto’s mayor and one of its councilmen going into federal prison and a third councilman narrowly ducking the same fate, at least three of Adelanto’s current city leaders have latched onto a different political grift, but one which they will put into their own pockets untold millions of dollars, again believing they can sidestep the regulatory regime that is supposed to be applied to the controversial business they are now promoting.
In this go-round, it appears that the city’s current mayor and possibly three and more likely four of the council’s members believe that instead of devoting square miles of land within the city limits to growing, processing, refining and distributing marijuana and cannabis products, the city can allow dozens or maybe even scores of data centers to set up operation and flourish.
The sense of déjà vu is palpable to those who witnessed the Kerr-and-Wright-led debacle, which includes the recognition that the practical issues that felled the effort to turn Adelanto in the marijuana capital of the world – the lack of adequate electrical utility output and an insufficient supply of water – are equally applicable to the current pipedream. And just like a trio of former councilmen thought they could outsmart a team of FBI agents and a quarter dozen assistant U.S. Attorneys who were monitoring their moves, the current council comes across as believing they can take money from some deep-pocketed entrepreneurs and promise them shelter from federal, state and local regulations.
With the clean sweep that was effectuated in the 2014 election when Rich Kerr ousted Mayor Cari Thomas and John Woodard and Charles Glasper defeated Steve Baisden Charles Valvo, Kerr joined forces with incumbent Councilman Jermaine Wright and Woodard to embrace the long-in-coming liberalization of California’s marijuana laws that were fully effectuated with the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016. Presciently anticipating Proposition 64’s passage, the three spent 2015 acclimating the city’s populace to the concept of simply allowing a limited number of warehouses in the city industrial park zone to operate as indoor marijuana farms where medical marijuana was to be cultivated. Continue reading →

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME
CASE NUMBER CIVSB2620226
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS: Petitioner ROBYN PORTER filed with this court for a decree changing names as follows:
ROBYN JODI PORTER to ROBYN JODI ABRAMS
THE COURT ORDERS that all persons interested in this matter appear before this court at the hearing indicated below to show cause, if any, why the petition for change of name should not be granted. Any person objecting to the name changes described above must file a written objection that includes the reasons for the objection at least two court days before the matter is scheduled to be heard and must appear at the hearing to show cause why the petition should not be granted. If no written objection is timely filed, the court may grant the petition without a hearing.
Notice of Hearing:
Date: AUGUST 24, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m.
Department: S24
Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino
San Bernardino District-Civil Division
The address of the court is Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino, 247 West Third Street, San Bernardino, CA 92415
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a copy of this order be published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel in San Bernardino County California, once a week for four successive weeks prior to the date set for hearing of the petition.
Joseph T. Ortiz
Judge of the Superior Court.
Aryanna Sheehe, Deputy Clerk of the Court
Dated: July 10, 2026
Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on July 17, 24 & 31 and August 7, 2026.

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME
CASE NUMBER CIV SB 2620549
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS: Petitioner DANIEL JAMES MILES filed with this court for a decree changing names as follows:
DANIEL JAMES MILES to DANIEL JAMES WAGNER
THE COURT ORDERS that all persons interested in this matter appear before this court at the hearing indicated below to show cause, if any, why the petition for change of name should not be granted. Any person objecting to the name changes described above must file a written objection that includes the reasons for the objection at least two court days before the matter is scheduled to be heard and must appear at the hearing to show cause why the petition should not be granted. If no written objection is timely filed, the court may grant the petition without a hearing.
Notice of Hearing:
Date: September 3, 2026
Time: 8:30 a.m.
Department: S28
Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino
San Bernardino District-Civil Division
The address of the court is Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino, 247 West Third Street, San Bernardino, CA 92415
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a copy of this order be published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel in San Bernardino County California, once a week for four successive weeks prior to the date set for hearing of the petition.
Joseph T. Ortiz
Judge of the Superior Court.
Adilene Gutierrez, Deputy Clerk of the Court
Dated: July 15, 2026
Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on July 17, 24 & 31 and August 7, 2026.

Continue reading →