Mel Albiso, the San Bernardino City Unified School District’s former assistant superintendent of human resources and its current associate superintendent and chief administrative officer, has engaged in numerous examples of nepotism, cronyism and race-driven favoritism, according to an independent hearing officer who looked into the district’s personnel practices.
The district retained administrative hearing officer Norman Brand, the past president of the California Dispute Resolution Council, to look into former personnel director Abe Flory’s contention that he was wrongfully terminated by the district in 2007. In reviewing more than a ream of documents Flory produced or referenced in support of his case, Brand came to the conclusion that Flory’s firing was unjustifiable and that he should be reinstated with $550,000 in back pay. In making that determination, Brand found merit in Flory’s assertions, posted in a newsletter and on a website, charging the district and Albiso engaged in hiring practices that were fraught with  “nepotism, cronyism and racism.” Brand told the district’s personnel commission “evidence shows at least two of the accusations are true.”
District officials maintained Flory’s sacking was justified because of 29 alleged acts characterized as insubordination, dishonesty or failure to perform his duties. Brand found merit in only two of the accusations against Flory, specifically that Flory had violated a district rule when he used overbearing or offensive language in penning a memo saying former superintendent Arturo Delgado had “lied to all district employees in writing and lied to the newspapers” and again violated district policy when he distributed a written account at a school board meeting that essentially accused four district administrators of “stealing” as well as being “unethical, discourteous, offensive and threatening.”  Brand recommended that Flory, who was pulling down more than $120,000 per year, be suspended for one week without pay and receive a letter of reprimand, but otherwise be reinstated.
Flory maintained that evaluations of personnel should have been carried out by the personnel commission rather than Albiso and other district administrators because of their bias.
The personnel commission, which presently carries out merit evaluations of the school district’s employees with the exception of administrators, teachers and counselors, has accepted Brand’s findings. The school board now has the option of confirming the personnel commission’s acceptance of Brand’s determination or appealing the matter to the superior court.
Under Delgado, who departed the district as superintendant last June to become superintendent of Los Angeles County Schools, Albiso had acceded to the second highest ranking position in the district. There have long been suggestions that Albiso advanced to the associate superintendent’s position because of a secret backroom deal Albiso and Delgado closed three years ago.
On January 27, 2009, the San Bernardino City Unified School District (SBCUSD) school board voted 6-0 to give Albiso, who had been the district’s director of personnel and was promoted to assistant superintendent in 2005, a 2 percent raise, retroactive to January 13, 2009. Undisclosed at that time was the salary enhancement was intended to put him into a higher compensation bracket  consistent with duties it had already been secretly agreed he would assume the following month. Indeed, the following month the school board created the position of associate superintendent – in effect the district’s number two staff position second only to superintendent, and promoted Albiso into that position. Among the position’s duties was supervising the district’s assistant superintendents.
Albiso was provided with a $151,188 annual base salary, such that he was receiving a total annual compensation package exceeding $210,000, including all benefits and salary. Albiso at that time was a member of the Colton school board.  Delgado utilized Albiso  as his budgetary axe-man, assigning him to the task of laying off other administrators. Albiso’s promotion into the second highest district office fell under criticism because of his lack of experience, qualifications and expertise with regard to the role he took on. He oversaw the non-educational, non-teaching departments, known as the district’s classified divisions: employee relations/human resources, facilities/maintenance & operations, and information technology.
Albiso does not have an educational degree or any type of state credential, including an administrative credential. His primary duty as an associate superintendent was to oversee non-credentialed personnel, i.e., non-teaching positions such as custodians, groundskeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical help, nurses, etc. Nevertheless, as associate superintendent, Albiso supervises the assistant principals whose job it is to oversee and manage instructors.
Albiso’s daughter, Nicole Ramirez, was recently working in a senior and lucrative position in the district’s nutrition services department without going through any competition or testing for the position. She is the proprietor of an Ontario-based business, Advanced Computing Concepts, which, according to its own website, is involved in advertising, website development and political campaigns. Ramirez touts herself and her company as being able to help a candidate “project the right image, have a clear and well articulated message, and adopt a campaign strategy with clear and concise goals. We offer a comprehensive approach to campaign consulting, including strategic planning and marketing, issue research and message development, and media consulting. A few of the many services we can provide for your campaign include: direct mail marketing targeted to the highest propensity voters, email marketing, Web development, campaign signs, fliers, and other marketing materials, fundraising event planning, [and] multimedia presentations.”
Ramirez and Advanced Computing Concepts have, her website boasts, been involved in school board, city government and school bond and municipal issues. Among those candidates referenced on the Advanced Computing Concepts website are former San Bernardino City Unified School District board members Dr. Elsa Valdez and Teresa Parra.
Both Valdez and Parra supported Albiso’s promotion to associate superintendent at SBCUSD and were his political supporters when he was with the Colton Joint Unified School District, where he was voted out of his position as a board member in November 2010. Both Valdez and Parra were defeated in their reelection bids in November 2011.
Complaints have cropped up that the hiring of Ramirez was improperly done and timed to provide her with medical benefits to cover the cost of the birth of her child. Ramirez’s position, a full-time one, was on occasion filled by her while she worked away from the district office, either at home or at her Ontario office. There have been suggestions that she was paid by the district while actually engaged in work for Advanced Computing Concepts.
In his examination of the matter, Brand found that Ramirez, then known as Nicole Albiso, was originally hired as a programmer with the district in 1999, even though she did not have a degree in information systems at that time. Brand said there was no record of Albiso/Ramirez’s test results for the programming position in the district’s personnel file. Three performance evaluations she was given during her probationary term with the district indicated she needed to improve her computer skills – including learning Visual Basic, which all other district employees in her department had already mastered. Nevertheless, she became a permanent employee at the end of her hiring probation. Subsequently, she resigned, but in 2001, after she changed her name to Nicole Ramirez, she applied with the district once more and was rehired.
Her immediate supervisor, Thomas McCauley Jr., complained up the district chain of command about Ramirez’s performance. McCauley maintained that his superior, Dilip Patel, told him to rescind his complaint because of who Ramirez’s father was. During a hearing before Brand, Patel contradicted McCauley, saying he merely remarked that as a new employee Ramirez needed time to acclimate herself and learn new skills. When Ramirez tested for the position of web developer in 2003, she was the only candidate who failed to finish the test, even after she was provided with an extra hour. According to McCauley, Ramirez passed because a panel member gave her 8 out of 10 points for two questions she did not answer. Despite her performance on the test, Ramirez was promoted to the position.
In 2005, Ramirez resigned from the web developer position and wangled being rehired two days later as a “substitute” web developer who did not need to work out of the district office and could function from home. She was provided the highest level of pay for the web designer position. Patel acknowledged Ramirez did not have the requisite five years experience working with Visual Basic, as required in the job description.
Brand told the commission that “The case of Nicole Ramirez, Albiso’s daughter, can only be explained by nepotism. The evidence of her special treatment is overwhelming.”
In several instances, according to Flory, the district showed a preference in hiring unqualified workers, either because they were blood related to district administrators, were associates of one sort or another of the administrators, or because they were Hispanic.
A custodian who spoke very little English was hired, despite the consideration that safety regulations dictated that all employees be conversant in English.
Last year, Albiso was buffeted with accusations that he engineered the hiring of Helen Rodriguez at San Bernardino City Unified as special education director in the aftermath of a problematic circumstance she had worked herself into at the Colton Joint Unified School District, where she had been protected in her position as director of pupil personnel services there when Albiso was on the school board. Rodriquez engendered a litany of complaints in Colton with regard to failure to comply with federal regulations pertaining to the preparation of education plans for students with disabilities and instead substituting an unapproved curriculum. Those complaints led to legal wrangling between the Colton Joint Unified School District and the Association of Colton Educators.
SBCUSD had for some time been seeking a special education director and held interviews to fill that slot, but, at Albiso’s prompting, the district held the position open for Rodriguez and she was hired by the board, upon Albiso’s recommendation, on June 21. Emanating from the district were indications that other more highly qualified individuals had applied for the special education post with SBCUSD.
Last year, a major rift developed between the district, its administrators and most of the school board on one side and the personnel commission on the other. The stalemate between the district and its personnel commission, which ranks job applicants and recommends to the board of trustees candidates for secretarial, custodian, food-service and other nonteaching assignments, reached a crisis point, as more than 300 nonteaching positions went unfilled for nine months. That contretemps arose out of a disagreement over the suitability of Bryan Astrachan to serve in the capacity of personnel commission director. The district’s management and administration favored Astrachan, while the commission’s three members were adamant that the district instead appoint Patrick Maher. Delgado, in seeking to come to some accommodation with the commission, hired Astrahan as a deputy director in the human resources department, perhaps to make way for bringing in Maher. That, however, infuriated the commission, which was collectively upset over the district’s unwillingness to hire Maher immediately. The stand-off did not end until October, when the board agreed to hire Mahler.

