By Mark Gutglueck
Electing to jump rather than being shoved, Ontario City Councilman is resigning all of his appointive assignments growing out of his status as a city councilman. That will include his beloved position[s] as both a member of the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Directors and that panel’s president. He will also walk away from his membership, as the City of Ontario’s representative, on the board of directors of Omnitrans, which oversees local rapid transit operations consisting essentially of bus lines and of which he is the current president; the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, of which he was formerly the president; the San Bernardino County Council of Governments, of which he was formerly the president; the Southern California Association of Governments, of which he was a past president; the National Association of Regional Councils; the California Association of Councils of Government.
He dropped his letter of resignation off at the Ontario City Clerk’s Office unsigned on Tuesday, saying he would return on Friday, August 14, to sign it and make it official and binding. Thus, at present, he retains his status as a member of all of the boards, commissions, committees and governmental adjunct positions conferred upon him, most of which came as the result of a voted by the city council, of which he remains a member.
The crisis which has forced the resignations materialized on July 28, when the FBI served search warrants at Wapner’s home, the home and office of San Bernardino County Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is also a board member with the airport authority; Frank Lizarraga, a one-time Ontario planning commissioner who is Wapner’s personal attorney; James Su, the owner of EDI Media; the business office of Andy Sehrmelis, a major campaign donor to Wapner, Hagman and other local elected officeholders; and at a mansion in the 600 block of North Canon Drive of Beverly Hills. The day of those raids, the FBI also served subpoenas for the production of documents at Ontario City Hall and the administrative offices of the Ontario International Airport and the Ontario International Airport Authority.
Word emanating from informed sources in government and the Ontario/West San Bernardino County community is that the pay-to-play culture that both Wapner and Hagman were steeped in was brought to the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office too many times and with concrete examples of graft, quid pro quos, payoffs, kickbacks and bribes which could not be ignored. Wapner, who has been on the city council since 1994, has in that time collected at least $3.8 million in campaign contributions, making him the most prolific political fundraiser among municipal and county elective officeholders in county history. Wapner’s technique in raising funds is legendary, one feature of which is his buttonholing anyone and everyone with business before the City of Ontario or the various commissions or governmental entities of which he is a board member and then asking for support, without making any overt threat but implying that for the prospective donor’s pending project, franchise application or contract that has or is coming before the governmental entity in question to be met with approval, a donation to his political war chest is in order.
A shockingly high percentage of those businesses and entities which have obtained project approval and secured franchises and contracts with the City of Ontario and the Ontario International Airport Authority are identified as donors on the campaign financing disclosure documents Wapner, like all elected officials in California, is required by law to fill out twice annually during non-election years and more often in election years.
According to some of those who approached the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in regard to Wapner over the past several years, Wapner was able to sidestep being brought to account by local and state authorities, most notably the Ontario Police Department and the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, primarily, in the case of the police department, because he was formerly a police officer, detective and lieutenant with that agency and now has tremendous influence over the department as a council member, and, in the case of the district attorney, because District Attorney Jason Anderson was formerly one of Wapner’s city council colleagues, formerly served as a lawyer representing Wapner when Anderson was in private practice and Anderson has tapped into the same political support network within the Ontario and San Bernardino County establishment that has backed Wapner in his run as a public official for more than thee decades. It was for that reason that those disturbed by the manner in which Wapner was prioritizing government action to favor his personal and political associates turned to federal authorities.
Wapner on Tuesday deferred his resignations on the multiple committees and boards he is on until Friday so that he could attend two critical meetings involving a subcommittee and another delegation of the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority on Thursday, August 13. On that day, tomorrow, the SBCTA Transit Committee is to meet and selected members of the authority are also scheduled to participate in the Metro Valley Study Session. The authority’s transit committee often sets the parameters for what the discussions and votes of the entire 29-member authority board, which consists of a representative in the form of a mayor or council member from the county’s 22 cities, two incorporated towns and the county’s five supervisors. In this way, the transit committee in the past has controlled what projects were to be considered and which were to be taken off the table, whether freeway commuting options were to be prioritized over rail transit options and whether certain proposals would be previewed to the entire board or rejected without further discussion.
