The motion picture and television industry has discovered Lucerne Valley as a Western-themed location. Apple Valley-based Two-Gun Productions, which touts itself as a Christian-oriented media concern, is creating an answer to the once-popular HBO offering Deadwood. The series, called “Tales of the Frontier,” features far less, or more accurately, none of the foul language which was a staple of Deadwood. The family-oriented Tales of the Frontier has yet to be picked up by HBO, but in recent weeks it has been airing on AskMilton.tv, a global Internet-based television network. Two-Gun founders Tino Luciano and Garry Lee Brooks did not have to travel to far to find backdrops for the shooting of “Tales of the Frontier.” Portions of the series pilot were filmed at Lucerne Valley’s Lazy Lizard Ranch in northern Lucerne Valley.. Luciano and Brook’s production company have also made use of the Lazy G Ranch, located in southeast Lucerne Valley as a shooting location. Two half hour episodes of Tales of the Frontier play back to back from 7:30 to 8:30 Thursday night on Ask Milton.tv.

BARSTOW—In a move toward self-sufficiency and faster response time, the city of Barstow will consolidate its fire department and police department dispatch functions.
Currently, the police department operates its own dispatch center and the fire department contracts with the county’s fire service dispatch system, known as Confire JPA Communications, which operates out of a communications center in Rialto. The contract with Confire currently runs at $179,000 per year.
The police department dispatch system fielded well over 33,000 calls of all type and order of magnitude in the last year. Roughly 10,000 of those were for emergency services most logically provided by the fire department. Those calls were immediately patched through to the Rialto Confire JPA communications system, which in turn reached a determination as to which of the Barstow Fire Protection District’s two fire stations would be the most logical first responder and second responder, and dispatched crews accordingly.
The Barstow Fire Protection District is a subsidiary district of the city. This month, the city council, acting as the governing board for the district, voted to enter into an arrangement by which the police department’s dispatch center will be expanded and the city’s contract with Confire JPA will be terminated so that the city’s dispatch center will handle all emergency calls, police, fire and medical.
The changeover will result in a one-time $164,000 cost to augment the existing police dispatch center with the requisite equipment and computer software to allow for the efficient sorting of calls and the routing of a call for action to the appropriate station.
The police department dispatch center, which already employs six full time dispatchers, will hire two more full-time dispatchers and another two part-time dispatchers. All ten will be provided with training to make them capable of dispatching in response to police, fire and medical calls and emergencies. The four new hires and training for all ten employees will cost the city an estimated $191,000 for the first year of operation.
City officials hope to have the fire department weaned off of the Confire system by September, at which point the new safety division dispatch center will be entirely up and running.
By eliminating the middle call from Barstow to Rialto, officials believe response time will be improved and that coordination between the police department and fire department will be improved, and in certain cases provide for greater safety for responders and superior response to those involved in traumatic incidents.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA—The city of Rancho Cucamonga and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department are stepping up video surveillance around Victoria Gardens.
The video cameras already in place at the popular shopping mall will be augmented with 20 more of the devices.
The images captured are displayed at a viewing station located within the sheriff’s department’s Kew Avenue quarters adjoining the AMC Theater and lying south of Cultural Center Drive and north of North Main Street.
From that vantage, a trained and quick-eyed deputy will scan the multiplex of monitors, looking for any indication of trouble or overt criminality.
The cameras are being strategically located near spots that have already shown themselves to be likely scenes of illicit activity. The deputy at the monitor, who will be tied directly into the 911 system, will be able to monitor the locations where crime has been reported, note descriptions of suspects and relay that information to a deputy or deputies in the field who have been dispatched to the scene, potentially aiding in the apprehension of a suspect or suspects.
In addition, the high-resolution cameras will record activity at all of the locations under electronic surveillance, allowing an after-the-fact review of events and suspects who escaped real time notice in the commission of their illegal acts.
The sheriff’s department and the city refer to the videotaping capability as a force multiplier and have declined to disclose the equipment’s cost or the cost of mounting it. Nor would officials discuss the locations where the cameras will be installed.
While city and sheriff’s officials and others hail the videographic devices as a safety and security enhancement, others see them as further evidence of the intrusion of government and the extension of mass surveillance,  authoritarian presence, and oppressive control of the population as was expounded upon in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