An initiative to change San Bernardino County supervisors to part-time status and significantly curtail their pay and office budgets has qualified for the November ballot, the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters announced March 21.
Advocates of the measure, which was drafted and  initially sponsored by Wrightwood resident and former grand jury member Kieran “Red” Brennan, needed to obtain the valid signatures of ten percent of the county’s electorate – 43,520 – to qualify the initiative for the ballot. Brennan’s effort was boosted when the union for the county’s general employees, the San Bernardino Public Employees Association, and the union for the county’s sheriff deputies, the Safety Employees Benefit Association, took up his cause and utilized union money to hire petition gatherers.  Two weeks ago supporters turned petitions containing 73,672 signatures over to the registrar of voters. By Wednesday, the registrar had examined enough of those petitions and compared the signatures contained thereon against voter-registration documents to ascertain that the threshold to qualify the measure for the ballot had been achieved.
Framed as the “San Bernardino County Elected Officials Pay Reduction Act,” the measure if passed would provide for a charter amendment reducing the pay and benefits of the county’s five elected supervisors from an average of $271,000 to $60,000 annually, and cut their district budgets from a total of $6 million to $250,000 per supervisor.
The effort to qualify the measure for a vote brought together some disparate, even contradictory, elements. Much of the original impetus for reducing the supervisors to part time legislators stemmed from the desire to rein in county spending in general, including salaries and benefits to county employees.
Nevertheless, the unions became involved in large measure because county supervisors have given county chief executive officer Greg Devereaux wide latitude in pushing all of the county’s employee bargaining groups to accept either pay reductions, decreased benefits, greater employee contributions toward health coverage and pension funds or a combination thereof in preparation for upcoming contract negotiations.
The initiative will come before the board of supervisors on Tuesday, March 27. Under state law, the supervisors can directly adopt the measure as drafted, place it on the November 6 ballot or take up to 30 days to conduct a study before taking either of those actions. One issue the board is likely to seek information on is whether the measure’s provisions will go into immediate effect upon passage or whether the pay and benefit reductions will not go into effect until all current terms of the supervisors, including those elected in June or November, end.