The Ontario City Council at its August 18 meeting is set to consider a vote to remove Wapner from all of his committee, commission, board and adjunct assignments. Indications were that as recently as last weekend, Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, Wapner was intent on engaging in some very serious arm-twisting of Councilman Jim Bowman, his longstanding ally on the council, in seeking to exploit Bowman’s various vulnerabilities, including his alcoholism, financial constraints and some questionable political trade-offs involving past votes on the city council and the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Directors. Wapner’s belief was that with his own vote, that of Bowman and that of Councilwoman Daisy Macias, he could prevent the council from achieving the three votes to remove him from his appointed assignments.
By Monday, however, Wapner had discarded that approach.
The Sentinel is informed that someone who was not identified convinced Wapner that he should do as Hagman did in the days after the July 28 FBI raids, in which Hagman stepped down from all of the committee and other assignments he had taken on as adjuncts to his position as Fourth District County supervisor.
Wapner’s resignation will have historic implication, as he has been the only president of the Ontario International Airport Board of Commissioners since its inception in 2012. It is anticipated that Councilwoman Debra Dorst-Porada will be appointed to replace him on August 18.

By Mark Gutglueck
An attorney for Carol Plowman, a senior vice president and founding principal of Lee & Associates Commercial Real Estate Services in Ontario, this week characterized as “categorically false” reports linking her to an effort by Alan Wapner, the president of the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Directors, to force airport staff to undertake the sale of 198 acres of airport property to a consortium consisting of Lee & Associates and Sares Regis at a price far below the actual market price of that land.
“Ms. Plowman did not participate in the proposed acquisition of the airport property, provide campaign funds in exchange for governmental action or any business benefit, or enter into any bribe, payoff, or quid pro quo with Wapner or any other public official,” Theodore Stream, of the law firm Stream Kim Hicks Wrage & Alfaro, which represents Plowman told the Sentinel in a letter dated August 11.
The letter was precipitated by the Sentinel’s July 28 coverage of developments in the FBI’s nine-year ongoing investigation into activity involving the Ontario International Airport Authority that had taken place that day in the form of FBI and other federal agents serving search warrants at the homes and offices of Wapner, who in addition to being the president of the airport authority is also an Ontario city councilman; San Bernardino County Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is also a board member with the airport authority; Frank Lizarraga, a one-time Ontario planning commissioner who is Wapner’s personal attorney; James Su, the owner of EDI Media; the business office of Andy Sehrmelis, a major campaign donor to Wapner, Hagman and other local elected officeholders; and at a mansion in the 600 block of North Canon Drive of Beverly Hills. The day of those raids, the FBI also served subpoenas for the production of documents at Ontario City Hall and the administrative offices of the Ontario International Airport and the Ontario International Airport authority.
Stream’s registering of objections with the July 28 article, which ran in the July 31 edition of the Sentinel, extended to a passage within it that chronicled the experiences of Kelly Fredericks, who served as the first executive director of the airport authority and manager of the airport following the transference of ownership and management of the airport to the City of Ontario/the Ontario International Airport Authority from the City of Los Angeles in 2016, and Mark Thorpe, who succeeded Fredericks as the airport authority’s executive director in 2017. The Sentinel article cataloged how Wapner, shortly after the local takeover of the airport, began pressuring Fredericks to inventory airport property to ascertain what parcels might be classified as “surplus,” and be sold off to interested buyers. The article related how Fredericks was reluctant to have the airport/airport authority divest itself of property, even it was not at that time being put to aviation-related use, in that it might be later needed for operational expansion, and described how Fredericks’ resistance to Wapner’s demands ultimately resulted in his being pushed out of the executive director/airport managerial role by the board, essentially at Wapner’s insistence.