RIALTO—The city of Rialto will move ahead with the outsourcing of its water and sewer operations to New Jersey-based American Water Works Co. Inc., despite outsourcing opponents’ successful gathering of sufficient petitions to force a referendum on the takeover.
City officials, guided by city attorney Jimmy Gutierrez, are referencing what they claim is a technical glitch in the circulation of those petitions for the referendum as grounds deny the request for the citywide vote.
After more than two years of contemplating an arrangement by which American Water Works Co., Inc. would take over maintenance, operation and administration sans ownership of the city’s dilapidated water and wastewater system for 30 years, the city council on March 27 voted to do just that.
Under the terms of the deal, American Water Operations and Maintenance, Inc., a division of American Water Works, was to function as a local company known as Rialto Water Services and take over operation and maintenance of the water district. The city was to retain the district’s water rights.
The for-profit company would take on all aspects of operations, maintenance and billing, effectively running both the water and sewer utilities for the next three decades.
Some water and wastewater division employees were to be allowed to transfer into the city’s engineering or public works divisions, remaining as city employees with their public pension plans intact. Others would go to work with American Water, which was to be required to guarantee those employees will remain employed for at least a year-and-a-half with salary and benefits equal to those offered by the city. That guarantee was to sunset after 18 months.
According to city officials, the company had agreed to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 million in upgrades to the water system. American Water has also agreed to assume all debt owed by the city’s water utility division.
In return, city officials agreed to a 114.8 percent increase in water and wastewater rates by 2016, such that the average water bill of Rialto households utilizing 17,000 gallons per month will jump from the current rate of $26.27 per month to $64.14 monthly and increase the wastewater treatment fee from $25.97 to $61.46 as of January 1, 2016.
Members of the Utility Workers of America together with citizens irate at the prospect of the rate hikes organized a signature drive to require that the outsourcing be approved by the city’s voters. The city council’s 4-1 vote with councilman Joe Baca, Jr. dissenting was an unpopular one, and a capacity crowd attended the March 27 meeting to lodge protests.  The petitions collected in April and early May requesting the referendum were handed off to the Rialto city clerk’s office on Saturday May 12,  The union submitted 6,379 signatures to meet the threshold of 3,800 valid signatures of registered voters needed to force the matter to a vote. According to the city clerk’s office, 1,545 of the signatures were determined to be invalid during a certification process conducted by the county Elections Bureau, leaving 4,834 valid signatures, which seemingly qualified the call for a referendum.
On June 26, however, the city council voted against scheduling the referendum on the outsourcing agreement to coincide with the November November 6 general election.

Jimmy Gutierrez

The council’s rationale was based upon city attorney Gutierrez’s rendered opinion that the referendum applicants had failed to include with the signed petitions when the signatures were being gathered a copy of the ordinance authorizing the deal with American Water, including the several-hundred-page-long concession agreement between the city and the New Jersey-based company.
Gutierrez’s citation appears to be to California Elections Code Section 9238, which states, “(a) Across the top of each page of the referendum petition there shall be printed the following: ‘Referendum Against an Ordinance Passed by the City Council’ [and] (b) Each section of the referendum petition shall contain (1) the identifying number or title, and (2) the text of the ordinance or the portion of the ordinance that is the subject of the referendum.”
Petition circulators did offer a copy of the city council resolution to city residents before they signed the petition. There is a legal question as to whether that inclusion would have provided the signers with enough context and information upon which to make an informed endorsement of the petition or if, as Gutierrez is suggesting, voters needed to be provided with the full text of the agreement with American Water as was approved by the council on March 27.
Utility Workers spokesman Mark Brooks told the Sentinel that the union is now contemplating legal action to force the city to conduct the referendum.
“We are studying what the city did before determining what action we will take,” Brooks said. Without getting into specifics, Brooks said “It appears the council acted on very bad advice with regard to whether the referendum qualified. We are examining all of our options.”
Brooks said the union was mindful that there is a deadline for items to appear on the November ballot that will elapse later this summer, requiring timely action in challenging the council’s decision.