The Mitsubishi Cement Corporation is proposing to add another quarry at the south end of its existing operations in Lucerne Valley.
According to its application for the expansion on file with both the U.S. Forest Service and the San Bernardino County Land Use Services Department, most of the expansion site is located on federal land within the San Bernardino National Forest and will abut and encroach on the mountainside.
What is referred to as the South Quarry Project will have an approximate life of 125 years and cover 153.6 acres, including a 128-acre quarry, 2.7 acres of landscaping and a 1.8 mile long road covering 22.2 acres.
Today is the deadline for providing to the federal government comment regarding the scoping and analysis of the project. Mitsubishi will complete and release a draft environmental impact statement/environmental impact report by October, with the finalization of that document by April 2013

Ontario city officials seem to be unconcerned about the perception or reality that they are putting the cart in front of the horse in their latest aggressive moves to wrest Ontario Airport back from the city of Los Angeles.
According to a press release disseminated early this week, the city is working toward forming an Ontario Airport Authority which is to exist as an entity involving Ontario, San Bernardino County and perhaps other local municipal governments. Ontario officials envision that this newly created authority will supersede the joint powers authority involving Ontario and the city of Los Angeles that was created in 1967.
After the formation of that original joint powers authority for the airport more than 44 years ago, Los Angeles used its influence with the airlines to induce them to establish flights into and out of Ontario and furthermore through its Department of Airports committed to making airline facility improvements worth at least $20 million in 1967 dollars. Whereas in 1966, passenger traffic out of Ontario Airport stood at  under 200,000 passengers per year, by 1969, flights out of Ontario dramatically increased and continued to do so for the next 38 years, though  a benchmark of 10 million passengers at the airport by 1975 was not  achieved. Under Los Angeles’ management, the gravel parking lot was paved. In 1981, a modern, second east-to-west runway was built, necessitating the removal of the old northeast-to-southwest runway.  A few years later, as Los Angeles officials stepped up pressure on Ontario officials to have them cede ownership of the airport in total to Los Angeles, then-Ontario mayor Robert Ellingwood resisted, instead seeking to have the joint powers authority rescinded so Ontario could again assume control of the aerodrome. But on February 19, 1985, at a council meeting when Ellingwood was too ill to attend, the city council voted 4-0 to transfer title to the airport to the city of Los Angeles. Ellingwood refused to endorse the transfer documents with his signature. Instead, the documents carried the signature of then-mayor pro tem Faye Myers Dastrup.  Los Angeles took over ownership officially on July 1, 1985.
In 1987, the departure runway was extended to the east.  In 1997 and 1998, Los Angeles built two modern 530,000-square foot terminals at the airport at a cost of $270 million. In 2005-2006, the airport’s departure runway was repaved, received storm drains, and runway lighting was improved. The airport’s taxiways were widened. The same year Aeroméxico started seasonal flights to Guadalajara and Mexico City, making Ontario a true international airport.  The airport was also renamed Ontario/LA International Airport, ostensibly to avoid confusion with an airport in Canada.
Use of the airport continued on an upward trend for the first four decades it was under the control of Los Angeles, peaking in 2007, when 7.2 million passengers enplaned there. But from that point on, Ontario Airport has seen its use decline. In 2008, 6.2 million passengers took flights from the airport, a drop of 13.5 percent compared to 2007. In 2009, the airport had 4.95 million passengers pass through it. That trend continued in 2010, with 4.8 million travelers flying from Ontario International. Simultaneously Los Angeles World Airports undertook a flurry of improvements at Los Angeles International intended to make traveling in or out there more convenient to passengers.
In the last year, passenger volumes in Ontario continued to decline, with travel at Los Angeles International Airport picking up. Just under 4.6 million passengers took flights out of Ontario International in 2011.  At Los Angeles International, passenger traffic increased by nearly 6 percent.
In 2009, Ontario officials began a dialogue with Los Angeles officials about combating the downward trend in passenger traffic at Ontario. But Los Angeles officials were not keen on surrendering any share of the market Los Angeles International had captured in the aftermath of extensive improvements to that airport.
Ontario officials gravitated toward the conclusion that reacquiring the airport was paramount and that not leaving its destiny in the care of Los Angeles officials, whose first loyalty consisted in keeping Los Angeles International Airport thriving, was the only realistic approach to the problem.
They began pushing Los Angeles to allow a public agency-to-public agency transfer of the airport at no consideration, reversing the 1985 action.
Los Angeles officials balked at that, asserting that over the past 45 years, Los Angeles World Airports has made significant investments to modernize Ontario Airport, entailing the expenditure of over $560 million toward capital improvements there.  Los Angeles officials maintain that money consisted of a combination of Los Angeles and Ontario airport revenues, Federal Aviation Administration grants and bond proceeds secured by Los Angeles World Airports, which is the entity created by the Los Angeles Department of Airports to run Los Angeles International Airport, Van Nuys Airport, Palmdale Airport and Ontario Airport.
