A minor furor has broken out in the City of Gracious Living over special viewing accommodations for Upland’s upcoming July 4 fireworks spectacular being given out at taxpayer expense to an unknown number of municipal, political and business insiders who are on good terms with the Upland City Council.
A letter, referenced in its subject line as an “Invitation to City of Upland Firework Spectacular private viewing,” from the city council and signed by Mayor Bill Velto dated June 1, 2021 was sent so a select group of residents, business people and individuals active as political supporters of the current city council.
The letter stated, “The City of Upland is proud to announce the return of our Firework Spectacular! This year’s event theme is “Light up the Night” and will be viewable from many locations within the city. While we cannot have a large-scale viewing event due to potential Covid restrictions, we have arranged a smaller private viewing event. We are excited to invite you and a guest to attend our “Light up the Night” Firework Spectacular private viewing event on Sunday, July 4, 2021 at 7 p.m. This private event will be held outdoors at the city’s public works facility, 1370 N. Benson Ave, Upland, 91786.”
The invitation said there “will be light refreshments… and activities for everyone to enjoy.”
Those invited were asked to RSVP to (909) 931-4281 by June 20.
“Upon your RSVP, you will be provided with details regarding parking,” the letter states, before concluding, “We look forward to seeing you there!”
The 931-4281 number connects with a desk in the city’s recreation department.
There has arisen a brouhaha over the matter on multiple grounds.
Some have objected to the exclusivity of the invitations and the suggestion that the city council is looking to hobnob with a select group on an occasion as iconic as the Fourth of July. The upshot is that if the council is going to engage itself in such a celebration, it should be open to the public.
A second objection is that if the city council is to extend private invitations to its members’ friends and political supporters, it should not be doing so at taxpayer expense but rather on the council members’ own dimes.
Third, there is the suggestion that the council was misusing the city-sponsored fireworks show improperly by exploiting it for political purposes and to ingratiate itself with possible campaign donors.
A fourth objection is that the circumstance is exacerbated by the consideration that the get-together between the council members and their friends and supporters is being hosted on city property.
Fifth, the event involving all five of the council members in the same place and at the same time may be a violation of California’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, which prohibits members of an elected public panel from coming together and discussing anything related to the agency they represent outside of a forum open to the public. The Brown Act also requires that such a panel’s actions and deliberations be open to public scrutiny, and that members of the public must be given an opportunity to comment on any action the panel might take before the action is taken. The Brown Act further requires that such a meeting have an agenda laying out the topics of discussion, and that the agenda be publicly posted 72 hours in advance of the meeting.
The private fireworks viewing event in Upand this coming Sunday summoned comparisons to an exclusive reception that San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia held for his supporters last month after he delivered his state of the city address. The cost of that event, held at a restaurant owned by one of Valdivia’s campaign donors, was defrayed with city funds. While Valdivia maintained that it was intended as a celebration of the city’s progress and bounce back from the bankruptcy San Bernardino declared in 2012 which was meant to be attended by the city’s movers and shakers and community “stakeholders” and those likely to contribute to the city’s continuing economic recover, only those invited were allowed to attend. Valdivia failed to invite six of the city’s seven council members to the reception.
Meanwhile in Upland, City Councilwoman Janice Elliott insisted, “I was not involved with the guest list” for the fireworks viewing event in Upland.
Moreover, Elliott said, she did not believe that city staff was involved in sending the invitations out.
-M.G.

By Mark Gutglueck
Two Joshua Tree landowners, who relatively recently moved to Southern California from Oregon, have been fined $18,000 for the wholesale destruction of 36 of the trees that their new town is named after.
Jeffrey Walter and his wife, Jonetta Nordberg-Walter, are attempting to construct what is described as their dream house on a ten-acre property located right off Prescott Avenue in the town limits of Joshua Tree she inherited from her father. In the course of clearing land to accommodate the home they are building, the couple began uprooting Joshua trees.
In February, they had hired a backhoe operator to clear a swath of the property, activity which included uprooting chaparral and Joshua Trees.
A nearby landowner saw the mayhem.
Joshua trees, known by their scientific name yucca brevifolia, are a protected species in California. Their destruction on both private and public land is prohibited throughout the state.
Their neighbor called the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which dispatched one of its officers to the area.
That was on February 11.
Initially, the Department of Fish and Wildlife agent was thwarted in documenting what was going on because it took him three hours to find the subject property and the Walters had their contractor bury the trees on the property. This made it so that the destruction of the trees was not visually apparent when the agent arrived.
Nevertheless, he persisted in his investigation and continued to reconnoiter the Walter property.
The officer was provided with crucial assistance by the individual who had phoned in the report. The Department of Fish and Wildlife agent was able to get close enough to the Nordberg-Walter property because of the cooperation of the informant.
That individual, the Sentinel is informed, was motivated to make the call and render further assistance because he had previously been prevented from doing extensive construction on his property because doing so would have required taking out Joshua Trees. Permits for doing that are prohibitively expensive, and generally require that the trees not be destroyed but transplanted, which is an arduous and expensive undertaking.
Ultimately, the agent was able to catch the Walters red-handed in the act of destroying Joshua trees. This gave the Department of Fish and Wildlife probable cause to come onto the property and conduct a search. That search entailed bringing in a backhoe and unearthing at a spot where it was believed the Walters had buried several of the tree that had been uprooted. Ultimately, the agent found 36 trees that were destroyed.
Both Jeffrey Walter and Jonetta Nordberg-Walter maintained they were unaware of the California law protecting Joshua Trees. Department of Fish and Wildlife agents were skeptical of that claim, based on the way they had buried the trees that were uprooted almost immediately.
Nevertheless, once the investigation and action of the Department of Fish and Wildlife was under way, the Walters came across as being cooperative, officials said.
