(August 10)  It now appears that Ray Musser will face three challengers in this year’s mayoral race in Upland.
His challengers include two of his current council colleagues, Gino Filippi and Debbie Stone. Also in the contest is Hal Tanner, a former prison warden who in recent years has been critical of the Upland City Council with regard to adherence to open meeting and disclosure regulations.
Musser was first elected to the city council in 1998. For years he was the sole political opposition on the council to former mayor John Pomierski, who was indicted by a federal grand jury last year and pleaded guilty to bribery early this year. Musser unsuccessfully opposed Pomierski for reelection in 2004 and 2008, but was selected by his council colleagues to succeed Pomierski following his resignation just before his indictment last year.
Filippi, the first of Musser’s opponents to declare his mayor candidacy earlier this year, was first elected to the council in 2010. Stone was elected to complete Musser’s term as councilman in a special election last year after Musser vacated his council position to become mayor.
As of press time Thursday, only Musser had returned his filing papers to qualify his candidacy. The other three had pulled nomination papers, but had not yet returned them. The deadline for doing so is noon today, Friday, August 10.

(August 3)  In an event of historical significance, the Orange County-based Santa Margarita Water District on July 31 certified the environmental impact report for the Cadiz Water project, clearing the way for Los Angeles-based Cadiz, Inc. to extract an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year for the next century from the eastern Mojave Desert and send it via pipeline westward to Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.
The controversial plan was given go-ahead over the strident objections of desert residents and landowners, who said they viewed the project as an unprincipled theft of the desert’s water resource by Cadiz, Inc. and the water district, the second largest water district in Orange County serving the affluent communities of Rancho Santa Margarita, Mission Viejo, Coto de Caza, Las Flores, Ladera Ranch and Talega.
There was particular objection to the Santa Margarita Water District’s assumption of lead agency status on the project, officially known as the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation and Recovery Project, despite the considerations that the district lies 217 miles from the Cadiz Valley across the county line from San Bernardino County and the district has an interest in the project in that some 20 percent of the water to be mined by Cadiz, Inc. will be sold to Santa Margarita. A secondary action taken by the water district Tuesday night was to approve a purchase agreement that outlines the financial terms between the district and Cadiz, Inc.
San Bernardino County officials, who belatedly learned that the Orange County-based water district had taken on the role as the lead agency overseeing the project, contemplated but ultimately rejected contesting the water district’s assumption of that authority, instead entering into a memorandum of understanding with Cadiz, Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District with regard to the undertaking, requiring a ground water mitigation and monitoring program to govern the extraction of the water.
The environmental impact report for the project was performed by the Los Angeles-based firm of ESA.  That environmental review, which describes in some detail the physical aspects of pumping more than 16 billion gallons of groundwater per year from the desert aquifer, essentially said the project would not create havoc on the environment. The environmental impact report (EIR) was paid for by the Santa Margarita Water District, which is now eligible based upon the terms of a prior agreement with Cadiz, Inc., to be reimbursed by Cadiz, Inc. for the environmental impact report expense by having accepted the report as valid. The environmental impact report supported Cadiz, Inc.’s contention that the project would capture water that would be lost to evaporation and that mitigation of any untoward impacts of the project would meet the standards required for such projects under the California Environmental Quality Act.
A number of desert residents and environmentalists questioned that contention, however, taking issue with several particulars in the environmental impact report and project proposal. One area of contention was the assertion that the Cadiz Valley experienced 32,000 acre-feet of water recharge per year. Project opponents cited surveys previously conducted to show that recharge of 5,000 to 12,000 acre feet per year was more accurate. Also contested was Cadiz’s assertion that the project will rely on diverting water that would be lost to evaporation, with opponents questioning how wells sunk several hundred feet below the ground could stem surface evaporation.
On May 25, a salt mining company in the Cadiz Valley, Tetra Technologies, lodged a lawsuit against the county of San Bernardino over the proposed Cadiz Water Project, maintaining the memorandum of understanding the county entered into with the project’s proponents bypasses crucial components of the environmental certification process. That suit, consisting of a petition for a writ of mandate and a complaint for injunctive relief against the county of San Bernardino and its board of supervisors, was filed on behalf of Tetra Technologies by the law firm of Rutan & Tucker. The lawsuit names Cadiz, Inc., the Santa Margarita Water District and the Fenner Valley Mutual Water Company, an entity created and wholly owned by Cadiz, Inc., as real parties in interest.
The Santa Margarita Water District board held a previous public hearing on the sufficiency of the environmental impact report and the water purchase on the evening of July 25. That meeting, which extended into the early morning hours of July 26, took place in the largest meeting room within the Norman P. Murray Community Center in Rancho Santa Margarita, which was filled beyond capacity requiring some in attendance to view the proceedings from an adjacent hallway,   A two-way video and audio hook-up to the Bell Center Community Room at Copper Mountain College, where several dozen desert residents had gathered, was incorporated into the meeting. At the July 25/26  hearing more than 90 individuals put their views on the record and provided the board with voluminous written materials to consider. The board deferred until July 31 making its decision, again conducting hearings that included the video feed to and from Copper Mountain College in Yucca Valley.
At the July 31 hearing, a memorandum from Santa Margarita Water District general manager Dan Ferons was referenced which said that the input received at the July 26 hearing had been reviewed by ESA to determine relevancy to the environmental impact review process and that “none of the comments reviewed by ESA… identify new or more significant impacts, substantially different mitigation measures, or substantially different feasible alternatives and as such, the final environmental impact report does not require recirculation.” The board then heard comments from a number of individuals in attendance at both the Santa Margarita and Yucca Valley location.
Those speaking in opposition to the project referenced ecological damage they believed the project would perpetuate, that the removing of water from the desert to quench the thirst of a community near the coast was not justifiable, that the project should also be subjected to the federal environmental certification process since part of the project would be situated on federal land, that it was unsuitable for the Santa Margarita Water District to be serving as an agency overseeing a project outside its jurisdiction and that the district’s acceptance of the environmental impact report and passage of a contract to purchase water from the project would result in litigation. There was also some comment with regard to the presence of contaminants, notably chromium and arsenic, in the water.
Ruth Musser-Lopez, one of the leaders of a loosely-knit coalition against the Cadiz project, said that the arrangement to have Cadiz, Inc. pay for the district’s cost of having the environmental impact report prepared conditional upon the acceptance of the environmental impact report as adequate was an impropriety bordering on bribery that would be grounds to overturn the acceptance of the EIR. She said the project should have been subjected to the federal National Environment Protection Act approval process.
