(December 4)  The number of passengers at Ontario International Airport rose 4.11 percent from January 2014 through October 2014, compared to the same period last year, according to airport officials.
The passenger numbers were particularly good for October. The airport saw a 7.68 percent jump for the month of October, the largest increase this year.
Airlines at Ontario International served 3,422,524 travelers compared to 3,287,423 travelers during the same ten month period in 2013.
“2014 is shaping up to be a good year for Ontario Airport,” said Jess Romo, the airport’s manager. “We’ve taken great care to support the airlines and other businesses on the field so that as the economy improves, the financial environment here at Ontario International Airport may foster continued growth. We also recognize the need to balance positive financial results with the equal need to make the airport experience pleasant and relaxed for our travelers.”
International traffic continues to grow with International carriers, AeroMexico and Volaris, serving 71,705 passengers, a 66.4 percent increase over the same period in 2013. Both provide a total of seven nonstop flights each week between Ontario and Guadalajara, Mexico. Volaris announced earlier this month that daily service to Guadalajara will be offered during the Holiday season, beginning December 17h and continuing at least through the end of the year.
“If we continue to see the healthy operations through the end of the year, we hope this provides an opportunity for carriers to reexamine market potential for increased service or new routes in the future. We also hope local and regional travelers will continue to support available service at Ontario International,” Romo said.
The 3.96 million passengers the airport had in 2013 was substantially below the 7.2 million that flew into and out of the airport in 2007. The airport’s performance numbers declined with the onset of the recession in 2007. Because the airport did not rebound quickly, even as other Southern California regional airports such as those in Orange County and Long Beach did, Ontario city officials have faulted the city of Los Angeles and its corporate arm that runs Ontario Airport, Los Angeles World Airports, for Ontario International’s stagnating passenger numbers.
Since 1967, Ontario Airport has been managed by Los Angeles pursuant to a joint powers authority. That management agreement was entered into because Los Angeles was able to use its control over gate positions at Los Angeles International Airport to induce airlines to use Ontario Airport, a medium-hub, full-service airport approximately 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Ontario Airport flourished under Los Angeles’ management in the late 1960s, 1970s, 1080s, 1990s, and early to mid 2000s. In 1985, after the airport met performance criteria specified in the original joint operating agreement, the Ontario City Council deeded the airport to the city of Los Angeles for no consideration.
Utilizing bond money it secured, revenue from Los Angeles International Airport operations and Ontario International Airport operations and that obtained from other sources, Los Angeles completed over $500 million in improvements to Ontario Airport, including the addition of a second runway and the construction of two modern passenger terminals.
The airport continued to expand, reaching its record performance mark in 2007, with the aforementioned 7.2 million passengers. Since that time, as Los Angeles World Airports has continued with an energetic improvement plan at Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario officials have become increasingly strident in claiming Los Angeles is neglecting Ontario Airport. In June 2013, the city of Ontario sued Los Angeles, Los Angeles World Airports and the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners. The suit maintains Los Angeles is purposefully giving Ontario Airport short shrift because it is pursuing a plan to generate more passengers and revenue at Los Angeles International Airport. In the suit, Ontario is asking Riverside County Superior Court Judge Gloria Trask to void the agreement giving Los Angeles ownership and management control of Ontario Airport. Trask’s decision on a summary motion to return the airport to Ontario is pending.

(December 4)  A former Rialto Unified School District Accountant has pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.8 million and now faces eight years in County Prison.
Judith Oakes, 50, of San Bernardino pleaded guilty today to nine counts of Public Officer Crime (PC 424).
Oakes faces 8 years in County Prison when she is sentenced Jan. 8, 2015. Under the agreement, Oakes will be required to pay $1,845,137.81 which she embezzled from July 2005 to Aug. 2013. She will be making her first payment of $339,002.58 following pronouncement of judgment.
“After so many years of theft, the victims can now feel confident that justice was served today,” said Deputy District Attorney Jason Liso, who prosecuted the case. “Hopefully this sends a strong message that our public servants will be held accountable for their actions when they decide to abuse the public trust.”
On August 7, 2013, Oakes was arrested by Rialto Police and booked into West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga after she was recorded on video stuffing school lunch money into her bra. Oakes; arrest touched off a series of audits and investigations at the district and triggered the eventual resignation of superintendent Harld Cebrun.

(December 4)  The Chino Valley Unified School District has been sued by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and more than 20 unnamed local plaintiffs over the district’s practice of engaging in Christian prayer and Bible readings at school board meetings.
The suit seeks the discontinuation of prayer and religious references during the conducting of official district business.
Referenced specifically in the suit are board president James Na and trustee Andrew Cruz, who are said to pepper their discussions of issues at board meetings with Christian homilies and scripture readings.
The suit was filed by Andrew Seidel, an attorney for Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation on behalf of several unnamed local plaintiffs.
Seidel said he wants the district to discontinue preaching by the board’s members and their promotion of religion.
According to Seidel, the religious references went well beyond invocations, which have been deemed acceptable by the courts, to create an atmosphere in which individuals who do not profess the Christian faith felt uncomfortable.
For some time, some members of the public who attend board meetings and other district events have remarked upon the degree to which religious references were becoming a part of official proceedings.
Pastor Jack Hibbs of the Calvary Chapel of Chino Hills denounced the lawsuit as the work of the Devil and his agents seeking to remove God from the public education process. The Calvary Chapel of Chino Hills has both junior high and high school ministries.
Chino Police Chief Miles Pruitt said he believes his rights and beliefs are being abridged by those who would prevent him and others from engaging in prayer at school functions.
One parent said she did not begrudge anyone his or her own beliefs, but felt that district officials were creating a circumstance in which members of the public who attended district meetings and events felt they were ostracized if they did not profess Christian beliefs.

