Chased Out By Councilwoman Calvin

San Bernardino City Manager Rob Field will depart from his post in January after 28 months as the top administrator in the county’s largest city, a casualty of confusion, contention, miscalculation, misunderstanding and, ultimately, the full unraveling of Mayor John Valdivia’s political career.
The prime mover in Field being forced out, the Sentinel has learned, is Sixth District Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin, who would have preferred that he be outright fired without any severance package being conferred upon him. Instead, Field was given leave to resign, a face-saving gesture for him by which he will be accorded the professional courtesy of a generous exit stipend and the city will avoid tarring itself as a municipality inhospitable to its top administrators beyond the somewhat dubious reputation it has in that regard already. Continue reading →

The San Bernardino County Department of Health and its vector control division have been silent in the face of reports that aggressive and atypically resilient mosquitoes or cuicoides of an unknown provenance have been extant in the northeastern end of San Bernardino.
Reports have reached the Sentinel that the insects, which are hard to detect visually, are proliferating, perhaps breeding in standing pools of water in the troughs in the flood control district facilities and settling ponds east of the Arrowhead Country Club.
The Sentinel was told that the insects are able to survive and thrive in conditions that are inhospitable to native mosquitoes and/or midges, that being in cold weather and possibly in cold water that has accumulated locally as a consequence of the rainstorms that took place in November and earlier this month.
One resident characterized the mosquitoes as no-see-ums, similar to culicoides, also known as punkies or biting midges, which are minute flies barely visible to the eye. Continue reading →

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday announced it had secured a landmark agreement resolving a race and national origin discrimination lawsuit against the City of Hesperia and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department that had drug on in federal court for three years.
Despite the apparent settlement, city officials and the city’s legal team are putting out that the city engaged in no untoward action when it adopted its “crime-free” rental housing program in November 2015 and then vigorously enforced it while it was fully in effect from January 1, 2016 until July 18, 2017.
In its lawsuit, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged the housing program was a thinly-veiled effort to prevent the relocation of African Americans and Latinos from the impoverished neighborhoods of Los Angeles County to Hesperia, in what was a clear and demonstrable pattern or practice of discrimination.
The City of Hesperia’s “Crime Free Rental Housing Ordinance” required all rental property owners to evict tenants upon notice by the sheriff’s department that the tenants had engaged in any alleged criminal activity on or near the property. The complaint by the U.S. Attorney’s Office involved a who’s who of the nation’s highest prosecutors, including then-U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr; then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General Eric S. Dreiband; Sameena Shina Majeed, the chief of the office’s housing and civil enforcement section; the section’s deputy chief, R. Tamar Hagler; Nicola T. Hanna, then the United States Attorney in Los Angeles; David M. Harris, the chief of the civil division in Los Angeles; Karen P. Ruckert, the chief of the Los Angeles office’s civil rights section; and Matthew Nickell, the head of the civil division within the Los Angeles office’s civil rights section. Megan K. Whyte De Vasquez, who is a member of the bar in Washington, D.C., was designated as the trial attorney on the case. Continue reading →

A common trick by government officials used to hide their activity from the public is to schedule votes or action at meetings that take place right before holidays, particularly over Christmas holidays.
The Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, requires that public agencies have their elected decision-making authorities carry out their official action in the forum of a public meeting which is noticed ahead of time and which has an agenda or catalog of the matters to be considered or voted upon. When a county board of supervisors, a city or town council or a board of directors for a school district, water district, fire district or similar entity is about to embark on a particularly controversial program or effort, having the action take place at nighttime meeting a day or two or three before Christmas can result in no one being present when the discussion of that matter and a vote on it is made. With a little luck or further obfuscation – such as burying the discussion and vote among dozens, scores or even hundreds of other items to be considered or voted upon at the same meeting – the public might miss what takes place entirely and never catch on at all to what occurred. Continue reading →

The 2022 election cycle brought about a fair number of changes in the local political landscape in San Bernardino County.
Generally, an advantage accrues to incumbents in political races, such that most officeholders who seek to remain in office do so. In most cases, the name recognition and positive name identification an incumbent has, combined with the fundraising capability that naturally falls to someone who holds a decision-making position that will impact local businesses gives a member of the political establishment a leg up over challengers. Such donations infuse a candidate’s electioneering war chest, and if a candidate’s team spends that money judiciously and skillfully on polling, billboards, campaign signs, handbills, mailers, radio and television spots and newspaper advertising, he or she can be hard to beat by a challenger who does not have such means at his or her disposal. Continue reading →

Whether Winn Williams is a conscientious public servant who has been unfairly persecuted by his fellow elected officeholders or is an egocentric blowhard with a contrary attitude who has consistently prevented his colleagues from ensuring that the public interest is properly attended to, people won’t have him to kick around for at least another two years.
Williams, a former firefighter and an incumbent Chino Valley Fire District board member, in November vied for reelection to that post and also ran for a board position on the Inland Empire Utilities Agency.
He came up short in both contests.
Williams over five decades has singularized himself within the Chino Valley in association with the Chino Valley Fire District in both positive and negative ways. Continue reading →

He is in a tavern in Damascus and as he is about to take a draught he looks up and sees Death sitting at a table across the room, regarding him. He cries out, ‘No. It is not my time. It cannot be.’ He sets his glass down and flees from the tavern at once.
He mounts his steed and rides, rides like the devil himself, out into the desert in the direction of Samara.
The sun and the sand are unrelenting. He presses on. The desert is endless, as if he has inserted himself and the beast he is upon into an eternal channel of desolation. Continue reading →

The Justice Department announced today it has secured a settlement agreement with the San Bernardino City Unified School District to resolve the department’s investigation into the district’s educational program for English learners.
The department investigation, conducted jointly by the United States Attorney’s Office and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, concluded that the district was not providing English learners with the necessary services and supports to become fluent in English, or to meaningfully participate in core content classes like math, science or social studies.
The district has agreed to improve its services so that English learners have access to the same crucial educational opportunities as their peers. Continue reading →