The investigative file on the matter, documentation, reports and evidence were turned over to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, which then initiated a prosecution of both Walter and Nordberg-Walter.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office filed 36 misdemeanor charges each against Walter and Nordberg-Walter, one for each tree, an overall total of 72 charges.
The case against the couple was adjudicated in the courtroom of Judge Shannon Faherty at the Joshua Tree Superior Court. Walter was assessed a fine of $9,000 and Nordberg-Walter a like fine of $9,000.
There is some variance in perspective with regard to the matter.
Some believe what Walter and Nordberg-Walter did was inadvertent, and reflected no ill intent or effort to evade the law. They are recent newcomers to California and, in addition, the law relating to the removal of Joshua trees is a new one. The “taking” of a western Joshua tree became a criminal act in September 2020, when the California Fish & Wildlife Commission made the tree a candidate for endangered or threatened species protections. That statute made it illegal to disturb, move, replant, remove or kill western Joshua trees. Such action is designated as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $4,100 fine and six months in jail.
To some, Walter and Nordberg-Walter got off easy. For $18,000 and a minor blemish on their records, they will now be able to proceed with developing their property, which they legally would not have been likely to be able to do. Moreover, what amounts to a $500 fine per tree is less than what would have been a far more extensive cost if they had applied for permits to transplant them and then executed upon actually transplanting them.
Based on fees determined and set by the state, a permit to relocate a Joshua tree 13.123 feet tall or smaller on developed property costs $175. To remove the same size tree from developed land will cost $525. To relocate a Joshua tree taller than 13.123 feet from developed property costs $700. A Joshua tree that is less than 13.123 feet high growing on undeveloped land can be relocated for $625 and removed for $1,050. Those are permit costs. In addition, the cost of actually relocating a Joshua tree in such a way that it will survive can be quite expensive, as much or more than $1,200 for mature trees. Younger and smaller trees are less expensive to transplant.

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors is on an irretrievable trajectory to designate Undersheriff Shannon Dicus as Sheriff John McMahon’s successor, according personages within the department and involved in the county’s governmental structure.

McMahon, who has been sheriff since he was appointed to that post in 2012 following the resignation of his predecessor Rod Hoops and then ran successfully for election in 2012 as an unelected incumbent against two challengers and was reelected without opposition in 2018, on June 18 abruptly announced his resignation effective July 16.

The intertwined interests of the county’s top governmental and law enforcement silos, the history of the department, tradition, precedent, the current board of supervisors’ interest in maintaining continuity and preserving the status quo and the dynamic of noninterference between the county’s ruling elite and its policing arm, taken together with Dicus’s declaration that he intends to seek election in 2022, as well as what is essentially or predominantly the outsider status of the field of three alternate candidates who like Dicus have applied to replace McMahon, makes an appointment of anyone other than Dicus inconceivable.

The board of supervisors is scheduled to interview the four candidates on Wednesday, July 7, with the possibility that a vote settling the succession question being taken before that convocation concludes.

Competing with Dicus for the appointment to the sheriff’s position, which carries with it the titles of coroner and public administrator while providing on average yearly salary and other pay of $280,000 and benefits of $248,000 for a total annual compensation of $528,000, are Phillip Dupper, Cliff Harris and William Loenhorst.

Dupper can arguably make a disputed claim to insider or establishment status with the department, as he is has acceded to the rank of lieutenant with the department, after 25 years with the department. After graduating from the academy in 1996, he worked in the jails, thereafter working patrol out of the Fontana Station. He promoted to detective, whereupon he was assigned to the Rancho Cucamonga Station, then subsequently working in the narcotics division. Upon being promoted to sergeant, he returned to the departments jails, then was assigned to Morongo Valley and was then brought back to Rancho Cucamonga. After his promotion to lieutenant, he worked out of the department’s headquarters on Third Street in San Bernardino, where he saw the department’ information technology, central communications and dispatch functions. He has since returned to the department’s corrections division, first at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga and currently at the Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center in Devore.

Dupper is currently Loma Linda’s mayor, and has served on the Loma Linda City Council for 11 years. Previously, he was a board member and eventual vice president of the Safety Employees Benefit Association, the union representing San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies.

By clicking on the blue portal below, you can download a PDF of the June 25 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 06-25-21

Recent events demonstrate a sharp dichotomy in the attitude among and between different community leaders and residents over the hot button issue of warehouse development in San Bernardino County.
Over the last two decades, even as Southern California, the Inland Empire and San Bernardino County experienced explosive growth and residential, commercial and industrial expansion that was a continuation of the post-World War II trend that continued unabated for the last half of the 20th Century, warehouse development has been a part of that buildup, particularly in the last 20 years.
Southern California, which involves large port facilities in San Pedro and Long Beach, lands massive amounts of merchandise from manufacturers in Asia brought across the Pacific Ocean by ship. That cargo is offloaded onto trains and trucks and distributed throughout much of the country. In this way the Inland Empire has become a major logistics center.
Nevertheless, with more and more land locally being consumed by warehouses and distribution centers, some have begun to second guess the wisdom of allotting so much property, which could be used for other purposes, for the building of warehouses.
Increasingly, some elected officials, local residents and futurists are questioning whether warehouses constitute the highest and best use of the property available for development in the region. And while logistics facilities in modern times must be part of any land use mix, there is an argument to be made that there is a need to maintain a balance between such operations – or at least the quarters for such operations, as many of them stand empty – and other types of development. In refuting the assertions of the sponsors and proponents of warehouses that they constitute positive economic development, their detractors cite the relatively poor pay and benefits provided to those who work in distribution facilities, the large diesel-powered semi-trucks that are part of those operations with their unhealthy exhaust emissions, together with the bane of traffic gridlock they create.