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
With so many untoward reports about our county’s smallest and most remote city drifting into my ears, curiosity beseeched me to have my chauffer Anthony fill up the Bentley with the requisite amount of petrol and we embarked on the more than three hour trek from the chalet down the north side of the San Bernardino Mountains, past Lake Silverwood and through Summit Valley to the I-15 and thence out the I-40 to Needles. Along this last part of the journey, I had Anthony pull over so I could remove myself from my usual position in the back seat to instead ride up front and take in an unobstructed view of the panorama. Once so nestled, I must admit falling into something of reverie, harkening back, no doubt, to the passages in the adventure books imported from America that were read to me by my governess more than seven decades ago, which celebrated the Chisholm Trail and the Wild West. For a time, it seemed I was perched atop a stagecoach, ranging across the boundless Southwest…
Ultimately, we reached our destination. It gives me no pleasure to report that the tales of Needles’ current state were accurate, actually an understatement. The city, where the railroad came across the Colorado River in the late 1800s, was once, I am informed, the second largest city in the county and a grand one at that, having a special status conferred upon it by the railroad. The city, now numbering fewer than 5,000 mostly bedraggled souls, has lost luster. Indeed, for the most part it has fallen into an appalling state of disrepair…
I cut right to the heart of the matter and troubled Anthony to escort me to the Needles City Council Meeting, where the now fallen city’s public affairs are trotted out for display and decision-making. It was at this meeting that three of the council’s members – Terry Campbell, Linda Kidd and Shawn Gudmunson – would make their final full appearance as city officials, in that they had all three been voted out of office by the city’s voters on November 4. This is the same council responsible for bringing in a fellow by the name of Rick Daniels as city manager last year, just as he was being shown the door as city manager in the Riverside County city of Desert Hot Springs, which was itself flirting with bankruptcy. The Needles council saw fit to provide Mr. Daniels with a salary double that of his predecessor, apparently on the basis of his claims he could rejuvenate the city’s sputtering economy. Under Daniels’ watch, the city has expended taxpayer money to hire an economic development director, but its economy has eroded yet further, with the one grocery store in town having closed in May. City residents now cross the river to shop, with a resultant loss of tax revenue from the city and California to Arizona…
While the departing council members could not resist congratulating themselves for what they perceived to be a job well done, with outgoing Gudmunson and Campbell in particular touting their accomplishments during their tenure in office, some available fiscal data undercuts the basis of their pride. In 2005, the city had $1.5 million in reserves. This year, the city had what the council calls a “balanced budget” of $4.8 million, but its reserves have dwindled to $360,000. Their biggest accomplishment, balancing the budget, from my observation, looks more like a shuffling maneuver than a balancing act, what with the laying off of critical electrical utility workers…
One indication of the city’s dire financial circumstance consisted of its effort to utilize eminent domain to condemn the property of 14 of its residents and then seize it for what has not been a clearly enunciated purpose beyond the claim that it may be utilized as part of the city’s I-40 to Arizona 95 interconnect project. Included among those properties is land owned by the city’s mayor, Ed Paget, who was the only member of the council reelected this year. Reelected is perhaps not the right term. He had no opposition in the race. While the city and its law firm, Best, Best and Krieger maintain that the land confiscation is being done for the betterment of the city, several of the landowners have pointed out that the city already owns the land necessary for the traffic signals and other road improvements and that the property is being taken for future speculative purposes. My own examination of the agreements the city is asking the owners of the condemned land to sign leads me to conclude that they were drafted to provide the city with the future authority to take far more property than is needed for the completion of the interconnect project…
This apparent abuse of the city’s authority is accompanied by what I can only describe as an effort to provide favorable status to a select group of the city’s businesses, while ignoring, or in the case of the aforementioned landowners whose property is being confiscated, harming others. The group singled out for favorable treatment is the Needles Downtown Business Alliance. With Kidd being the lone dissenter, the entire city council voted to waive fifty percent of the city facility rental fees required of local 501C’s including the Chamber of Commerce and Needles Downtown Business Authority. The council further provided the Needles Downtown Business Authority, calling it a “local organization,” with a reduction in fees at the Jack Smith Park boat launch. The council dangled, but ultimately did not offer the same, reduction to local residents. The council previously imposed a $3 monthly flat tax on every utility user in town, rich or poor, making no exceptions. This most recent giveaway of public funds to the council’s favored private corporate 501C sixes rankled the voters, who in two years will be asked to reelect or jettison councilmen Tom Darcy, Tony Frazier and Jim Lopez..
Meanwhile, the personal affairs of these lions of the community charged with running the affairs of the public are no more impressive than their public acts, at least in a few cases. One council member’s business has severely cut back on the scope of its operations, laying off most of its employees, as it teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Sadly, another councilman, according to sources, has a son in a Nevada jail, awaiting trial on a murder charge…

By Mark Gutglueck
Robert S. Carlisle, a Southerner by birth and sentiment, was blessed with striking good looks, intelligence, energy and good business sense. He was well respected, wealthy, popular and politically successful. He also possessed a flash temper and he may well have been a murderer.
Carlisle was born in Kentucky around 1830. Little is known of his early life or ancestry. There is no dispute that he was well educated. He had come to California from Kentucky, settling at first not in San Bernardino County or Southern California, but in San Jose. He remained there until he was 26 or 27, at which time he came to Southern California.
His timing was good. In 1856, Colonel Isaac Williams, who had fought on the American side during the 1846-1848 Mexican American War and distingished himself at the Battle of Chino, died. After California was annexed to the United States, Williams had been rewarded with the sum of $80,000 for his contribution to the war effort, a vast amount of money in those days. Williams was the owner of the Rancho Santa Ana Del Chino, a 22,193-acre Mexican land grant on what had been part of the San Gabriel Mission and what today is part of Chino and Chino HIlls. The bulk of his estate was left to his two daughters, Maria Merced and Francesca. Their mother was a daughter of Don Antonio Maria Lugo and sister of Jose Maria Lugo, Jose Del Carmen Lugo and Vicente Lugo, who, among them, owned the large San Bernardino Grant. Maria Merced married Sheep farmer John Rains. On May 13, 1857, Robert Carlisle wed Francesca Williams. He was twenty-seven and she was sixteen.