San Bernardino County, which is proceeding with the construction of a new courthouse in downtown San Bernardino next to its existing criminal and civil courthouses at the county seat, is contemplating closing the Barstow courthouse in response to anticipated funding reductions from the State of California.
Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed 2012-13 state budget calls for $21 million in funding takeaways from the Superior Courts in San Bernardino County. In making the cut, the state would suck $14.5 million out of a reserve fund specifically set aside for San Bernardino County Superior Court, reducing that cushion to $13 million.
San Bernardino County would have the option of tapping into that $13 million remaining in the reserve account to sustain service levels, but is simultaneously faced with making up for a $5 million deficit in the just concluding year’s budget.
When all is said and done, the county court system expects to see its 2012-13 budget reduced from $103 million to $82 million.
As a consequence, Court Executive Officer Stephen Nash in conjunction with presiding judge Ronald Christianson is proposing simply closing the doors of the Barstow Superior Court. Cases that otherwise would be heard there will for the most part be moved to Victorville Superior Court. That change will come with Barstow’s three judges being transferred to other courthouses and all 37 court employees there being laid off. The earliest the closure will come would be September 1.
In addition, court administrators will seek to effectuate other economies including measured staff reductions at courthouses in general and imposing on the remaining court employees the loss or reduction of certain benefits.

FONTANA—The previously-underreported but now increasingly spotlighted proliferation of schoolyard and classroom bullying drew even more attention to itself last week and throughout this week when a teacher and four students attending his class at A.B. Miller High School were arrested for hazing two students at the school. The teacher and an eighteen year old student were charged by the district attorney’s office on June 26 with felony counts including child abuse and false imprisonment, prosecutors said.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office charged the teacher, Emmanuel De La Rosa, 27, with child abuse, two counts of attempted sexual penetration by a foreign object involving a minor victim older than 14  and two counts of false imprisonment by violence. De La Rosa was also charged with failure to report suspected child abuse to a child protective agency.
Eighteen-year-old Fernando Salgado was charged with two counts of sexual penetration  involving a minor victim older than 14, and two counts of false imprisonment by violence.
The felony complaint references two unidentified victims. According to Fontana Police, the three students hazed the two victims while all were attending a summer-school masonry class taught by De La Rosa. While there is nothing to indicate De La Rosa was directly involved in meting out the abuse, police allege he knew it was taking place and investigators suggested De La Rosa might have consented to the hazing to “discipline” what he considered problem students.
Supporters who flooded a special school board meeting on June 26 said that the charges leveled at De La Rosa were out of character with the man they knew. Some suggested that he was being scapegoated for excesses in a culture of violence that permeates local schools.
De La Rosa was freed on $100,000 bond and has been put on administrative suspension from his teaching assignment. He was arraigned on June 28.
Salgado remains in custody on a $100,000 bond and was arraigned on June 28.
The child abuse allegation lodged against De La Rosa states he “willfully and unlawfully, under circumstances likely to produce great bodily harm and death, injury” caused and permitted “a child to suffer and to be inflicted with unjustifiable physical pain and mental suffering.”
In an affidavit submitted by police to the court, it is alleged that on June 21, one victim related that while he was in De La Rosa’s class three students held him and pulled his pants down while Salgado attempted to penetrate him with a piece of steel rebar. During their investigation, officers came across a second alleged victim who told them that on June 14 three students in the same classroom tried to hold him down while Salgado attempted to force a wooden broom handle into his body. De La Rosa was aware of both incidents and others like them that had occurred in his classroom, according to the affidavit.

San Bernardino City Unified School District Director of Youth Services Ray Culberson this week publicly stated  chronic absenteeism by high school  students in San Bernardino is correlated with the recent proliferation of gang violence that has been plaguing the city.
In May, there was a spate of 12 murders within San Bernardino, most of which appeared to be gang related. In 2012, according to the FBI, the city had a homicide rate of 8.57 per 100,000. That rate was 13.33 in 2011 and 15.56 in 2010. Those statistics place San Bernardino second behind Compton as the most murder-prone municipality in Southern California in recent years.