Rob Bower, an attorney for Rutan and Tucker, said the environmental impact report did not include a reasonable range of alternatives.
Marjorie Mikels, an attorney from Upland, said the project was an illegitimate attempt to change state water law.
Seth Shteir of the National Parks Conservation Association, said the environmental impact report was an inadequate and fundamentally flawed document that that will not ensure the protection of the Mojave National Preserve’s  springs, groundwater resources and air quality.
Jerie Miller, president of the board of directors of Casa Del Sol, asked, “If this is  such a splendid project, why hasn’t the Metropolitan Water District locked this up? How does evaporation impact water that is several hundred feet under the ground?”
Dr. Karen Tracy said, “Do not certify this EIR. This document is composed of fabricated science by people who were paid to dream it up. There is so much circular logic and self-fulfilling nonsense in this document.” She said the project needed to be subjected to the federal environmental process.
Tom O’Key charged that the project was designed simply to fulfill the imperative of “Orange County prosperity and growth.”
LynAnne Felts said acceptance of the environmental impact report “will open all of our desert aquifers for others to use that water hundreds of miles away.”
John Hildner criticized the members of the board for not spending “much time…at the project site.”
Sequoia Smith said Cadiz’s motivation “amounts to filthy lucre. What is the legacy you wish to leave to these children who are becoming savvy to global and ecological issues?”
David Fick said documentation filed in conjunction with the project application indicated Cadiz had intentions of pumping as much as 150,000 acre-feet per year. “Your project is trying to go under the five percent of the water the desert uses to get to 95 percent of the water,” Fick said. “It is against the laws of science. It is against the law of gravity. It is against the laws of California.”
Douglas Buckley said the district should encourage conservation in its jurisdiction and resort to “charging four times as much” for the water it delivers to teach its customers to “conserve like people in the desert do.”
Debbie Cook, a former Huntington Beach mayor, warned the board that a lawsuit against it by the Center for Biological Diversity was forthcoming.
Kevin Hanaway said he believed there was “contamination in this water.”
Robert Siebert called it a “troublesome project” that was going to be very expensive because of the need for electricity to transport the water a great distance. “You have no idea what the cost of electricity is going to be in the future,” he said.
David Renuart said he had concerns about the presence of contaminants in the water and the possibility this would elevate the incidence of childhood cancer among those who consume it.
F.K. “Joe” Holtzman of the Mission Viejo Homeowners Association said “I applaud you for trying to get water. I do not applaud you for where you are getting it from.” He warned that Orange County was essentially declaring war with San Bernardino County by taking its water. “Some of the greatest battles in the West were over water,” he said, reminding the board that to protect their water, the desert’s residents had four remedies, in his words, “The ballot box, the soap box, the jury box” and when those failed, “the cartridge box.” He said the district should seek to utilize “water wise schedules and conservation” instead of resorting to stealing water from the desert.
Those supporting the project cited south Orange County’s current and future growing need for water, and they hailed the environmental impact report as thorough and adequate, the project as an innovative method of fulfilling the district’s charter to ensure water availability in South Orange County and they commended the board for its collective vision and courage in pursuing the project.
Ramon Mendoza  said the Cadiz project provided “a model that is needed for the entire state of California. This project has taken into consideration desaturization. Desaturization increases the range of water that can be taken  by 69 to 90 percent. This is a good project. I have no idea why the people of Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree have any concerns about that project.”
James Thor, a former councilman and mayor of Rancho Santa Margarita, told the board, “South Orange County fully supports this. Certify the EIR tonight.”
Marvin Floyd  said the board should ignore the threats being made to it by opponents of the project. “The job you people are doing is admirable. We support the project and we support the EIR.”
Laer Pearce told the board, “Thank you for your vision. I understand water very well. Reliability is not a given. It takes a lot of hard work.” He said he had the signatures of 220 people who supported the project.
Michelle Ouelette, a contract attorney for the district, said the project was not located on  federal land and therefore did not trigger a requirement that National Environmental Protection Act standards be brought to bear in considering the project.
Board member Betty Olson said she had reviewed the EIR thoroughly and that data collected by EIS this time around which favored the project moving ahead was more reliable than data collected ten years ago that held water extraction from the Cadiz Valley would be harmful to the environment. She said the district had the legal right to sign off on Cadiz, Inc. exporting the water out of the desert region.
“That is an unadjudicated basin and the land owners can move the water,” Olson said. “This EIR is adequate to go forward. If you do not believe this project should go forward than you have the courts and the ballot box.”
Board member Roger Faubel said, “It is a moderate, thoughtful plan.”
Board member Saundra Jacobs, like Olson, said she had thoroughly read the environmental impact report and was convinced  that “in the desert things are in place to protect the environment and habitat and test. California has  a long history of moving water. We now have CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) to safeguard the water.” She said the project would  “not be at the detriment of the environment. I know in my heart we will be a good steward of the water. This public private partnership is a unique opportunity. If we do not move ahead with this project, someone else will. We will drink this water.”
Board chairman Bill Lawson, who by profession is a traffic engineer experienced with environmental impact reports, said, “This is one of the most complex and comprehensive EIRs I have ever had to suffer through. I heard the term bad science used. This is not an exact science. It is the best science we have. Where we don’t know what the science is, there is a program to catch those errors.”
Lawson said he had originally questioned “Why is the Santa Margarita Water District the lead agency for a project that is not in this district?”
Nevertheless, at this point, Lawson said, “I am very comfortable with the Santa Margarita Water District being the lead agency as we are continuing to explore alternative sources of water for our district.”
Both the environmental impact report certification and the water purchase agreement passed by unanimous votes.
Scott Slater, the president of Cadiz, Inc., after the vote told the Sentinel, “We continue to be pleased with the leadership and stewardship of the Santa Margarita Water District and are pleased by the outpouring of support for our project. We pledge to work with San Bernardino County to implement this project we can all be proud of.  We will continue to work with the district and I do not expect any interference as we continue to gather baseline data. I am looking forward to engaging the local community in a legacy discussion for the protection of the desert tortoise, the development of a cultural center and the operation of a tourist steam engine on our property to Rice, Arizona.”

(August 3)  RANCHO CUCAMONGA–More than a year after the state legislature moved to shutter redevelopment agencies up and down the state, there is a wide variance  in the response by cities to that takeaway and the effectiveness of those differing strategies. San Bernardino County, with its 24 incorporated municipalities, is a microcosm of California with regard to the adjustments being made to the loss of redevelopment authority. While some of the county’s cities are rolling with the state’s punches and on occasion scoring points with counterblows to Sacramento, others are taking it on the jaw and one has gone  down for the count.