The once cordial relations between Ontario and Los Angeles municipal officials have grown increasingly acrimonious, with those in Ontario suggesting that their counterparts in Los Angeles are purposefully mismanaging Ontario Airport to ensure substantial passenger traffic levels are maintained at Los Angeles International. They are carrying out a public relations campaign aimed at propounding the concept of having Los Angeles and Ontario simply rescind both the 1967 joint powers agreement and the 1985 title transfer. In public pronouncements, Ontario officials have suggested that the title transfer should be made for no consideration, just as the 1985 transfer was made. They maintain that as a public benefit entity, the airport has no value as real estate per se. Privately, however, Ontario officials have offered what is tantamount to $250 million to Los Angeles for the return of the airport, consisting of $50 million cash, an agreement to pick up the remaining $75 million in outstanding bond obligations relating to financing for infrastructure at the airport and to over time divert $125 million in future passenger facility charges at the airport to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles World Airport officials have been privately advising members of the Los Angeles City Council to seek to recover as much of the money put into improvements at Ontario Airport since 1967 as possible and to accept no less than $450 million for the airport. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa and a majority of the Los Angeles City Council have indicated they are not inclined to consider a sale of the airport during the current down real estate market and want to wait at least two years before entertaining the notion of transferring the property back to Ontario.
Nevertheless, a two-person minority on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, Dennis Zine and Bill Rosendahl, in January called for a study of how to return LA/Ontario International Airport to Ontario. Their motion was referred to the council’s Trade, Commerce and Tourism Committee, which was scheduled to meet on March 20 in an effort to “determine the fair market value of Ontario Airport, including the land, facilities, financial assets and liabilities, then report on the process by which a sale of this facility could occur between the city of Los Angeles and the city of Ontario.”
Rosendahl, a member of the three-person Commerce and Tourism Committee, was hopeful that he could convince the other two committee members, Tom LeBonge and Joe Buscaino, to recommend that the full council move forward with an appraisal and a report summarizing proposed terms of a sale. Before Tuesday’s meeting, the city of Ontario’s intention to form, in conjunction with San Bernardino County and possibly other municipal entities, a new airport authority was publicized. Against that backdrop, Zine was heard by the committee. He asserted that Los Angeles International Airport is “overburdened” and Ontario Airport “underutilized,” with terminals that on occasion stood “virtually empty.” While Zine made a case that some redistribution of the airport passenger traffic in Southern California would be desirable, he and Rosendahl were not successful in convincing LaBonge that an immediate title transfer was necessary to achieve that. Instead the committee asked for a report on the issues relating to the sale be completed in 90 days.
In Ontario, Mayor Paul Leon said he did not think that Ontario needed to be sensitive to diplomatic protocol in dealing with Los Angeles, which still owns the airport and ultimately will decide at what price the airport will be sold or whether it will be sold at all.
“I’m not in a place where I am concerned about offending anyone in Los Angeles,” Leon said. “Here in the Inland Empire, everyone in this region is offended by what Los Angeles is doing to us. We are suffering economically.  We have lost 9,500 jobs because of what is happening to the airport. The regional economy has lost half of a billion dollars. We have one and a half of million more cars driving on the freeways every year because of what is happening, or not happening, at the airport. If anyone needs to be offended, it is us. Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports have been engaging in mismanagement of the airport. How they feel about it has nothing to do with what we have to do with expedience for Ontario and the Inland Empire, which is preparing ourselves to take back the Airport, and we have to do that now.”
Leon said the council was originally set to officially discuss the formation of an airport authority at this week’s council meeting but the item had been withdrawn. He said that the authority’s precise make-up “hasn’t been determined.”
In their effort to reestablish control and ownership of the airport, Ontario officials have sought the backing of other local municipalities in both San Bernardino and Riverside counties as well as the county government in San Bernardino County, where the current chief executive officer, Greg Devereaux, was formerly Ontario city manager.  Based upon previously published reports and statements that have emanated from Ontario City Hall, the new joint powers authority will likely consist of a five-member board that will include two members of the Ontario City Council, one or two members of the county board of supervisors or county executive staff and one or two other members to be drawn from the business sector or a city council within the region.