Following a year or so of residence in Los Angeles, Robert and Francesca returned Santa Ana Rancho Del Chino. Robert managed that holding with considerable efficiency, as he oversaw the work of about one hundred Indians who had comfortable adobe quarters near the main ranch adobe.
By virtue of his popularity and business acumen, Robert Carlisle in 1862 was elected supervisor for the First Supervisorial District in San Bernardino County. He assumed office on November 17, 1862, succeeding Richard Varley, and four days later, on November 17, 1862 he was selected by his colleagues to serve as chairman of the board. He held the position of board chairman for the remainder of the time he was on the board. he served until November 1864.
It was on the very day that he took office, November 17, 1862, that his sister-in-law’s husband, John Rains, disappeared.
John Rains had used the dowery he had received from the estate of Isaac Williams to purchase Rancho Cucamonga, a spread of ground that covers a substantial amount of present day Rancho Cucamonga. Rains built a fired brick home that is still extant on Vineyard Avenue just north of Foothill Boulevard. Rains built the Rancho into a successful business, entailing vineyards and a winery, as well as a stage station. Rains’ abode became “the social center of the community,” and he enjoyed political prominence of his own, as in 1860 when he traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
His succeess with the Rancho allowed him to make investments elsewhere, including securing part ownership of the Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles.
By 1862, just as Robert Carlisle’s already bright prospects were brightening, those of John Rains were taking a turn for the worse. Rains had overextended himself with some of his business ventures and to hold everything together, he borrowed against his rancho. On that fateful day, November 17, 1862, John Rains departed for Los Angeles – a city which then boasted a population of some 4,500 – and overnight at the Bella Union Hotel that evening before finalizing some further financing arrangements, including the signing of some loan and collateral documents the next day. He departed for the metropolis in a wagon pulled by a team of his best horses. Rains never arrived at his destination.
On November 19, 1862 the team of horses found its way back to the rancho. They were no longer hitched up to the wagon. Curiously, this did not trigger any immediate action. On November 21, the same day that Robert Carlisle attended his first board of supervisors meeting in San Bernardino as a member of that august panel and was named chairman of the board, a group of travelers arrived at the rancho, intending to see Rains. When they were told that he was missing and of the return of his unhitched wagon team, a search was initiated.
The two day delay in starting the search was a remarkable one and has been problematic for historians. Rains commonly sojourned to Los Angeles, where he had a substantial investment and business to attend to.
On November 28, 1864 his body was found near Azusa, amid cacti some 400 feet off the road. There were obvious signs that violence had attended his last minutes of earthly existence. According to the Los Angeles Star, it appeared as if he had been lassoed and yanked from his wagon perch. His right arm was mangled from the elbow down and its upper portion had been pulled out of its shoulder socket. He was shot twice in the back, once in the side and on the left side of his chest.
It was a violent era in a violence-prone place. At that point, there had been 50 murders in and around Los Angeles over a period of about a year. Rains was known to have been assertive and to have something of a temper but did not seem to have any lasting enemies. He seemed to have been a victim of a random act of violence or larceny, perhaps by a highwayman on a remote span of the road to Los Angeles.
As Maria Merced’s brother-in-law as well as a leading local official, Robert Carlisle led the effort to find Rains’ killer and bring him to justice. Early on, he settled upon one of Rains’ ranch hands, Ramon Carrillo. But Carrillo had an ironclad alibi, having been in Los Angeles and seen by multiple witnesses at the time Rains was thought to have met his grim end. Carlisle twice brought Carrillo before a court, but both times those charges were dismissed. Carlisle made accusations against a few others, using what even for that time were heavy-handed tactics to obtain two confessions, both of which fell apart under further examination by others. Ultimately, every case Carlisle sought to put together against those he said he suspected of having committed the murder failed to pan out. The only conviction growing out of Rains’ death and its investigation was that obtained against Manuel Cerradel, one of Carrillo’s compadres. When deputies who came to arrest him as a suspect in Rains’ death at Carlisle’s urging, Cerradel flew into a rage and attacked the deputies. He was exonerated of anything related to Rains’ death, but drew a ten year sentence in San Quentin for his violence against the deputies. Before he could pay his debt to society, Cerradel was set upon by a band of vigilantes who aspparently were convinced he did have something to do with Rains’ demise. After Cerradel had been escorted to a ship in San Pedro Harbor that was to take him to San Quentin, a vigilante group boarded the steamer, overpowered the small party of attendant guards and hung Cerradel from the ship’s mast. Cerredel was then bound up, weighted down with bricks that were tied to his legs and unceremoniously thrown into the harbor.
Cerredel’s death may have sated some of the bloodlust that had been enkindled in the citizenry of Southern California by Rains’ murder, but less primitive minds knew that his murderer remained on the loose.
Indeed, not a few locals held abiding suspicions that Rains’ murderer was none other than Robert Carlisle. In utilizing the classic criteria detectives utilize in ferreting out the perpetrators of crime – motive, means and opportunity – Carlisle comes across as a prime suspect.
On November 17, 1862, the day Rains disappeared, Carlisle was scheduled to be on hand in San Bernardino for his swearing in as one of San Bernardino County’s newly elected supervisors. He departed from Rancho Santa Ana Del Chino, ostensibly to keep his appointment at that honorific but never showed up. He was never able to adequately explain his whereabouts on that day.
During the weeklong search for the missing Rains toward the end of November 1862, Carlisle, who was in charge of the effort, instead of staying in the wild along the road to Los Angeles to maintain a thorough scouring of the places Rains might have been, Carlisle returned to his home where one evening he held a festive party.
Then there was the matter of his comportment toward his sister-in-law after her husband’s death. Carlisle hectored, bamboozled and bullied Maria Merced into granting him power of attorney over the Rains estate.