Redevelopment agencies were adjuncts to municipal government intended to transform troubled neighborhoods or districts while rejuvenating the local economy. Redevelopment agencies used a variety of funding mechanisms, including the issuance and sale of municipal bonds, to create infrastructure, promote economic development and eradicate blight. Theoretically, redevelopment bonds would pay for infrastructure improvements that would result in an increase in property values, in turn generating increased property tax. That property tax revenue increase, referred to as increment, would be utilized to pay the bondholders on a yearly basis.
Last year the state legislature, at Governor Jerry Brown’s behest, passed Assembly Bills XI 26 and XI 27, which set an abrupt timetable for the closing out of municipal redevelopment agencies by October 1, 2011. A legal challenge by a coalition of cities delayed the implementation of that close-out until this year. When the law passed, there were thousands of redevelopment agency projects that various cities had begun but had not finished, with millions of dollars left to fund the projects’ completion when the state foreclosed on the money.
The legislation shuttering the redevelopment agencies called for the creation of successors to the cities’ and counties’ redevelopment agencies to oversee the extinguishment of their authority and the discharging of their enforceable  financial obligations.
Provisions of AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 allowed successor agencies to utilize tax proceeds and bond money to complete ongoing projects pursuant to strict regulations and requirements, including having service or construction contracts in place before the laws went into effect. Another provision of the laws was that any lawsuits brought against the state over the agency dissolution or the availability of funding had to be litigated in Sacramento Superior Court.
Some San Bernardino County cities were pro-active in the face of the state’s threat to yank redevelopment authority from them, while others docilely accepted the state’s action and its outcome as inevitable.
Remarkably, one of the county’s smaller and most remote cities, Twentynine Palms, has proved to be the feistiest of the county’s municipal entities in resisting the state.
Even before AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 were passed in 2011, the 25,048-population city hatched a plan to protect its redevelopment funding. As the redevelopment agency-dissolution legislation was being considered in Sacramento, the Twentynine Palms City Council, which doubled as the city’s redevelopment agency board, issued two tax allocation bonds for a downtown revitalization undertaking known as Project Phoenix, which is to include a community center, a 250-seat theater, classrooms, a civic plaza, a park, a paseo, residential units, a wastewater treatment plant, and improvements to the downtown fire station. That bond money was made available before the law went into effect but was never expended.
Having made that precautionary move, the city of Twentynine Palms this year has proceeded with an extremely  aggressive challenge of the state Department of Finance in its effort to wrest  back $31 million in bond proceeds.
Twentynine Palms officials maintain that AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 are trumped by federal securities regulations, meaning the money the Twentynine Palms Redevelopment Agency bonded for last year must be utilized only for the purpose that bondholders were told the money would be applied toward.
Twentynine Palms City Attorney A. Patrick Munoz, of the law firm Rutan & Tucker, believes he can convince a judge the non-taxable bonds issued last year created specific obligations between the city, the issuer, the bond underwriter and the bond purchasers, and as such are enforceable obligations. If the city were to hand off the bond proceeds to the state and the state were to use the money for a purpose other than what the city had specified in marketing the bonds to the bond buyers, that would constitute fraud, according to Munoz.
Munoz’s strategy calls for having the successor agency lay claim to the redevelopment money and proceeding with the previously ratified redevelopment programs, including Project Phoenix. The state will have to go along with the city’s discharge plan because the bonds are enforceable obligations and the proceeds are secure, Munoz has theorized. Munoz suggested the city will have to be very precise about how the money earmarked for Project Phoenix is expended.
Munoz drafted a contract between the successor agency and the city by which the  successor agency is to  turn over the bond spending authority to the city with a directive that it go toward Project Phoenix. After the contract was presented to the council on May 22 and approved with the 4-1 vote, the oversight board took up the issue and its seven members voted unanimously to endorse a resolution to transfer their duties and obligations to administer the bond proceeds to “the city in its capacity as a municipal corporation. If the proceeds were turned over to the state to be re-allocated for operational purposes, these proceeds would no longer be tax-exempt if they were not used for public works projects,” Munoz maintained. “That creates concerns as to whether we violated federal tax laws and federal securities laws due to promises we made to the public when we sold the bonds versus the way we’re using the bonds.”
Acknowledging the strategy could entail a protracted “legal fight with the Department of Finance,” Munoz has recommended that if the state of California does not accept the contract for the Project Phoenix expenditures as legitimate, the city and its successor redevelopment agency should proceed with litigation against the state.
Another San Bernardino County city that has not taken the state’s action lying down is Rancho Cucamonga.
Before AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 went into effect, Rancho Cucamonga was in the process of using its redevelopment authority and bonding capability to widen a portion of Foothill Boulevard on the west side of town, to undertake an I-15 interchange improvement project at Base Line Road on which the city has already spent $11 million and to make improvements to the public works yard on the southwest corner of Ninth Street and Hellman Avenue.
Because elements of those projects were not bid out at the time the redevelopment agency was closed down, the state maintained that money previously earmarked for those redevelopment efforts cannot be used to see those projects to completion. The California Department of Finance holds that bond proceeds for contracts made after AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 passed and were signed into law on June 28, 2011  are not “enforceable financial obligations.”
The city of Rancho Cucamonga  appealed the state Department of Finance’s decisions in that regard and began exhausting all other administrative remedies in seeing that the money would be freed up. At the same time, the city solicited bids for the uncompleted work. City emissaries have been dispatched to Sacramento to see if the Department of Finance will entertain the validity of the city’s claims.
City attorney Jim Markman vowed that if the state continued to deny the city access to the money, he would file suit against the state in Sacramento Superior Court to test his interpretation of the law that bond proceeds can be utilized for “ongoing feasible projects.”
That threat of legal action, simultaneous with the passage of new legislation, Assembly Bill 1484, has strengthened Rancho Cucamonga’s position. AB 1484 became law June 27, one day short of a year after AB XI 26 and AB XI 27 were passed,  and allows newly created “development agencies” to seek the return of bond proceeds that were taken away by AB XI 26’s and AB XI 27’s dissolution of  redevelopment agencies. AB 1484 allows remnants of previously available redevelopment money to be allocated to the successor development agencies, pursuant to a strict accounting and auditing regime.
