By Mark Gutglueck
Upland Mayor Bill Velto and his four colleagues on the city council are suing the voters who elected them to prevent the city’s residents from objecting to or otherwise contesting city leadership’s intention to issue $120 million in pension obligation bonds later this year.
Because of generous commitments made by past city councils going back more than three decades, the City of Upland has an accrued pension debt that is close to three times its annual budget. The current outstanding debt to cover the payments the City of Upland must make to the California Public Employees Retirement System to cover the cost of the pensions being paid to already retired former Upland City employees and the anticipated cost of paying present employees their pensions in the future is referred to, in municipal parlance, as Upland’s unfunded pension liability. More than nine years ago, as of June 30, 2012, Upland’s unfunded pension liability had reached $88,994,066. It rose modestly but steadily for the seven years thereafter, jumping almost $11 million, reaching $99,976,917 as of June 30, 2019. Over the last two years, Upland’s pension debt escalation has been historically steep. During the six months after June 30, 2019 alone, the pension debt grew by more than it had in the previous seven years, hitting $112,039,675 by the midway point of fiscal year 2019-20 on December 31, 2019. As of June 30, 2020, it stood at $120,920,721. A document issued by the city in March 2021 indicated the city’s unfunded pension liability as of that month had reached $130,186,277.
For years, a small but vocal group of Upland residents, including Larry Kinley, who had been elected Upland Treasurer in 2016, began pushing for municipal pension reform. Alarmed at the growing pension debt, which was consuming more and more of the city’s budget on a yearly basis and reducing the amount of money available for the delivery of municipal services, they called for the city to both change the terms of city employee contracts to eliminate the generous pension benefits provided to city employees going forward and for an end of the city’s affiliation with the California Public Employees Retirement System. Simultaneously, Kinley sought to use his position and authority as city treasurer to place a running tally of the unfunded pension liability into the monthly treasurer’s report prepared by city staff and which he signed before it was released to the city council and the public. Kinley’s hope was that by alerting the public to the burgeoning pension debt the city was accruing, an impetus among Upland’s citizenry to redress the issue would form and action could be taken before the city is forced into bankruptcy. The city manager and finance director, both of whom stood to qualify for annual pensions of more than $200,000 and $140,000, respectively, upon retirement, moved to obstruct Kinley from doing so. At first, they prevented him from having city staff put the unfunded pension liability figure into the monthly treasurer’s report, and then whited out Kinley’s handwritten notation of the current debt figure Kinley put on the documents when he signed them before the reports were released. When Kinley sought to assert himself, the city council backed the city manager and the finance director when they renamed the “treasurer’s report” the “treasury report,” and cut Kinley out of the loop. In the summer of 2020, Kinley resigned as treasurer in frustration, while his supporters lodged a complaint with the civil grand jury. The civil grand jury ultimately delivered a report on the matter that was highly critical of the city, noting that city officials had illicitly and improperly curtailed Kinley’s function as treasurer.
Even before the grand jury report was delivered, the escalation of the unfunded pension liability to more than $120 million in June 2020 was forcing the city’s hand.
When city officials took up the question about what the city was going to do regarding the escalating pension costs, they turned to Urban Futures, which offers municipal management and financial consulting services, for advice on possible solutions. Urban Futures, which formerly employed then-Assistant City Manager Steven Parker who is now serving in the role of acting city manager, pushed the city council unrelentingly toward the option of issuing pension obligation bonds as a ploy to refinance the pension debt at a lower rate than the 7 percent expected return on investments that the California Public Employees Retirement System functions under. Undisclosed was that after the city council accepted Urban Futures’ advice and upon resolving to issue pension obligation bonds, it committed to pay Urban Futures $62,500 when the issuance of the bonds takes place. In this way the city council found itself relying upon an advisor with a financial stake in the advice it is providing to city management and the city council.