Along the I-10 Freeway corridor running from Ontario in the west to San Bernardino in the east are four of San Bernardino County’s largest cities population-wise – Ontario, at 183,393, Rancho Cucamonga at 178,849, Fontana at 216,173 and San Bernardino at 217,491.
Of those, both Fontana and San Bernardino have embraced warehouse development as a means of economic development, to the point that Fontana’s mayor since 2010, Acquanetta Warren, is known by the sobriquet “Warehouse Warren.”
In March, San Bernardino gave go-ahead to one of the most ambitious warehouse projects in the region, dubbed San Manuel Landing, to be built by the San Manuel Indian Tribe near the city’s eastern border, which upon completion is to entail 1.153-million square feet under roof.
Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga have been far less hungry, or perhaps the word is desperate, for development, and somewhat more selective in what they allow to be built in their cities. Nevertheless, they too are hosts to a substantial number of warehouses.
Rancho Cucamonga is one of the more affluent cities in San Bernardino County in terms of the wealth of its residents, and as a municipality, it has the second largest budget among the county’s cities, with more than $224 million running through its various funds at present. Though Ontario’s residents are well behind those of many of the county’s other cities such as Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland and Redlands in terms of personal wealth, as a city it is home to some extremely lucrative businesses and other features, such as Ontario Airport, the Ontario Mills shopping mall, the Cemex corporate offices and others that provide the city with a prodigious revenue stream in terms of fees and taxes, such that it has more than half of a billion dollars a year running through all of its funds.
Thus, neither Ontario nor Rancho Cucamonga have found themselves under the gun to accommodate as much in the way of warehouse development as some other close-by communities. They have been at the periphery rather than the center of the warehouse-building frenzy.
Upland, which also lies along the I-10 Freeway Corridor, traditionally has not been a recurrent host of large warehouse projects.
Bloomington, an unincorporated county district of some 34,000 population that for the first half of the 20th Century was an agricultural community, in recent decades has become a major player within the logistics industry, and it finds itself attracting ever more warehouse development proposals. This was perhaps an inevitability, because of the I-10 Freeway, which runs through it; the major road arterials of Slover, Jurupa and Santa Ana avenues, all of which lead from the east toward Ontario Airport, to say nothing of the east-west railroad line that traverses it.
Rialto, a blue-collar city of 104,000, has welcomed some warehouses along the way.
Colton, with its 54,000 population, rail lines traversing north south, east and west and even diagonally, as well as its contiguity with both the I-10 and I-215 freeways has made it a natural haven for warehouses.
Warehouse developers and the owners of property to be converted to warehousing can make a quick buck. Consequently, they have proven to be significant donors of money to the campaign war chests of politicians who hold sway over the Inland Empire’s cities, as well as the county board of supervisors, which has ultimate land use authority over the unincorporated areas of the county, such as Bloomington. Many of those politicians have done the bidding of those who provide them with this campaign cash, in many cases going along with whatever development proposal is set down before them, including warehouses.
Since 2015, 26 warehouse projects have been processed and approved by the City of San Bernardino, entailing acreage under roof of 9,598,255 square feet, translating into 220.34 acres or more than one-third of a square mile.
In May, San Bernardino City Councilman Ben Reynoso, in consonance with four of his council colleagues, was able to provide direction to city staff to prepare an urgency ordinance that called for imposing a moratorium on building further warehouses in the city until city officials, with the input of residents, can formulate a set of standards with regard to such facilities, including how much of the city’s remaining available space in terms of undeveloped or blighted property should be utilized for warehousing, what requirements should be put on such development such as electrification of the vehicles utilized there and what restrictions should be placed on them, including distance from existing residential or school properties.
California law, however, requires that a moratorium on any specific type of building can be imposed only if it is passed by a four-fifths vote of a governmental entity’s legislative body. In San Bernardino, where the mayor is not empowered to vote, that means six of the seven members of the council had to sign off on the moratorium to meet or exceed the 80 percent passage threshold. Third Ward Councilman Juan Figueroa, a firm and fast political ally of Mayor John Valdivia, was unwilling to support a moratorium because Valdivia is heavily supported by warehouse developers, who have made major donations to Valdivia’s political war chest. Valdivia has passed some of that campaign cash along to Figueroa. Likewise, Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett, who has built his political career by professing to be pro-development and has been the recipient of money from the development community, was unwilling to support a moratorium.
Thus, though Reynoso had solid majority support of First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin and Seventh Ward Councilman Damon Alexander, he did not have the requisite political muscle to achieve the six council votes – tantamount to 85.71 percent of the council, to impose the warehouse moratorium.
Nevertheless, Reynoso, in league with Sanchez, Ibarra, Calvin and Alexander, will likely be able to block any warehouse development proposals in the county seat that do not embody the standards the five-member coalition deems desirable in such projects.
In neighboring Colton, the city council on May 4 put a 45-day moratorium on further consideration or approval of any warehouse projects not already in the pipeline. That gave city staff until June 18 to study the advisability and long term implication of allowing any remaining fast-depleting undeveloped land in the city to be converted into warehouses, distribution centers or similar uses. When staff by last Friday had not completed its assignment of making findings on whether permitting more warehouse development in the city qualified as a sensible land use strategy and what mitigations should accompany that type of development if it is allowed to occur, the council this week voted to extend the ban on further warehouse/distribution center development for another 10 months and 15 days, such that the moratorium will run through May 3, 2022.
Unfazed by the moratorium are a 960,000-square-foot warehouse that is referred to as the Barton Road Logistics Center, another 882,000-square-foot distribution facility referred to as the Agua Mansa Logistics Center and a more modest warehouse contemplated for South La Cadena Drive. Proponents for those three undertakings began the application process for them before May 4.