Also contained in the July 28 Sentinel narrative was a description of Thorpe’s experience as the airport authority’s executive director, which paralleled that of Fredericks’, but played out over a longer period. The Sentinel related how, while Thorp was running the airport, Wapner’s previously amorphous demand that the airport administration ready what he characterized as “surplus airport property” for eventual sale grew into a more sharply defined instruction that 198 acres east of the runway be readied for sale in accordance with an offer tendered by Lee & Associates and the Sares Regis Group at a price of $101 million. The Sentinel article provided a description of how Thorpe, who shared Fredericks’ reservations against selling off airport property piecemeal or in any fashion based upon its potential for use in future aviation applications, in essence dragged his feet and resisted those instructions until a denouement materialized in which making that sale was not necessary. That resolution, the Sentinel article reported, consisted of an arrangement involving San Antonio, Texas-based USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group of Newport Beach, functioning as a joint venture under the title of CanAm Ontario, leasing the 198 acres for 55 years rather than purchasing the property outright at an overall cost of $625 million, a number that dwarfed the $101 million offer by Lee & Associates/Sares Regis. The agreement specified that CanAm Ontario was to make a non-refundable $10 million deposit with the airport authority, after which USAA Real Estate Company/McDonald Property Group, functioning jointly, were given time to obtain local jurisdictional entitlement and environmental approvals to construct buildings and improvements on the property. In the first five years, CanAm Ontario agreed to pay the airport authority $25 million per year and in the second five years, $30 million per year, such that at the end of the first ten years, the airport authority will have received $275 million. Over the remaining 35 years of the lease, CanAm was to pay the authority an average of $10 million per year.
The July 28 Sentinel article, in the context of delineating the significance of the FBI’s activity that day and its relationship to the investigation of Wapner and Hagman that had been ongoing at least since 2018, dwelled at length on what were alleged by those who had alerted the FBI to be quid pro quos, i.e., bribes, involving the two members of the airport authority. Under state law, specifically Government Code § 84308, appointed governmental officials in California from 1982 until 2023 were prohibited from accepting $250 or more from a donor and then voting or taking action on any matter impacting that donor financially or otherwise. In 2022, Government Code §84308 was altered, effective January 1, 2023 so that it was made further applicable to elected officials with a threshold donation amount of $500. Those who had lodged the initial complaints with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office with regard to Wapner and Hagman had done so because of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office’s unwillingness to pursue action against the pair based on their violations of Government Code §84308, and sought an examination of the prospect of prosecuting Wapner and Hagman, as well as another member of the airport authority board, Jim Bowman, on those areas of U.S. federal law which parallel Government Code §84308, including but not limited to 2 Code of Federal Regulations § 200.303 and related provisions in the Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards, which governs conflicts of interest and prohibited contributions for governmental agency officials involved in awarding contracts, grants, or other entitlements.
In illustrating what the FBI had been asked to investigate, the Sentinel reported that corporate officers with both Lee & Associates and the Sares Regis Group had provided Wapner with at least $219,040.07 in political donations between 1998 and 2024, making the further clarification that $123,444 of that came from partners/employees within Sares Regis and $95,596.07 came from individuals associated with Lee & Associates. The Sentinel identified those making the donations on behalf of Sares Regis as that company’s principals John Hagestad and Peter Rooney as well as its employees Larry Lukanish, Kenneth Coatsworth, Patrick Russell, Vincent Ciavarella and William Thormahlen. The Sentinel delineated those connected with Lee & Associates who had made the donations as Joe McKay, Mike Wolfe and Carol Plowman.
The Sentinel’s July 28 narrative propounded the theory pursued by the FBI that Wapner’s and Hagman’s demonstrable pattern of accepting campaign donations from donors, who were not solely limited to but did include the Lee and Associates and Sares Regis principals and employees, and then taking action in their official capacity as airport authority directors that was beneficial to those donors potentially constituted bribery and/or soliciting bribes (18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(B)) and honest services wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 371), which approximate the California state offense of violating Government Code §84308.