Consequently, the necessity of Rancho Cucamonga’s threatened legal action has passed, at least temporarily. Rather than detailing Markman to Sacramento to file that litigation, the city council this week voted to utilize available money in the city’s capital-improvement fund for the completion of unfinished redevelopment projects with the intention of the city seeking reimbursement from the proceeds of its already issued bonds as soon as they become available.
If the state again seeks to hold up the funding, Markman will switch back into a litigative mode. Meanwhile the city wants to move forward with the projects, most particularly the Baseline/I-15 widening project, by the end of the year because by doing so it will qualify for $8 million in federal funding.
The city of Chino has also refused to back down in the face of the state’s effort to commandeer its redevelopment money.
In April, the city of Chino’s redevelopment successor agency, taking stock of the consideration that the city of Chino had made more than $15 million in loans to its redevelopment agency for improvements in its redevelopment agency project areas, submitted to the state Department of Finance a recognized payment schedule for the first half of 2012 that called for the successor agency to begin retiring the debt on more than $15 million in promissory notes issued by the Chino Redevelopment Agency and held by the city of Chino. In May, the redevelopment successor agency followed up on its April action, and submitted to the state a recognized obligation payment schedule for the second half of 2012 that cited payment on the promissory notes as an outstanding obligation.
The Department of Finance, according to Jeff Oderman, an attorney for the Chino redevelopment successor agency, has rejected the approved list, holding that loans made to the redevelopment agency by the city that founded it are, with the dissolution of the redevelopment agency, invalid debts. According to a number of attorneys, however, the promissory notes from the Chino Redevelopment Agency held by the city of Chino, like many other debts pursuant to loan arrangements involving other cities and  their respective redevelopment agencies, are enforceable under AB X1 26 and AB X1 27. Chino is on the verge of seeking a litigative remedy in Sacramento Superior Court.
On the other end of the spectrum, the cities of San Bernardino and Redlands have fared far less well, seeing money they were highly dependent upon taken away from them, leaving them in financial straits.
San Bernardino officials this week filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in federal court, an action unprecedented in San Bernardino County history. While the closure of its redevelopment agency by the state was not the only or even a primary cause of San Bernardino’s current financial crisis, the loss of redevelopment funding was a resounding blow. Indeed, a portion city employees were paid by the redevelopment agency and when the state legislature took up consideration of AB XI 26 and AB XI 27, San Bernardino officials began casting about for a way of preserving its redevelopment funding. A stratagem they hit upon was to create a nonprofit called the Economic Development Corporation, which the city hoped could siphon off most, if not all of its redevelopment revenue, convert it into funding for programs that would pass legal muster and apply it in the same fashion that redevelopment money had been traditionally used.
In March 2011, three months before AB XI 26 and AB XI 27 were passed into law, the San Bernardino City Council voted to transfer $525 million from the San Bernardino Economic Development Agency, which the city was closing out, to a newly created nonprofit municipal adjunct agency dubbed the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation.
In carrying out their bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, the city named Emil Marzullo, who had served in the capacity of the  city’s economic development agency’s director, as the director of the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation.
Inevitably, however, state officials said “no dice” to San Bernardino’s desperate move. On May 31, the California Department of Finance informed the city that it considered the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation to be a bogus institution that could not lay claim to any money, let alone the $525 million Marzullo’s operation had tried to take possession of. Marzullo, as executive director of a division without any funding, was recently handed a pink slip.
The city of Redlands likewise is smarting from the financial blow dealt it by the state. On July 26, its redevelopment successor agency borrowed $3.1 million from the city’s water department to cover a bond payment. The city council authorized that “loan,” which potentially might never be paid back.
The Redlands Redevelopment Agency in years past had issued bonds and sold them to investors. Those bondholders yet need to be paid under the terms of the bond sale. Redlands’ successor agency has opened up accounts and was depositing money in them to stay current on the payments to those bondholders. On July 13 the county auditor-treasurer informed the city that all funds in successor agency accounts after June 30, the end of the fiscal year, were considered reserves and would have to be turned over to the state.
The same legislation that Rancho Cucamonga believes will benefit it in its showdown over the eventual control of leftover redevelopment money, Assembly Bill 1484, contains a provision that in Redlands’ case worked to its detriment.  Under AB 1484, Redlands had to make the bond payment by July 16 or face daily fines of $10,000.
Redlands reluctantly, and under protest, made the payment. City officials are trying to see if they can offset that unanticipated loss by selling off property once owned by the city’s redevelopment agency. They are also seeking to see if through future communication with the California Department of Finance they can convince the state that the loan is a dischargeable debt the agency, which is now in the hands of the state, must satisfy. The city has placed the loan on its successor agency’s obligation payment schedule. By forwarding a request to the state through its successor agency oversight board, the city believes the state Department of Finance will recognize the loan as a debt that must be paid by the bond proceeds.
The city arranged for the $3.1 million loan at a .38 percent interest rate over ten years.

(August 3)  In a decision handed down July 17, retired Judge Sam Cianchetti upheld the Upland City Council’s May 2011 termination of former City Manager Rob Quincey.  Quincey sued the city alleging his firing was without cause, and sought $7.8 million in damages.
After arbitration proceedings in June,  Cianchetti found that Quincey intentionally concealed his settlement of a retaliation claim brought by a police sergeant who investigated a July 2008 domestic violence incident involving Quincey and his girlfriend.   The officer’s claim named Quincey, the city and  former city officials.  Quincey did not inform the city council of the claim and used city money to fund the settlement.
In November, Quincey, represented by attorney Joseph Wohrle, filed a wrongful termination claim against the city, maintaining the city council breached the terms of his contract when it fired him in May 2011, four months after he was placed on paid administrative leave, and that mayor Ray Musser and councilman Ken Willis defamed him and maliciously and wrongfully characterized his performance in comments they made to the press at that time.
Wohrle requested that the matter be heard by an arbitrator rather than in open court.
Wohrle and Quincey maintain that Quincey was made into a scapegoat in the aftermath of the political corruption scandal that overtook former Upland Mayor John Pomierski in 2010, resulting in the mayor’s resignation and indictment on bribery and extortion charges in 2011 and his guilty plea in April 2012. Wohrle and Quincey maintained Musser, Willis, former city attorney William Curley, city councilman Gino Filippi and city treasurer Dan Morgan made statements to the press which painted Quincey in a “false light.” In addition to ruining Quincey’s reputation and damaging his future earning potential, the claim purported that the city withheld payments and benefits Quincey was due during the time he was on administrative leave, and at the time of his firing, Quincey claims, the city made unwarranted deductions from benefits he was eligible to receive under his employment contract.