In Bloomington, residents there increasingly dismayed over the county’s disregard of their protests over the placement of warehouses into their residential neighborhoods and the granting of zone changes and variances required to accomplish this, are gradually becoming more sophisticated and activated in lodging protests and registering their discontent over such government actions, though the money the proponents of warehouse projects put up still rules the day.
In Upland, against overwhelming resident opposition, the city council as it was then composed in April 2020 gave Bridge Development Partners permission to construct for on-line retail behemoth Amazon at the western end of Upland a 201,096-square foot distribution center facility involving 25 dock high loading bays for 18-wheeler trucks, another 32 bays for delivery vans and trucks, along with 1,438 parking spaces around the building. The previous year, Bridge had previewed the project as three buildings comprising 977,000 square feet, but reduced the size of the project while city officials were contemplating the overture. The environmental certification for the project consisted of a mitigated negative declaration rather than a more comprehensive environmental impact report.
A group of residents, under the guise of a group they had formed, Upland Community First, sued the city, alleging a bevy of issues – including conflicting land use considerations, water consumption, air quality, potential contamination, noise, traffic, and biological and cultural resources – were not adequately addressed with the mitigated negative declaration, and they asked that the Superior Court order that the project approval be rescinded and a full-blown environmental impact report be completed for the project before it is again considered by the city.
Judge David Cohn, while finding that the council acted within its legal discretion in making its negative declaration with regard to the lion’s share of issues raised by Upland Community First, ruled in a tentative decision which has yet to be finalized that the negative declaration was flawed in its analysis of the project’s air quality impacts, in particular the greenhouse gasses to be emitted from the warehouse operation. Without ordering up the comprehensive environmental impact report that Upland Community First had requested, Judge Cohn’s tentative decision called upon the city to do an in-depth study of the greenhouse gas issue and adequately research precisely how many thousands of tons of carbon dioxide and other particulate-bearing emissions would be dispersed in the atmosphere if the facility were to be built and begin operating.
In the meantime, Bridge Development Partners, perhaps disenchanted with Upland and its residents’ unwillingness to welcome the Amazon distribution center into their community, has initiated an application with neighboring Rancho Cucamonga to construct on 91.4 acres in that city’s southeast corner two warehouse facilities totaling 2,175,000 square feet.
The two buildings, one described as consisting of approximately 1,422,500 square feet of floor area and the other as 752,500 square feet, are to be sited on a single property at 12434 4th Street in the City of Rancho Cucamonga, bordered by 4th Street to the south, which is also the jurisdictional boundary between the City of Rancho Cucamonga and the City of Ontario, and 6th Street to the north, and generally located between Etiwanda Avenue to the east and Santa Anita Avenue to the west.
At this point, Bridge, which paid $191 million for the 91.4-acre Rancho Cucamonga property upon which the retailer Big Lots until early last year operated a warehouse, has not identified the tenant for the proposed 2.175 million-square feet facility in Rancho Cucamonga. In Upland, Bridge has not acquired the property but has arranged to occupy it pursuant to a 50-year lease, with an option to renew for fifty more years beyond that.
Unlike the circumstance in Upland, Rancho Cucamonga officials are requiring a full-dimensional environmental impact report for the warehouse project in their city. As the location of the 2.175-million square foot facility is in an area that is zoned for and already occupied by light and medium-intensity industrial uses, it is anticipated the project will be deemed one that is compatible with its surroundings, and which will not trigger any environmental or other legal challenges. The Upland project is surrounded by existing mining, aviation, commercial, industrial and residential properties. It is widely believed that if it achieves success in bringing the Rancho Cucamonga project to fruition, Bridge will forsake the Upland project. Bridge officials, however, have not confirmed that.
In Fontana on April 20, 2021, the Fontana City Council entrusted to that city’s planning commission land use authority with regard to a proposal by Michael Weber and his Irvine-based company, Duke Realty, to consolidate seven parcels into a single parcel of approximately 8.61 acres at the southwest corner of Slover Avenue and Oleander Avenue upon which a proposed 205,949-square foot warehouse was to be built. The planning commission approved that project.
That approval included passage of the project’s design review and its tentative parcel map.
Elizabeth Sena, a Fontana resident, appealed that project approval to the Fontana City Council.
According to Sena, the proliferation of warehouses in Fontana generally, and the Weber/Duke Realty warehouse project specifically are contrary to the interests of the Fontana community. In a multitude of political and geographical contexts, according to Sena, there are “racial and ethnic disparities’ in terms of those who bear the brunt of the negative consequences of warehouse development. She maintains that elsewhere, as is the case in Fontana, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians more than the white population have the close proximity of warehouses, including their negative health consequences, imposed upon them by virtue of those onerous uses being located in or proximate to their residential neighborhoods.
With regard to the Weber/Duke Realty warehouse proposal, Sena wrote in her appeal, “This project is planned directly adjacent to Jurupa Hills High School in South Fontana. The pollutants from the persistent truck traffic, along with tire particulates are clearly harmful.” She asked how Fontana city officials could “justify harming our kids and the community? This blatant disregard for the safety of our community smacks of environmental redlining, using a warehouse developer-friendly planning commission and city council. In a recent Fontana City Council meeting, Mayor Warren stated: ‘I think we have taken every effort legally to keep people safe.’ This study proves that the mayor is wrong.”
Mayor Warren and her three allies on the council, John Roberts, Phil Cothran, Jr. and Peter Garcia, were able to sidestep the opposition that Sena raised, and the voices of protest that joined with hers, consisting of Carlos Tinoc, Tina Tinoc, Sunny Renteria, Julian Rambila, Julia Avina, Gabriela Mendez, Brian Culdy, Rosa Culdy, Yolanda Rivera, Jasmine Cunningham, Veronica Perez, Eddie Lopez, Ben Vasquez, Paul Salazar, Debrah Seldon, Cynthia Gonzalez, Alejandra Collazo, Andrew Noriega, Annelle Torres, Rebecca Gonzalez and Jose Valdez
The council, in a 4-to-1 vote, with Warren, Roberts, Cothran and Garcia prevailing and Councilman Jesse Sandoval dissenting, denied the appeal, upholding the planning commission’s decision to let Weber/Duke Realty proceed with the project.