Added to the obvious misdirection toward ultimately false suspects during the murder investigation that followed the discovery of Rains’ body, Carlisle’s behavior is at best extremely curious.
In time, the theory that Rains had been killed because of his secessionist sympathies and affiliations took hold. Carlisle, in looking after his sister-in-laws affairs, became deeply involved in the settlement of John Rains’ estate. This led to a bitter dispute with the King Brothers of El Monte and Los Angeles, with whom Rains had business dealings, including shared ownership of the Bella Union Hotel.
On November 21, 1864, Carlisle was replaced on the board of supervisors by Henry Suverkrup. By that point, Carlisle’s land holdings had grown from the 22,193 acres of Rancho Santa Ana Del Chino to some 46,000 acres, which included much of the land he had managed to swindle from Maria Merced Rains.
More than seven months after he had left the board of supervisors, on July 5, 1865, Carlisle had come to Los Angeles to attend the wedding of merchant Solomon Lazard and his bride, Caroline Newmark, the daughter of Joseph Newmark, who established the Los Angeles Hebrew Benevolent Society and the city’s first Jewish cemetery. The wedding party was held at the Bella Union Hotel. In attendance at the party was Los Angeles County Undersheriff Andrew King, one of the King Brothers. Though Andrew King was at that time a Los Angeles County official, he previously had been San Bernardino County’s constable. In addition to the bad blood between Carlisle and the King Brothers over Rains’ business holdings with them and their interference in his management of his sister-in-law’s estate, Carlisle had accused Andrew King of indolence in the investigation of Rains’ murder. That night in the crowded saloon on the ground floor of the hotel, there was a heated exchange between the two men, and Carlisle, who perhaps was drunk, slashed the lawman across his right hand and opened up a gash on his chest with a Bowie knife. Friends separated the two men, but Carlisle threatened, according to later testimony, to kill “any and all” of the King Brothers.
Carlisle did not have the good sense to leave Los Angeles after this contretemps and instead spent the night at the Bella Union. The next day, two of the King Brothers, Houston and Frank, came into the hotel to confront Carlisle. A gunfight ensued. Carlisle was fatally wounded, but not before he had himself shot and killed Frank King. Carlisle’s funeral was held in the Bella Union. Houston King was charged with the murder of Carlisle. At Houston King’s murder trial in 1866, he was acquitted.

Many of us who watched cartoons from the 50’s to the 80’s, remember Wile E. Coyote always being outsmarted by the Road Runner! That bird was just so fast, and ran circles around that wild dog! The Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus, is known to run 17-24 miles an hour on land, and is the fastest running bird that can fly (but only for a short period of time, sometimes just seconds).
Preferring to sprint rather then fly, this species was nicknamed the Ground Cuckoo because it made a habit of running along paths in front of horse drawn carriages! Being a member of the Cuckoo family, known for their curiosity, they won’t hesitate approaching humans. The male roadrunner’s low dove-like coos in a descending pitch are quite attractive to the female roadrunners, along with a preet-preet call. Adding to its odd behavior, the male also performs a unique courtship, wagging its tail while bowing and tempting the female with a morsel of lizard or snake dangling from his beak.
Even though this bird prefers arid deserts and chaparrals in the Southwestern United States, we see the roadrunner in the San Bernardino Mountains at Wildhaven Ranch. To find cover while hunting, they can also be found in grasslands, brush habitat and at the edges of woodlands in Southern California.
The head, neck, back and wings are dark brown-black, heavily streaked with white, while the breast is mostly white. Its eyes are bright yellow with a barely seen streak of bare blue and red skin surrounding the eye. His crest of black feathers can be raised or lowered for necessary displays to allure intruders away from nests, or simply to make a statement! The greater roadrunner is about 20-24 inches in length with a 32 inch wingspan, and it can alternate with several shallow rapid wing beats with long glides if flushed from a bush or crossing obstacles.
While the male collects the nest materials of sticks, grass, feathers, snakeskin or dung; the female builds most of the construction in low trees, in a bush or a cactus about 2 1/2 feet off the ground. Their diet varies from insects, spiders, lizards, snakes, small birds to small mice. Scanning for prey as they walk rapidly, they ascend on their target with great gusto, and may jump in the air to catch an insect! After capturing a small rodent, they will deftly smash the head against a rock and swallow it whole, many times its prey left hanging out of its mouth while being digested! Their lifespan is 7 to 8 years, a long time considering that their predators are species of hawks, skunks, raccoons, cats, and yes, coyotes!
Quite the character, the greater roadrunner is important to the ecosystem by eliminating pests like mice and poisonous insects. Both predator and prey, this valuable bird helps balance our natural environment while captivating humans by their comical antics in the wild! Recalling again the absurdly complex contraptions and elaborate plans to pursue his quarry, Wile E. Coyote never did get his Road Runner, while the latter would “beep-beep” out of grasp.
Hopefully, we can continue to conserve the habitat for this funny, unusual and special cuckoo bird!
Wildhaven Ranch is a wildlife sanctuary in the San Bernardino Mountains specializing in educating the public about one of our natural resources, wildlife, in our ecosystem. Visit it at www.wildhavenranch.org or call for tours at (909) 337-7389.

By clicking on the portal below, you can download a PDF of the November 28 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 11-28-14

(November 24)  Fifty-eight of San Bernardino County’s schools have received the dubious distinction of being placed on the California Department of Education’s 2015-16 Open Enrollment list.
In essence, schools placed on the state’s open enrollment list are deemed to be among the 1,000 lowest achieving schools in the state. Parents of students in those schools can apply to have their children transfer to another higher performing district school.
The list is derived using a formula that reserves 687 spots for elementary schools, 165 middle schools and 148 high schools. Charter schools and schools with fewer than 100 valid state standardized test scores escape being rated for open enrollment.
