(August 24)   ONTARIO – The Ontario City Council on August 21 voted to join with San Bernardino County in the formation of the Ontario International Airport Authority, an entity intended to facilitate the city’s efforts to regain ownership and control of Ontario Airport.
It is anticipated that San Bernardino County will officially vote to join Ontario, the county’s fourth largest city in terms of population, as a member of the joint powers authority later this month.
In 1967 the city of Ontario transferred management of the airport to the city of Los Angeles and its department of airports, a ploy which allowed the entity that owned and controlled Los Angeles International Airport to use its prestige and greater negotiating leverage to convince airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. In 1985, Ontario deeded the airport to the megalopolis for no consideration. Under Los Angeles’s direction, over $550 million in improvements were made to the airport, and passenger traffic there increased dramatically from just under 200,000 in 1966 to 7.2 million in 2007. But over the last five years, passengers flying in and out of Ontario have dwindled considerably, with 4.2 million passengers in 2011, and further declines are registering this year.
Ontario officials blame Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, the non-profit entity Los Angeles created to own, maintain, administer and operate its division of airports, for the downturn in passenger traffic through Ontario in recent years. The once-cordial relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles has suffered as Ontario officials maintain that Los Angeles has purposefully increased enplaned passenger costs at Ontario and diminished marketing of the airport as a ploy to increase passenger traffic at Los Angeles International Airport, even as the airline industry in general has been contracting. Led by councilman Alan Wapner, Ontario officials have been pushing ever more aggressively to have Los Angeles relinquish the airport, maintaining that the entirety of the Inland Empire has seen its economy negatively impacted as a result of the loss of passengers transiting through Ontario Airport. That effort, which included videos, and a push to have legislation passed in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. to mandate what is referred to as local control of the airport, has angered Los Angeles World Airport officials, who earlier this year offered to let Ontario take over the Ontario Airport marketing assignment.
Ontario officials maintained that they did not want to undertake the promotion of the airport if they did not have control over costs at the aerodrome. Los Angeles World Airports, known by its acronym LAWA, oversees Los Angeles International Airport, Van Nuys Airport, Palmdale Airport and Ontario International. Ontario officials assert that for the last five years LAWA has allowed Ontario International Airport to languish, as major improvements have been made to Los Angeles International Airport.  LAWA charges the airlines at Ontario International $14.50 per enplaned passenger, which is substantially more than the $11, $9.93, $5.34, $4.07 and $2.10 charged at Los Angeles International, John Wayne, Long Beach, Palm Springs and Burbank airports, respectively. Ontario officials have noted that Los Angeles World Airports has overstaffed Ontario Airport with Los Angeles Department of Airports personnel, artificially inflating the operating costs at Ontario Airport.  Indeed, Ontario officials maintain, LAWA is purposefully mismanaging Ontario International as part of an effort to bolster the Los Angeles economy.
In recent years, some airlines have elected to discontinue operating out of Ontario. JetBlue no longer offers a nightly red-eye flight from Ontario to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, having discontinued that option in 2008. Allegiant Air ceased flying into and out of Ontario in 2009. Both JetBlue and Allegiant cited the higher costs at Ontario in their decisions to abandon the airport.
In recent days, LAWA has unveiled an incentive plan including the lowering of rental rates at Ontario Airport to encourage airlines to increase flight operations there.
LAWA’s Jess Romo, who serves as the Ontario Airport manager, is promoting Ontario Airport by offering airlines currently operating there or ones contemplating coming in a reduction on the rent for space in the airport’s terminals.
Currently at Ontario, airlines are paying $144.11 per square foot for terminal space. That is up from the $134.39 they were charged in 2011, but less than the $154.63 charged in 2010. Romo did not specify how much of a break LAWA would be offering the airlines, but said the discounts would be significant, making Ontario competitive with all of the airports in the region. And he indicated the rents would be reduced even further for airlines that significantly increased their operations at the airport.
Ontario officials were not placated by that proposal, however, and pushed forward with the creation of the joint powers authority, designating Wapner and councilman Jim Bowman as the city’s representatives to it.
“Ontario Airport and the economic destiny of the Inland Empire should not be in the hands of the officials of a city more than 40 miles away, who are not answerable to the local electorate,” Wapner said. “Ontario Airport should be operated by an agency that is responsible and accountable to our residents for its service and performance.”
The county will have at least one representative on the authority board. Another elected official from another local city, quite possibly Rancho Cucamonga, will in time be appointed as a voting member as well. Ontario officials did not rule out the possibility of having a representative from Los Angeles or LAWA in some fashion associated with the authority.
Gina Marie Lindsey, the executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, told the Sentinel, “Our immediate focus is ensuring the long-term success of ONT.  An independent, multi-jurisdictional authority can be a good governance model for enterprises like airports.  If there were to be a change in the governance structure for ONT, an airport authority is one of many models.”
Linsey has previously  maintained the decrease in passenger traffic at Ontario International is a reflection of the struggling national, state and local economy. She indicated she did not believe Ontario’s effort to seize back ownership and operational control of the airport would reverse Ontario Airport’s decline.
“Local control, in and of itself, is not going to be a panacea,” she said. “We ought to be working together to stem the exodus now.”
Lindsey further indicated that Los Angeles was not poised to simply return the airport to Ontario, emphasizing that a considerable amount of money under the discretionary spending control of Los Angeles World Airports had been invested in Ontario Airport. “The city of Los Angeles has made an extraordinary investment in Ontario Airport,” she said. “$128 million of passenger facility charges paid by passengers at LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] came over to Ontario to help build the two terminals.”
Charges that Los Angeles is exploiting Ontario Airport are unfounded, Lindsey said. “Every dollar that was earned at the Ontario airport went back into re-investment at the Ontario airport,” she said. Criticism that LAWA is using Ontario as a dumping ground for Los Angeles Department of Airport employees is similarly inaccurate, she said, pointing out that her agency had reduced operating costs at Ontario Airport by $19 million per year. “150 of the employees that used to be at Ontario were absorbed into LAX,” she said.
The formation of the joint powers authority was widely seen as an intensification of Ontario’s recent moves to reacquire the airport. Previously, Wapner and other city officials asserted that Los Angeles should simply deed the airport back to Ontario as a public benefit transfer, maintaining that the airport had no value as marketable real estate. It was subsequently learned, however, that the city of Ontario had made a confidential offer to purchase the airport for $50 million and an assumption of all debt related to financing for improvements that had been made to the airport.
Los Angeles officials have privately said they believe the airport and its assets to be worth in excess of $450 million.

(August 24)  The Needles City Council on August 22 unanimously agreed to sell the Colorado River Medical Center to Community Healthcare Partner, Inc., a non-profit corporation owned by Bing Lum, for $2.577 million.
The deal comes seven months after the city entered into a previous arrangement with another locally-formed non-profit, Needles Hospital, Inc., to sell the hospital for $3,587,002. Ultimately, that deal fell apart when Needles Hospital, Inc. was unable to close escrow by a stipulated April 26 deadline.
