Ontario city officials raided the city’s water enterprise fund for more than $120 million from 2008 until 2021, the Sentinel has learned.
Fifteen years after the city initiated a repeated practice of diverting specific money to purposes other than those to which under California law it must be devoted, the money has not been returned.
Nevertheless, city officials in October 2021 boosted the average rates city residents and businesses pay for water by 3.6 percent and hiked the rates by another 5 percent in July 2022. The Ontario City Council is scheduled next month, on July 18, to consider increasing those rates by 6.67 percent, and is further on track to up them by 5.23 percent in July 2024. Thus, over the course of two years and eight months, the city will have raised its water rates by 22.14 percent.
As the city’s officials ready themselves to make those increases, a growing number of city residents are questioning why they are being subject to the rate increases, given what has been characterized as the city’s inappropriate looting of the water fund. Specifically, those residents say, the city ran afoul of Proposition 218, which was passed by the state’s voters in 1998.
Proposition 218 put in place strict rules for raising fees and taxes in California. Under its provisions, a municipality cannot shift the cost of providing services under its general fund to utility ratepayers. Continue reading →

Conflating homelessness with mental illness, the board of supervisors this week unanimously voted to enact the provisions of Assembly Bill 1976 and Senate Bill 507, commonly known as Laura’s Law, clearing the way for the San Bernardino County Department of Mental Health to track down homeless, take them into court and have them declared mentally ill, and force them to participate in involuntary “assisted outpatient treatment.” That assisted outpatient treatment is to consist of administering them anti-psychotic medication.
Laura’s Law grew out of the action of Scott Harlan Thorpe, a paranoiac who reportedly was not taking the anti-psychotic medication he had been prescribed when he murdered three people during a shooting spree in 2001, including Laura Wilcox, a 19-year-old high school valedictorian and college sophomore who was working at the Nevada County Department of Behavioral Health as a receptionist. The following year, Assembly Bill 1421, the Assisted Outpatient Treatment Demonstration Project Act of 2002 was passed, allowing, on a trial, the imposition of a requirement that mandated treatment – the use of medication – for individuals deemed to be mentally ill, even if those subject to the mandate had no criminal record and it was merely presumed they might prove violent. Once assisted outpatient treatment was demonstrated as workable and successful under the auspices of Assembly Bill 1421, the requirement was permanentized with Assembly Bill 1976. Subsequently Senate Bill 507 created a requirement that for the law to go into effect in any given county, the county’s board of supervisors must enact an ordinance permitting outpatient commitment programs under the provisions of the act to take place in that particular county.
According to the county, the board’s approval of that ordinance will result in providing “assistance” to those in the county suffering from mental illness, while simultaneously promoting public safety and quality of life and reducing the level of homelessness. Continue reading →

Having reached the point where he will receive as much by collecting his pension as he currently makes in salary, Hesperia city manager Nils Bentsen is officially retiring as of Sunday.
Bentsen will be replaced by Assistant City Manager Rachel Molina.
Bentsen was the Hesperia Station commander with the sheriff’s department for slightly less than three years when the Hesperia City Council in January 2016, faced with the retirement of City Manager Mike Podegracz, selected Bentsen as his replacement. Bentzen at that point had 27 years’ experience in law enforcement, but no real experience or training in municipal management.
One of the things that did recommend Bentsen to the post was his intimate familiarity, as a native son, with the Hesperia community. He attended Hesperia Christian School and Victor Valley College. In his capacity as the Hesperia sheriff’s station commander, a position tantamount to being police chief in Hesperia insofar as Hesperia contracts with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement services, he was less aloof than many of those who had previously held the station commander’s post and he had engaged regularly with residents, city employees and elected officials.
During his tenure as city manager, the city faced some challenges beyond what were already difficult issues in the City of Progress.
When Bentsen took on the post of city manager, the city had long been dealing with the legacy of Penn Phillips, the founder of modern Hesperia, who had created a residential community after purchasing the entire Township of Hesperia for $1.5 million in 1954, and then installed infrastructure that was inferior and inadequate to support the population that came to inhabit what was eventually incorporated into a city in 1988. The first several generations of the city’s political leadership, in some cases because of natural inclination and in other cases as a consequence of graft and corruption, were virulently pro-development in their orientation toward running and managing the city, opting to allow the building industry to proceed with project after project that was accompanied by inadequate infrastructure, thereby perpetuating and exacerbating the infrastructure deficit that had characterized the community from the time before Phillips abandoned it to pursue his “get rich quick” scheming elsewhere. The situation in Hesperia was not enhanced by the consideration that its first city manager was Robert Rizzo, who militated with investment and development interests in Orange County to commit the city’s governmental structure to facilitating and having the city’s taxpayers subsidize elaborate developmental schemes in which the cost of infrastructure was to be underwritten by the public rather than the entities that profited by the residential and commercial subdivisions that were popping up all over the more-than-70-square-mile city. Continue reading →