Moreover, also advising the city with regard to its options was City Attorney Steve Deitsch. Deitsch advised the city that it could get around the requirement in the California Constitution that requires that before a governmental entity in California levy taxes on its residents or citizens and before it take on bonded indebtedness, the residents, i.e., voters, to be burdened by that tax or debt first approve that tax or bond issuance with a majority vote. The way the city could avoid that vote, Deitsch told the city council, was to engage in a validation action. In Upland’s case, that validation action is a lawsuit filed against the city’s residents in which anyone who wants to challenge the issuance of the bonds is commanded to come into court to lodge their protest within 30 days of having received notice of the lawsuit’s filing. If someone responds to the lawsuit, that person or persons must then put on a case before a judge as to why the city should not be able to issue the bonds. If no one comes forward to respond to the suit within the thirty days, then the judge gives the city clearance to issue the bonds, after which no contesting of the bond issuance can be made.
On May 10, the city council agreed to pay Best Best & Krieger, the law firm with which Steve Deitsch is a partner, $70,000 for its assistance in readying the the city for the bond issuance, consisting of $45,000 to serve as bond counsel, $20,000 to handle the validation proceeding and $5,000 to cover miscellaneous court costs.
Last week, on Thursday August 12, the city quietly filed a summons naming no single individual but a collective, that being “all persons.”
“You are being sued,” the summons to participate in the validation process reads in part. “You have 30 calendar days after this summons and legal papers are served on you to file a written response.” That service will consist of a newspaper notice that is anticipated to be published three times over the course of three weeks beginning sometime this month.
There are residents in Upland who either question the wisdom of the city issuing pension obligation or are opposed to their issuance altogether. Among those is Kinley, a former vice president with the Bank of America, who headed up its problem loan department.
“All they are doing with this pension obligation bonds strategy is transferring the city’s debt from one set of books to another set of books,” Kinley said. “It’s a shell game.”
The Government Finance Officers Association has issued advisories against pension obligation bonds, calling them risky gambles with public money, saying strategies involving them are akin to using a newly-issued credit card to pay off existing credit card debt.
Given the degree of stealth with which the city council is approaching the matter, there is a real question as to whether members of the city council want their constituents to know that they have been sued by the city or if they would prefer that those who elected them and put them into office not know that they are defendants in a lawsuit brought against them by their own city.
The Sentinel this week sent an email to Mayor Bill Velto, Councilwoman Janice Elliott, Councilwoman Shannan Maust, Councilman Rudy Zuniga and Councilman Carlos Garcia, asking how understanding they each thought their constituents will be about getting sued, and if they had considered whether some of their constituents will resent that the city has sued them. None of the council members responded to those questions. The Sentinel inquired as to how energetic the city and the city council were going to be about letting Upland’s residents know that they had been sued by the city. The Sentinel asked if the three legal notices by publication will be the sole means by which the city’s residents would be informed that the city had sued them. The Sentinel asked the mayor and the council members if they believe the three legal notices by publication will suffice in informing their constituents that the city had sued them, and the city asked why they had not chosen to use the city’s website to inform the city’s residents that they were being sued. Neither the mayor nor the council responded to the questions. As of today, the city had not mounted on its website any reference to the lawsuit or notice thereof.
The mayor and council were also questioned as to why they had chosen to sue their constituents.
Specifically, the Sentinel asked if the mayor and council felt there was no other way to accomplish their goal, which presumably was to put the city into a position where it could issue pension obligation bonds, and whether they were individually and collectively convinced that suing their constituents was the only way the pension obligation bonds could be issued.
The Sentinel asked if there indeed was another way to issue pension obligation bonds that did not involve suing their constituents, why the mayor and council did not utilize that option. The Sentinel asked if the mayor and council had, prior to initiating the lawsuit, discussed among themselves whether there was another way to issue the pension obligation bonds that would not involve suing their constituents.
The mayor and each of the council members was asked if they felt that the issuance of pension obligation bonds has taken on such a priority that suing their constituents is absolutely called for.
The mayor and the four council members did not consent to answer those questions.