Another entity controlled by Lum, A.M. Pharmacy, which operates contract pharmacies within existing hospitals, had made a competing $3 million bid for the Colorado River Medical Center last year before losing out in that go-round to Needles Hospital, Inc. Lum, a doctor of pharmacology, grew up in Needles and graduated from Needles High School with the Class of 1979.
A.M. Pharmacy is a for-profit company and as such, was at a disadvantage with regard to the takeover protocol for the hospital because Needles voters in June 2010 passed Measure Q, which called for keeping the hospital open and absolving the city of the financial burden of subsidizing the facility by having a non-profit entity selected to run the hospital.
The city of Needles took on ownership of the Colorado River Medical Center in April 2008 after Brentwood, Tennessee-based Lifepoint Hospitals, a for-profit corporation, embarked on an effort to move the institution’s equipment and personnel to Valley View Hospital, another facility it owned in Arizona, roughly 12 miles from Needles.
Because of long-running inadequate billing practices, including failures to invoice Medicare and Medi-Cal as well as insurance companies and patients in a timely fashion, the hospital has lost money while under city ownership, representing a financial liability to taxpayers.  The city created the board of trustees to oversee the hospital, and that panel, together with the city council, came to a consensus that spinning the facility off to an independent operator is the best solution for ensuring that the community has adequate medical care without soaking the taxpayers.
Lum formed Community Health Care Partner as a non-profit entity to be able to make a bid in compliance with conditions of Measure Q. Lum said Community Health Care Partner is an entity entirely distinct from AM Pharmacy, although he said he would be able to call upon the resources of AM Pharmacy and the experience he has in having run that company in operating Colorado River Medical Center. The hospital, together with the 5.71 acres upon which it is located, was covered under the purchase agreement. The city council made several amendments to the draft purchase agreement under consideration August 22 and a finalized version of the agreement will not be available until it is rewritten by city attorney John Pinkney.
Lum told the Sentinel he believes Community Healthcare Partner will be able to “close escrow by the first of the year. We are of course in a situation where the hospital is in need physically, with the building and equipment, and operationally and financially. Those things are up in the air right now and if there is an immediate dire need, I may have to work with city officials to start sooner, but right now I am anticipating getting started at the first of the year.”
Lum said he is looking forward to making the transition in ownership come about and keeping the hospital afloat.
“I want to thank the city council and the hospital board and city of Needles for their thoughtful and thorough consideration of my proposal,” he said. “I am excited by the opportunity to return to my hometown and provide health care services for the Tri-State Area.”

(August 24)  ADELANTO—A month after the Adelanto Elementary School District was forced by a court ruling to accept a parent collective’s formalized demand that Desert Trails Elementary School be radically restructured, the school board on August 17 rejected the parent’s proposal that the underperforming school be immediately transformed into a charter school as of the opening of the 2012-13 academic year this week.
In July the parents union at Desert Trails Elementary School became the first such coalition of parents and education activists to actuate the provisions of California’s Empowerment Act, which was authored by former state senator Gloria Romero and passed by the legislature in 2010 to enable a majority of parents at a school at which students score  as low-performers on state academic tests to force a district to implement significant reforms. Known by the colloquialism “parent trigger,” those reforms can range from replacing the principal and up to half the staff to reopening the school as a charter academy.
The parent trigger process at Desert Trails Elementary School, where a significant number of the students have parents whose first language is not English and at which for the last seven years students have had the lowest scores within the district on state standardized academic tests, began last year. Pursuant to the Parent Empowerment Act, a parent union was formed by  Desert Trails Elementary parents, who with the assistance of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Parent Revolution, on January 12, submitted 466 school parent signatures on petitions asking the district to undertake a set of reforms at the severely underperforming school. Those reforms included sacking the school’s principal, David Mobley, giving the school’s parents authority in hiring his successor, reducing class sizes and increasing the number of school days and instructional hours while intensifying the school’s science, history and art curriculum. The number of signatures on those petitions  was sufficient to meet the requirements of the Parent Empowerment Act, parent union members believed.  A group of parents opposed to the parent takeover of the school formed and went to work obtaining rescissions of many of the signatures on the petitions, and the parent union subsequently modified its agenda to request that the school be converted to a charter academy.
In February, the school district, to whom the parent trigger petitions had been entrusted, announced that it had validated the signatures of only 317 of the 466 signatures on the petitions. The Desert Trails Parent Union, represented by a law firm on retainer with Parent Revolution, Los Angeles-based Kirkland & Ellis, demanded a recount and reconsideration of that invalidation of the petition effort. After the district conducted that recount, the board, on March 28, voted unanimously to give a final rejection to the reconsideration of the parent trigger petitions, finding they fell 20 signatures short of the 321 signatures needed.
In response,  Mark Holscher, an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis, on April 5 filed on behalf of five of the members of the parents union – Doreen Diaz, Kathy Duncan, Teresa Rogers, Olivia Zamarripa and Bartola Del Villar – a petition for a writ of mandate and a complaint in Victorville Superior Court seeking a court order that the district verify the signatures and allow the Parent Trigger process to advance, as well as asking for the  recognition of  the educational rights of students at Desert Trails.
Holscher maintained that the district did not make an impartial tally of the signatures and “engaged in a systematic effort to invalidate the petitions” and that “the district’s teachers as well as teachers from outside the district engaged in a campaign to coerce parents to ‘rescind’ their petitions, and the district then used 97 of these purported ‘rescissions’ to block the January 12th petition.”
Judge Steve Malone, to whom the case was assigned, restored 97 of the signatures tossed out by the district, ruling that the district did not have the authority or a basis in law to discount signatures that proponents gathered and the district had abused its discretion in doing so. By his ruling Malone raised the number of qualified signatures to well above the 50 percent needed to validate the petition. He ordered the Adelanto Elementary School District to accept the petition as filed by the parent union within 30 days and seek proposals from charter school operators to take over Desert Trails.
By the ruling, the Desert Trails Parent Union became the first group to successfully enact California’s 2010 Parent Empowerment Act.
Board members of the Adelanto Elementary School District on August 17 voted 3 to 1 to accept the parents’ petition for the comprehensive makeover of  Desert Trails Elementary School. But that acceptance did not include signing off on the parents’ demand that the school be transformed into a charter campus.
The California Education Code provides for the formation of charter schools under the aegis of a sponsoring local school district. Charter schools function outside the normal parameters of normal schools and can offer a curriculum and educational smorgasbord unavailable in traditional public schools while meeting the requirements of both special needs students and accelerated scholars.
The school board, noting that the start of the 2012-13 academic year is imminent, concluded there was not sufficient lead time to form and initiate the operation of a charter school.
That provoked a sharp rebuke from the parents union,  Parent Revolution and Kirkland & Ellis, all of whom said the district and the board did not have the authority to override Malone’s July 18 court order to permit the parent union to undertake the formation of a charter school.
Holscher threatened further legal action, stating “We are prepared to use all available legal remedies to make sure Judge Malone’s order is followed.”
Holscher insisted Malone’s order was binding with regard to the 2012-13 school year since the district had previously asserted there was not adequate time to set up the charter school operation by the start of the school year. Despite taking that position, the district had submitted to the parent union a charter school formation plan.