In his letter to the Sentinel, Stream took issue with the Sentinel including reference to Plowman in the series of events that led to the FBI investigation and constituted the issues being explored by investigators and evaluated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution. In this way, Stream asserted, the Sentinel article contained “false and defamatory statements” at least insofar as Plowman is concerned and that the Sentinel had “no factual basis for grouping her with the other identified individuals” who had provided donations above the $250 limit formerly specified in Government Code §84308 or the $500 limit the current version of Government Code §84308 imposes on both appointed and elected public officials.
According to Stream, Plowman “did not make the substantial campaign contributions the article attributes or imputes to her. To the extent the article attributes any portion of the stated $95,596.07 or $219,040.07 collective totals to Ms. Plowman, that attribution is false and materially misleading.”
In his letter, Stream implies that Plowman gave no money to Wapner.
“The article identifies no communication between Ms. Plowman and Wapner concerning the airport property, no role she played in the proposed transaction, and no contribution she made in exchange for official action,” Streams letter states. “Instead, the Sentinel aggregated alleged contributions by numerous people over more than two decades, inserted Ms. Plowman’s name into those collective totals, and then accused the named individuals of graft, bribery, and paying off a public official.”
In suggesting that Plowman did not provide money to Wapner as the July 28 Sentinel article reported, Stream cites the article’s failure to provide the precise dates and amounts contributed to Wapner by Plowman to insinuate that the donations were never made.
“The article provides no breakdown identifying any amount supposedly contributed by Ms. Plowman, no dates of any purported contributions by her, and no factual basis for grouping her with the other identified individuals and attributing that substantial sum to them collectively,” Stream wrote.
While the Sentinel did not include a blow-by-blow description of the donations from the Lee & Associates and Sares Regis principals and employees in the July 28 article, it had previously reported on the generosity shown to Wapner by Lee & Associates in sponsoring his political activity. In an article published on February 20, 2026, the Sentinel reported that Lee & Associates and its various principals/employees had provided Wapner with at least $97,153.14 in political contributions. In an article published in the Sentinel’s July 18, 2025 edition, it was noted that Lee & Associates had endowed Wapner’s political war chest with at least $95,596.07. In a Sentinel article published on August 2, 2024, it was reported that Lee & Associates had provided Wapner with, at minimum, $95,596.07 for use in his electioneering efforts. In an article published on October 7, 2022 pertaining to Wapner having pressured Thorpe and other airport staff members to sell the 198-acre airport property to the Lee & Associates/Sares Regis consortium, the Sentinel reported that between 1999 and that month, McKay, Wolfe, Plowman and Lee & Associates had supplied Wapner with $95,596.07 in campaign funding.
Available California Form 460 campaign funding disclosure records filed by Wapner in connection with his campaigns going back to his first run for the city council in 1994 that are in the possession of the Sentinel are marred by, two instances of an entire missing year and in a third and a fourth case missing reports covering at least six months each. That incomplete record shows that Plowman provided Wapner with $1,000 on December 8, 1999; $1,000 on November 28, 2000; $1,000 on December 27, 2001; $1,000 on January 28, 2003; $500 on May 29, 2003; $1,000 and $99, both on June 9, 2005; $1,000 on February 6, 2006; $1,000 on June 1, 2006; $1,000 on December 12, 2007; $1,000 on September 8, 2009; $1,000 on February 18, 2009; $1,000 on February 27, 2012; $1,000 on February 25, 2013; $1000 on May 19, 2014; $5,000 on October 17, 2014; $1,000 on March 20, 2015; $1,000 on February 16, 2016; $1,500 on February 17, 2017; $99 on May 31, 2018, $1,000 on February 3, 2020; $2,500 on February 5, 2021 and $2,500 on April 12, 2022..
Stream’s letter implied that Plowman did not contribute to Wapner’s campaign fund.
“To the extent the article attributes any portion of the stated $95,596.07 or $219,040.07 collective totals to Ms. Plowman, that attribution is false and materially misleading,” Stream wrote. “During the past 24 months, Ms. Plowman’s only contributions were two checks to the Business Roundtable—one for $1,000 and one for $3,000. No contribution by Ms. Plowman had any connection to Wapner, the proposed property transaction, or any governmental action.”