-Mark Gutglueck

By Mark Gutglueck
With at least $3 million and perhaps as much $15 million in future bribes and payoffs riding on their decision, three-fifths of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors are carefully weighing whom they will appoint to replace John McMahon as sheriff.
On June 18, McMahon announced his resignation from the county’s top law enforcement post, some eight-and-a-half years after he was appointed by the board of supervisors as it was then composed to lead the sheriff’s department in the aftermath of Rod Hoops, who was McMahon’s predecessor as sheriff, having himself resigned. McMahon, running as an unelected incumbent in 2014 against two challengers and unopposed in 2018, was elected sheriff twice. His resignation, effective July 16, means he will depart from office a little less than 18 months prior to the term he was elected to in 2018 coming to an end.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, as the county government’s highest decision-making authority, has discretion in determining how McMahon is to be replaced. The board could call for a special election to allow the voters of the county to make that determination or it can use its own authority to make an appointment.
Citing what is estimated as a $1.4 million cost to hold such an election countywide, the board has indicated it will instead make an appointment, most likely on July 7, the same day interviews of those interested in serving in the post who have submitted applications by June 30 will be conducted.
Word circulating about the county is that the most likely successors are either Undersheriff Shannon Dicus, Assistant Sheriff Robert Wickum or Assistant Sheriff Horace Boatwright.
In the past, as in 2012 when McMahon replaced Hoops and in 2009 when Hoops replaced Gary Penrod who resigned that year after 15 years as the elected sheriff, the board of supervisors has honored the recommendation of the departing sheriff in making its selection of who would succeed him. In 2012, Hoops had nominated McMahon, who was then serving in the department’s third-ranking position of assistant sheriff, a move which some considered surprising, as there was anticipation that the department’s second-in-command, Undersheriff Bob Fonzi, would get the nod to head the department. In 2009, when Penrod departed prematurely, both Penrod in his recommendation and the board of supervisors in its decision, bypassed then-Undersheriff Richard Beemer in favor of Hoops, who was assistant sheriff.
The board of supervisors, nonetheless, is not bound to comply with the departing sheriff’s wish as to who will replace him. The board is at liberty to make a collective decision to put into the sheriff’s post any qualified lawman they deem fit, as long as their appointee has certification by California’s Police Officers Standards and Training Commission, which sets minimum selection, eligibility and training standards for California law enforcement officers, and is a resident of San Bernardino County.
It has not been publicly announced if McMahon is going to make a recommendation to the board or whom he will endorse.
There is a chance that in the current case the board of supervisors will not comply with McMahon’s recommendation. At the root of that possibility are dual factors: the corruption of county government that is taking place as a consequence of the societal shift with regard to the legality and availability of marijuana with its accompanying financial opportunities and the resurrection of disgraced former San Bernardino County Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Bill Postmus as a political force to be reckoned with in San Bernardino County.
McMahon, for the majority of his law enforcement career, which began when he was hired as a deputy by then-Sheriff Floyd Tidwell in 1985, lived by the ethos that marijuana was a prohibited drug, the growing of, the possession of, the distribution of, the sale of or the use of which was illegal under both California law and U.S. law. When California’s voters in 1996 passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, which made it legal for the drug to be sold, purchased and used, subject to certain restrictions including the user first obtaining a medical prescription, that softened no soap with San Bernardino County’s governmental authorities, and none its cities nor the county government itself allowed, until first Needles in 2012 and Adelanto in 2015 became the exceptions, the sale of marijuana. The county’s law enforcement agencies, including most notably the sheriff’s department, continued arresting, jailing and through the judicial process convicting and imprisoning marijuana offenders.
After the passage of Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act in 2016, which legalized the sale and use of marijuana for its intoxicative effect throughout California, San Bernardino County government and the lion’s share of the municipal governments in San Bernardino County continued to resist such liberalization, primarily out of a belief that marijuana use and availability are contrary to the maintenance of an orderly and moral society. Only the cities of Needles, Adelanto and San Bernardino, all of which were in dire financial straits, acceded to the new order by allowing marijuana cultivation, harvesting, distribution, wholesale and retail sale, or alteration into edibles, palliatives, ointments and/or salves within their respective jurisdictions. Barstow consented to the sale of the drug within its confines, and Hesperia allowed marijuana distribution and mobile sales businesses to operate there, while yet prohibiting storefront sale of the substance. Everywhere else in the county, including the 18,899-square miles of the county’s unincorporated territory and within the incorporated towns of Apple Valley and Yucca Valley and the cities of Chino Hills, Chino, Montclair, Ontario, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, Rialto, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland, Redlands, Big Bear, Yucaipa, Twentyine Palms, and Victorville, the production, distribution, conversion and sale of marijuana remained prohibited.
In Adelanto and San Bernardino, elected and city officials, functioning under the cover of California’s legalization of the production and sale of marijuana, while publicly using the rationale that having their cities get in on the ground floor of the commercialization of marijuana in the Golden State represented an economic development opportunity that would prove a financial boon to their cash-strapped communities, invited and then embraced marijuana and cannabis product entrepreneurs to apply for marijuana-related business permits.