A woman denied the opportunity to address the Upland City Council at that panel’s meeting on Monday night, June 12, narrowly avoided being arrested by Police Chief Marcelo Blanco when she grew insistent that she be allowed to present the evidence supporting her case that a code enforcement citation she was issued earlier this year was invalid.
City officials, concerned to the point that Blanco’s action in confronting the woman and using his command presence and intimidation tactics to escort her from the council chamber crossed the line into an assault under the color of authority, have excised the footage and part of the audio of the police chief’s interaction with the woman from the video of the council meeting.
The city council on Monday night had scheduled to hold and then held a hearing during which it considered the approval of the list of parcels around the city deemed by its code enforcement inspection crew to be in violation of the Upland Municipal Code relating to excessive vegetation growth and weed abatement and authorizing city staff to place a lien on those parcels.
According to the city, 22,603 property inspections were conducted beginning in February and continuing throughout March, April and into May. As a result, according to the city, there were 193 so-called courtesy notices issued in which no administrative fee was attached and the resident/landowner was give 15 days to comply. Another 42 notices to comply, sent via certified mail, were issued in cases where the city alleged the property owner or resident had gone more than 15 days without complying, entailing the levying of a $108 administrative fee. Thereafter, upon the landowners or residents in question failing to comply, another 15 notices to abate were issued, sent by certified mail, which signaled the imposition, in addition to the $108 administrative fee, another $416 administrative fee for a total levy of $524. This is to be in addition to the cost of the actual weed abatement, which the city says is competitively procured, and will be applied and charged by the city to the property owner along with a special assessment the San Bernardino County Tax Assessor’s Office charges for affixing such liens. If last year’s model holds through this year, the precise cost of each individual weed abatement job will be determined and specified at some point in July. Continue reading →

Rita Ramirez-Dean, an old school Democrat whose perennial and earnest candidacies for elected office over the course of four decades provided a repeated and clear demonstration of the San Bernardino County Democratic Party’s inveterate inefficacy in the face of a more sophisticated and cohesive Republican opposition, died on June 11.
Ramirez-Dean was 80.
An educator whose high-water mark in politics came for her as a member of the Copper Mountain Community College Board of Trustees, Ramirez-Dean ran for San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools once, Congress four times, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors once and the California Assembly last year. While she had a demonstrated ability to win over her Democratic would-be constituents in the many different jurisdictions where she sought office and repeatedly captured her party’s nomination for those positions in the primary elections held over the years, she was unsuccessful in constructing candidacies that appealed far enough across the political spectrum to capture the support of a sufficient number of independent voters and Republican voters to add to the Democratic voter totals she did manage to bring in to prevail. Continue reading →

Legislation now being contemplated in Sacramento carries with it the potential for complicating the effort to hash out water use arrangements at the extreme northwest corner of San Bernardino County.
AB 560, if passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor, would impact water rights adjudication cases by requiring the courts conducting them to consult with the State Water Resources Control Board and the Department of Water Resources to determine whether or not the proposed judgement substantially impairs the area’s ability to achieve sustainable groundwater management.
The availability of water and the regulation with regard to obtaining and using it has grown to become a huge, indeed virtually existential issue in Indian Wells Valley, which stands at the confluence of San Bernardino, Inyo and Kern counties in the western Mojave Desert. The effort and implication of the effort at governmental regulation of the state’s water resources is as pronounced or more so there than anywhere else in California. In the face of a then-three-year running drought, California state officials in 2014 undertook efforts to head off the absolute depletion of the state’s regional water resources. In September 2014, then-California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local agencies to draft plans to bring groundwater aquifers into balanced levels of pumping and recharge. That was followed in 2015 by Brown mandating water-saving measures throughout the state. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
On Tuesday morning, June 13 in Miami, former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court on 37 charges over his handling of classified documents after he left the White House upon being succeeded by Joseph Biden as president in January 2021.
That arraignment came in the aftermath of his indictment in New York State on falsifying of business records relating to payments made from his corporation to adult video star Stormy Daniels, allegedly to buy her silence with regard to an extramarital affair they had.
What occurred Tuesday morning came amidst suggestions that the former president might also be indicted for his statements and actions leading up to and during the January 6, 2021 insurrection that occurred on the U.S. Capitol grounds. All of this is occurring while Trump is campaigning to obtain the Republican nomination for president in the 2024 election. Continue reading →

Nicholas Liguori’s previously inexplicable exit as the City of Chino’s director of development services, it has turned out, came about because he was offered a similar but more lucrative position in neighboring Chino Hills.
Liguori began with Chino as a planner in 2004. By 2012, he was the deputy director of community development. In 2014, he was promoted to director of community development. In 2018, he was promoted to director of community services.
Liguori has a bachelor’s degree in urban and regional planning from California Polytechnic State University, Pomona and a master’s degree in public administration from California State University, Northridge. He is certified as a planner through the American Institute of Certified Planners.
While with Chino, Liguori was the lead staff member on the effort to update that city’s comprehensive general plan and complete two housing element updates. Continue reading →