When the parent union rejected the district’s charter school proposal, the district, in an assertion hotly contested by the parent union, maintained that it has final authority in determining which reform options will be applied to the school.  The school board has given superintendent Darin Brawley instructions to revamp Desert Trails’ educational mission in compliance with a plan propounded by the board, which is to entail revised curriculum, an extended teaching and instructional day, more technology, writing workshops, evaluation of teachers’ performance and the academic performance of the school’s students, and teacher support. The district is also forming a community advisory council composed of teachers, administrators, parents and civic officials to oversee the implementation of the changes.
Despite the district’s action, the parent union is continuing to consider charter applications and intends to initiate a charter school operation on the Desert Trails campus by October. The parent union succeeded in attracting four charter school proposals, including the one provided by the district.
Both the Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley and LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy in Hesperia have tendered tentative proposals and are continuing to work on finalizing those by September. The parents union, as noted, rejected out of hand the district’s overture to form a charter school on the Desert Trail campus. Another  tentative proposal was floated by   South Lake Tahoe-based Iwa Rere Educational and Technical Engagements. Soon after learning that well over 70 percent of the school’s students were performing significantly below state standards and many lacked basic communicative skill in English, Iwa Rere, which tailors at least a portion of its approach to gifted students who function well independently and in unstructured learning environments, abruptly withdrew as a candidate to run the school.
Some observers anticipated difficulty if the Lewis Center gets the parents union’s nod, given its disaffinity for test preparation-driven instruction. Lewis, while attempting to instill problem-solving skills and out-of-the-box thinking in its students, has had success to some degree but has enjoyed the advantage of working with significant numbers of students with sound basic skills. An eventual goal at Desert Trail will be to improve test performance among the students there.
The school’s students have collectively scored in the bottom 10 percent of all California elementary schools. In the school’s 2011 graduating sixth grade class 72 percent of students were not proficient with the English language and 70 percent were not proficient in math. Two-thirds of this year’s crop of graduating sixth-graders are unable to read or do math at grade level. Since 2007 Desert Trails has been classified as a failing school.
Both the Lewis Center’s and LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy’s proposals are to be submitted in full to the parent union by September 15. The parent union will then submit those proposals to the parents who signed the January petition, many of whom lack basic English and other academic skills themselves, for evaluation. They will then collectively come to a determination about which entity will be contracted with to run the Desert Trails charter school, which the union wants to open as early as October.

By Steven Ipson
(August 24)  There is an ongoing problem between the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center (which does business as the Cooper Regional History Museum) and the county board of supervisors as well as the county assessor. As an active member of the cultural center’s board of trustees for the past five years plus, I would like to present the history that has taken place and request the public’s support for this community resource. The Chaf-fey Communities Cultural Center was established in 1965 and is dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history and cultural legacy of the communities of Upland, Ontario, Montclair, Mt. Baldy, Rancho Cucamonga and San Antonio Heights.
The groundwork for the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center (CCCC) was laid in 1964 by a number of civic leaders who joined together to preserve the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, built in 1911 and located at Euclid and F Street. It was being replaced by a larger church being built on 16th Street just east of Euclid Avenue. The committee accepted the city of Upland’s offer to lease a five acre portion of Pioneer Park at $1 a year to serve as the new home to historic St Mark’s Church. In 1966, the church was cut into three sections and moved to its present location on 18th Street. In June of 1967, the CCCC held a grand opening and the church was opened to the public. The plans were to feature a history museum, art gallery, amphitheater, sculpture garden and theater.
To enhance the beauty of the church, the public became involved through residents, businesses, local organizations and service groups. There was construction of additional buildings, installation of landscaping, and the planting of a two-acre citrus grove, harking back to the origins of Upland.
Tragedy struck in 1987 as a fire destroyed a significant portion of the church and the historical artifacts collection stored there. A restoration program ensued and the cultural center transformed itself. Much repair work was done and chairs and new carpeting were added, which transformed the structure into a modern auditorium. With the addition of a new entrance, walkways, signage lighting and shrubbery, the building became more attractive and re-opened in April of 1990 for performances, lectures and concerts. This venue continued through the end of the 20th Century and continues today. In addition, weddings and funerals were added so residents could hold these important ceremonies in a landmark location. All of these events are hosted for a minimal donation, because the cultural center’s mission is to serve our communities, not generate profits. Over the years, our income from the use of the church building has just covered our maintenance and other operating expenses. The church and the Ada Cooper Museum, located downtown, are both staffed by volunteers and a director who is paid part time.
Many of the larger artifacts that are displayed in our shed at the back of the 18th Street property were exhibited to the many school children that came for yearly visits and received a better understanding of the early citrus industries and how the citrus groves looked when they dominated the area for over 60 years.
In 2005, the city of Upland entered into a business transaction at our 18th Street Property that spawned our dispute with the county assessor. The city sold the property consisting of Pioneer Park, including the portion that had been leased to Chaffey Communities Cultural Center to a builder, who deeded back 1.25 acres to CCCC, which consisted of the church, a small garage, which holds historical artifacts and documents, a shed to hold the larger artifacts, and a caretaker’s house that is rented out to provide security and minor maintenance.
In 2009, we were advised by the county assessor that the center was responsible for property tax in the amount of approximately $14,000 per year. We explained that the center was a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and, thus, was exempt from property taxes. The definition of a non-profit organization is one that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather then distribute them as profit or dividends and that is precisely the kind of operation we have. During the dialog we had with the assessor’s office, we were advised by the assessor’s staff that we would qualify if we made specific changes. We first revised our articles of incorporation and had them approved by the Secretary of State of California and then notified the assessor’s office of the changes. The Secretary of State, in addition, issued us a certificate of welfare from the Board of Equalization, which the assessor’s office stated qualified us as eligible for a 100% exemption. We then responded to their request that we modify the appearance of the 18th Street location by distributing our farm implements over the entire property with the implied statement that this adjustment would qualify us. Following this, we provided photos of the 18th Street location to the assessor’s office to confirm that we had complied with their request. After taking all these steps, we were confident that we had satisfied the county assessor that we were a non-profit institution and, therefore, would not be liable for property tax.
The assessor’s office re-evaluated our property and allowed CCCC a 19% discount against our property tax. This lowered our property tax to approximately $10,400 a year. When questioned about the amount, we were told that we employed companies for profit and that disqualified us. We questioned the irreasoning behind this decision. There are no offices on the property. People conducting weddings and funerals contact our president by phone to arrange for time slots for their ceremonies. They make a small contribution to utilize the historic 18th Street Church. The monies garnered from these ceremonies are used exclusively for our standard operating costs (insurance, gas, electricity, cleanup, security, and phone). There is no connection between any of the organizations or individuals that utilize our facilities and the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center. Facing a property tax amount that would exhaust our limited resources, and force us to close our doors within five years, we sought legal help. Research showed that similar non-profit organizations had encountered the same type of problem, but they had the resources to take their battle to court. In each case, these organizations, which closely resemble the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center, demonstrated that the revenues they received were used to further the charitable purposes of the associations and did not inure to private benefit.