The claim asserted the actual reason Quincey was terminated was because in the latter part of 2010 he had undertaken a critical evaluation of the billing practices of the city’s legal counsel, the law firm of Richards, Watson & Gershon, which employs Curley.
Quincey was chosen by Pomierski in March 2005 to succeed Upland’s previous city manager, Mike Milhiser, whom Pomierski together with his then-supporters on the council, forced into resigning, softened by a $200,000 severance package.
Quincey was hired on April 4, 2005 and given a five-year contract with an annual salary of $195,000 and a guaranteed pay raise each January 1 equivalent to the highest percentage afforded any other city executive management employee, together with 10 percent of his salary payable in deferred compensation, eligibility for an annual incentive bonus of up to 15 percent each year, a $300-a-month technology allowance and a $950-a-month vehicle allowance plus use of city gasoline, together with $1,000 a month in public employee retirement buy-back.
An analysis of city documents shows that within seven months of his hiring, the first of what would prove to be a series of amendments to Quincey’s contract upping his compensation was made. City records indicate that many of those salary or benefit increases were not ratified by the city council meeting in public as a  body, but rather upon the signature of Pomierski and without an official vote being taken.
In October 2005, Quincey engineered for himself, with Pomierski’s blessing, a 4 percent salary increase to $202,800 that was retroactive to his hiring date.  In January 2006 he received a 4 percent salary increase to $211,728. In April 2006, he was granted a 7 percent increase to $226,836 and  a lump sum incentive bonus of $18,147 on top of that.  On January 1, 2007 he was provided with a 6 percent increase to $240,444.  In 2007, an amendment voted upon by the city council granted Quincey, a resident of Chino, on top of his salary, a $2,000 per month housing allowance to purchase, lease or rent an abode in Upland. In 2008, that housing allowance was boosted to $3,000 per month. In January 2008 Quincey’s salary was upped by 4.5 percent to $251,268 and in April 2008 he was granted another 3.5 percent increase to $260,004 per year. Also in April 2008, all limitations on Quincey’s leave accruals, balances and carry-over from year to year were waived, allowing him to bank his leave time if he did not take it. In January 2009, Quincey’s salary was raised 4.5 percent to $271,700 per year. As of April 1, 2009, Quincey’s contract was amended to have the city purchase an additional year of California Public Employee Retirement System retirement service credit for each year of his employment starting from his hire date, essentially doubling his pension from the city.
When Quincey was put on paid administrative leave in January 2011, he was receiving a base salary and add-ons of $368,529 with benefits of $92,096, for a total annual compensation of $460,625.
Cianchetti was provided with testimony from current mayor Ray Musser, councilmen Brendan Brandt and Ken Willis and former councilman Tom Thomas that they were never informed about nor voted to ratify at least four of the eight contract amendments to Quincey’s contract, such that Quincey and Pomierski were acting independently and illegally to grant them. The attorney representing the city, Timothy Owen of the law firm Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, demonstrated Quincey engaged in a prohibited conflict of interest when he and Pomierski pushed through an amendment to his contract guaranteeing him a pay raise equal to that to be provided to the city’s police officers and Quincey then negotiated with the police union himself and granted officers 5 percent raises for three years.
Quincey maintained that enhancements to his contract were legally approved by Pomierski.
The grounds for Quincey’s termination pertained to having exceeded his authority to spend no more than $25,000 without prior city council authorization. That expenditure came about as a consequence of a police report compiled on July 27, 2008 by detective Craig Sipple under the supervision of sergeant John Moore pertaining to a domestic disturbance incident involving Quincey and his former fiancé, Jennifer Stelzer. A heated argument between the couple resulted in alleged vandalism to Stelzer’s vehicle and a series of insulting and profanity-laced text messages from Quincey to Stelzer, which, according to the police report, Stelzer deemed threatening. As Sipple was generating an eight-page report signed off on by Moore in which it was recommended that the matter be reviewed by the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, Quincey contacted Stelzer and persuaded her not to press charges and then sought to have then-police chief Steve Adams intervene in the matter.  Penultimately, the eight-page report Sipple originally authored was reduced to six pages and Sipple and Moore’s recommendation that the matter be referred to the district attorney’s office was changed to state that the case was given “Exceptional Clearance. Stelzer does not desire prosecution.” The redrafted six-page version of the report was buried in an inactive police department file that prevented it from being open to public scrutiny. Moore, however, retained a copy of the original eight-page report. When he later applied for one of two open lieutenant posts with the department and was passed over, he hired attorney Dieter Dammeier to represent him. Dammeier, in his discussions with Adams and Quincey, maintained his client had been bypassed for promotion because of his involvement in the Quincey domestic disturbance investigation and threatened to make a public issue of the matter and release the report. In response, Quincey and Adams upped the number of captain positions with the department from two to three, promoted a lieutenant into that new spot, thereby creating another lieutenant vacancy, into which Moore was promoted. Dammeier presented the city with a $57,816 bill for his efforts on behalf of Moore. To keep the matter quiet and from coming to the attention of the city council and the public, Quincey used his maximum $25,000 annual discretionary spending authority as city manager to pay Dammeier’s firm in two $25,000 installments, one before the close of the 2008-09 fiscal year and one after the opening of the 2009-10 fiscal year. Quincey persuaded then-assistant finance director Ruby Carrillo, with whom Quincey was alleged to have been intimately involved, to miscode one of those checks to make it appear that the payment had been made for another police department related matter.  It was Quincey’s expenditure of $50,000 – double his independent spending authority without previous council authority – that was cited as his defiance of the council’s authority.
Judge Cianchetti determined that Quincey violated the city’s ethics rules and broke his employment contract.  Still to be decided is whether Quincey is owed compensation for unused leave and 30 days of wages.

(August 3)  SAN BERNARDINO—When San Bernardino’s voters approved a change to the city’s charter that guaranteed police and firefighter salaries will be equal to the average of ten  similarly sized cities in California, the city was in a position to be generous, with a thriving business community generating sales tax revenue.
But in the intervening years, San Bernardino’s financial condition has worsened, with unemployment increasing, businesses closing and the city this week proceeding with a bankruptcy filing, putting it in the same category of other California fiscal pariahs such as Vallejo, Stockton and Mammoth Lakes.
Also contained in Charter Section 186, which was most recently adjusted in 2006, is a commitment giving police officers the right to retire at the age of 50 and begin pulling an annual pension that is equal to their highest yearly pay times three percent times the number of years that particular officer worked for the department.