In Adelanto, then-Mayor Rich Kerr, then-Councilman John Woodard and then-Councilman Jermaine Wright, manipulating their council colleague Charlie Glasper, who was in the throes of dementia, arranged first to open the city to marijuana cultivators who would produce a supply of the product to marijuana dispensaries located elsewhere and then transitioned to allowing any type of commercial marijuana activity – cultivation, harvesting, packaging, shipping, distribution, wholesale marketing, retail selling, and cannabis-based product manufacturing – to take place in their city. Early in the going, they employed Jessie Flores, a one-time political associate of Bill Postmus, as the city’s economic development director. Later, they transitioned Flores into Adelanto City Manager.
Along the way, Kerr, Woodard and Wright engaged in graft of a breathtaking scope, with those applying for the marijuana-related business permits the city was offering coming into City Hall with briefcases full of cash. Wright was caught by the FBI taking bribes from marijuana-related business applicants in exchange for ensuring that licensing of those businesses would take place and that those operations would be free of the city’s regulatory interference. He was arrested and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in 2017, and forcibly removed from office. The FBI was closing in on Kerr, Woodard and Flores in 2018, having served search warrants at City Hall, Kerr’s home and the business offices of marijuana business applicants the FBI had grounds to believe were paying off Adelanto city officials. In the November 2018 election, Glasper, who was at that point fully non copus mentis, did not seek reelection, and both Kerr and Woodard, whose corruption was evident, were soundly defeated. In their place, three political newcomers who represented themselves as reformists – Gabriel Reyes as mayor and Gerardo Hernandez and Stevevonna Evans as councilmembers – were elected. The reforms that troika had intimated would take place if they were elected did not manifest, however, and Flores remains as city manager, while the City of Adelanto remains on course to become the marijuana capital of California as Kerr once promised, with the applicants for marijuana-related business permits yet plying the city’s decision-makers with money. According to city insiders, including those currently and formerly employed with the city, money originating with the owners and operators of marijuana-related businesses that have obtained permits in the city is still making its way into the political funds and pockets/personal bank accounts of the city’s elected officials, and lax enforcement of city regulations is allowing those marijuana entrepreneurs to function without having to pay the full fees and taxes that the city is supposed to collect from them.
In San Bernardino, John Valdivia, who represented that city’s Third Ward from 2012 until 2018 and was elected mayor in 2018, used his position of authority in the county seat to militate on behalf of those seeking marijuana-related business licenses in exchange for money, either in the form of contributions to his political war chest or what were tantamount to bribes, kickbacks and payoffs in the guise of retainers provided to his business, AAdvantage Comm LLC. Valdivia, in exchange for the money applicants for those permits provided him, gave assurances that he would manipulate the city’s permitting process such that they were to be granted licenses to operate marijuana dispensaries, stores, cannabis-related product derivation and manufacturing concerns, research facilities, wholesalers, distribution companies or cultivation operations. Valdivia came through in several of those instances, and those who had paid him were granted permits. In others, the promised permits were not obtained by those who had paid Valdivia. In at least two of those cases, when those who had paid Valdivia directly or made contributions to his political fund with the understanding that they were to receive a marijuana-related business permit in return and were not successful in having their application approved by the city, Valdivia told them he could yet come through for them but that they would need to provide him with more money.
Meanwhile, Bill Postmus, who had been San Bernardino County First District supervisor from 2000 until 2007, chairman of the board of supervisors from 2004 until 2006, the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee from 2004 until 2006 and San Bernardino County Assessor from 2007 until 2009, has inserted himself into the San Bernardino County marijuana fortune sweepstakes.
In 2009, Postmus was caught up in a scandal and forced to resign from office. Ultimately between 2009 and 2010, he was charged with 14 felonies relating to political corruption and public office office crimes, including conspiracy, bribery, soliciting a bribe, accepting a bribe, fraud, public office conflict of interest, misappropriation of public funds and perjury stemming from his activity while he was both a member of the board of supervisors and county assessor. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to all 14 of the felony charges against him, and was eventually sentenced to three years in state prison. His conviction on the public office conflict of interest charge carried with it a lifelong ban on him holding elected office in California.
Postmus was determined to remain politically involved in San Bernardino County, nevertheless, and created a Wyoming-based company, Mountain States Consulting Group, LLC, which he uses to engage in political money laundering for California elected officials, particularly ones in San Bernardino County. Relying on his experience in having been caught, prosecuted and convicted of bribery as well as taking advantage of the lax reporting requirements Wyoming has for limited liability companies based there, Postmus has devised a formula by which Mountain States Consulting Group takes in money from those with an interest in decisions to be made by elected officials in local government and conveys that money to those elected officials with the proviso that the suppliers of the money will get their projects, licenses, permits, contracts or franchises approved by those elected officials.
Postmus and his associates, including John Dino De Fazio, who has an interest in a licensed marijuana cultivation operation in Needles, are working through Mountain States Consulting Group on behalf of those who have obtained marijuana-related business permits in San Bernardino, Adelanto and Needles to ensure they are not interfered with by any competitors. A comprehensive business plan Postmus is pursuing includes those entities that have already established a toehold in the San Bernardino County marijuana industry in San Bernardino, Adelanto and Needles to move to the next phase, which involves opening the rest of San Bernardino County up for a set number of commercial marijuana operations, which Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients are to be given exclusive licenses and permits to run.
Postmus, through Mountain States Consulting Group, has begun to filter money to Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Curt Hagman, First District Supervisor Paul Cook and Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe to get them to accept the next step in the process, which is intended to confer a monopoly, or a near monopoly, on those who have established cannabis-related operations in San Bernardino and Adelanto through bribery, as well as on De Fazio and his associates, in the areas of the county where commercial marijuana activity is now prohibited but will later be permitted. Toward an even more lucrative goal, Postmus has formulated a timetable that would have the county move to allowing commercial cannabis within the unincorporated areas of the county, roughly 94 percent of its overall 20,105-square mile jurisdiction by 2022. The estimated half of a billion dollar initial revenue stream this would create would be spread around to the decision-makers to be brought in on the deal, such that Hagman, Cook and Rowe would be guaranteed no less than $1 million each, along with the governmental and political support network that exists around them, including several of their supervisorial staff members to include their chiefs of staff, who in any event serve in key positions on the supervisors’ campaign teams. In this way, Postmus and the marijuana cartel he is now representing are prepared to apply “political grease,” consisting of more than $10 million, to the governmental and political players in the county as necessary to establish a monopoly, or near monopoly, for the cartel.