As Stream did not acknowledge in his August 11 letter to the Sentinel that Plowman provided any money to Wapner’s campaign fund, he did not offer any explanation of what Plowman’s purpose was in the more the more than $28,000 investment she has made in Wapner’s political career. He makes no reference to Government Code § 84308, which prohibited Wapner from engaging in any action, as the president of the Ontario International Airport Authority, concerning or impacting Lee & Associates and Sares Regis, given the political contributions he had received from those companies, their principals and employees. Nor did he reference the parallels in federal law to Government Code § 84308 – 2 Code of Federal Regulations § 200.303, 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(B) and 18 U.S.C. § 371 – which formed the basis of the FBI’s investigation of possible bribery or solicitation of a bribe on the parts of Wapner and Hagman.
Stream did write in his letter to the Sentinel, “Ms. Plowman categorically denies every statement and implication that she participated in, knew of, authorized, facilitated, funded, or benefited from any bribe, payoff, graft, quid pro quo, pay-to-play arrangement, or other corrupt transactions.”
Stream withheld judgment as to whether Hagestad, Rooney, Lukanish, Coatsworth, Russell, Ciavarella, Thormahlen, McKay and Wolfe, in providing political contributions to Wapner, were engaged in an attempt to influence his decision-making as the president of the Ontario International Airport Board of Commissioners, but insisted that his client was engaged in no such illicit effort. He demanded that the Sentinel “[c]orrect the false and misleading attribution to Ms. Plowman of having participated in supplying substantial campaign funding to Wapner” and that it [r]emove Ms. Plowman’s name from the portions of the article associating the identified contributors with criminal or corrupt conduct.”
Stream demanded that the Sentinel retract those portions of the July 28 article which related to how “Ms. Plowman supplied campaign funding constituting or contributing to ‘graft,’ a “classic quid pro,’ ‘a bribe to a public official’ or payment intended to benefit persons “paying [Wapner] off.”
Stream further wants the Sentinel to back off from any reportage that “Ms. Plowman participated in, funded, knew of, or benefited from bribery, graft, a payoff, a quid pro quo or any other corrupt transaction.”

By Mark Gutglueck
With the FBI scrutinizing virtually every element of his political existence, Ontario Councilman Alan Wapner has abandoned his challenge of Mayor Paul Leon and will instead run for reelection to the city council for the eighth consecutive time in the upcoming November 3 election.
Leon and Wapner are two of San Bernardino County’s longest-serving local elected officials. Wapner was first elected to the city council in 1994. Leon was appointed to the council in 1998.
Wapner, who has stated on numerous occasions, in numerous contexts and to numerous individuals privately and publicly that he considers himself to be comprehensively superior to Leon with regard to every consideration the voters should make in selecting a mayor, seriously contemplated running for mayor in the special election that took place in June 2005 after former Mayor Gary Ovitt was elected to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in November 2004 with two years remaining on his term. Leon, however, beat Wapner in filing to compete in that race, and Wapner opted against making it into a race between two incumbent council members. Leon prevailed in the special election against former Ontario City Attorney Sam Crowe, who had also served on the city council in the 1960s. Wapner contemplated running against Leon in 2010, but again deferred to the reality that Leon, given his Spanish surname, had an electoral advantage over him in a city in which upwards of 60 percent of the population is Hispanic. Privately, Wapner lamented that Ontario was being poorly and inadequately represented by Leon who was doing a disservice to the city’s residents by monopolizing the mayor’s position. Nevertheless, he chose, again in 2024, 2028 and 2022 to run for city council rather than mayor, and even arranged to run as a troika with Mayor Leon and Councilman Jim Bowman, who together shared the same election cycle in which they were due for reelection in California’s gubernatorial election years. The three ran as members of the so-called Team Ontario, claiming in mutually-funded election material that they were responsible for the economic development in their city that had rendered Ontario into the most lavishly funded municipality in San Bernardino County. Despite this public show of comity, Leon and Wapner in actuality loathed one another. Continue reading →

With the deadline for elected public office candidacies for most of the municipal positions to be contested in the November 3 general election eclipsing at 5 p.m. today, a clearer picture of who is vying for mayoral and council positions in San Bernardino County’s cities and towns has emerged.