Ray Culberson

One of Culberson’s primary responsibilities at San Bernardino City Unified is to see to it that students attend school and he has been carrying out a literal crusade against truancy, utilizing authority granted him through the district and the state educational code to issue citations to both the students caught skipping school and their parents.
On June 18, some 100 truant students and one or more of their parents were subpoenaed to appear at district headquarters.
The assembled multitude was then treated to Culberson’s exhortations, which boiled down to a demand that students attend school and that their parents take steps to ensure their children get an education and stay off the streets.
Playing hooky is a deadly pastime, Culberson said, indicating that ditching school is related to serious crime and violence. And that violence is particularly acute in San Bernardino, he said.
“I’ve known probably every kid who’s been killed under 26, 27,” Culberson said. “In fact, I’ve known a lot of the ones who did the shooting. I’ve had kids in my office on a Thursday, and on a Saturday they’re shot dead.”
The intense, no-nonsense Culberson, who has been the recipient of the “Beyond Boundaries Award” given for his commitment to providing services to the school district’s students, has also been credited with transforming the district’s School Attendance Review Board, which takes a relatively moderate approach to redressing truancy issues, into one of eleven model school attendance boards recognized by the California Department of Education.
But Culberson says that effort is insufficient and he is serious about utilizing stronger methods of persuading parents that their kids belong in school.
Under a California law in effect since January 1, 2011, parents of truant students can be charged with a misdemeanor and face a series of fines and punishments if found guilty, ranging from a $100 fine for the first conviction and reaching on the far end to up to a year of incarceration and a $2,000 fine for having chronically truant children.
Under the law, students missing school are placed in one of three categories.  A truant is a student who is 30 or more minutes late to class on more than three school days. A chronic truant is a student who misses more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. A habitual truant is a truant who continues to miss class even after school officials have taken corrective action with regard to that student’s attendance. The truancy rate in California is an astonishingly high 24 percent. Culberson says the truancy rate in San Bernardino is far greater than the state average, with close to 2,000 of the San Bernardino City Unified School District’s students habitually truant.
Throwing parents in jail, if need be, is something he is willing to do, Culberson indicated.
“I’m tired of watching kids get killed,” he told the parents. “And I’m tired of watching you die because you’re not in school,” he said, speaking to the students themselves.

The Sentinel has received a report that the FBI is investigating the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s alleged hacking of the website iepolitics.com.
The FBI, which has a strict policy prohibiting comment with regard to ongoing investigations, did not confirm that report.
According to that unconfirmed report, some sheriff’s department higher-ups grew concerned about the provision of what was considered to be sensitive information to the website or its administrator, and sheriff’s department assets were used to hack the website to obtain the IP addresses of those in communication with the blog. An IP address is an identification code specific to a computer or device connected to a network.

Sharon Gilbert

Iepolitics.com is a website that was set up more than four years ago by one-time county employee Sharon Gilbert,  which features both original reports and reprints of news articles from disparate sources, including newspapers and other websites, along with commentary by readers. The primary subject matter on the blog pertains to politics and government in San Bernardino County. It has become a magnet for input from a host of individuals identified and unidentified, including some purporting to be current or former members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Some of those have offered criticism and inside details about department operations and policies.
Information made available to the Sentinel is that administrators in the sheriff’s office who have long been concerned about the leaking of information to Gilbert and iepolitics became particularly alarmed at references on the blog to a major anomaly in the operations of the Inland Regional Narcotics Enforcement Team (IRNET), which is composed of sheriff’s narcotic division detectives and deputies working in concert with other local and state agencies.
Word is that federal investigators at one point removed five San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigators/IRNET members and possibly an IRNET investigator employed by the Rialto Police Department to an out-of-state location to either interview them as witnesses or interrogate them as suspects in an ongoing probe of IRNET and its activity. Reference to that matter on iepolitics.com, including the inclusion of information thought to be held only by members of the department’s command echelon or their staff, allegedly prompted the effort to crack the iepolitics.com system to determine the source of the leak.
The accuracy of the underlying report with regard to the FBI’s questioning of IRNET members could not be determined and the sheriff’s department has had no comment on the matter.
Gilbert, in a cryptic posting on iepolitics this week, alluded to being contacted by the FBI and stated, without referencing the hacking of her site directly, that “there has been a major new development in reference to the blog” and that as a consequence “the blog will go down on the 23rd for good or at least for a very long time.” As of press time, the iepolitics website was still in place, though the Sentinel’s efforts to reach Gilbert by email and phone were not successful

On June 25 or shortly thereafter, members of the Upland City Council will make a crucial decision with regard to their city’s future when they   determine whether to keep city manager Stephen Dunn in place.