Those schools in San Bernardino County singled out for their poor performance were the San Bernardino County Office of Education’s San Bernardino County Special Education School; the Columbia International Science School of Math & Technology and Adelanto Elementary School, both in the Adelanto Elementary School District; the Barstow Unified School District’s Crestline Elementary and Montara Elementary schools; the Bear Valley Unified School District’s Big Bear Elementary School; Valley View Continuation High School in the Chaffey Joint Union High School District; Walnut Avenue Elementary, Ramona Junior High, Dickson Elementary and Anna A. Borba Fundamental Elementary in the Chino Valley Unified School District; Paul Rogers Elementary, Woodrow Wilson Elementary and Alice Birney Elementary in the Colton Joint Unified School District; Cucamonga Elementary School in the Cucamonga Elementary School District; Birch Continuation High School, Citrus Continuation High School, North Tamarind Elementary and Cypress and Tokay Elementary in the Fontana Unified School District; Helendale Elementary School in the Helendale Elementary School District; the Morongo Unified School District’s Joshua Tree Elementary School and Palm Vista Elementary School; the Needles Unified School District’s Vista Colorado Elementary; the Central Language Academy, De Anza Junior High, Ray Wiltsey Middle School, and Kingsley Elementary in the Ontario-Montclair School District; Lugonia Elementary and Victoria Elementary in the Redlands Unified School District; the Rialto Unified School District’s Bemis Elementary, Dunn Elementary and Frisbie Middle School; Rim of the World Unified School District’s Valley of Enchantment Elementary School; San Bernardino City Unified School District’s Indian Springs High, Arrowhead Elementary, Manuel A. Salinas Creative Arts Elementary, Del Rosa Elementary, Lincoln Elementary, Mt. Vernon Elementary, Del Vallejo Middle School and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School; Liberty Elementary and Green Tree East Elementary in the Victor Elementary School District; Victor Valley Union High School District’s Adelanto High School; the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District’s Dunlap Elementary and Valley Elementary; Silver Valley Unified School District’s Yermo Elementary School; the Snowline Joint Unified School District’s Vista Verde Elementary School and Phelan Elementary School; the Hesperia Unified School District’s Eucalyptus Elementary, Hollyvale Elementary and Hesperia Junior High; the Lucerne Valley Unified School District’s Lucerne Valley Elementary; the Upland Unified School District’s Citrus Elementary and Upland Elementary; and the Apple Valley Unified School District’s Phoenix Academy and High Desert Premier Academy.
Parents who seek to have their children placed into a better performing school will generally be accommodated. In most cases, however, bus service for students traveling to a more distant campus is not provided.
Schools in San Bernardino County were among the poorest performers statistically in the state per its ratio of open enrollment schools. San Bernardino County, with a population of 2,088,371, is the fifth largest county in terms of population in California. Riverside County, the fourth largest county in the state at 2,292,507 population, had 52 open enrollment schools. San Diego County, the second largest county in the state at a population of 3,211,252, had 65 open enrollment schools. Orange County, the third largest county in the state with a population of 3,114,363, had 58 open enrollment schools. Los Angeles County, the largest county in the state with a population of 10,017,068, had 193 open enrollment schools. Contra Costa County the state’s ninth largest county with 1,094,205 population, is the county closest to being half of San Bernardino County’s size. It had 22 open enrollment schools.

(November 26)  Steve Knight’s election to Congress earlier this month has prompted three hopefuls to declare their candidacies to replace him as State Senator in the 21st District. Three others are contemplating joining the political fray as well.
Among the declared candidates is his opponent in the 2012 election, who waged a spirited campaign on a host of ideological and practical issues.
The 21st District straddles San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties and covers portions of the Victor, Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys. More than two-thirds of registered voters in the 21st Senate District reside in Los Angeles County.
Knight, who defeated fellow Republican Tony Strickland in the November 4 election, is scheduled to be sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 6. Knight will resign as a state senator some time prior to that. Two years remain on his current term. Upon Knight’s resignation, Governor Jerry Brown has two weeks to make a proclamation calling for a special election to fill the vacancy. That election is likely to be held in April or May. A special election must occur between 126 to 140 days after the governor’s proclamation, according to state elections code.
Star Moffatt, who ran for 21st District State Senator in 2012, taking second place in the June open primary and qualifying for the two-way run-off against Knight in November of that year, was the first declared candidate in the race to succeed Knight.
Moffatt, a Democrat, cited numerous issues and differences with Knight, a Republican, in making her appeal to voters two years ago, including protection of the public education system, maintaining local employment opportunities, ensuring voter rights, providing access to medical care, providing support to disenfranchised small and medium sized businesses, actively engaging the disabled and racial and ethnic minority senior citizens to inform them of support programs, stepping up the state’s veteran support programs and subsidies, hiring more public defenders, and preventing hikes in property tax.
In announcing her candidacy, Moffatt said, “It is time to put a priority on issues affecting our district and the need for real solutions which will help us retain and create jobs, improve our public education system and reduce taxes.”
Characterizing herself as a conservative Democrat, Moffatt said she intended to build on the basis of her 2012 run, in which she garnered just under 43 percent of the vote. “My campaign,” Moffatt said, “was built up of a large community of grass-roots volunteers, endorsers and supporters, who were primarily sending a message to the state and the Senate District 21 community that it is time for a leadership change.”
A six-year Army veteran who earned her associates degrees in interdisciplinary studies and legal assistance from LA Mission College and completed her first year of law school at the William Howard Taft University School of Law, Moffatt was the executive director of a community-based organization providing assistance to the handicapped and handicapped homeless. In 2009 she was selected by the FBI as a member of the InfraGard, which is aimed at safeguarding Americans, particularly in the private sector and business arenas, from a whole range of hostile acts by foreign enemies, in particular cyber attacks, the theft of proprietary data and terrorist activity.
“As your next senator, I will present real solutions because we need less government, reduced regulations and taxes rolled back in order to keep California-born companies in California. I will also encourage out-of-state companies to migrate to our beautiful State,” Moffatt said.