We elected to take our appeal to the county board of supervisors, feeling a review of these legal precedents and a better understanding of how we operated out of the 18th Street location would result in a favorable decision by the supervisors. We met with and thoroughly briefed our two supervisors, Janice Rutherford, representing the 18th Street location, and Gary Ovitt representing our downtown Upland location. We were informed that our appeal was on the agenda for the May meeting.
Prior to the meeting with the board of supervisors, we heard comments from knowledgeable people that, “You won’t get one government agency to overrule another government agency,” and “The county needs the money more than you.” Nevertheless, we went into the meeting confident we would get a fair hearing and would prevail based upon our operation and previous court decisions. We utilize our courtyard in downtown Upland for the same kind of events for companies and organizations that donate a fee, and we have 100% property tax exemption there. Other 501(c)3 organizations operate in the same manner we do. Our president, Dave Stevens, our lawyer Sam Crowe and I addressed the board of supervisors. Unfortunately, both of the supervisors representing us did not appear at the board meeting and did not have the item postponed. The remaining three supervisors present voted to deny our appeal to give the entire property tax exempt status. Instead they voted to enforce the county assessor’s decision to apply a property tax to the cultural center on that portion of the property that does not have an exemption.
We continue to accommodate residents’ requests to tour the 18th Street Church and grounds, see the artifacts and to utilize our upgraded garage areas as a research area, focusing on local history. The library preserves books and maps of the area, clipping files, scrap books, historic home research tools, and a growing genealogy and family history. I personally have taken a number of guests through the church so they can appreciate the beauty and workmanship of a 100-year-old historic structure.
Faced with a property tax bill of $10,400 a year, and combined with a struggling economy which restricts our fundraising ability, the prospect of closing our doors within the next five years is steadily becoming a reality. We believe that the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center not only preserves the history of the local area, but also educates our local school children about roots in the community in which they live, and introduces both longtime and new residents to the unique and rich history of the valley. You are invited to come down to the Cooper Museum at 217 East ‘A” Street (across from the downtown Upland Metrolink) and see the museum. Admission is free and it is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. till 5 p.m. and can be reached at (909) 982-8010. If you believe that we are genuinely a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the community, that we are not trying to circumvent the law but rather apply the law in a fair and consistent manner, you are invited to pick up a postcard preaddressed to your county supervisor. This postcard will voice your support for our position that the 18th Street property should be totally tax exempt. This postcard only requires your signature and a stamp to let our supervisors know how the community feels. If you are an organization, group, school, church or other entity and want to get your people involved, let us know and we will supply you with the amount of postcards required. If our supervisors hear from enough of our citizens asking them to reconsider their position, the community will come out a winner.
You can also view us at our website at www.coopermuseum.org.  Our 18 Street property location is open from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. on Thursdays and upon request.

Steven Ipson is the secretary for the Board of Trustees of the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center.

(August 10)  The Upland City Council and three of the city’s senior staff members stepped into controversy last week when they sought to quietly push through an ordinance that gives the city manager and its development services director the authority to impose on residents and businesses administrative fines of up to $31,000 per month.
A vote on the approval of the controversial ordinance was scheduled for and made on July 30, at a city council meeting at which neither mayor Ray Musser nor city manager Stephen Dunn were in attendance. The ordinance itself and its language were not made available to the public prior to nor during the meeting and the ordinance was not publicly released until eight days after the city council voted to approve it.
While the city’s development services director publicly stated that the ordinance was not intended as a revenue generating ploy, residents chortled at that claim and no other city officials were willing to stand by that assertion. Nevertheless, the four council members present at the July 30 meeting voted unanimously to give the ordinance what is called a first reading, i.e. tentative approval. A second reading of the ordinance, which gives the law final approval, is scheduled for August 13.
The ordinance substantially intensifies City Hall’s bureaucratic power and increases the amounts of the fines that can be levied. Moreover, the ordinance also sets up a policy similar to that utilized in other municipalities that empowers the city to not only issue citations but adjudicate them and set the penalty, precluding, at least in the first three phases of the process, the individual who is cited from having the matter heard and the fine set by an independent arbiter, such as the municipal or superior court. Only upon being ajuged guilty and assessed with the fine, can a resident or business entity that is cited appeal the matter to an actual court.
The ordinance was drafted by interim city attorney Jimmy Gutierrez and development services director Jeff Zwack. Zwack said the ordinance was based upon similar administrative citation provisions contained in nearby cities’ municipal codes.
According to Zwack, who spoke to the Sentinel on August 7, “We have a 95 percent compliance rate with most of our code enforcement citations. What this is aimed at is the five percent who do not comply. Dealing with those five percent becomes extremely expensive and time consuming. We do not presently have adequate tools. If we issue a citation and there is no response after a second citation we have go to the city prosecutor and go into state or county court. That is a 60-day delay just to start the process and it can take up to a year or more before there is any action taken. A hearing can take up to half a day and that becomes very expensive. The administrative citations will save time and general fund money.
“The intent is to streamline the process and facilitate a resolution and accomplish in 60 days what in our current process could take six months,” Zwack continued. “Our current process is not efficient and wastes a lot of staff time. Our intent is to incentivize compliance with the threat of fines. No fine is attached until after the second letter [notifying the alleged offender of the ongoing violation]. The ordinance establishes fines of between $250 and $1,000, depending on the nature of the issue. At the low end would be having an inoperative vehicle parked on a lawn. At the high end would be a threat to public health or safety such as a broken sewer main that is emptying into the street and flowing into a storm drain. The ordinance gives us the ability to use a higher fine to get compliance. That is a decision of departmental policy made by the city manager and development services director.”
Zwack on July 30, told the council that the fines would range from $100 to $1,000 daily. The ordinance states that the “administrative fine for a violation shall be not less than one hundred dollars ($100.00) per day nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000) per day for each violation. The amount of any fine imposed hereunder shall be determined by the [development services] director. The director may escalate this range of fines for repeated violations that occur within a 12-month period.”
At the July 30 meeting Zwack made clear that the amounts in the fine schedule were a “per day fee.” He went on to say that the city “is not looking to create this as a revenue source.”
Zwack emphasized that there would be two letters giving notice of violation before a fine was imposed. If the fines are not paid, a lien against the property in question is, under the terms of the ordinance, to be recorded on the county tax roll.
No members of the public addressed the issue at the July 30 meeting. A copy of the ordinance was not included with the agenda for the meeting and no copy of the ordinance was on hand for public perusal at the meeting. Efforts initiated by the Sentinel to obtain a copy of the ordinance were unsuccessful until August 7.
During a previous public hearing the evening of August 7 related to the city’s action to record liens against property owners whose properties had undergone weed abatement at the city’s expense, two of those property owners, Bill Kimble and Christopher Scarzo, told the city council, and presented documentation to the effect that, they had themselves performed weed abatement on their properties prior to the city’s contractor’s action and that notification of their right to make an appeal of the lien had come after the deadline for making the appeal.