Stephen Dunn

Fallout from the political corruption scandal that ultimately resulted in the indictment of and eventual guilty plea by former Upland Mayor John Pomierski put former city manager Robb Quincey under a cloud. In January 2011, less than two months before Pomierski was indicted and less than seven months after FBI and IRS agents served a search warrant at Upland City Hall, the city council put Quincey on paid administrative leave and selected Dunn, who for nine years had been Upland’s finance director, to serve as interim city manager. In May, 2011 the city terminated Quincey and the following month hired Dunn. In taking the position, Dunn agreed to accept a salary and benefits package that was more than 44 percent less than that provided to his predecessor.  Whereas Quincey had been provided with a base salary and add-ons  of $368,529 and benefits of $92,096 for a total of $460,625, by contrast  Dunn’s contract called for him to receive $189,425 in salary with $65,119 in benefits, for a total annual compensation of $254,544.
Dunn’s salary was on the lower end of the scale among city managers in Southern California and he was paid less than one of the employees he oversees, the police chief, who is provided with a base salary and add-ons of $229,724, plus benefits worth $76,898 for a total of $306,621 per year.
Significantly, Dunn declined a multi-year contract, insisting that the council review his performance after his first 12 months of overseeing the 73,732 population-City of Gracious Living’s 327-employee, $116-million-budget municipal operation.
Once he was installed as city manager, Dunn was entrusted by the city council with the Herculean task of instituting financial reforms to prevent the city from running aground. Like all California cities, Upland was seeing shrinkage in its revenues brought on by the foundering national, state and local economies. Moreover, Quincey, whom Pomierski had handpicked to serve in the city manager’s role in 2005, had negotiated extremely generous employee contracts with the city workforce’s bargaining units, a ploy which some believe was intended to allow Pomierski to proceed with all manner of depredations at City Hall, including applying a selective land use, zoning and permitting policy that benefited those willing to pay the mayor bribes while punishing those who refused to participate in the graft.  The financial commitments the city made in raising municipal employee salary and benefit levels as a consequence of the contracts negotiated by Quincey meant that the city’s expenditures would clearly outrun available revenue, resulting in a severely unbalanced budget. At the outset of Fiscal Year 2011-12, a budget was approved that contained a $3.1 million deficit.
Dunn, however, formulated a program to lay off 16 and grant 28 golden handshakes to reduce the city’s payroll to 283. He implemented that plan by the end of July 2011.  Among those eliminated were four department heads – fire chief Mike Antonucci,  who received a base salary and add-ons  of  $170,698 and benefits of $71,692 for a total annual compensation of $242,390; public works director Anthony La, who drew a base salary and add-ons  of $177,030 plus benefits of $58,974 for a total of $236,004 per year; community development director Jeff Bloom, who was paid a base salary and add-ons of $165,422 plus benefits of $54,197 for a total annual compensation of $219,618; and Haweda Nash, the human resources/risk management director. with a base salary and add-ons  of $159,230 plus benefits of  $54,902 for a total of $214,132. By late August, the $3.1 million deficit was entirely erased.
Left out of the bloodletting in 2011-12 was the police department. But in upcoming 2012-13, the imperative to trim spending remains and with most other municipal divisions already thinned out, Dunn brought his focus to bear there.
The police department presented a particular challenge on multiple grounds. First, popular sentiment in many quarters held against reducing law enforcement function. Second, the police union represents the strongest of the city employee bargaining units, with a law firm on retainer and a history of filing legal challenges that had proven expensive for the city to defend. Third, under the terms of one of his contract amendments, Quincey’s own pay hikes were tied into those to be provided to members of the police department, giving him an incentive, when he was negotiating with the police union, to provide them with salary and benefit concessions. One of the costly concessions Quincey had made to the police union pertained to contributions to the police officers’ retirement fund. While both the city and the officers have traditionally contributed to that fund, previously each police employee was making a contribution equal to 5.8 percent of his or her own yearly salary. Under the  terms negotiated by Quincey more than two years ago, each officer’s contribution is now reduced to 3.9 percent, as of July 1 the contribution will be reduced to 1.9 percent, and on January 1, 2013 the officers will discontinue making that payment and the city will pick up their entire 5.8 percent retirement contribution. That change is locked into the contract the union and the city signed. Dunn made an effort to have the officers give back that benefit, but the police union did not consent to doing so. Consequently, Dunn responded by targeting the police department for layoffs.