Shortly after Moffett’s announcement, five others indicated interest in succeeding Knight. Two of those – Apple Valley-based entrepreneur Sal Chavez and Hesperia Councilman Eric Schmidt have officially declared their candidacies.
Chavez is the chief financial officer and project control coordinator of SC Engineering, which is located in Apple Valley. A Republican, Chavez lives in Victorville. He said his campaign will emphasize his commitment to easing the tax and regulatory burden on businesses in particular and taxpayers in general by reducing wasteful government spending.
Schmidt, a councilman in Hesperia since 2012, is now that city’s mayor pro tem. He is president and co-founder of an Adelanto-based propulsion system engineering and research and development firm, the Exquadrum Corporation. A Republican, he has previously been an advocate for returning much of the power assumed by the state government to local control.
Two others, Palmdale Mayor Jim Ledford and Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris, have indicated they might run for Knight’s soon-to-be-vacant position. Parris and Ledford are both Republicans. Rivals who attended Palmdale High School together, they do not get along particularly well. Indeed, they are said to despise one another. There was a suggestion that either or both were entertaining a run for State Senate as an effort to undercut the other and that each is awaiting the official announcement of candidacy of the other before declaring his own candidacy. Neither had officially declared at press time.
There was further speculation that former 33rd District Assemblyman Tim Donnelly might run for the post. Donnelly, however, does not currently live in the 21st District, but rather in the 23rd State Senate District. A provision in the California Constitution requires candidates to have lived in their legislative district for one year. The California Secretary of State’s legal counsel, however, has entered an opinion that provision is in violation of the U.S. Constitution and is not enforceable. Donnelly must, nevertheless, move into the 21st District to run. Were he to do so, he might face a challenge from some other entity or person on the duration of residency issue. Were he to prevail on legal grounds, he might yet face accusations of being a carpetbagger from one or more of his opponents. Donnelly forewent running for reelection to the Assembly this year to make an ultimately unsuccessful bid to capture the Republican nomination for governor.

(November 24)  The next stage in Marc Steinorth’s maturation as a political entity will ensue next month when he is sworn in as the new assemblyman in the 40th District.
Steinorth’s political climb has been one of the most dynamic and rapid upsurges by a local elected figure in memory. In 2010, he made his first foray into the political fray, when he sought to replace Rancho Cucamonga Mayor Donald Kurth, who had chosen not to run for reelection. An established businessman whose primary political attribute was that he represented the private sector in what was at heart a philosophical battle with the public sector for the control of the reins of government, Steinorth was the most articulate political outsider in the race, which featured incumbent councilman Dennis Michael, the representative of the other side of the philosophical/political divide.
Michael was a creature of the public sector. He had worked his entire career as a public employee, a firefighter with the Foothill Fire District, the forerunner of the Rancho Cucamonga Fire Department, rising to the fire chief’s position by the time the district was subsumed by the city. Michael retired as Rancho Cucamonga fire chief in 2004, having qualified for a comfortable pension, and had then run successfully for city council. In the 2010 election, Steinorth made a strong showing, giving voice to the discontent and anger brewing within the public over the perception that public employees had it too good, with high salaries that bettered those of many similarly ore even more skilled employees in the private sector, as well as benefits – meaning health coverage and pensions – that dwarfed those provided to most workers in private industry.
Steinorth relished his place as the opposition candidate, one who questioned and held up to scrutiny and even ridicule the incestuous relationship between elected officials, whose major campaign contributors were public employees unions, the members of which would in turn then benefit from the votes of incumbents elected with the assistance of union money. Michael, himself a pensioner paid by the taxpayers, made an attractive target. When the 2010 polling was finished, Michael failed, barely, to capture fifty percent of the vote, pulling down 19,978 votes or 49.52 percent. But two other non-establishment candidates were in the race – Robert Ledbetter and Bill Hanlon. Ledbetter polled 3,048 votes or 7.55 percent and Hanlon garnered 2,779 votes or 6.89 percent. Steinorth registered 14,541 votes or 36.04 percent, a more than respectable showing for a first time candidate in a four- way race that involved an incumbent office holder with considerable name recognition, but not enough to win.
Despite that loss, Steinorth had made an indelible impression on the community. With the economy continuing to stagnate four and then five years after the 2007 recession, more and more of the public was becoming receptive to the message being put out by the spokesmen of the private sector, mainly that government overregulation of businesses and the burden being borne by those enterprises that survived the economic downturn in propping up the government bureaucracies and the growing numbers of welfare recipients were crippling the most economically dynamic component of the community.
In 2012, Steinorth’s stock was on the rise, as he was widely seen as one of the more effective, charismatic and eloquent of the private sector’s representatives. That year, he tested the political waters once more and this time prevailed convincingly, outpolling by a significant margin both of the incumbents in the six candidate race for Rancho Cucamonga City Council.
Steinorth claimed 21,935 votes or 26.44 percent, well ahead of the second place finisher, incumbent councilman Sam Spagnolo, who garnered 17,840 votes or 21.5 percent. With his strong showing, Steinorth displaced long time councilman Chuck Buquet, who finished third with 14,626 votes or 17.63 percent.
Steinorth’s victory did not herald a radical departure from the public employee dominated ethos at Rancho Cucamonga City Hall, but rather a subtle change. Three of his council colleagues – Michael, Spagnolo and Bill Alexander – were retired firefighters pulling comfortable taxpayer-paid public pensions. Moreover, as Steinorth himself pointed out, 34 percent of all of the households in Rancho Cucamonga had at least one government employee living within them.
If many of those who had supported Steinorth’s candidacy were hoping that he would embark on a reformist agenda that would result in the reduction of city employee salaries and benefits, and many did, they would be disappointed. The simple truth of the matter was that Steinorth lacked the political muscle – on his own – to effectuate anything close to the change he or his supporters envisioned. Indeed, at the meeting where Steinorth was sworn in and seated upon the council for the first time in December 2012, the atmosphere was something like that depicted in the sixth chapter of the Book of Daniel. Steinorth, cast in the role of Daniel, tread somewhat gingerly into a chamber of Lions. For their part, the council was every bit as wary of him.