On July 30, Zwack told the council that he had made sure that they and members of the fire and police committee had received copies of the ordinance. When asked on August 7 by the Sentinel why a copy of the ordinance had not been made available to the public before or during the July 30 meeting, Zwack said, “That question is best answered by the city attorney.” The council waived full reading of the ordinance before voting on it.
Some members of the public in attendance at the meeting said they were caught flatfooted by the item, which was given only a sketchy description on the agenda. One such individual was Albert Pattison, a landowner in Upland. Pattison told the Sentinel Zwack’s presentation of the ordinance and the council’s brief discussion of it elicited his interest but that he felt reluctant to weigh in on it because he did not have a copy of the ordinance before him and did not want to make uninformed statements or ask poorly sourced questions on the public record. Pattison said he initiated an attempt to obtain a copy of the ordinance at the city clerk’s office the following day, and was referred to the library but succeeded only in obtaining a DVD of the council meeting he had attended. “They were very courteous to me at the city clerk’s office,” Pattison told the Sentinel, “but I never did obtain the language of the ordinance, which was what I was looking for.”
Other Upland residents and business owners have since expressed concern about the ordinance, including the way in which it places all of the citing, adjudicating and fining authority in the hands of city officials, as well as the steep fines it would impose. Others have said they are concerned that the liens on the properties in question will do nothing to alleviate the code violations and will be punitive to those who will eventually acquire the properties rather than those responsible for the violations.
Zwack insisted that the ordinance did not create a kangaroo court by violating constitutional due process protections. “This doesn’t make us judge and jury,” Zwack said. He said that the panel appointed by the city manager and him to hear the cases for the most part would not be city employees but “made up by community residents knowledgeable in building codes and other relevant issues. The outcome is appealable to a county judge.” He said the liens on the property would not prove to be a major factor in Upland and would not be likely to discourage prospective buyers from purchasing the distressed properties.
While Zwack said the ordinance was based on similar processes used in other cities, he did not address recent court rulings that have held that municipalities’ use of administrative hearing officers employed by those cities create a conflict in which the fundamental fairness of the hearing process is compromised and the right to due process and other constitutional protections are violated. In one such case out of Hesperia, that city’s imposition of a total of $129,000 in fines against Esther Duran and  her daughter, Janet, for maintaining three too many animals on their agricultural/residential zoned property imposed through the administrative hearing process was reversed by U.S. District Court Judge John E. McDermott. McDermott ruled that the city’s action against the Durans in seizing their animals and imposing the punitive fines was improper and that their animals would have to be returned to them, the fines, which were recorded against their property as tax liens would have to be expunged and that the city would instead need to pay them $200,000 in damages plus attorney fees. The Durans were represented by Upland-based attorney Louis Fazzi.
A calculation many cities make in using the administrative citation process against their citizens is that most do not have the financial wherewithal to fight City Hall. On those occasions where those citizens do have the means or in such cases where a lawyer like Fazzi is willing to represent them pro bono, the outcome can prove financially prohibitive for those cities.
City manager Steve Dunn, who was vacationing the week of the July 30 council meeting, told the Sentinel “The thing driving this [the administrative citation ordinance] was the expense of pursuing some code enforcement cases. If we cite someone and they give us the finger, we have to take them to court. The amount of dollars we then have to use can become excessive. That ordinance creates a mechanism to ensure less costly compliance. Could it be abused? Without a doubt, it could. It isn’t our intent to go after small cases with this. We consider it as something that would be useful against the [Dineen Trucking] dirt pile and the medical marijuana clinic. If we had this ordinance before, we would not have needed to go to court and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. We could have done it administratively. But it can be abused. It needs checks and balances put in there. Right now, it [the ordinance] lacks checks and balances.”
Zwack said he stood by the ordinance as it is written and as it was tentatively approved by the city council last week.
“My opinion is this is what everyone wants,” he said. “We will see whatever the community wants and it is up to the city council to make that decision.”

(August 10)  An effort to have city voters in November vote for or against keeping provisions of the San Bernardino city charter which lock in a pay scale for policemen and firefighters at a level that is roughly 15 percent higher than that paid to public safety employees in California cities sized similarly to San Bernardino failed this week on a 3-4 vote of the city council.
Some members of the community and at least three members of the city council are in favor of rescinding that portion of the charter relating to the pay of police and fire department employees. That provision was passed in a citywide vote years ago during less austere financial times. The city of San Bernardino has now filed for bankruptcy, however, and it is the contention of San Bernardino Mayor Patrick Morris that the generous salaries being paid city employees are  major factors in the erosion of the city’s financial condition.
The portion of the charter that relates to police and fire salaries, known as Charter Section 186, cannot be removed without another vote of the city’s residents. But the normal process for qualifying citizen initiatives requires that ten percent of the city’s registered voters sign a petition calling for such a ballot measure. Gathering that many signatures by August 10, the deadline for qualifying a measure for the November ballot, is a logistical impossibility. The other alternative would be for the city council to use its authority as an elected body to ask the registrar of voters to put the initiative on the ballot. A vote to do just that was taken by the city council on August 6. Councilmen Rikke Van Johnson and Fred Shorett and Councilwoman Virginia Marquez voted to place the measure on the ballot, but that was not sufficient, since councilwoman Wendy McCammack and councilmen Robert Jenkins, John Valdivia and Chas Kelley opposed the move. Morris, who is not empowered to votes unless there is a tie, did not participate in the vote.
The council did, however, collectively and unanimously vote to make it easier to lay off non-safety employees and to suspend cash-outs to employees who are resigning or being laid off.
The council voted to change civil service regulations such that employees will now have only two days rather than the previous ten days to appeal a layoff and a single day to ask the city’s personnel department to determine if there are employees of less seniority who can be removed in the laid off employee’s stead. The council also acted to suspend payouts to departing employees and initiate negotiations with them on a reduced payout. According to acting city manager Andrea Travis-Miller, 56 city employees have resigned since the city council indicated on July 10 it intended to seek bankruptcy protection. Some city employees took flight to prevent being subject to an anticipated future effort by the city to reduce pensions. Others wanted to cash in on accrued leave payouts. Some employees have as much as $300,000 in accrued leave time due them under the policy the city had in place. With the city’s bankruptcy filing, which was made last week, that policy has now been suspended. In July during the three weeks following the announcement of the intended bankruptcy filing alone, the city paid out $2 million to employees who had abruptly resigned.

(August 10)  District attorney Mike Ramos’s promotion of the woman his employees refer to as his live-in girlfriend to the position of chief deputy district attorney effective next month has had a deleterious impact on office morale, members of the prosecutor’s office have told the Sentinel.
A few months ago, according to prosecutors, Mike Ramos left his wife, Gretchen, and took up with deputy district attorney Mary Ashley.
Ashley, who has also gone by the name of Mary Frances Ashley-Martinez, was hired as a deputy prosecutor under former district attorney Dennis Stout in 1998. In 2004, Ashley was assigned to head the Victorville office of the district attorney’s newly-formed Family Violence Unit. She remained in that capacity until 2007. Ashley has served as a supervising deputy district attorney since 2007 in the district attorney’s office’s San Bernardino juvenile, Victorville juvenile and Joshua Tree offices.