The Sentinel sought to engage the mayor and council with regard to their understanding of all that the pension obligation bonds issuance would entail. Each was asked how much of a command he or she had of the particulars with regard to the plan to utilize pension obligation bonds to reduce the city’s unfunded pension liability, and whether he or she had a comprehensive understanding of the process or if each would characterize his or her understanding as less than comprehensive but still well-rounded. Each was asked if he or she was relying on Parker, Deitsch or Julio Morales, a managing director with Urban Futures, for guidance. Velto, Elliott, Maust, Zuniga and Garcia were asked if they had any misgivings about a potential conflict of interest arising from relying on Morales and Urban Futures and on Deitsch for advice with regard to the advisability of issuing pension obligation bonds when Morales and Urban Futures and Deitsch’s law firm all stand to profit if the bonds are issued.
The mayor and council made no response to those inquiries.
The Sentinel’s emails to the mayor and council provoked a response from City Manager Parker.
“No action is being taken against any individual, constituent or not, and at the end of the day, there will not be any judgment or adverse action taken against any individual because of the validation action,” Parker wrote. “The only exception to this would be if an individual specifically chooses to participate in the lawsuit, then they would risk having to pay fees and costs. But to be clear, no constituent will have a judgment entered against them and they will not owe the city any money because of this lawsuit.”
Despite the action filed in San Bernardino County Superior Court on July 21, 2021, designated CIVSB2121939 and titled City of Upland v. All Persons routed to the courtroom of Judge Lynn Poncin, Parker asserted, “To be clear, the city has not directly or even indirectly sued its constituents. What the city has done is filed a validation lawsuit regarding the potential issuance of pension obligation bonds. Under the rules imposed by the State of California, the city is required to file a complaint ‘in rem.’ This means that it is required by law to be stylized against ‘all persons interested’ in the matter.”
The term “in rem” designates that the lawsuit is against the residents of Upland together rather than against the residents individually.
Parker said, “The reason for filing the validation action is because the city is considering issuing pension obligation bonds, and in the event that the city issues such bonds it wants and needs to make sure that, as it firmly believes, the bonds are valid and properly issued so that there is financial certainty for the city, its constituents and the purchasers of the bonds. It is important to make sure that the bonds will be valid and binding before the time, effort and expense are expended to issue bonds. Filing a validation action is the best way to get that certainty and financial protection.”
Parker did not address why the city is not using its website to inform the public about the filing of the lawsuit, saying only that “notice must be published in a newspaper of general circulation in the community for three successive weeks. Obviously the city does not dictate the terms of how the newspaper publishes, but will make sure that the notice is properly given consistent with the rules.”
The bonds to be issued, Parker said, will run “up to approximately $120 million.”
Despite the elaborate preparations now under way for the issuance of the bonds, including the hiring Best Best & Krieger to serve as the validation counsel and bond counsel for the issuance, the filing of the validation action to issue the bonds, the selection of the law firm of Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth to serve as disclosure counsel for the issuance of the bonds and the city having hired J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated to serve as the managing and co-managing bond underwriters, Parker insisted, “The city has not made a decision on issuing pension obligation bonds. We will have additional public meetings to discuss the risks and benefits as well as how much to consider borrowing in the form of pension obligation bonds.”
The only direct response vouchsafed to the Sentinel by any of the members of the council was that of Councilwoman Elliott, who told the Sentinel it should “review the various definitions of ‘sue.'”
She suggested that it was not accurate to say the city is suing its residents.
“In the validation language, the word ‘sue’ means to notify of a court action. In this case, it is not an action against our constituents, it is a notification of a court process that allows us a cheaper and faster means of issuing pension obligation bonds than putting it on a ballot and calling for a special election or adding it to the governor recall election.”

Brendan Brandt, the scion of one of Upland’s premier lawyers who himself cut an impressive swathe through the Inland Empire’s legal community and served on the Upland City Council for a dozen years, has died. He was 57.
Brandt was born in 1964 at Vandenburg Air Force Base to his parents Barry and Barbara Brandt, while his father was yet a member of the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Office.