Peggi Hazlett has resigned as the interim executive director of the San Bernardino’s Public Safety Academy, less than a month after she assumed the job.

Peggi Hazlett

Hazlett, a member of the Public Safety Academy’s board of trustees and a special assistant to San Bernardino Mayor Patrick Morris, had resigned both of those posts to take up the $88,000-a-year job as the school’s top administrator on March 1. But on March 15, she abruptly tendered her resignation.
She gave no grounds for her action. There had been some degree of controversy over the board’s decision to elevate her to interim executive director, particularly with regard to the lack of advance public notice of the action and the consideration that Hazlett lacked both undergraduate and advanced degrees commonly held by school administrators and that her oversight of the academy’s financial circumstance was redundant.
That issue was smoothed over before Hazlett assumed the post, however, when it was agreed that she would carry the title of executive director rather than chief executive officer, and board president Rich Lawhead leapt to her defense in pointing out that she had strong organizational skills, extensive contacts in the community, a proven track record on the board and in previously running a Christian-based home-schooling academy in San Bernardino for two years.
The Public Safety Academy is a public charter school dedicated to preparing teens and pre-teens for careers in public safety. The California Education Code provides for the formation of charter schools under the aegis of a sponsoring local school district, which in this case is the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Charter schools function outside the normal parameters of normal schools and can offer a curriculum and educational smorgasbord unavailable in traditional public schools.
The academy, which now has its campus at the former Norton Air Force Base, was founded as an unaccredited educational seminar in 2000 by Michael Dickinson, a one-time arson investigator.  In 2005, the school was given accreditation. Nevertheless, under Dickinson, the Public Safety Academy fell short of both educational and accounting goals over the several years of its operation, then plunged into chaos last year. Four years ago a financial review revealed the school had not kept accurate payroll and accounting records, and had spent $164,000 that was not budgeted for. There were also questions about $20,000 worth of expenditures for laptops that were either never delivered, misappropriated or stolen.  In January of last year, a report commissioned by the district found the academy’s accounting practices deficient and cataloged arrearages with regard to accounts payable.
Last spring, Michael Dickinson’s wife who served as a principal at one of the school’s campuses, Susan Dickinson, fell under the charter school board’s focus after a report surfaced that she had crossed the line in prepping her students for questions contained in the state’s Standardized Testing and Reporting exam by showing them some of the questions contained in the test. When the charter school’s principal, Kathy Toy, recommended that the board of trustees terminate Susan Dickinson, Michael Dickinson dismissed the board of trustees before they could do so.
On June 20, 2011 the Public Safety Academy board, led by Hazlett, filed suit against Public Safety Academy Inc., an adjunct to the academy  set up and controlled by Michael Dickinson, who received $121,000 per year in salary for his services. That suit sought to restore the authority of the board that Michael Dickinson had terminated. In July, the court ruled that the board had legal authority to run the charter academy, and the contracts of Michael Dickinson, as the chief executive officer, and Dickinson’s hand-picked chief financial officer, Mike Davis, who was paid $120,000 per year, were terminated.
In recent months, the Public Safety Academy has scrambled to maintain its existence and at its February 8 meeting, the board settled upon Hazlett as the dynamic leader needed to lead the school.
At present, the academy is in the process of seeking to have its charter renewed by the San Bernardino City Unified School District, and Hazlett had overseen the preparation of that charter reapplication. Her departure at this point could complicate the process.
The board was scheduled to meet late this week to discuss finding a replacement for her.