There lingered an air of animosity between him and the mayor, a residual effect of what had transpired in the election two years previously. For the first several months of what turned out to be his 24-month tenure as a Rancho Cucamonga city councilman, Steinorth endured what appeared to be a role of isolated relegation. But then, at first slowly and in time at near blinding speed, Steinorth made a totally unforeseen transformation into a team player at the municipal level. With casual aplomb, the man who had invented himself as a political dissident clamoring for makeover in the way government – in particular local government – carried out its mission so as to purge its ranks of self-serving public employees more interested in riding the gravy train than looking after the best interests of the taxpayers, refocused his reformist vision away from local government and instead toward Sacramento.
Government’s betrayal and exploitation of its citizenry remained as a central tenet of his appeal to his constituency. The traitors to the cause of good governance, Steinorth now propounded, were not those manning the municipal stations of duty, but rather the bureaucrats, legislators and staff functioning at the state level who had commandeered the ways and means – the precious tax revenue provided by the governed – for its own large scale, big government purposes and goals, leaving the cities and counties without the ability to provide the services closest to the people and most responsive to their actual needs and necessary for the betterment of their quality of life.
Steinorth’s reorientation was seamless. Moreover, it was in keeping with his partisan political orientation, which had always been and remained a total identification as a Republican. Whether by coincidence or accident or well-thought-through design, Steinorth’s basis of operations, Rancho Cucamonga, is a Republican stronghold. Indeed, San Bernardino County as a whole remains one of the few remaining GOP bastions in the state, where Republican office holders seriously outnumber their Democratic counterparts. Rancho Cucamonga joins Redlands, Chino Hills, Upland, Yucca Valley, Yucaipa, Big Bear, Twentynine and Apple Valley as the county’s cities or incorporated towns where Republican voters overwhelmingly outnumber registered Democrats. And while party registration in cities such as Fontana, Colton, Rialto, San Bernardino, Needles, Montclair, Barstow, and Adelanto strongly favors Democrats over Republicans, such that countywide registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 324,898 or 38.2 percent to 294,028 or 34.5 percent, Republican vote in far greater numbers both by turning out at the polls as well as by mailing in absentee ballots.
Thus, In San Bernardino County, Republicans on the county’s 24 city councils outnumber Democrats 59 to 37, three to two on the county board of supervisors, and four to three in the State Senate. In the Assembly San Bernardino County has sent four Republicans and four Democrats to Sacramento.
By setting his sights on Sacramento and the monetary black hole it has come to embody, Steinorth quite naturally targeted the Democratic Party, which until the prosecution of two Democratic State Senators and a single Democratic member of the Assembly earlier this year resulted in their resignation, suspension or removal from office, held a supermajority in the state capital in both houses of the legislature, not to mention possession of the governor’s office.
Steinorth, who never surrendered his branding as a conservative and staunchly pro-business Republican, vied in the geographically dispersed 40th Assembly District, which runs from Rancho Cucamonga in the west and then spans the narrow and virtually unpopulated swath across the I-15 Freeway into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, then down into a portion of the city of San Bernardino, and then through all or most of Redlands, Highland, Loma Linda and Grand Terrace. The district was and remains almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. At the time he declared his candidacy, the Democrats boasted some 700 more registered voters in the district than did the GOP. But a Republican registration drive redressed that slight disparity, and just a few weeks prior to the election Republicans had swelled their ranks to outnumber Democrats by 101 voters. Of the 219,214 registered voters in the district, 77,771, or 37.0 percent, are registered Democrats. Republicans claimed 77,872, which is statistically likewise pegged at 37.0 percent.
For the Republicans and Steinorth, the outcome was never truly in doubt. Given the greater Republican voter turnout at most elections – consistently running at six to eight percent – and the reliable pattern of voters who decline to state a major party affiliation voting in equal numbers for Democrats and Republicans, the actual contest in the 40th this year was between the three Democrats – Art Bustamante, Kathleen Marie Henry, Melissa O’Donnell – in the race for second place in the June primary to see which of those would capture second place and the honor of losing to Steinorth in November.
Steinorth, nonetheless, did not assume victory or rest on his laurels but aggressively campaigned all the way in the November 4 final against Henry, running as if he were five percentage points behind.
Along the way, Steinorth picked up the endorsements of a veritable who’s who of political figures and associations. Notable among them were those of Mayor Dennis Michael, his first political opponent, as well as the Rancho Cucamonga City Employees Association and the Rancho Cucamonga Firefighters Association.
All of Steinorth’s hard work and diligence and that of his team paid off. The tallying of the votes after the polls closed on November 4 showed that Steinorth outpolled Henry by better than ten percent among the 70,602 of the district’s 219,214 registered voters who participated in this year’s balloting. Henry captured 31,306 votes or 44.34 to Steinorth’s 39,296 votes or 55.66 percent.
Steinorth’s accomplishment was an extraordinary one by any measure. Few San Bernardino County politicians since the inception of the county in the 1850s had risen from such political obscurity into the halls of the statehouse so rapidly. A mere four years after his maiden political venture in which he had failed to gain election as mayor of Rancho Cucamonga and just two years after Steinorth claimed his first electoral victory by acceding to the Rancho Cucamonga City Council, he is an Assemblyman-elect. In his run to victory he was endorsed by the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the San Bernardino Sun, the Press-Enterprise, the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the San Bernardino County Safety Employees’ Benefit Association, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the California Small Business Association, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Associated Builders and Contractors of Southern California, the Inland Empire Taxpayers Association, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the Association of California School Administrators, the San Bernardino County Farm Bureau, the Association of California State Supervisors, the California Republican Party, the California Republican Assembly, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, the California Young Republican Federation, the Inland Valley Young Republicans, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans and the Inland Empire Black Conservatives His energy and intelligence, his experience as a businessman, his charisma and eloquence, not to mention the variety of his political associations and contacts mark him as the political newcomer of the year in Sacramento.