Brendan’s older brother Brian recalled that when their father was discharged, Barry Brandt was offered several jobs with law offices in California as well as his native Connecticut, and that he chose Upland, which Brian Brandt described as “an agricultural community at that time. This was the early to mid 1960s. There was always a lemon grove just a few yards from our house when we were growing up as kids. That was our lives, running through the groves. Brendan loved Upland and he lived in Upland, other than when he was in college and law school, his whole life, until two years ago.”
An influence on young Brendan was his paternal grandfather, who had made his way in the world as the owner of a successful table building company. Their grandfather was inventive, Brian said, and had patents for a type of hook and cable used to land planes and another patent for an electrical cable bundle used in household settings for placement underneath a rug.
Brendan attended Sycamore Elementary School and Magnolia Elementary School and then went on to Pioneer Junior High. It was at Pioneer that he met the girl who would become his wife, Patti.
“What we had as kids was pretty idyllic,” Brian Brandt said. “We did a good deal of hunting and fishing up Cucamonga Creek. Upland was our paradise. Eventually, when we were older, Lewis Homes started to come in with tractors and in three or four days the trees in one of the groves would be ripped out, and they laid the foundations for houses. Over the years, one by one, the groves were gone and Upland became the suburbia it is today.”
Both Brian and Brendan had a younger sister, Pam, who was born in Upland. As the Brandt children grew, their father became part of the Upland establishment, first in the role of assistant Upland city attorney, which came about as a consequence of Barry Brandt’s status as a partner in the law firm of Maroney and Brandt. Barry Brandt’s law partner, Don Maroney, was Upland’s longtime city attorney. While his children were of school age, Barry Brandt was elected to the Upland School District Board of Trustees.
Brian characterized his brother and himself in their youth as “rambunctious,” and noting that he and his brother and sister were products of a “strict Catholic upbringing,” said that both he and Brendan “were shipped off to Damien High School rather than Upland High School where we were given what was not necessarily a better education but one that was more disciplined.”
At Damien, both brothers excelled in athletics as runners, competing on the cross country team on a three-mile course in the fall as well as running the one-mile and two-mile races on the track team each spring. “Brendan shattered my records,” said Brian, who was two years ahead of Brendan.
Of note was that Damien’s main cross country rival at that time was Upland High School. Historically, Upland had consistently bettered Damien, which is located in LaVerne. When Brendan was a senior, during the 1981-82 academic year, Damien’s cross country team at last outsped Upland High’s.
“At Damien, our arch-rival was Upland, which was the reigning powerhouse in all kinds of running,” Brian said. “Brendan’s senior year, Damien defeated Upland in cross country. It wasn’t that big of thing anywhere else, but it was huge at Damien.”
Brendan Brandt attended UCLA as an undergraduate.
Both of Barry Brandt’s sons emulated him in becoming lawyers.
“I don’t think we were pushed into it, but we gravitated to law as a career because that’s what we knew,” said Brian. “My father was involved in municipal law, some business law, but most of his work was in family law. Both Brendan and I saw enough of my dad sometimes getting calls at midnight with someone complaining about their spouse not following custody orders and wanting to get an injunction or restraining order, to the point that we knew we didn’t really want to get into family law as a profession. But we grew up with a lawyer as our role model, and after college, we both followed suit. After college, I went to Santa Clara and Brendan obtained his law degree at the University of San Diego, which is a Catholic Church-affiliated institution.”
Professionally, Brendan went to work early after passing the bar in 1990 with the law firm of Gresham, Varner, Savage, Nolan & Tilden. In 1997, in league with Stephan Saleson, another attorney at Gresham, Varner Savage, Nolan & Tilden, both Bruce Varner and Brandt departed from Gresham, Varner, Savage, Nolan & Tilden, based in San Bernardino, to form Varner, Saleson & Brandt, which was based in Riverside.
Brendan practiced in the area of business law, real estate and real property, labor and employment law and civil, commercial and business litigation. In addition to being a member of the California Bar, he was a member of the Federal Bar Association, the Riverside County Bar Association, San Bernardino County Bar Association, and the Western San Bernardino Bar Association.
Outside of California courts, Brendan Brandt argued or prepared cases that were heard by the United States District Court for the Central and Eastern Districts of California, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court. He won multi-million dollar verdicts or settlements in several cases.