Allan Rawland, San Bernardino County’s director of behavioral health for the last seven years, will retire on April 7.
The board of supervisors last week appointed CaSonya Thomas, the department’s assistant director, to succeed Rawland.
Rawland is concluding a 46-year career in human services, having worked in six different counties in roles ranging from juvenile hall counselor, social worker, community organizer and activist, executive administrator in human and behavioral health departments, and as a faculty member with the California State University System.
Rawland mentored Thomas, hoping the board of supervisors would select her as his successor. “Ms. Thomas has my utmost support and I am confident that the Department of Behavioral Health is in excellent hands,”  Rawland said.
Chairwoman of the board of supervisors Josie Gonzales told Rawland at the March 13 board of supervisors meeting, “You have brought about such a beautiful change in the department. We have nothing but productivity, wholesomeness, and progression taking place and it is you we have to thank for that.”
The county of San Bernardino Department of Behavioral Health employs 860 people and has an annual budget of $292 million.
Thomas began her career with San Bernardino County in 1991 as an eligibility worker with the Department of Public Social Services, now known as the Transitional Assistance Department. She gained extensive managerial experience through several successive positions in human services during the past 20 years. Most notable has been her six-year career with the Department of Behavioral Health, where she has held multiple leadership positions, including chief compliance officer, deputy director, and assistant director.
“Being appointed the director of behavioral health is a great responsibility and the board of supervisors can rest assured that I will continue the tenets of inclusiveness and collaboration that have contributed so much to the department’s success,” Thomas said.
Ms. Thomas has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a post-graduate degree in public administration, both from Cal State San Bernardino. She is also certified in healthcare compliance by the National Health Care Compliance Board and is a graduate of the San Bernardino County Management Leadership Academy and continues to participate in the program as a mentor.

The city of Hesperia has sustained a $340,000 loss brought about by the failure of a restaurant more than three years after the now-defunct Hesperia Redevelopment Agency sought to kickstart it with a low interest loan.
In December 2008, the Hesperia Redevelopment Agency provided the owner/operator of Kid’s Planet, a Mexican food restaurant located at 15075 Main Street, with the $340,000 loan, which came on top of the mortgage on the property with Arrowhead Credit Union.  Over the next two years, the proprietors sought to make a go of it, investing more into the operation and obtaining another $800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. By last year, the business was on the ropes and the business and property were put up for sale at an asking price of $1.6 million. Simultaneously, Governor Jerry Brown pushed, and the state legislature passed, legislation that dissolved the authority of all of the state’s cities’ redevelopment agencies. The 15075 Main Street property failed to fetch any offers even approaching $1.6 million and in February Arrowhead Central Credit Union, which held the note on the property, unloaded it to a private investor for $750,000.
Neither the Small Business Administration nor the city, which has inherited the assets and liabilities of the redevelopment agency, recouped principal or interest from the loans.

SAN BERNARDINO—The recently elected city clerk in the county seat has found herself in the unwanted glare of publicity, controversy and challenge as the city council this week turned back her request to boost her salary even as the electoral opponent she narrowly defeated in February is taking her and the registrar of voters to court to contest her victory.
Hanna, who was sworn into office March 5, had expected to be paid a salary of $11,307 per month or $135,684 per year, based on the $2,713.68 filing fee she was required to pay to run for the office. In San Bernardino County the filing fee is calculated at two percent of the yearly salary for the elected office in question.
Hanna has since been informed she will actually be paid $9,302 per month, or $111,624 per year, the low end of the pay scale for city clerk in San Bernardino.
In San Bernardino, there are eleven levels, or steps, to the remuneration paid to the city clerk. In considering Hanna’s request, the council determined that Hanna will need to progress through each stage of experience and remuneration city clerks are traditionally subject to.
One councilwoman, Wendy McCammack even suggested that the council should consider having Hanna voluntarily give back ten percent of her salary as a show of solidarity with other city officials and employees who have agreed to such pay reductions to help the city with its efforts to offset its ongoing budget deficit.
When city attorney Jim Penman said that the giveback could not be imposed on the city clerk, the council stopped short of doing that, which would have reduced Hanna’s pay to $8,371.80 per month or $100,461.80 per year. Hanna did not accede to McCammack’s hint and offer to take the pay reduction. The entire episode prompted some residents in attendance at the city council meeting to question Hanna’s commitment to civic duty and suggest that she was being greedy.
Meanwhile, Amelia Sanchez-Lopez, against whom Hanna eked out a razor-thin victory in the February 7 election, is proceeding with legal action to contest Hanna’s victory.
Represented by the Los Angeles-based law firm of Leal-Trejo, Sanchez-Lopez is petitioning the court to require San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Michael J. Scarpello to consider 28 sworn declarations of voters in which the affiants insist they cast ballots in the February 7 election that were wrongfully disqualified. Scarpello’s office threw those ballots and 36 others out because signatures on their mail-in envelopes were inconsistent with the signatures on those voters’ registration cards. The affiants claim they are and were indeed eligible to vote.
Shortly after the completion of mail-in balloting on February 7 in which 12,143 voters participated, Hanna was declared the winner by three votes. Sanchez-Lopez requested a recount, and on February 21, the registrar’s re-tallying of the votes gave Hanna a six-vote margin of victory.
Penman, who had supported Sanchez-Lopez during her campaign, assisted her in tracking down several of the 64 voters whose ballots were discarded by the registrar. Those voters had not been informed that their ballots were disqualified and 28 of them have now signed affidavits declaring themselves to be eligible voters. Twelve of those are plaintiffs in the suit asking for all 64 discarded votes to be considered in a final official vote count.
Hanna has retained Los Angeles-based lawyer Daniel K. Abramson to represent her in the matter. The registrar’s office will be represented by county counsel. Hanna appears to be secure in her office for at least six months, as the matter will not be heard until September 13.