Over the last year, as the retirement of assistant district attorney Dennis Christy was being anticipated, a commitment was made to promote Gary Roth, currently serving in Victorville as the chief deputy district attorney in the county’s desert division, to assistant district attorney. In turn, it was widely expected throughout the office that supervising deputy district attorney Richard Young, now overseeing the Fontana prosecutor’s division, would be tapped to succeed Roth. Young in recent years has been entrusted with several top-tier and high profile prosecutorial assignments, including murder and manslaughter cases, the review of officer involved shootings and delicate matters such as those involving trafficking in child pornography and accusations that a teacher had employed sexual battery perpetrated by some of his students against other students as a classroom disciplinary tool. Moreover, Young had cultivated what appeared to be a strong professional relationship with Ramos by supporting him politically in years past and endorsing other politicians with whom Ramos was aligned.
On July 18, however, Young had the rug yanked out from under him when Ramos, in an interoffice memo to all district attorney’s staff, announced that Ashley was being promoted to the position of chief deputy district attorney, effective September 6.
“Mary will be replacing Gary Roth as the chief deputy district attorney in the desert division,” the memo states. “Please join me in welcoming Mary Ashley as our new chief deputy district attorney.”
Members of the district attorney’s office drew an immediate connection between Ashley’s promotion and her relationship with Ramos, which was exposed earlier this year, members of the department say, when Ashley sent a cellular phone text message to another member of the office, deputy district attorney Suzanne Patton, telling her that Ramos was at her residence. Word of Ramos’s liaison with Ashley leaked out from there, spreading to numerous other members of the district attorney’s office, as well as at least two county judges.
Efforts to reach Ramos and Ashley for confirmation of the reports were channeled to district attorney’s spokesman Christopher Lee, who told the Sentinel, “This is one of those things where you are crossing the line. I am not going to comment on the personal life of the district attorney. I am not naïve. I know what is going on. I am not going to trash the district attorney, who I have the utmost respect for.”
To the question about whether the perception of Ramos’s favoritism toward Ashley was damaging office morale, Lee said, “I am insulted by this inquiry. To be honest with you, it is nonsense.”
Members of the prosecutor’s office said Ashley was a qualified and competent attorney who has done admirable work in prosecuting sexual crimes against children as well as crimes involving violence against women and children, and that she had more recently taken on evaluations of officer involved shootings. Nevertheless, most opined that she lacked the depth and breadth of office experience that Young and some of their other colleagues, deputy district attorney Denise Trager Dvorak among them,  possessed. Some suggested Ramos’s choice of Ashley to succeed Roth undercut  the esprit de corps and ethos of merit that the district attorney’s office should maintain.
Two even suggested that Ramos may have put the county, himself and the office at risk by his promotion of Ashley. One referenced a lawsuit, Edna Miller et al v. Department of Corrections, which resulted in a precedent setting ruling by the California Supreme Court relating to favoritism to a governmental employee based on a relationship with her boss.
In Miller v. Department of Corrections, two former employees of the Valley State Prison for Women, Edna Miller and Frances Mackey, claimed that the warden of the prison at which they were employed accorded unwarranted favorable treatment to numerous female employees with whom the warden was having sexual affairs and that such conduct constituted sexual harassment in violation of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.  The California Supreme Court ruled that employees passed over as Miller and Mackey were had grounds to sue the state and the Department of Corrections for both income lost and punitive damages.

(August 10)  On August 6, former Upland mayor John Pomierski was handed a two-year prison sentence by the federal judge, Virginia Phillips, before whom Pomierski on April 26 had entered a guilty plea on a bribery charge.
Pomierski, who had been Upland mayor since 2000, began shaking down local business owners and operators and others with projects pending at City Hall and before the Upland City Council as early as 2004. Utilizing a business he owned, JP Construction, as well as the construction business owned by one of his associates, John Hennes, Pomierski worked with two others, Jason Crebs and Antony  Sanchez, in perpetrating extortion and pay-off schemes. Those shakedowns targeted applicants for business, operating or construction permits in Upland who would be approached and informed that by securing the consulting services of Hennes, Crebs or Sanchez, approval of those applications could be guaranteed. Hennes was Pomierski’s appointee to the Upland Housing Appeals Board.
Upland City Hall along with the homes of Pomierski and Hennes and the Rancho Cucamonga office of Sanchez’s business were the sites of a raid by search warrant-bearing FBI and IRS agents in June 2010. In January 2011, Crebs and Sanchez were indicted by a federal grand jury for their involvement in a bribery scheme. Within a month, both had entered into plea agreements with the federal government. The last week of February 2011 Pomierski resigned as Upland mayor. On March 2, 2011, Pomierski and Hennes were indicted by a federal grand jury on 11 separate counts including bribery, extortion and conspiracy.
The overt acts described in that indictment included extortion and bribery efforts relating to two businesses in Upland, the Chronic Cantina and H3 Holistic.
Later in March 2011, Crebs withdrew his guilty plea and Sanchez, who had fled to Costa Rica, failed to appear at his arraignment. On March 25 an arrest warrant was issued for Sanchez. On April 18, 2011, Crebs entered a guilty plea to a single count of furthering a bribery conspiracy related to the Chronic Cantina as part of a revamped plea agreement by which he agreed to testify against Pomierski. Sanchez, who was still a fugitive from justice, was named as defendant in a superseding indictment. In December 2011, a plea agreement in which Hennes pleaded guilty to two of the four counts against him was unsealed. On January 15, 2012, Sanchez was taken into custody by FBI agents at Los Angeles International Airport upon his agreed-upon return to the United States. On January 17, 2012, Sanchez pleaded not guilty to extortion and bribery in federal court. He subsequently entered a guilty plea.
Pomierski’s guilty plea on April 26 pertained to his interaction with the owners of the Chronic Cantina between August 2009 and October 2009 carried out by Sanchez and Crebs, who acted as intermediaries. Representations made to the Chronic Cantina’s owners were that Pomierski would use his position with the city to obtain a new permit in exchange for money. Crebs and Sanchez were paid $10,000 and Pomierski was paid with a $5,000 check to JP Construction.
Phillips sentenced Pomierski to two years in federal prison, including six to eight months of alcohol dependency rehabilitation, as was arranged by Pomierski’s criminal lawyer, H. Dean Steward. Phillips also imposed a year of parole supervision after his release. The remaining counts against him were dismissed.
In a statement to the court, Pomierski said that by his actions he had “lost my wife, lost my friends, lost work and the job I loved the most, being mayor of Upland.”  Pomierski said the ordeal was a “difficult” one and that  “I was dead wrong. I know I will pay for it. I already have paid for it in the last two years.”
Sanchez is scheduled to be sentenced on August 13. Crebs is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

(August 10)  Jim Cox, who served two stints as Victorville city manager lasting 32 years over a 42-year period, is now seeking election to the city council.
This is Cox’s second effort at elected office, having previously vied, unsuccessfully, for the state assembly.