“Brendan was hugely successful in his legal practice,” Brian Brandt said. “He argued successfully several cases before the Court of Appeal, and case law was made on a number of cases he was involved in.”
Continuing, Brian Brandt said, “In the legal business you go up against so many other lawyers. In the courtroom, Brendan was no shrinking violet, but he had no dire enemies because he was ethical. His word was his bond. That goes a long way. He was well respected. He knew the law. He and I exchanged notes and conferred with each other a lot, at times literally every day, going over the law generally or in depth. We would bounce ideas off one another, giving each other our take on this part of the law or another, that sort of thing.”
His brother, Brian said, “was heavily invested in the Upland community.”
Brendan was elected to the school board, and served thereon from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he was elected to the Upland City Council. He served a dozen years as a councilman, leaving the council in 2014, having chosen not to seek a fourth term.
His brother’s honesty carried over to his time as an elected official, Brian Brandt said.
“During his time on the council, there were things that went awry,” Brian Brandt said. “People went to jail,” he said, alluding to then-Mayor John Pomierski, who was convicted in federal court on corruption charges. “There was the Colonies case [the prosecution of one of the principals in the Colonies Partners, the development company which built residential and commercial subdivisions in northeast Upland.] There were lawsuits. It all revolved around Upland. Brendan came though it all, and was never tarnished. I think that speaks well of him. He had ethics.”
Brendan Brandt was the vice chairman of the Upland YMCA Board of Directors, a representative on the Baldy View Public and Private Coalition Board, a former executive committee member of the San Antonio Community Hospital Business Benefactors, and was an an appointed member on the San Bernardino County Employees’ Retirement Association Board of Retirement.
Brian Brandt related two episodes in his brother’s life that were illustrative of his character.
“When he was at Damian, there was this guy who was running for student body president, a jock on the football team who was popular but not very serious,” Brian Brandt said. “The priest who was the student advisor recognized that and sort of tapped Brendan to run for student body president because he had such high regard for him. Brendan ran, and won the election. He went up against the most popular kid at Damien, not because of his own ambition but because that priest thought of him as a natural and the best leader.”
On another occasion, while Brendan was yet in high school, Brian said, his brother learned that someone had “made some catcalls at Patti, who is now his wife. Nowadays we would call it sexual harassment. Brendan heard about it and grabbed me, while I was sitting on the couch, and we drove around town until we found them. He made those guys go and apologize to Patti. He looked out for other people. He loved Patti and made sure she was not hurt in any way.”
A lifelong runner, Brendan Brandt generally ran at least six miles a day six days a week, while occasionally moving the distance up to ten miles. He was training to run in the Boston Marathon, normally held in April, but which had been canceled in 2020 and which was postponed in 2021 until October.
On Saturday, August 14, Brendan and his wife had gone to Ventura, where he was running in the Beachfront Half Marathon, intending to use it as a tune-up for the Boston Marathon, and Patti was participating in the five kilometer event also held that morning.
At roughly the four-and-a-half-mile point on the 13 mile course, Brandt collapsed. Running with him was a physician, who immediately began chest compressions. Shortly thereafter, paramedics arrived. They continued their ministrations as he was transferred to a hospital. Brendan had, however, suffered a massive heart attack, and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
“As you can imagine, we’ve been going over this,” Brian Brandt said. “You can say that there is nothing good about losing someone like him, but the one thing you can pull from it is he loved to run and he died doing what he loved.”
Brendan Brandt is survived by his wife, Patti, and three children, Kyle, Conor, and Amanda; his father, Barry Brandt; mother, Barbara Brandt; brother Brian; and sister Pam Brandt Shikiar.

Six years after the San Bernardino City Council as it was then composed closed out its 137-year-old municipal fire department and arranged to have the county fire department take on fire service and emergency medical response in the county seat, San Bernardino’s current city council this week signaled its intention to renegotiate the exorbitant giveaway of the city’s property tax that was part and parcel of that deal.