In the plan Dunn initially worked up with the assistance of police chief Jeff Mendenhall, it was proposed that the department eliminate one of its two captains, reduce its staff of ten sergeants to eight, drop from a force of 49 officers to 42 officers, while keeping in place all five of the department’s lieutenants and all nine of its detectives.  Simultaneously, Dunn proposed laying off one police service coordinator, three police service technicians, one evidence clerk, and one records specialist. That proposal gouged a nerve, prompting complaints that Dunn is intent on gutting the police department and public safety. Members of the city council were sent emails to that effect from both identified and anonymous residents and department employees.  Nevertheless, the police union has not consented to a rescission of the agreement to have the city pick up the police officers’ portions of their contributions toward their pension fund.
Dunn relented somewhat, moving forward with a plan that called for reducing the police department by 12, including six sworn officers and six civilian support staff. There were no actual layoffs of police officers, as there were already vacancies in six sworn positions. One of the civilian police positions was vacant as well, such that there will be five actual layoffs.
Despite the attenuation of Dunn’s police department reduction effort, he has not escaped criticism as a hardhearted, bottom-line oriented administrator.  His critics seized on the release of one of the police officers, Dan Tolliver, who had been with department since 1993 and was serving in the capacity of resource officer/police department liaison with the Upland Unified School District.
Tolliver was originally diagnosed in September 2005 with gastric cancer. After a six-month regimen of chemotherapy and five weeks of radiation, his cancer went into remission in April 2006. He went back to work full time with the police department but in September 2007, Tolliver was hospitalized again. During surgery, doctors found a tumor in his pancreas, which was redressed with six more months of chemotherapy. He was back to work in the summer of 2008, and was given the assignment of school resource officer. In April of this year Tolliver filed a workers compensation claim with the city.
Dunn has been attacked for callously terminating Tolliver against his will. According to those assailing Dunn and city clerk Stephanie Mendenhall, who last year was given secondary and tertiary assignments as the city’s director of human resources and risk manager in the aftermath of Nash’s departure, Tolliver, who yet had hopes of returning to work once again,  was informed by email that he was being handed an involuntary retirement.
One of Dunn’s more recent economizing efforts has yet to be embraced by the city council. Dunn recommended that the operation of the city library be outsourced and that the city negotiate a contract with Maryland-based Library Systems and Services, Inc. to do just that. But the Upland Library Board of Trustees has balked at that request, concerned that Library Systems and Services, Inc.’s profit motive would ultimately deprive patrons of services local tax dollars are paying for without any guarantee of savings to the city.
Perhaps sensing that with Dunn’s job review approaching he is more vulnerable than at any time in the last year, his critics have recently stepped up the effort to convince the city council to jettison him.
In the face of the layoffs, Dunn, and to a lesser extent Stephanie Mendenhall, are being blamed by city employees and their associates and family members for morale problems throughout City Hall, for creating an atmosphere of confusion and insecurity among employees as well as providing inconsistent information on how bumping rights (that is, a process by which city employees with greater seniority whose positions have been eliminated can supplant employees in other posts) will work.
Reliable reports have reached the Sentinel, confirmed by employees, that some employees “are at one another, yelling” and that at least some of Upland’s city workers believe “the team spirit that used to exist in the city has been totally destroyed.”
In this way, those  who are not favorably inclined toward Dunn report, there is a significant morale problem among employees in Upland and a perception that Dunn has sought to weaken city employees individually and collectively to create a stronger position for himself.
Dunn and Mendenhall have been criticized for using emails to inform employees that they were being laid off.
Furthermore, Dunn has been accused of protecting and promoting Stephanie Mendenhall and his own executive assistant, Annette Guthrie. Others have zeroed in on the consideration that Dunn was finance director during all five years of Quincey’s tenure as city manager and was thus implicated in the fiscal excesses the Pomierski/Quincey regime is accused of foisting on the city.