In Barstow Sonia Compton, Valerie Lee, Kelly M. Parker are vying to represent the city’s District 1, which is currently filled by Councilwoman Carmen Hernandez. Hernandez is not seeking reelection. Bartow District Two Councilman James Noble is seeking reelection and is being challenged by Latron Lester.
In Needles, incumbent Mayor Janet Jernigan is being challenged by former Mayor Jeff Williams
and incumbent council members Henry Longbrake and Jamie McCorkle are seeking reelection with Wayne Colburn, Sandra Queen Noble and Charles Dressler competing against them.
In Apple Valley, incumbent Mayor Scott Nassif is running this year and David Dencker, and Robert Lucero and Angelita Valles are running against him. In District 4, incumbent Curt Emick is seeking reelection, with Brian Cochrane and Matthew Rutledge vying against him. In District 3, incumbent Kari Leon is facing challengers Ted Bohanon and Evaggelia Markov.
In Adelanto, incumbent Mayor Gabriel Reyes is seeking to remain in office while facing a challenge from incumbent Councilwoman Stevevonna Evans and Ronald Beard. Incumbent Councilman Angelo Meza and incumbent Councilwoman Amanda Uptergrove are vying for reelection and Edward C. Reyes and Taisha Brown are running against them. Continue reading →

A man who lives in Summit Valley in the rugged area south of Hesperia was attacked by a group of people after they came onto his property on August 6.
The man survived two ineffective attempts to kill him. Thursday night, just before 8 p.m., residents of a home located in the isolated Summit Valley area in the unincorporated area outside the Hesperia City Limits saw several individuals in a vehicle, described as a gray Chevrolet Traverse drive onto their approximately 37-acre property. When they confronted them, the Traverse left, but less than 15 minutes later a black Jeep Cherokee came onto the property, located in the 4600 block of Summit Valley Road. It is not known whether those in Jeep Cherokee were the same group in the Traverse. The driver of the Cherokee angled the 4X4 SUV at, and attempted to hit, one of the residents, who managed to avoid being run down. At least one of the Jeep’s occupants then fired at least two gunshots at the man before driving away.
After sheriff’s deputies were summoned to the scene, they came across two 9mm bullet casings believed to have been ejected from the gun used in the shooting attempt, were found on the ground near where the two murder attempts occurred.

The Twentynine Palms City Council on July 28 failed to reach a consensus on pursuing a grant to work with the Sanctuary Church to establish a comprehensive emergency services/disaster response center, resulting in the city now being unable to meet the filing deadline for the grant.
Since 2011, the Sanctuary Church, has run the Hope Center out of an Adobe Road building, receiving food from the FIND Food Bank in Indio and the US Department of Agriculture in San Bernardino and providing it free Twentynine Palms residents in need weekly through the Feed the Need program. It has traditionally held giveaways at 5 p.m. every Tuesday. At least since 2025, the City of Twentynine Palms has participated in that program by augmenting its operations with $10,000 per year. Those heavily involved in the Hope Center include Bishop Perry Ford of the Sanctuary Church, the Hope Center’s community outreach director, Shanese Risper and Sylvester Cullum, the business administrator at The Hope Center.
In recent years, the Red Cross has had a presence in Twentynine Palms as a consequence of summer monsoons and resultant flooding that left residents in low-lying areas homeless, at least temporarily. Dialogues between the community volunteers led to a suggestion that the shuttered Rite Aid building acquired by the city could be converted into a so-called community resilience center.
A community resilience center is a local hub that supports everyday community needs and transforms into a resource center during emergencies to enhance what is termed “neighborhood resilience.” Such centers normally involve indoor space intended as a forum for to give local residents daily or weekly access to available social services and the serve as a shelter during disasters such as fires, extreme heat, earthquakes, or floods. Continue reading →

(ONTARIO–August 6) In a bid to assist Alan Wapner in his mayoral effort, Ontario Councilwoman Daisy Macias is jumping into the November 3 race.