San Bernardino was just one of four of San Bernardino County’s cities that in the middle of the last decade opted to close out its municipal or locally controlled fire department in favor of either contracting with the county for fire protection service or turning its fire department over to the county fire department. Between 2015 and 2017, the cities of San Bernardino, Needles, Twentynine Palms and Upland did just that.
In every case, the rationale cited for doing so was to to reduce or in some other fashion deal with the financial burden of maintaining a fire department.
Three factors were at play in the cases of San Bernardino, Needles and Upland wishing to unburden themselves of their fire departments. Those cities operated fire stations manned by firemen who were city employees, as do most cities across the United States, a quintessential part of those cities’ municipal function. In general, most cities are responsible for providing policing, fire protection, constructing and maintaining infrastructure such as roads, curbs, sidewalks, wastewater treatment plants and parks as well as providing other basic civic services.
With the aggressive advance of public employee unions in recent decades in which union members pool their money and use it during election season to mount campaigns against elected officials who do not support generous salaries and benefits for public employees including firefighters, the cost of fire department operations, particularly in California, has risen dramatically.
Simultaneously, the cost of public employee pensions has escalated, threatening the California Public Employees Retirement System with insolvency. Cities and other participants in the state retirement system are contractually bound to bail out the retirement system when that system’s investment earnings do not meet expectations and its coffers dwindle, meaning that cities must divert money from their normal operating budgets to make payments to keep the pension system whole.
In 2012, the City of San Bernardino filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. That same year, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the City of Upland’s credit rating, which had already fallen from an AA status to A+, to A, with a warning that further erosion of the city’s credit standing was likely to be forthcoming, which would make the city’s borrowing of money prohibitively expensive. Simultaneously, the public accounting firm Mayer Hoffman and McCann said there were serious questions with regard to the City of Upland’s solvency to the point that in a short while “it will be unable to continue as a going concern.” In Needles, the city’s budget deficit was so massive and the red ink hemorrhaging into its books so thick, that its elected officials took the gamble of becoming the only city among San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities willing to allow the sale of marijuana within its city limits under the terms of 1996’s Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act. Needles did so out of desperation, hoping the influx of tax money that might be realized from sales of the drug might help it stave off bankruptcy.
By 2015, San Bernardino, the oldest and largest population-wise of San Bernardino County’s cities, had lingered in bankruptcy for nearly three years. Led at that point by then-City Manager Allen Parker, then-Mayor Carey Davis and then-Assistant City Manager Nita McKay, city officials hatched a plan to liquidate its fire department as part of a cost-cutting measure that would assist the city in its bankruptcy exit plan. After seeking from the county fire division, the Colton Fire Department, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and the Centerra Group, a Florida-based private company, among others, proposals on which entity might function in place of the city fire department, the city gravitated toward the county as its best option. County officials, however, were leery of putting themselves in the position of being dependent upon payments from the city, which had consistently demonstrated its willingness to ignore its bills. Accordingly, the county was not amenable to simply contract with the city to provide fire services. Rather, the county arranged to have the entirety of the City of San Bernardino – all 61.95 square miles of it – annexed into a fire protection zone previously established in 2006 to serve the desert communities of Helendale and Silverlakes. This zone was designated Fire Protection Service Zone Five, known by the acronym FP-5.
The inclusion of San Bernardino into Fire Protection Service Zone Five entailed the imposition of a $142 per year assessment, subject to a maximum three percent inflationary increase, on the city’s approximately 56,000 parcels, calculated to initially generate some $7.952 million per year in revenue under the auspices of the fire protection district. Simultaneously, the city entered into negotiations with the county to pass through to it the entirety of the city’s ad valorum tax, i.e., property tax to pay for the county to provide it with fire protection. As part of the arrangement, the county thereupon returned to the city the $7.952 million collected through the inclusion of the city’s landowners into the FP-5 assessment district. Taken together with the more than $3 million to be realized by dissolving the department and by the rediversion of the $7.952 million in assessments back to the city, San Bernardino achieved “an $11 million contribution to solvency,” according to a report by a city consultant, Management Partners, which was assisting the city in mapping its way out of bankruptcy.