Cox is largely credited with having guided Victorville during its expansion from a modest desert city that was highly dependent upon the financial sustenance of the former George Air Force Base into a city that was itself the economic engine of the Victor Valley, with the lion’s share of  commercial development among the municipalities of Hesperia, Apple Valley, Adelanto and Victorville. With sales tax from that commercial development flowing into Victorville’s coffers, the city Cox headed was better situated than its neighbors to provide infrastructure and services. Cox, held an associate’s degree in accounting and a bachelor’s degree in political science from San Diego State when he was hired as administrative assistant in Victorville in 1967. Two years later he became city manager. He remained city manager for thirty years, retiring in 1999. Over those thirty years he had escorted the city to the doorstep of the 21st Century, facing down challenges such as the closure of George Air Force Base, and leading the city in its transformation into what is today the county’s fifth largest city, with a population of 115,903.
Cox had successfully pushed through Victorville’s de facto acquisition of the Air Force base property, now known as Southern California Logistics Airport. It was in the final days of his watch as city manager that the application process for what was then called the High Desert Power Project, a 830-megawatt electrical generating facility now referred to as Victorville 1, was begun. After Victorville 1 came on line, it became the single largest producer of tax revenue for the city, bringing in something close to $5 million per year.
After Cox left Victorville, the city embarked on a series of what are now considered to be missteps, including the creation of a city electrical utility division intended to recreate the success of Victorville 1 and build large and small power plants. Those efforts foundered, however, and approaching $200 million of taxpayer money controlled by the city was invested in power generating facility projects that have yet to come to fruition. In one case, the city entered into a $180 million contract with General Electric for the provision of generating equipment that was never delivered when the city failed to find a purchaser for the electricity it wanted to generate. The city then had to relinquish $50 million to General Electric as a penalty. The city issued close to $80 million in bonds to pay for these electricity-producing projects. Both the county grand jury and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations into Victorville over these debacles, all of which were occurring while Cox was in retirement.
In December 2007, Cox was sought out by the town of Apple Valley to serve as town manager there. He stayed in that role for ten months, before retiring for the second time as a municipal manager. And then, the following year, Victorville, staggering under the weight of the mismanagement of its electrical utility division as well as the downturn in the national and state economy, asked him to again come out of retirement and oversee city staff once more. Cox did so, staying in that assignment for two years.
The political climate in Victorville has deteriorated considerably. Terry Caldwell, who was appointed to the Victorville City Council in 1972 and then was elected in his own right in 1974 and reelected to another eight four-year terms to become what was then the longest serving elected official in the state, decided against running for reelection in 2010. Previously, two other long serving members of the city council, Bob Hunter and Joanne Almond, had been defeated in their reelection attempts. Rudy Cabriales, another long term councilman who was formerly Victorville fire chief, has decided against running for reelection this year. Cox joins a field of eighteen who have pulled candidacy papers, including another long time incumbent, Mike Rothschild, in this year’s race.
He acknowledges the previous council made mistakes, but he insists that those were honest mistakes and not ones fueled by personal interest, greed or corruption.
“When I served as city manager, we always had balanced budgets and reserves and I believed the city councils worked for the betterment of the city and considered what was best for the city,” Cox said. “I was gone from 1999 to 2009 and when I came back I learned  what had happened. There had been a huge debt accumulated, there had been huge bond sales and the city was now in tremendous financial difficulty. When I came back I tried to get the city back on its feet. I cut labor costs and slashed the budget. I cooperated with the grand jury and the SEC, who were looking into what had happened between 2002 and 2007. After two years I felt I had done everything I could do and I retired. I had been working six days a week the first year-and-a-half and seven days a week the last six months. I felt I needed to retire. Shortly after that, I encountered a large number of people who wanted me to run. I rejected that, but I kept reading about the infighting in the city. A lot of that has to do with the accusations that were made to the grand jury. When I was with the city the last time, I worked with the grand jury. I felt there were no criminal charges that will come from that. The SEC investigation is still ongoing and I can’t talk about that. The city is getting negative comments coming its way all the time and adverse publicity.
“I think the council made some very bad decisions,” Cox continued. “I don’t think the council believed they were bad decisions at the time. This was just like homeowners who lost homes during the economic downturn because just before that they moved up and bought a nicer home and did not expect to lose their jobs. They would now admit they should have been more conservative.   Rudy Cabriales has publicly apologized and said they were bad decisions and that they should not have done that. I came in as city manager the second time after those decisions were made. I tried to be a professional and do my job and not get involved in politics. Joanne Almond was defeated.  Bob Hnter was defeated. The city manager had left for Colorado. Only two members are left on the council  – Mike Rothschild and Rudy Cabriales. I am mystified by peoples’ comments that the people in City Hall should be in jail. I say ‘What people?”  If you want to be objective about it, there are now two people who were involved in the decision to build those power plants. One, Mike Rothschild, is running. The other is not running. There is a fair possibility there will not be a single person left at City Hall [i.e., on the city council] involved in those decisions after the November election. The amount of money lost and squandered is not as huge as the naysayers want to make it out to be.”
Cox said, “Controversy is building over the power plants and expenditures at the base. These things are very expensive and have generated huge debt. Now that the state is taking over the redevelopment agency, is what remains a state debt and no longer a local debt? Nobody knows. The city pursued ideas they thought would make a lot of money. The city approved the first power plant, known as Victorville 1 back in 1998 and it produced a lot of revenue. They believed that building the second power plant would do the same.
“In regard to the $50 million that went to GE, clearly that was not thought out,” Cox continued. “On paper we are showing a loss of $132 million [for the Victorville 2 power plant]. The one certain loss at this point is the $50 million to GE, although there is a ten million dollar credit, but I doubt the city will ever use that. No elected city officials should ever lose $50 million. My own belief is that if a private corporation wants to build it [a power plant], then they should do so but we should not invest public money if there is a possibility it will be lost.”
Cox said that he is not interested in apportioning blame at this point, since that will not, he said, have any beneficial effect.
“There is a lot of negative publicity and statements made to the press hurting the city, hurting businesses, hurting investors. The more I look into it the more I felt I understood why investors or people wanting to start a business would be hesitant to come in here. I believe Victorville is a great city. I believe in accountability and transparency. I want to help run things and get this city back on track so its citizens are proud of the city rather than embarrassed. I want to quiet the naysayers and get this resolved and move on. The only reason the city exists is to serve the public. The turmoil on the city council needs to end. I have already given thirty-five and a-half years to the city. I am willing to give more, if that is what it takes.”
Cox said his qualifications to serve on the city council are well recognized.
“I understand the finances of the city inside and out,” he said. “I believe that because I understand local government that is why Apple Valley asked me to assist them. I also believe that because of my knowledge and experience the [Victorville] council asked me back because they know my background experience and reputation. I will not compromise my principles. I have long been recognized as a professional with conservative values who treats taxpayer money like it is my own. I believe the voters want someone who understands the city, who has a long history of public government experience who is committed to accountability and open government. I don’t believe they want someone whose goal is to put people in jail and shut everything down and stop progress. I have no friends and do no favors and expect to receive no favors between 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. I gave the city councils I worked for objective evaluations and I will do the same for my constituents as a city council member.”