At the behest of Wapner, who has offered her assistance in funding what both have agreed will be a token campaign not intended to succeed in getting her elected but rather to divide the city’s Hispanic vote, Macias took out mayoral candidacy papers, Ontario Assistant City Clerk Claudia Isbell confirmed on August 4.
Wapner was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994, and had contemplated running for mayor in the 2005 special election to replace former Mayor Garry Ovitt after Ovitt left the mayoral position to serve as Fourth District San Bernardino County supervisor following his election to that post in 2004, but did not do so when Paul Leon, who had been on the city council since 1998 beat him to the punch by declaring he was going to seek the office. Leon prevailed in that contest over Sam Crowe, Ontario’s former city attorney and former city councilman.
Wapner and Leon thereafter found themselves on the same electoral cycle, such that each was up for reelection, Leon for mayor and Wapner for councilman, in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. At each juncture, Wapner deferred his ambition to become mayor to some future point. Wapner was hampered from achieving the city’s highest elective post by the consideration that Leon held the upper hand of being the incumbent and the even more important advantage of his Spanish surname, which redounded to Leon’s benefit in a city which at that time had a population that was then 63 percent Latino and which in the last 21 years has transitioned into being 68.8 percent Hispanic.
At various times during their combined tenure as city leaders, the relationship between Leon and Wapner has broken down and broken into open hostility. In 2009, their enmity reached what was previously a nadir, when Wapner joined with two other members of the council to reduce the mayor’s stipend by $30,000 to match what was paid council members and he hired attorney/private investigator Loerena Nesci to dig up dirt on Leon, and then had Nesci trumpet to the community that Leon was carrying on with Diana Huizar, an executive secretary working at the Ontario Convention Center. Wapner had hoped the matter involving Huizar would damage Leon’s reputation sufficiently to dim the mayor’s prospects for reelection in 2010 or convince him to discontinue in office entirely. When a pollster who took the pulse of the community reported back to Wapner that the Huizar affair had not made sufficient inroads on Leon’s popularity with the city’s electorate and that polls showed Wapner losing to Leon in an head-to-head contest, Wapner opted out of running for mayor in 2010. Instead, he engineered a rapprochement with Leon, and Leon, Wapner and Jim Bowman, another incumbent councilman who shared the same re-election cycle, represented themselves as “Team Ontario,” the trio of dedicated and competent city fathers who were responsible for Ontario being the most economically successful of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities. All three were reelected, and in the election years since, Leon and Wapner remained in their respective mayoral and council lanes, endorsing one another for reelection, along with Jim Bowman.
In 2024, the veneer of civility that had existed between Leon and Wapner began to crack when Wapner poached Daisy Macias from Leon as one of his allies. Leon had long been grooming Macias as a potential member of the city council, having hired her to work as a secretary at the church where he is pastor, then assisting her in getting positions in the real estate industry, including most recently a high-profile and lucrative position with Community Renaissance, an affordable housing developer founded by Jeff Burum, who has proven over the years to be one of the deepest-pocketed donors to San Bernardino County politicians, including Leon and Wapner. In a move to begin a redraft of Ontario’s political landscape, Wapner transferred $40,000 out of his political war chest to Macias to assist her in what was to Leon a surprise run for the city council in Ontario’s recently-formed Fourth Council District. Wapner then arranged for a host of donors he had come to rely on to fill out his own campaign coffers to make donations to Macias. In this way, Macias proved successful and was elected Fourth District councilwoman. Once in office, she aligned herself with Wapner.