It was a neat trick. In California, additional taxes are not to be levied unless they are first approved by a majority of voters who are to pay them. San Bernardino, through its arrangement with the county, which simply slipped the entirety of the city into FP-5 and then kicked that money back to the city, had imposed on its residents a $142 per year tax without giving them an opportunity to vote on it.
Nevertheless, city officials bitterly and vociferously denied the suggestion that imposing on the city’s residents and landowners the $142 per parcel assessment was tantamount to a bankruptcy tax or that the city was in any way seeking to tax its way clear of bankruptcy.
The deal with the county had come at a price, nonetheless. The city had agreed to give the entirety of its share of the property tax collected on its landholders back to the county.
Property tax is one of the mainstays among revenue streams that a city can count on in California, representing up to a third of its income, the other major influxes of cash being sales tax, use taxes, business license fees, transient occupancy tax or hotel tax, utility tax, documentary transfer tax, property transfer tax in the case of charter cities, regulatory fees, development impact fees, a portion of state gasoline tax collected in the city, a portion of motor vehicle licensing fees for cars registered within the city, franchise fees, fines, penalties, along with federal and state subventions, contributions and augmentations.
Committing the entirety of the city’s share of property tax to defray the cost of fire safety service in the city of 217,734 population, it was realized relatively early on, was something of a mistake. There were numerous other expenses relating to the running of a city beyond the fire department. The police department alone ate up approaching two-thirds – 62 percent – of the city’s available revenue. In addition, the city had commitments to its public works division, community development department, animal services, city attorney’s office, water department, finance department, parks, library, information technology, community and economic development, finance, management and administration divisions.
In 2019, San Bernardino officials were gathering the resolve to approach the County of San Bernardino about the possibility of changing the terms of the city’s arrangement to pay for county-provided fire service that gave away the totality of the city’s property tax revenue. Either inadvertently or purposefully, then-County Executive Officer Gary McBride stood off San Bernardino municipal officials by disclosing what city officials had been denying for four years at that point, which was that the city had made the deal to give away all of its property tax so it could lay claim to the assessments collected through the ploy of annexing the city into FP-5, thereby imposing taxes on San Bernardino’s residents without giving them the opportunity to vote on the levying of that tax. At that point, four of the seven members of the city council who had closed out the fire department in 2015 were yet members of the council – Councilman Fred Shorett and then-Councilman Jim Mulvihill, who had supported the liquidation of the fire department, and then-Councilman Henry Nickel and Mayor John Valdivia, who as councilmen had opposed the county takeover. City officials, faced with the prospect of alerting a large number of their residents to how the city was, essentially, imposing an illegal $150 per year tax on its citizenry, at that point lost their nerve with regard to undoing the property tax giveaway.
This week, with Shorett the only member of the city council who in 2015 supported the shuttering of the municipal fire department remaining on the council, the council vowed to approach the county and open up discussions, indeed negotiations, on restructuring its payments for the county’s provision of fire service to the city, with an eye toward undoing the city’s commitment to fork over 100 percent of the property tax it receives.
At the suggestion of Seventh Ward City Councilman Damon Alexander, the city council at its Wednesday evening meeting discussed scheduling for a future meeting making an effort to “renegotiate the San Bernardino property tax rate with San Bernardino County for fire services.”
Alexander said, “I would like to see that we empower our city manager to renegotiate our San Bernardino property tax rates. We do not currently get any.”
In response, City Manager Robert Field said, “I would just like to ask for flexibility in how we solve this. There’s a lot of different ways in how we skin this. If staff could have some flexibility in how we approach this with the county, that would be much appreciated. The underlying goal is abundantly clear.”
Councilman Shorett said, “This was all done through the bankruptcy and to start the fire district.” He asked Field, “There is a reopener in there, isn’t there?”
“Of sorts, answered Field. “It’s not as robust of an opener as…” he started to say, but was then interrupted by Shorett before he could finish.