Scott Slater, general counsel and president of Cadiz Inc., this week reprised his presentation of the Cadiz water project to the Municipal Water District of Orange County, one week after the Santa Margarita Water District certified the environmental impact report for that plan.  The Cadiz water project will extract up to 150,000 acre-feet of water per year and send it via a pipeline to Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties. While five southern California water agencies have already signed on as eventual recipients of the water, the Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC) currently is not one of those. At MWDOC’s request, Slater’s made a presentation to update the board.  While no action was scheduled to be taken on the informational item, Slater’s “buy now” pitch came when he advised “within six months we expect to be 100 percent subscribed”   and that “18 months from now we’ll be in construction.”
The Municipal Water District of Orange County board members, some of who also serve as directors of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District, evinced considerably less enthusiasm for the project than had the Santa Margarita Water District board members last week.   That lack of enthusiasm may prove crucial down the road since Cadiz Inc. will need the cooperation of the Metropolitan Water District with regard to the use of its aqueducts and other water conveyance facilities to deliver the desert water to the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.
The added cost of treating the Cadiz aquifer water, reportedly laced with 14 to 16 parts per billion of hexavalent chromium, has previously been cited as one of the Metropolitan Water District’s concerns.  Diluting the chromium by blending it with Colorado River water to reach the public health goal standard of  .02 parts per billion is a challenging option since the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) is already blending to bring “chrome 6” levels down.  In 2002, acting as lead agency under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the MWD ultimately rejected an earlier version of the Cadiz Water Plan which was then called the “Cadiz Groundwater Storage and Dry-Year Supply Program.”  Subsequently, Cadiz filed a lawsuit against the MWD, and though they dropped it shortly before trial, the preparation was costly for the water agency.   It is not likely the board members in attendance had forgotten that Cadiz, Inc. had filed that lawsuit.
After a 20 minute presentation, board members asked hard questions, demonstrating their reluctance to embrace the current Cadiz Water Project, in some part based upon their experience with the previously proposed project. Board member Brett Barbre observed that the district being asked to participate in the Cadiz project was essentially a suggestion that  MWDOC was not presently supplying its customers with an adequate water supply and wondered if Cadiz thought this was  justification for accepting  Cadiz’s toxic water into the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Slater threw two carrots to the Municipal Water District of Orange County. Board member Larry Dick was interested in intentionally created surplus water credits the district would get for lessening its use of Colorado River Water and whether Slater was willing to pay anything  relative to the MWDOC wheeling rate.  Slater said the credits could be obtained and that the   Municipal Water District of Orange County could up its wheeling rates to whatever level it wished.
Slater said the water to be drawn from the Cadiz Valley was not tributary to the Colorado River, an assertion that has previously been disputed by opponents of the project.
Slater reassured the board that there should be no concern over the failure of springs, since his company’s hydrologic studies show that the springs are not connected to the aquifer, and are instead fed by runoff. He essentially asserted that the springs are not artesian or forced from water pressure coming from above.
Slater cited a “quartet of criticisms” surrounding the previous version of the plan.  He said  “It became obvious to me that we were never going to make progress unless we understood issues” and identified as the four concerns the project scale, the failure of springs in the upper water shed, the potential for subsidence and dust.  The high chromium 6 level was not included within the quartet of concerns, though the board had an abiding interest in that question.
Craig Innis, a Santa Margarita Water District ratepayer who is currently considering running for a position on the district board, pointed out that Slater’s Powerpoint presentation did not include a slide of how the  chromium 6 levels at Cadiz are twice as high as the content at PG&E’s Hinkley  plant where Erin Brockovich made famous the illnesses and death caused by the contamination.  Innis then quoted Metropolitan Water general manager Ron Gastelum, who in 2000 said, “If it’s going to cost as much as Ft. Knox, we’ll look for another project.” Innis cited the possibility that the Hinkley plume migration will require additional monitoring if water is being downdrafted in the lower basins, including Cadiz 100 miles south. Innis was particularly concerned that the $425,000 in the escrow account would not cover the Santa Margarita Water District’s out-of-pocket expenses, Cadiz was almost insolvent and their loans were coming due in June of 2013 and that the  law firm representing Cadiz, Brownstein Hyatt Faber & Schreck, did not have enough money to lobby the millions of water ratepayers who’ would protest the chromium 6 in their water.  He observed that the Metropolitan Water District will not look at the chromium 6 issue until next summer  and before that could bow to public pressure over the chromium 6 issue and not accept the water.  If the Colorado River Aqueduct cannot be used, the failed project could cause the  corporation to fold and leave ratepayers holding the tab, he suggested, and he said that no matter how much money is in the escrow account, the court will put a hold on it.
He cited numerous large homeowner associations in the Rancho Santa Margarita  area with thousands of residents who are against the Cadiz Project and said “we want to be paying for water, not litigation.”
Several project opponents attending the meeting challenged the substance of Slater’s presentation.  David Lamfrom of the National Parks Conservation Association rejected Slater’s argument that the springs are not hydraulically connected and would not be impacted, offering to make available to the board the independent tests and analysis data compiled by the National Parks Conservation Association countering the findings  of the Cadiz project environmental impact report, which the association considers to be grossly flawed.
Despite the pronounced opposition to the project at public meetings, Slater referenced in his statements to the MWDOC board overwhelming support from the citizens of San Bernardino County.  Ruth Musser-Lopez, a resident and former city council member from Needles, commented that no public hearings or information meetings had been held in Needles or anywhere else east of Kelbaker Road in the district where the Cadiz water project would be located.  She said that the San Bernardino County residents most impacted by the project were excluded from the process and that the Needles mayor and city council were on record as being unanimously opposed to the current project.
Musser-Lopez also took exception to Slater’s powerpoint imagery and speech characterizing the east Mojave as aving snowcapped mountain and ice packs, saying that this was a gross misrepresentation and that snowfall in the desert was a rare thing.  A former Bureau of Land Management archaeologist working in the east Mojave for eight years, Lopez said that she had worked extensively with desert scientists and that the current environmental impact report  seemed more like spin than science to her.  She described her own evidence that the watershed in Fenner and Lanfair Valley also migrated easterly, surfacing in various places including Paiute Creek and Klinefelter Spring before it reached the Colorado River.  She asked the board why they would want to risk an interception of the water at the Fenner Gap, water that they would need to pay for, when they are already getting the water that naturally migrates easterly, provides water for wildlife where it surfaces, and gets cleaned in the sandy alluvium along the way before it reaches the river.
In response, Slater rejected the notion that water was migrating any direction except through the Cadiz Valley.
Not discussed during the meeting was an accounting of the loss of 30,000 acre feet per year of subsurface groundwater, not exposed to evaporation – the difference between the watershed recharge factored in the environmental impact report at 32,000 acre feet per year and the 2,000 acre-feet per year said to flow through the Fenner gap to the Cadiz Valley.
Debbie Cook, former Huntington Beach Mayor, objected to the lack of transparency during the process of approving the project.