Over the last several years, literally hundreds of bootleg marijuana producers – that is, individuals who have not obtained permits or licenses to operate nor otherwise registered their operations with the state or county government – have set up marijuana farms in the more remote areas of the county, such as in the mountains but particularly in the vast reaches of the Mojave Desert. Beginning in January 2021, the sheriff’s department began a concerted effort to, in the words of Sheriff McMahon, “take down” those illicit operations. Since January, the sheriff’s marijuana eradication team has busted dozens of such operations and uprooted and destroyed nearly 100,000 marijuana plants. Inadvertently, those operations have benefited those permitted and licensed operations in San Bernardino, Adelanto and Needles, as the destruction of the crops at the unpermitted farms decreases the supply of marijuana generally available in the region, allowing the licensed or permitted operations to sell their product at a premium price, making those operations much more profitable. This has left the owners of those operations in a position to continue to kick a substantial amount of money back to the San Bernardino city, Adelanto and Needles politicians who approved their existing operations, and make donations to San Bernardino County elected officials whose support will be needed to expand their operations into new territory within the county.
In setting the county’s budget for 2021-2022, the board of supervisors earmarked $10.4 million to deal with nettlesome land use and code enforcement issues in the county’s unincorporated areas, the most significant of which consist of unlicensed marijuana farms.
The supervisors’ commitment to fund more sheriff’s department efforts against unlicensed marijuana cultivators served as a signal to Postmus that county officials are agreeable to the timetable he has worked out with Hagman and County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez to provide the marijuana-related business operations that are Mountain States’ clients with the limited number of permits the county will issue when it undertakes to legalize marijuana-related commercial activity less than two years hence. The arrangements Postmus is pursuing in getting his clients permits to operate at the county level will ultimately give those entities an inside track in establishing cannabis-related businesses in the 18,899-square mile expanse of the county’s unincorporated territory. Moreover, that groundwork will give the cartel Postmus represents an advantage in obtaining marijuana cultivation and cannabis-related product commercial entitlements in the eleven other county municipalities besides Adelanto, Hesperia and Needles where the sheriff’s department fills the role of police department, Postmus believes, those being Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland, Big Bear Lake, Yucaipa, Yucca Valley, Twentynine Palms, Apple Valley and Victorville.
The timing of the sheriff’s department’s stepped-up operations against illicit marijuana cultivation operations in the desert, corresponding as it did with Postmus’s efforts on behalf of the cartel that has established itself in San Bernardino, Adelanto and Needles, was interpreted as a sign that McMahon was on board, along with Hagman, Cook, Rowe, Supervisor Janice Rutherford, Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr., County Executive Officer Hernandez, County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson, County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny Alexander-Kelley, in allowing the cartel that has retained Postmus to achieve its marijuana cultivation and cannabis-product related monopoly.
Sources close to McMahon, however, have told the Sentinel that he had been completely unaware of the money laundering activity Postmus was engaged in involving members of the board of supervisors until earlier this month. Upon being sallied with questions about his own motivation and why he was assisting Postmus in his strategy, which included suggestions that the motive behind the department’s action might have included better positioning the cartel represented by Postmus to increase its current profitability and equip itself to widen the range of those being politically greased to include himself and members of his department, McMahon grew angry. After McMahon detailed detectives attached to the sheriff’s department’s executive command to look into the matter and determine the grounds for the accusations he was confronted with, the investigators’ findings confirmed that in fact Postmus has begun so-called “fundraising” efforts on behalf of Hagman, Cook and Rowe, money which is tantamount to payoffs for their going along with the move to legalize commercial marijuana activity in the county’s unincorporated areas. A key element of that strategy was to use the sheriff’s department’s eradication efforts and the seemingly endless proliferation of illicit activity the department is encountering even in the face of that aggressive program to make a case that cracking down on marijuana production in the desert and elsewhere is futile, and that the most sensible approach is to create a system under which massive marijuana production is permitted and taxed, thereby creating a regulated market and a revenue stream for the government. Part and parcel of that strategy is that the permits that will ultimately be issued by the county government will go primarily to those businesses which have retained Postmus/Mountain States Consulting Group to ensure that the county government decision-makers are kicked back to.
McMahon was “appalled” to learn that Hagman, Cook and Rowe, whom he had previously considered to be on the up-and-up, were on the take. Concerned that his reputation as a law enforcement officer would be ruined through his and his department’s association with what is ongoing, McMahon abruptly elected to tender his resignation as sheriff.
Now taking place is an examination of the senior members of the sheriff’s department or other individuals with sufficient law enforcement credentials outside of the department who meet the San Bernardino County residency requirements to be eligible to be appointed to the sheriff’s post who are willing to play ball with Postmus and the majority of the board of supervisors looking toward accepting marijuana use as the “wave of the future,” which, if properly orchestrated, means a fortune can be had by not only those now occupying San Bernardino County’s seats of power, but the retinue of political and governmental operatives surrounding them.