Last year, when Leon downplayed the concerns expressed by some of the city’s residents about the aggressive tactics of federal law enforcement officers with the onset of Donald Trump’s second term as president, in particular Border Patrol and Department of Immigration and Customs rounding up undocumented aliens, Wapner perceived that to be a major stumble on the mayor’s part, one that would alienate him from a portion of his natural constituency. He seized the day, making statement to the effect that he was horrified by the Leon’s insensitivity to the Latino community. He then reformulated his campaign committee, which was formerly intended to raise money for his 2026 council reelection campaign, instead declaring that he was seeking the mayoralty. Wapner then moved to secure the backing of all of Ontario’s municipal employee unions, including AFSCME, SEIU, the Firefighters Association, the Ontario Police Officers Association and the Ontario Police Management Association. In addition, Wapner, who over the three decades he had been in office had already established himself as the most prolific fundraiser among local elected officials in San Bernardino County history, outhustled Leon in preparing for the 2026 election. From January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, Wapner took in $326,100 in political donations. In the same timeframe, Mayor Leon collected $48,600 in contributions. In the first six months of this year, Wapner brought in another 323,199.08 in donations. Leon was able to touch his supporters for $47,849 from January 1 until June 30, 2026. In this way, Wapner was able to obtain $652,248.08 in political donations to fuel his effort in the 2026 mayoral contest, which was 676 percent of the $96,449 in political contributions Leon put together.
With his endorsements and monetary lead, Wapner was confident that he would be able to overcome the two advantages Leon possessed, namely being the incumbent and the readiness of Ontario’s predominantly Hispanic population to embrace a Latino as mayor rather than a Caucasian.
Wapner, however, encountered a major speed bump in the race to become mayor on July 28, when the FBI served search warrants at his home and business office, as well as at the headquarters of the Ontario International Airport Authority, where he is the president of the airports board of directors, as well as at the homes and offices of two of his closest associates, San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is a member with Wapner of the airport authority board, and Wapner’s personal attorney, Frank Lizarraga. Word on the street was that the FBI already had strong indication that Wapner and Hagman were taking bribes and receiving kickbacks, and that in serving the search warrants the federal agents were looking for even more damning evidence in that regard.
Seeing what had occurred as a major setback to Continue reading →

Isaac Elias Carrillo, a 28-year-old instructional assistant at Condor Elementary School in Twentynine Palms has been charged with two counts related to sexual abuse of a child.
Carrillo, who lives in Twentynine Palms, will not be returning to resume his work assignment with the district when the new school year begins later this month.
Carrillo has been charged with sexually abusing a developmentally disabled student under age 14 at Condor Elementary School.
The five foot-eight inch, 200-pound Carrillo was taken into custody on July 1 at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s headquarters in San Bernardino, where he had apparently consented to speak with investigators, a interview which turned into an interrogation.
In court July 8, he pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse with a child 10 or younger and sexual penetration or oral copulation with a child 10 or younger.
According to information available to the Sentinel, in May, a mother of a child who had attended Condor Elementary School approached the police department in Oceanside in San Diego County and told a detective there that her child had been sexually abused at the Twentynine Palms School. The child told the mother the abuse had taken place during school hours. She related what the child said to the Oceanside police investigator, who relayed that information to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department personnel in Twentynine Palms.
On May 13, Oceanside police notified the Morongo Basin sheriff’s station about what the mother had said and forwarded a report of the interview with her.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department probe into what occurred was handled by Deputy A. Stumbo, who works as a resource officer with the Morongo Basin Union School District, and Detective Wendy Winegar, a member of the sheriff’s Crimes Against Children Detail. They identified Carrillo as a suspect.
Carrillo has been employed by the Morongo Unified School District since 2018 and has worked at multiple schools throughout the Morongo Basin, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Continue reading →

Federal Express is going to going to shutter its shipping center in Victorville, in September, which will entail laying off 54 employees.
The current operation at 12212 Industrial Boulevard is the 16th largest employer in Victorville, offering a range of FedEx shipping services, including express and ground drop-off, package pickup, packaging supplies, and international shipping. It also provides in-store services such as getting shipping labels, holding packages for pickup, and offering Saturday service.
Federal Express will maintain a presence at the location, rebranded as a FedEx Office, after September 27, but it will be reduced to customer interface with a skeleton crew.