Dunn’s detractors are matched by an equally passionate group of Dunn’s supporters, who hail his efforts at reform and economy as exactly what the doctor has on order for the ailing City of Gracious Living. With regard to the charge that Dunn was complicit in the profligate spending policies that proliferated under Quincey, members of the city council, who will ultimately pass judgment on Dunn, are acutely aware that the past council provided Quincey with the authority to fire all city department heads at will. Consequently, Dunn did not have the authority nor the leverage to oppose Quincey’s financial plans. Nevertheless, he documented what could be construed as his dissent with regard to at least some of the former city manager’s spending habits by means of interoffice memoranda which were carbon copied to the city council.
Mayor Ray Musser, who represents one of five votes that will determine Dunn’s continued tenure with Upland, offered a positive assessment of the work the city manager has done.
“Well, he’s done a good job generally, in my view,” Musser said. “He’s reduced top management from nine to six department heads. He’s walked the talk. He’s come in for [i.e., being paid] a whole lot less than the prior city manager. He has encouraged us to get rid of lifetime medical benefits for all council members and department heads. Who else could have done that? That ticket is a thousand dollars per month per family. The clock is ticking and in two or three years it would have been even more. That was an unfunded liability we had no control over and he did an excellent job dealing with that. He’s wrestling with balancing the budget. That is not a fun job, but he is determined and he is doing the best that can be done balancing the budget. We are doing a whole lot better in that regard than some other cities.”
The same courage Dunn showed in recommending to the council members that they take away their own medical benefits is on display, Musser said, in his efforts to have the city’s employee unions give back portions of the generous benefits promised to them by Quincey.
“The city is committed to paying the entire pension contribution of our safety employees, which is nine percent of their salaries and for the pensions of our non-safety employees, which is seven percent,” Musser said. “That is a whole lot of money and it is breaking this city. Steve has asked them to forego that and told them that if they pick it up from here on that will save the city enough that we will be financially okay for at least the next two years. The unions have not agreed to do that and he has said that the only choice is to cut across the board ten percent. He had the courage to say that and he has the courage to do exactly as he said if he doesn’t get the concessions. He has gotten a handle on overtime in the public works department. He is now working on getting that done in public safety, which is hard to do because when you have a fire and need resources, it’s harder to control the hours worked. He is doing things that should have been done a long time ago. “
Musser said he understood that some of the employees who had been laid off were bitter and that many of the remaining employees are concerned about being laid off in the future. Dunn is merely dealing with financial reality, the mayor said, and cannot be rightfully blamed for carrying out the directions of a council that wants to put the city’s financial house in order.
The council is relying on Dunn to come up with sensible answers to the challenges facing the city, Musser said, indicating that the council evaluates the options he provides before ultimately voting to authorize the action.  Musser said he could not speak for the rest of the council and that as council members, “We dare not talk to more than one person about this except during meetings,” in reference to the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law which prohibits a quorum of a governing body from discussing official action. Yet he said his sense of it was that the rest of the council was satisfied with Dunn’s performance.
“He hasn’t been perfect and I feel we will give him feedback on where he needs to improve,” Musser said. “We’re a little bit late on doing this evaluation. His one year contract was up on June 4. I think after we get to his job review on the 25th, he’ll still be our city manager.”
Across the political spectrum on the city council, it does not seem that Dunn has too much to worry about in terms of job security.
Councilman Gino Filippi, who first came into office in 2010, is the sole declared candidate against Musser in the upcoming November mayoral election. There does not appear to be any significant difference between Musser and Filippi with regard to Dunn, however.
“From my perspective, the city manager continues to do what has been asked, which is to stop the bleeding, reduce expenses and identify methods to balance the city’s budget in order to avoid municipal bankruptcy,” Filippi said. “He has engineered Upland’s fiscal recovery plan and as painful as it may be, it had to be done.  He has met the challenge, keeping in focus that Upland residents and businesses are the priority.  There is much work to be done and he has my full support.  Of course, I believe his contract should be renewed.  He is a silver lining to say the least and I look forward to working with him for at least a couple more years at the minimum.”