Now, city officials maintain they need the flexibility of being able to pay all of their employees at a rate that is consistent with the city’s means. Consequently, they want to do away with Charter Section 186, and free themselves up to pay their police and firefighters at whatever rate those employees’ bargaining units can be induced to agree to.
Some city officials, in conjunction with a group calling itself Save San Bernardino, are advocating that a citywide voter initiative be placed on the ballot that rescinds Charter Section 186. A citywide vote on the issue is needed because Charter Section 186 was enacted by initiative and can only be changed by initiative.
Achieving that goal as an indigenous movement would be nearly impossible, because advocates of the initiative would need to garner the valid signatures of 10 percent of the city’s voters by August 10 to qualify the measure for the ballot. The only other alternative is for the city council to use its authority to place the initiative on the ballot by means of a vote.
At press time, there was talk of the council doing just that at its August 6 meeting.
Under Charter Section 186, representatives of both the city and its unions consider the pay grades for fire and police officers in all of California cities with populations between 100,000 and 250,000, and then alternate in eliminating cities from the list until 10 remain. This process normally eliminates the cities with salary levels in the lover 55 percentile and salary levels in the upper 28 percentile. Salaries for each job classification are determined from an average of those classifications in those ten cities remaining.
Police and firefighters are generally opposed to putting the Charter Section 186 rescission measure on the ballot. Proponents point out that firefighters in San Bernardino are particularly well paid.   Newly hired basic San Bernardino firefighters – ones without paramedic skill certification – are paid between $64,581 and $83,243 per year. Overtime pay provided to firefighters raises that remuneration level a considerable degree. Total wages for the city’s 13 rookie firefighters last year ranged from $91,843 to $152,845.
City officials are reportedly looking to see how much public support for the Charter Section 186 revision measure there is before placing it on the ballot. The cost for holding the vote would range from between $90,000 to $130,000, according to the County Registrar of Voters office.

(August 3)  Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Company, which is constructing a massive solar power facility at Ivanpah in northeastern San Bernardino County, and the California Department of Fish and Game are on the verge of working out a $20 million land deal that would allow the company  to offset damages to the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise, thus allowing the project to proceed.
According to both state and federal officials, desert tortoises are threatened with extinction.
Under the terms tentatively worked out, BrightSource is to contribute the money to a state habitat land-bank fund, thereby getting credit for preserving about 7,100 acres of desert tortoise habitat that the state has preserved since 2010 by funding grants to conservation land trusts.
Some $10 million of the money BrightSource is to put up would be used for administrative costs associated with the state’s land grant program and the other $10 million would go toward an endowment for managing and monitoring land as wildlife habitat.
The habitat parcels being purchased are located throughout the western Mojave Desert. In some cases, the parcels lie more than 100 miles from BrightSource’s solar plant now under construction in the Ivanpah Valley off Interstate 15 near the Nevada border. That preserved habitat includes a concentration of  parcels northeast of Kramer Junction between U.S. 395 and Harper Lake; an area north of Joshua Tree National Park east of Yucca Valley; and in Hidden Valley between Barstow and the Mojave National Preserve.
A condition of the California Energy Commission’s October 2010 approval of the solar power facility on 5.6 acres of public land was that BrightSource preserve 7,164 acres of desert tortoise habitat. BrightSource sought to meet that mandate by acquiring mining interests in the Castle Mountains in the eastern Mojave and preventing any activities thereon that would threaten the species. The state rejected that proposal, holding that the area was not heavily populated by tortoises. The state extended an April 2012 deadline for the company to acquire such habitat until next January.
BrightSource earlier committed to meeting the state mandate by placing $34 million into an escrow account to cover whatever costs a tortoise habitat protection regime will entail. Simultaneously, the company is coordinating with federal Bureau of Land Management officials to protect tortoises by fencing roads and taking care that tortoise habitat at its site is not disturbed.
The Ivanpah solar power facility is located on approximately 3,500 acres of federal land in San Bernardino County’s  Mojave Desert overseen  by the U.S. Department of the Interior‘s Bureau of Land Management. The 377 megawatt net output facility consists of  thousands of computer guided mirrors capable of tracking the sun and three separate solar thermal power towers upon which the sun’s rays will be focused, creating high temperature steam to turn a turbine. Once constructed, the facility will produce enough clean energy to power 140,000 homes.
The project’s first phase will be completed and be producing power by early next year.
Federal officials, including President Barack Obama, have cited the project as a forward leap in reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and on that basis facilitated its “fast track” approval.
Some 2,400 megawatts of the power generated from the solar plant will be sold under separate contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE), with PG&E  purchasing approximately 1,600 megawatts of the power generated at Ivanpah and SCE purchasing approximately 800 megawatts.
Prior to ground-breaking on the project, surveys commissioned by the company found 16 tortoises in the project area. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a permit to move a maximum of 38 tortoises to facilitate project development. But after more tortoises than were expected were found in the path of heavy machinery last year, the company was ordered to temporarily stop construction. Federal officials have moved to reassess the situation and issue a new permit.
In total, 76 adult and about 52 juvenile tortoises have been captured at the site to date, and another 50 have hatched in captivity, according to Bureau of Land Management biologists.
The tortoises in Ivanpah are classified as genetically unique and biologists accordingly are intent on preserving as many as possible at that site.  In certain respects, the preservation work being done at the solar plant is creating a baseline for environmentalists and biologists, since further development in the area is contemplated, including an airport and high speed train line.

(August 3)  The city of San Bernardino filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection Wednesday, August 1, three weeks after the city council first gave the city attorney direction to do so.
When the city council, facing a $45.8 million deficit, voted to take that unprecedented move on July 10 and confirmed it with a follow-up vote on July 18, city attorney James Penman indicated it would take nearly a month to prepare the filing and make full documentation to support it. But on Wednesday, Paul Glassman, a bankruptcy attorney with the Santa Monica-based law firm of Stradling Yocca Carlson and Rauth submitted an “emergency filing” in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Riverside which bore the signature of interim city manager Andrea Travis-Miller as well as that of Glassman.
The eight page long filing included the five-page resolution the city council passed July 18 declaring that without bankruptcy protection the city’s financial situation “jeopardizes the health, safety or well-being of residents.”
According to the filing, the city has liabilities and assets which both total more than $1 billion and somewhere between 10,001 and 25,000 creditors, which include employees, vendors, the city has worked with, and litigants who have sued the city.

(July 27)  The governing board of the Santa Margarita Water District this week postponed until next week a vote on certifying the environmental impact report for the controversial Cadiz Valley Water Project.