Yet for all of the potential seemingly spread out before him, Marc Steinorth will walk into the lower chamber of the California Legislature next month in much the same way he took his place at the dais in the Rancho Cucamonga City Council two years ago, something like the way Daniel walked into the lion’s den.
A pro-business Republican, he is headed for a city – Sacramento – currently dominated by Democrats. The owner of the team is a Democrat. The team manager is a Democrat. The team captain is a Democrat. The squad leaders are Democrats. Will he be able to play ball in this unfamiliar stadium?
Most likely, given the assets he possesses and the Republican-friendly turf from which he hails, Steinorth can successfully vie for reelection again in 2016 and 2018. Given the new term limit restrictions that allow one politician to serve up to 12 years in a single house, he can perhaps seek and obtain voter recertification in 2020, and 2022 and 2024. But will he be effective in terms of achieving the ends that his supporters elected him to achieve? Or will he, to reach his own definition of political success and pass legislation, need to shift what he is advocating, come to an accommodation with his more numerous Democratic colleagues, compromise on the goals he currently has in mind? As a die-hard advocate of the business community in a chamber full of politicians who have been given their charters because they are advocates of those who desire an overarching welfare state, will his eloquence prevail in an argument that overregulation must cease, that the fetters have to be removed from businesses so that the economic engine of California can get in tune, with all eight cylinders firing in sequence, so the state’s financial vehicle can hum down the highway pulling everyone along? Or will he need to make concessions, as he did in Rancho Cucamonga, on issues of principle and orientation, a move that endeared him to the political establishment and advanced his own standing as a political entity but which forsook the issues that brought him into the political arena to begin with?
At this stage, with one foot planted in Rancho Cucamonga and the other reaching toward the banks of the Sacramento River, Steinorth does not see the world in same stark terms he did four years ago. He has softened, by some standards, though he maintains he has actually been toughened, hardened by political reality.
Steinorth told the Sentinel this week that when he took up his position on the city council in 2012, “What I experienced was as much of an education as what I tried to teach. I learned that public employees, the people who comprised staff at City Hall were all regular, normal people trying to perform their jobs as best as possible with the resources available to them under tremendous pressure.”
He grew understanding of those he had been critical of in the past, Steinorth said.
“In the private sector we look at in a way where we see the public system perhaps as giving its workers opportunities with job experience unavailable to traditional private enterprise, private sector employees.”
But Steinorth intimated that what many people consider to be generous or overly generous pay checks and benefits provided to public employees are in some way justifiable.
“Private sector employees know what is expected of them,” Steinorth said. “If I’m a car salesman, my job is to sell cars and I can see how many cars I need to sell per month to be successful. In the public sector the benchmark is forever changing. Running a city efficiently with great senior programs, youth programs, paving roads, landscaping neighborhoods and parks, providing public safety with the police and fire departments is not one job. There are multiple parts and multiple approaches to their jobs. They also have to work with the public and public opinion can be fickle. What I saw when I came to the city were a lot of really hard working people who were not always sure they were appreciated for the hard work they were doing. When you have a city that is well run you are tempted into saying it can run itself but what I learned is it was quite the opposite. It took a tremendous amount of effort to make it look easy. As we say in the private sector, you need to make commitments with your people for them to achieve the talent level you need for success. I think the city of Rancho Cucamonga has been very successful in growing the next generation of talented employees. That stewardship from the city managers- Jack Lam and now John Gillison – has been tremendous. I may not agree with every decision John Gillison makes, but I have to recognize his desire to make the best decision for the benefit of the city. When I joined the Rancho Cucamonga City Council, the other city council members and the mayor were not sure how we could best work together, but within a very short period of time we were able to form a relationship to determine our common goals and work as a team.“
Looking back at what he originally conceived of as a clash of two world views, Steinorth said turned out to be a fruitful exchange of differing but ultimately reconcilable perspectives.
“I was able to tell the about the way I used to think before about the way government operates,” he said. “I still think government does not understand how much of the private sector works. On the private sector side, we don’t have much interaction with the government and we do not have an understanding of what government is really doing. Since I have been in office, I am able to share with others what I have learned, since I have worked within government, and I see what it is about.”
Steinorth said he will go to the state capitol as a facilitator rather than a dissident.
“I intend to represent our region in Sacramento with that same optimism I had on the city council, to achieve results,” he said. “Some of my ambition may not be shared by my future colleagues, but most people recognize there is some commonality among all of us. We need to find those areas where we agree with one another and create cooperation among all of us.
“If you analyze it,” Steinorth continued, “The Republicans and Democrats disagree on sixty percent of the issues. That means we can work with each other on forty percent. With the new term limits being implemented, one person can stay for up to 12 years in one house. This allows a much greater opportunity to build relationships with each other and work together regardless of whether there is an R or a D next to your name.”
Steinorth gave further indication that he would be prepared to dispense with strict partisan affiliation in favor of creating alliances with Democrats to achieve ends that would benefit their constituencies in common.
“Speaking about this region, in the freshman class we have myself, the current mayor of Big Bear, Jay Obernolte, and Chad Mayes, who was supervisor Rutherford’s chief of staff and Ling Ling Chang. Coupled with sophomores Cheryl Brown and Christopher Holden, we represent the Inland Empire. Larger than the Inland Empire is the inland regions and as a unit we have more in common than we have differences in opposition. I am really optimistic and truly encouraged at what we are going to be able to achieve in the next two years.”
Steinorth, who yet owns an advertising agency which is based in Rancho Cucamonga, said he, for one, was not in danger of becoming a creature of Sacramento, who would grow out of touch with his district.
“During the orientation they had for us, I heard that some of the new members are looking at purchasing homes there,” Steinorth said. “I’m looking at buying better luggage. I’m the guy who will be traveling a lot on Southwest.”