Ted Dutton this week told the Sentinel that recent press reports relating to him with regard to his current involvement with the Cadiz Land Company and as a past contributor to his son’s political campaigns were inaccurate.
Last week, the Sentinel reported that the Needles City Council had declined to endorse the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, which is a proposal by Cadiz Inc., also known as the Cadiz Land Company, to pump an average of 50,000 acre feet of water out of the aquifer in the east Mojave Desert per year and sell it to five water purveyors serving consumers in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.  Cadiz, Inc. has recruited the Santa Margarita Water District in Orange County to act as the lead agency for the environmental certification of the project and was hoping to get from the city of Needles a letter of support for the project to help offset the opposition raised by local residents and environmentalists to the project.
Dutton said he is no longer involved with Cadiz, Inc. and that it was not true that he was the owner or prime mover in the company.
“I was a stockholder and an employee but was far from being the majority owner,” he said. “I was the vice president of Cadiz, but I am not the VP now. I haven’t had stock in the company for at least thirteen years. I sold my stock when I left there.”
When he was vice president of the company in the 1990s, Dutton had taken a lead role in opposing a proposal by the Santa Fe Railroad and Waste Management, Inc. to locate a massive waste dump at Bolo Station near Cadiz. The Cadiz Land Company had opposed the project because of its potential to contaminate the water source upon which the Cadiz Land Company’s 500-acre citrus, melon, tomato and grape farm relied for irrigation. Dutton said, “I opposed the trash-by-rail plan because both as a citizen and a Cadiz employee, I thought it was wrong.” With regard to the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, Dutton said, “I think they have a viable project. Unfortunately, the way it is being looked at by others is making it difficult. But I am not personally involved.”
Dutton said he became less active in the company when he began spending more time in Sacramento during his stints as a member of the state’s Fish and Game Commission, a member of the State’s Employment Training Panel, executive offer with the State Allocation Board and the State Office of School Construction.
Dutton also took issue with another report in the March 16 edition of the Sentinel relating to developments in the ongoing political campaign for the GOP nomination in the newly redrawn 31st Congressional District. Ted Dutton’s son, Bob Dutton, currently a state Senator, is vying against incumbent congressman Gary Miller in that race.
The Sentinel article stated that in the past Ted Dutton had “bankrolled much of his son’s political career.” Ted Dutton insisted that was an overstatement.
“If you fully consider the situation, I could not legally give him any more money than anyone else could,” he said. “If you check with the Fair Political Practices Commission, which enforces the law that controls how much an individual can contribute to any single politician, you will see that I did not contribute any more to him than I provided to several other politicians or any more than others contributed to him. Yes, I donated to his campaign, just like you would donate to your son if he was running, or any candidate I believed would do a good job. But I did not contribute any more than the maximum allowable amount provided by law. I would have been fined or sanctioned if I had.  I think that while he has been in office, Bob has studied the issues and has done the right thing. I think he is honest. I taught him to be. I think he would be a good congressman. As far as his political situation goes, if you want to write something political, write something about his opponent. How people in San Bernardino County would want a Congressman under FBI investigation, I don’t know.”

NEEDLES—The Needles City Council has unanimously rejected making an endorsement of the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project.
Cadiz Inc., also known as the Cadiz Land Company, is proposing to pump an average of 50,000 acre feet of water out of the aquifer in the east Mojave Desert per year and sell it to five water purveyors serving  consumers in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.
Cadiz Inc., which operates a 500 acre citrus, table grape, tomato and melon growing agricultural operation in the Cadiz Valley, pursued and abandoned a plan a decade ago to extract water from the water table underlying the Cadiz Valley and pipe it to the Los Angeles metropolitan area for use there. That original plan was forsaken after questions about the ecological impact of the strategy were raised by environmentalists and the entity Cadiz intended to partner with to carry out the undertaking, the Metropolitan Water Agency. That plan called for taking water from the desert aquifer in what were deemed “wet” years and pumping water from the Colorado River into the desert aquifer during “dry” years.