Officially referred to as the Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, if approved it would provide the Cadiz Land Company, also known as Cadiz, Inc. with permission to pump an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year out of the aquifer in San Bernardino County’s Eastern Mojave Desert and convey it in a pipeline to Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties to replenish the water supply there.
The Santa Margarita Water District, the second largest water district in Orange County that serves an area more than 200 miles from the Cadiz Valley, is the lead agency for the project, overseeing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review process for the project’s permitting.
After Cadiz, Inc. completes the project, which entails the sinking of 34 wells into the desert and construction of a 44-mile pipeline along a railroad right-of-way until it meets up with the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas, the company  will sell the extracted water to the  Santa Margarita Water District; Three Valleys Water District, which provides water to  the Pomona Valley, Walnut Valley, and Eastern San Gabriel Valley; the Golden State Water Company, which serves several communities in Southern California, including Claremont;  Suburban Water Systems, which serves Covina, West Covina and La Mirada; and the Jurupa Community Services District, which serves Mira Loma in Riverside County.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors acceded to the Santa Margarita Water District’s assumption of lead agency authority over the project application and environmental certification and entered into a memorandum of understanding with Cadiz, Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District that gave the county limited power to second-guess the district’s decision on the environmental certification and compliance with its own ground water management ordinance as well as requiring that Cadiz, Inc. defray the cost of any legal action taken by parties against the project or in reaction to its impacts. The project has garnered considerable opposition, particularly in San Bernardino County and the East Mojave Desert, where the Cadiz Valley is located. A brine mining operation in the desert, Tetra Technologies, has already filed a lawsuit against San Bernardino County over the memorandum of understanding.
On the evening of July 25 and early morning hours of July 26, the governing board of the Santa Margarita Water District met in Santa Margarita in the largest meeting room within the Norman P. Murray Community Center, which was filled to capacity. A two-way video and audio hook-up to the Bell Center Community Room at Copper Mountain College, where several dozen desert residents had gathered, was incorporated into the meeting.
An overview of the project was provided by Santa Margarita general manager Dan Ferons. Leslie Moulton, one of the employees of the Los Angeles-based firm, ESA, which prepared the environmental impact report, gave a Powerpoint summarization of the environmental impact report (EIR). Statements limited to three minutes were then heard from several of those gathered at Copper Mountain College. Most of those speaking from that location were opposed to the project and the environmental certification, though some said they endorsed the project and hailed it as one that would provide some level of economic revitalization to the desert. Notable among the speakers against the project at the desert location was current Needles mayor Ed Paget. His statements were countered by a statement by his predecessor as mayor, Jeff Williams, who is currently the Needles Chamber of Commerce president, which was read into the record by another individual.
After those speaking from the desert location were heard, the board heard statements from those on hand at the Murray Center. Many speaking at that venue, including Cadiz, Inc. president Scott Slater, Cadiz, Inc. chief financial officer Timothy Shaheen, former Rancho Santa Margarita city councilman Gary Thompson, former councilman and mayor Jim Thor and others endorsed the project, characterizing it as one that would ensure water availability to the community served by the Santa Margarita Water District into the future. Slater said his company had incorporated changes in the project plan based upon an earlier version of a water conservation and extraction plan in the East Mojave his company had proposed in conjunction with the Metropolitan Water District that had been abandoned a decade ago and input from project supporters and opponents. He called the current plan an innovative approach to dealing with the region’s water shortage. Shaheen dismissed as inaccurate claims that Cadiz, Inc. was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI for making misrepresentations to its investors and he said that it was not true that investors had lost faith in the company.
John Goss, a former assistant administrative officer with San Bernardino County who had worked for 18 months drafting the county’s desert groundwater management ordinance before it was adopted in 2002, said he was concerned that the memorandum of understanding between the county, Cadiz, Inc. and Santa Margarita Water District had been entered into before a groundwater management plan for the Cadiz project was adopted. He said this violated the terms of the 2002 ordinance.
Al Vogler, a Hesperia resident who had sojourned to Orange County to attend the hearing, questioned the viability of the water selling arrangement, saying the $1,127 per acre foot Cadiz, Inc. was seeking to sell the water to Santa Margarita for was far less economical than water available from the California Aqueduct at $400 an acre-foot.
Former Huntington Beach mayor Debbie Cook said that there were “incestuous relationships” between the district’s leadership and Cadiz, Inc. and that the district’s agreement to purchase the water from Cadiz, Inc. was made during an “illegal closed session” more than three years ago. She said the district had an inability to consider the full implication of the project because of “bureaucratic malaise.” She told the board, “You haven’t considered the risks to your agency if Cadiz goes bankrupt.”
Charles Collett, an attorney from Newport Beach who with his brother owns property in the Cadiz Valley on which a well is located, said he was opposed to the project because “it will be taking out more water than will go in. There are uncertainties in the hydrologic methods. There are representations that Cadiz, Inc. is taking the risk but a lot more scientific study needs to be accomplished before you consider the EIR and decide on it. “
Collett said that if pumping in the Cadiz Valley is initiated that make his well run dry “I will file a lawsuit and there will be other lawsuits that will affect the cost of your water.”
Ruth Musser Lopez of Needles said the Santa Margarita Water District serving as the lead agency on the environmental certification of the project was “an abuse of power” that made it so that the desert’s residents “do not have a say in this.” She said the district had involved itself in a criminal conflict of interest when it entered into an agreement with Cadiz, Inc. to be reimbursed for the processing costs for the environmental impact report and other work related to the project conditional upon its approval of the environmental impact report and the water purchase agreement.
In total, more than 80 individuals in Yucca Valley and Rancho Santa Margarita addressed the board throughout the evening and early morning.
The board was presented with voluminous written documentation from multiple individuals during the course of the hearing. Coincidentally, earlier in the day Governor Jerry Brown and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled a proposal to construct a massive $14 billion twin tunnel system to carry water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to farms located as well as 25 million Californians living between the Bay Area and San Diego.
The board voted to postpone its consideration of the Cadiz project until a specially called meeting in a smaller room within the Murray Center on Tuesday July 31.
At the conclusion of the meeting just before 1 a.m. July 26, Slater told the Sentinel he “thought the meeting was open and transparent. I appreciate the opportunity this gave the public to express their points of view.”

(July 27)  Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Tuesday a bill that provides for the California Fair Political Practices Commission to serve as the lead enforcement agency for a campaign finance ordinance now under consideration by San Bernardino County.