While on most handicap sheets, Undersheriff Dicus appears to be the favorite in the field of potential candidates to succeed McMahon, his straightforward approach to police work and traditionalist values may leave him disinclined to go along with Postmus’s plan. The longer list of contenders includes more than Dicus and assistant sheriffs Wickum and Boatwright, as Deputy Chief Sam Fisk, Deputy Chief Robert O’Brine, Deputy Chief Sarkis Ohannessian, Deputy Chief Rick Bessinger and Deputy Chief Trevis Newport are in the running, as is Captain John Ades, who currently oversees the sheriff’s department’s bureau of administration.
Newport, who began with the department in 1999, has made a meteoric rise since 2013, when he was serving as a sergeant in Needles. He subsequently promoted to lieutenant and in that capacity led the homicide detail that investigated and solved the 2014 Erin Corwin murder case. After a stint within the department’s bureau of administration in 2017, Newport made captain in January 2018, and then served as the commander of the Morongo Basin Sheriff’s Station. His time in Needles, while that city became the first jurisdiction in San Bernardino County to allow medical marijuana sales to take place, is considered a positive attribute by Postmus and his crowd.
Others mentioned include Sheriff’s Captain Jeremy Martinez, who oversees the sheriff’s department’s operations in Adelanto, and those members of the department who preceded Martinez as station commander in Adelanto over the last six years. The sheriff’s department serves as the contract law enforcement service provider for Adelanto, which in essence makes the Adelanto Sheriff’s Station the Adelanto Police Department, the deputies serving there Adelanto police officers, and Martinez the Adelanto police chief. Since 2015, the Adelanto Police Department has peacefully coexisted with the political leadership in Adelanto, even as several of the owners of the companies that have successfully established marijuana and cannabis-related operations in that city did so through graft and bribery of the city’s elected officials. It was not the sheriff’s department that felled Councilman Wright nor which undertook the hard-hitting investigations of Mayor Kerr, Councilman Woodard or Economic Development Director/City Manager Flores, but rather the FBI.
Personages outside the department considered potential candidates to replace McMahon include Upland Police Chief Darren Goodman and former San Bernardino County Marshal Keith Bushey.
Goodman left the sheriff’s department in 2018, while he was serving in the capacity of captain overseeing the Chino Hills Sheriff’s Station, to become Upland police chief. Goodman possesses a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and a doctorate from USC’s Rossier School of Education. As recently as last year, however, Goodman was not a resident of San Bernardino County, living at that time in Riverside County.
Bushey was commander with the Los Angeles Police Department before he accepted the marshal’s position in San Bernardino County, which in 1999 was absorbed into the sheriff’s department when the board of supervisor’s merged the marshal’s office with the sheriff’s department. Bushey served as a deputy chief in the sheriff’s department for six years before retiring in 2005. In 2009, when Penrod resigned, and in 2012, when Hoops resigned, there were multiple advocates for Bushey’s appointment as sheriff. He contemplated but ultimately did not seek election as sheriff in 2010 and 2014.
Goodman’s and Bushey’s position with regard to licensing/permitting/facilitating the availability of marijuana in the unincorporated areas of San Bernardino County are unknown.

The shutdown of the eastbound lanes of the I-10 Freeway in the Fontana area that lasted from roughly 1:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday June 23 was the result of the action of a yet-unidentified man who apparently commandeered a truck around 11:50 p.m. Tuesday and led the Highway Patrol on a wild wrong way chase on the I-15, 210, I-215 and then the I-10 freeways.
Authorities offered only minimal detail about the incident, which ended in the fatal shooting of the driver of the vehicle. Details of the shooting remained scarce more than two days after the incident. The Sentinel is able to piece some, but not all of what occurred.
A truck registered to CMC Steel Fabricators of Irving, Texas that functions out of CMC’s Rancho Cucamonga facility was stolen sometime around 10:30 p.m. in the city of San Bernardino while it was in the 5400 block of Industrial Parkway in San Bernardino. There were unverified and unconfirmed reports that the individual who stole the truck was armed, and had kidnapped the driver. Some time after 11:45 p.m., Colton police caught sight of the truck. Ultimately, the Highway Patrol was alerted, and both ground units and a helicopter eventually located the truck and began a pursuit.
A report to the Sentinel, which the CHP did not verify, was that the driver of the truck, in seeking to elude his pursuers, used an offramp in Rancho Cucamonga to enter the southbound I-15 Freeway heading north, transitioned onto the westbound 210 Freeway, which at that hour was fortunately not too-heavily traveled, going east, then transitioned to the northbound I-215 Freeway while headed south, and then headed west on the eastbound I-10 Freeway.
The CHP set up a roadblock on the I-10 freeway between Cedar Avenue to the east and Sierra Avenue to the west. As the truck approached the roadblock between after 1 a.m. and 1:15 a.m. on June 23, a CHP officer opened fire on the cab. Four bullet holes were visible in the windshield of the truck.
The driver, a male who has yet to be identified, was pronounced dead at the scene.
There was a passenger in the truck, who was treated for a glass injury to his arm. He was escorted from the scene by law enforcement officers. At least two reports were that he was in custody, but there was no report of an arrest relating to the incident. A conflicting report was that he was an unwilling participant in the mad ride, and was possibly a driver for CMC, who had been abducted. Despite the Sentinel’s requests to CHP Spokesman Ramon Duran, no clarification on the passenger’s involvement in the incident has been forthcoming.
In the early morning daylight hours of Wednesday, some seven hours after the shooting, a member of a Sentinel delivery crew reported seeing what he believed was the body of the driver underneath wrappings beside the truck.
San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department traffic and homicide investigators were summoned to make a thorough examination of the scene, which entailed traffic in both lanes being shut down at about 1:30 a.m. Motorists at a critical point on the freeway were unable to leave it form more than three hours early Wednesday morning, when they were allowed to travel single file using the freeway shoulder to exit at Cedar Avenue. At 5:30 a.m. the westbound lanes of the I-10 were reopened. Eastbound lanes remained closed until 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.