By Mark Gutglueck
This month marks the ten-year anniversary of Dr. Raymond W. Wolfe’s accession to the position of executive director of San Bernardino County’s transportation agency.
The approach of that milestone in the past several months has occasioned some discussion with regard to the prospect of his remaining in that position beyond 2023, at which point the completion of the 10 Freeway toll lanes in San Bernardino County will be achieved. Among a significant cross section of knowledgeable people in the habit of observing governance in San Bernardino County are a good number who say the advent of road use charges will ultimately push Wolfe into a voluntary or forced departure.
All the same, there are others who insist that Wolfe’s management of a key element of local collective Continue reading
Effort To Root Out Cronyism Cost SBCUSD Superintendent His Tenure
Less than a year after Harry “Doc” Ervin assumed the position of San Bernardino City Unified School District superintendent, he was forced to depart this week after a series of intense backroom clashes with no fewer than two of the school board’s members relating to nepotism, cronyism and favoritism involving district officials, which were exacerbated by Ervin’s personality conflict with another board member.
According to well-placed sources in and around the district, Ervin’s agenda to concentrate district personnel and resources toward improving academic performance of the district’s students ran into stiff headwinds when he undertook a review of whether a multitude of existing contracts with educational specialists and specialized service providers fit those educational goals. Some of those contract holders Continue reading
Pacheco Singing Soprano To The FBI Everything He Knows About WVWD Graft
Reports have drifted in to the Sentinel suggesting former West Valley Water District Assistant General Manager Ricardo Pacheco has provided federal investigators with a window on multiple layers of corruption at the West Valley Water District backed with substantial evidence outlining specifics within that narrative.
At issue now, the Sentinel is told, is whether the U.S. Attorney’s Office will act in a timely enough manner to ensure all of the issues uncovered through that investigation and attendant probes are included in Continue reading
Wonder Valley Residents Denounce Resort Proposal As ‘Foot In the Door’ To Urbanization
Two developers and a civil engineering and land surveying specialist who in 2020 ran for a position on the San Bernardino City Council have raised the concern of dozens of Wonder Valley residents with a proposal to develop a 106-room hotel, to include an all-night restaurant, spa/wellness center, conference hall and event center to be located at the southeast corner of Amboy Road and Gammel Road in the sparsely populated desert community roughly 10 miles east of Twentynine Palms. The resort would Continue reading
Sam Spagnolo Insisted On Going Out The Same Way He Lived, While He Was Still Standing Up
Sam Spagnolo, a member of the Rancho Cucamonga City Council for more than 17 years, died this week.
“It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Rancho Cucamonga City Council/Fire Board Member, Sam Spagnolo,” a posting to the City of Rancho Cucamonga website states. “Council Member Spagnolo dedicated his life to public service.”
After a stint in the Navy, Spagnolo attended Chaffey College, at which point he was a volunteer with the Alta Loma Fire Department. In 1968, at the age of 27, he obtained a position as a firefighter with the Continue reading
Disney Tunes To Be Featured In Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band’s May Program
The Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band will present “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Monday May 16, 2022 at 7:30 p.m. at the Merton Hill Auditorium located at the southwest corner North Euclid Avenue and Fifth Street on the campus of Chaffey High School in Ontario.
The performance is sponsored in part by Al Boling, the retired city manager of Ontario, and Jennifer Boling.
Merton Hill Auditorium can be identified by its white bell tower. Continue reading
An Apology To Sentinel Readers
The Sentinel apologizes to its 43,683 readers and subscribers for the interruption of its journalistic coverage that came about with the current edition. Sometime in the morning of May 9, a data overload occurred as the Sentinel’s internet service provider sought to migrate the entire backlog of the Sentinel’s 5,172 articles, columns and features since late 2011 to its new platform. An unanticipated incompatibility issue resulted with the merging of the encoding programs used by the Sentinel prior to March 2016 and the two programs the Sentinel has utilized since that time. For more than 26 hours, the only articles, columns and features available were the 2,593 published through March 2016.
As inconvenient as this was for the Sentinel’s readership, please know that this episode was even more trying for the Sentinel’s publisher, who saw the last six years of his life flash by him in a less than a thirty-seventh of a second when he learned that the entire April 2016-to-May-2022 canon of the Sentinel’s coverage contained within the server’s panel had been erased.
With the application of some programming expertise and some $2,500, those files have been recovered, including the 2,277 articles and columns that have run in the Sentinel since April 1, 2016. Those articles, along with the PDFs of each edition of the newspaper and the weekly print-outs of the legal notices that have run in the Sentinel have now been successfully migrated to a deeper, more robust and dexterously accommodating hosting platform, so they are now available for our subscribers’ perusal.
Henry Hopkins Sibley
Zachary Taylor
Winfield Scott
By Mark Gutglueck
Terry Elliott, who is seeking election to the San Bernardino City Council in the Second Ward on June 7, has an extensive history involving fraud, theft and financial misdealings that have resulted in the loss of at least two of his pastorships, civil judgments against him, a bankruptcy and criminal convictions.
Despite his checkered past, Elliott remains as a preacher with the Ship of Zion, a church in San Bernardino, and the San Bernardino Police Department has allowed him to serve in the capacity of a police chaplain. Earlier this year, Elliott was able to leverage his status as a chaplain with the department into an endorsement by the San Bernardino Police Officers Association in his run against incumbent Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra to represent the city’s Second Ward. Continue reading