Third District Supervisor Neil Derry three years ago floated the concept of creating a county ethics commission that would have authority over possible campaign finance reform. Ultimately, the board rejected creating an ethics panel but last year First District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt and Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford introduced a campaign finance ordinance.
In February, a majority of supervisors expressed support in concept for an ordinance imposing campaign contribution limits on county office candidates modeled after limits in state legislative races, allowing individuals to give no more than $3,900 per election cycle. Additionally, small contributor committees would be limited to $7,800. The ordinance would also prevent contributors from attempting to get around the limits by providing money to candidates through intermediaries. The ordinance would require committees that spend or raise more than $10,000 and participate in local elections to file statements electronically.
With the passage of Assembly Bill 2146, authored by Assemblyman Paul Cook, R-Yucca Valley, the Fair Political Practices Commission is now empowered to enforce contribution limits and disclosure requirements for county races. Supervisors said they would now bring the ordinance containing the $3,900 contribution limit proposal to an official vote, perhaps as early as August 21.
The state Fair Political Practices Commission, which employs 80 and is headquartered in Sacramento, investigates alleged violations of the state Political Reform Act, sending warning letters to offenders with regard to offenses deemed less egregious, and in more substantive cases levies penalties in the form of penalties or court actions that theoretically can remove an offender from office.
“This legislation provides the county with an effective and affordable means of policing campaign contribution and spending rules,”  Rutherford said in a press release. “Now the board can move forward with adopting campaign finance rules that limit campaign contributions and help thwart influence peddling by deep-pocket donors. I thank Assemblyman Cook for his leadership and support of San Bernardino County’s efforts to institute meaningful campaign finance reform. By contracting with the FPPC to police campaign finance regulations, the county can avoid the conflicts of interest and budget-busting costs of forming an internal ethics commission.”
“Without adequate enforcement, campaign finance rules are toothless,” Cook said. “This is a major victory for the public and for voters in San Bernardino County. The FPPC is a proven watchdog agency, with 40 years of experience in rooting out abuses and violations of campaign finance law. AB 2146 will assist the county in setting much-needed limits on political contributions to candidates running for county office, and it will help prevent corruption.”

(July 27)  The parents union at Desert Trails Elementary School this week became the first such coalition of parents and education activists to actuate the provisions of California’s Empowerment Act.
The Parent Empowerment Act, authored by former state senator Gloria Romero and passed by the legislature in 2010, enables 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, ranging from replacing the principal and up to half the staff to reopening the school as a charter academy. That process is known by the colloquialism “parent trigger.”
At Desert Trails Elementary School in the Adelanto Elementary School District, a significant number of the students have parents whose first language is not English. For the last seven years, Desert Trails students have had the lowest scores within the district on state standardized academic tests. The school’s students have also 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.
Pursuant to the Parent Empowerment Act, a parent union was formed by parents at Desert Trails Elementary last year, in large measure at the instigation of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Parent Revolution, which is devoted to challenging the traditional authority of school districts.
On January 12, the parent union submitted 466 signatures on petitions asking the district to undertake a set of what the parents union maintains will be reforms at the severely underperforming school.
Those petitions, which called upon the district to sack the school’s principal, David Mobley, and surrender to the school’s parents authority in hiring his successor, infuse in the new principal hiring authority for the school’s faculty, reduce class sizes and increase the number of school days and instructional hours, and include more science, history and art in the curriculum, were sufficient to meet the requirements of the Parent Empowerment Act, parent union members believed. The parent union subsequently modified that agenda to request that the school be converted to a charter academy, offering an intensified curriculum.
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.
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.
While the parent trigger proponents said nearly 70 percent of the parents had signed the petitions, the district claimed that some of those signatures had been rescinded, that there were no signatures on file to verify some of the signatures, and that others were invalid because the signers did not know what they were signing. After discounting them on those grounds, the district claimed the petitions were 16 signatures short.
Holscher maintained that the district did not make an impartial tally of the signatures and “engaged in a systematic effort to invalidate the petitions. First, despite the clear legal mandate that the district must accept every parent’s petition absent proof that a petition was not valid, and the courts’ repeated instructions that any attempt to reject a citizen’s First Amendment protected right to petition must withstand the most ‘exacting scrutiny,’ the district refused to accept 25 parents’ petitions because the district could not find a signature in its files to compare to the petition signature. The parents’ first requested relief is for this court to reverse the improper rejection of these 25 petitions.
“Second, 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,” Holscher continued. “The parent trigger statute and its regulations do not allow for any ‘rescissions’ after a petition is filed. The parents’ second request for relief is for this court to rule that the district improperly rejected 97 petitions by rescinding the votes through this unauthorized ‘rescission’ process.   Moreover, not only are rescissions not permitted, the parents have uncovered smoking-gun proof that individuals who obtained the rescissions doctored and falsified rescission forms and engaged in a coercive campaign to block the petition.  Even if the parent trigger statute called for ‘rescissions’ after a vote, which it does not, the fraudulent rescission process here could not possibly survive the ‘exacting scrutiny’ that this court must apply to this rejection of the petition.  Third, the parents here request that the court grant a writ requiring the district to approve the March 6, 2012 resubmission of the petition by the parents.”
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. “Once the petition was submitted, the district and the trustees lacked authority to reject 97 signatures from the petition based on subsequent extrinsic evidence of rescission,” Malone ruled.  “The district and trustees have a mandatory legislative duty to include those signatures.”
By his ruling Malone raised the number of qualified signatures to well above 50 percent. 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.
The ruling makes the Desert Trails Parent Union the first group to successfully enact California’s 2010 Parent Empowerment Act.
Doreen Diaz, lead petitioner and the coordinator of the Desert Trails Parent Union commented, “In speaking for all the Desert Trails parents, this is a huge milestone in our struggle for our children to receive the basic education they are entitled to and deserve.”
Holscher said, “We appreciate the careful consideration Judge Malone gave the parents in this precedent setting case.   This ruling will pave the way for parents across California to secure their fundamental right to a quality education for their children.”
Adelanto Elementary School District Superintendent Darin Brawley told the Sentinel “We’re disappointed in the ruling. It is ironic that a statute provided to empower parents is actually disempowering parents.”
Brawley said he did not know whether the parent union would insist on restarting the school as a charter academy, turning it around,  seeking alternative governance for the school or shutting it down altogether.  “There has been a lot of speculation about what they will do. They are going to hold a news conference on July 27 to announce their next step. We’re waiting to see what they’ll do next. It would be premature to formulate how we are going to respond at this time.”