Ted Dutton

Four years ago, Cadiz Inc., revived the water plan, renaming it the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. Cadiz is working with Orange County-based Santa Margarita Water District, which services an area that is more than 200 miles from the Cadiz Valley, to obtain approval for the project. The Santa Margarita Water District is currently serving as the lead agency for the project and is charged with overseeing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review process for the undertaking.
Through an arrangement with the Cadiz Land Company, the Santa Margarita Water District will, if the project is approved, receive the lion’s share of the water. In addition, Cadiz, Inc. has entered into agreements with 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.
Both Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District maintain the project is an environmentally responsible one that should not alarm environmentalists or local landowners. It will rely on a wellfield of 34 wells to “capture and conserve” the water resources in the East Mojave Desert using “safe, established groundwater management techniques  to ensure the project is operated without causing harm to the local environment,” according to the Santa Margarita Water District.
In recent months, however, numerous critics of the plan have come forward, asserting that  pumping from the aquifer 35,000 acre-feet to 65,000 acre-feet of water yearly as Cadiz Inc. proposes to do would cause a continuous drop in the desert water table that would dry up springs, deplete the local area of a water source crucial to life and future development of the area, create dust storms on nearby dry lake beds, adversely impact air quality, alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Desert by drawing water away from neighboring aquifers and have a devastating effect on bighorn sheep and other indigenous wildlife.
Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District have stepped up their lobbying efforts on behalf of the project, seeking to gain endorsements of the project from local governmental entities and other influential bodies in the desert to counter the efforts by local landowners and environmentalists to have the Santa Margarita Water District displaced as the lead agency overseeing the environmental certification and approval of the project. In seeking those endorsements, the project advocates maintain that the project is one that is aimed at “conservation” of water otherwise lost to evaporation. A major selling point is that the $536.25 million project will represent a $138 million boon to the East Mojave’s economy that will directly or indirectly create 2,090 jobs for four years, involving $53 million in wages or salaries to workers or proprietorships involved in building the pipeline and other elements of the project.
One such group that Cadiz Inc. made headway with was the Needles Chamber of Commerce, which last month went on record with a letter of support saying it was in favor of the project. Chamber board president Jeff Williams said the project will not only provide employment for many Needles residents but will also result in greater patronage of existing businesses in Needles.

Ed Paget

The Needles City Council, however, expressed opposition to the project with a greater intensity than which the chamber supported it.
Based on statements by city manager David Brownlee and municipal water department director Jerry Porter, both of whom evaluated the project, the city council on February 28 unanimously refused a request by Cadiz, Inc. to support the project. Cadiz Inc. founder and vice president Ted Dutton was in attendance at the February 28 meeting.
In a letter dated March 1, 2012 to Environmental Science Associates, the Los Angeles-based consulting company hired by Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District to do the environmental evaluation of the project, Needles Mayor Ed Paget wrote, “The city of Needles cannot endorse a project that will take 50,000 acre-feet of ground water annually from an extremely fragile ecosystem with no concrete plan for the replenishment of the aquifer. Natural recharge is estimated to be 14,000 acre-feet per annum. Taking the other 36,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, the most over-subscribed waterway in America is unacceptable.”
Brownlee told the council that he was highly skeptical of the claim the aquifer could be recharged in the aftermath of the extraction of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year over a 20-year period.
Brownlee said the water the project will capture is a critical part of the desert ecosystem. “What is the definition of lost?” Brownlee asked. “Evaporation comes back as precipitation. It is a critical part of the natural cycle. It also sustains the desert vegetation and critters. I find it hard to believe that as much as 50,000 acre-feet (1.6 billion gallons) are ‘lost.’”
An acre-foot is equal to the amount of water that would cover an acre to the depth of one foot, i.e., 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851.43 gallons, approximately the amount of water used by a typical household comprised of four people in a metropolitan area over the course of a year.

David Brownlee

Brownlee said he did not think it proper to be drawing water from the desert for use near the coast. “There isn’t even a pretense of a water conservation ethos,” Brownlee said.
Brownlee said he thought it “highly unlikely” that the second phase of the project, involving drawing water from the Colorado River to recharge the desert aquifer near Cadiz, will actually come to fruition, “given that the Colorado River is the most over drafted and litigated upon river in the world. It serves 17 million people in Southern California. There isn’t a drop to spare and the Bureau of Reclamation endeavors to measure every one of those drops.”
Brownlee said he felt it to be highly inappropriate for the Santa Margarita Water District, given its distance from the Cadiz Valley and its direct interest in the project, to be serving as the lead agency in the environmental certification process for the undertaking.
“The jurisdiction in which the potential environmental impacts are anticipated to occur should be and usually is the lead agency,” Brownlee said. “How can an entity that stands to benefit from a favorable environmental impact report finding be the responsible jurisdiction? Is that not a prima facie conflict?”