HESPERIA—Hesperia Mayor Russ Blewett’s colleagues have rejected his call to have their city join a regional group intended to help homeowners who are upside down on their mortgages. On June 5, the Hesperia City Council voted down an invitation to join the Homeowner Protection Joint Powers Authority (JPA) that has been formed by the county of San Bernardino and the cities of Fontana and Ontario.

Russ Blewett

Blewett, who flips houses for a living, sought to persuade his fellow council members that joining the JPA was worthwhile since declining property values have close to 50 percent of the city’s homeowners “underwater,” i.e., owing the institution that lent them the money to buy their homes more than the homes are presently worth.
The JPA, which was championed by San Bernardino County Chief Executive Officer Greg Devereaux, has chartered itself with the ability to use the eminent domain process. Eminent domain has traditionally been used to condemn and acquire property for public use. The JPA is contemplating utilizing condemnation procedure to force lenders to hand over the mortgages that are in arrears so that they can be refinanced to provide the homeowners with more affordable payments.
Blewett said lending institutions’ policies of sitting on foreclosed homes has stagnated the local economy and blocked recovery. He said at least 3,000 homeowners in Hesperia would benefit if the city joined the JPA. In the end, the only member of the council Blewett convinced was Bill Holland.
Council members Thurston Smith, Mike Leonard and Paul Bosacki, concerned that the already cash-strapped city would not be able to sustain the cost of participating, opposed the idea.
The JPA, which involves the county’s best funded municipality – Ontario – and the county’s third most flush city – Fontana – boasts the participation of the county as well pursuant to a vote by the board of supervisors this week. Throughout the county, 264,122 of the 488,422 single family homes in its constituent 24 incorporated cities and towns and unincorporated areas have at some point in the last four years been underwater.
Of those 254,122 homeowners in arrears, 63.7 percent or 151,876 had received notices of default. Unemployment in the county is roughly 12.6 percent. The JPA was created to assist those troubled homeowners stave off foreclosure.
While some elements of the community have criticized governmental involvement in the restructuring of home mortgages as progressive socialism, the JPA’s action will potentially provide businesses with the opportunity to make a profit.
A San Francisco-based investment group, Mortgage Resolution Partners, stands ready to work with the JPA to step in as a participant if officials resolve to use condemnation proceedings to acquire mortgage notes. Pursuant to the condemnation, the current owners of the loans would be forced to sell at a price deemed to be fair market value pursuant to a court’s determination.
Mortgage Resolution Partners has created a niche for itself by working to counteract the proliferation of so-called securitized mortgages, i.e., the practice of bundling mortgages which are then sold to massive numbers of investors. That practice has been seen as a contributory factor to the mortgage crisis because it has created a situation in which a single lender no longer holds the mortgages, preventing homeowners from renegotiating their loans when the value of their property has plummeted.
While the JPA has not committed to utilizing eminent domain to acquire the mortgages and has not signed off on  partnering with Mortgage Resolution Partners, Mortgage Resolution Partners has already secured the backing of investors representing over a billion dollars in ready capital to fund the effort and take possession of the mortgage notes in line with the current market value of San Bernardino County homes they are tied into. The homeowners would get renegotiated loans that reflect the actual value of the property. Mortgage Resolution Partners would earn a fee on each transaction.
Within the mortgage and real estate industry there is concern about the involvement of the government in the mortgage industry and the use of eminent domain and condemnation procedure.
The Inland Valleys Association of Realtors has stated that the use of eminent domain to seize mortgages in the numbers contemplated “could result in the biggest combined public taking in the history of California.”
While the JPA is leaning toward using the eminent domain strategy to obtain and quash the delinquent mortgages, other options are being explored, including bringing in private broker negotiators to change the terms of loans or coordinating relief for upside down homeowners through the federal Home Affordable Refinance Program. At present the median home price in the county stands at $150,000.