“Let’s just be lookin’ at that,” Shorett said. “I don’t want to say too much. I’m not reading your facial expressions real well, but we’ve had some conversations, and I think we gave up a lot to do that, to get out of bankruptcy, with the fire district, and I think it’s time we reopen it and reevaluate it.”
“Go in there and try to negotiate and get some of our tax funds back,” Alexander said.
The motion to direct Field to proceed passed unanimously.
“We’ve got the global direction,” said Field. “We understand.”
San Bernardino’s action could touch off further changes with regard to the county fire department’s evolving relationship with many of the county’s cities.
In 2004, the Hesperia City Council in a highly controversial move closed out its municipal fire department, the existence of which predated the incorporation of Hesperia in 1988, and contracted with the county fire department for fire safety service.
On July 1, 2008, the Victorville Fire Department, which had existed in one form or another since 1926, was closed out and the city contracted with San Bernardino County and its fire service division for fire protection and emergency medical services. As a consequence, a fire station the City of Victorville had under construction at that time and which was completed in 2009, lay dormant for the entire duration that the county was handling Victorville’s fire service. In February 2017, the Victorville City Council reversed course and voted 4-1 to terminate the city’s contract with the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District when that contract was scheduled to end on July 5, 2018, and reestablish the Victorville Municipal Fire Department. The Victorville Fire Department is now in place and functioning out of all of Victorville’s fire stations, including the one that remained unused by the county.
The San Bernardino County Fire Protection District has 1,043 employees, is the primary fire protection service provider to approximately 19,278 of the county’s 20,105 square miles, and serves more than 60 incorporated municipalities and unincorporated communities within four regional service zones within the county – Mountain, North Desert, South Desert and Valley – including the City of Grand Terrace, the City of Hesperia, the City of Needles, the City of San Bernardino, the City of Twentynine Palms, the City of Upland, the Town of Yucca Valley, and unincorporated areas.
In 2017, when Upland, represented by then-acting-City Manager Marty Thouvenell, negotiated the county takeover of its then-111-year-old municipal fire department, it did so from a position of weakness. What had previously been an annual $8.5 million fire department budget in Upland in 2014-15 had ballooned to nearly $11 million in 2016-17 because of rampant overtime paid to Upland’s firefighters in the year before the county moving in to take on fire protection in the City of Gracious Living. The deal Thouvenell worked out with Supervisors Janice Rutherford and Curt Hagman, then-County Chief Executive Officer McBride, then-County Fire Chief Mark Hartwig and the Local Agency Formation Commission called for annexing the entirety of the Upland City Limits into a county fire service assessment district and imposing on each of the city’s parcel owners a $157 per year assessment along with turning over to the county in perpetuity 54 percent of the property tax collected in the city to pay the county for providing the city with fire protection service.
Many Upland residents, including former City Councilman Glenn Bozar, decried that arrangement as a poor deal. Bozar, who had been a member of the council in 2016 when the city began to explore the possibility of shuttering its fire department in favor of a contract with county fire department, said the council had authorized Thouvenell to do no more than explore the concept and provide numbers on costs that could be compared. What occurred instead after Bozar left the city council in late 2016,he said, was an application with the Local Agency Formation Commission for the shuttering of the fire department and annexation of the city into a fire assessment district on terms he would never have voted to accept. That application was processed and approved, which imposed on Upland’s residents not only an assessment Bozar said he considered to be a double tax, but the city surrendering more than half of its property tax revenue.
“It was ridiculously unreasonable,” Bozar said. “From a financial standpoint it had no basis in logic or fairness. The city gave away far too much.”
Bozar said the rationale for exploring the county’s assumption of firefighting duties in Upland was to see if a county takeover would save the city money. What occurred instead, he said, was the city cutting a bad deal in which it gave up too much revenue to the county, while losing control over the fire department.
With the Red Brennan citizens group challenging the legality of the fire zone assessments used to fund the fire department’s operations in both unincorporated communities and incorporated cities, coupled with Victorville officials showing the will to end that city’s contractual relationship with the county fire department altogether, and San Bernardino now leading the charge in exploring whether the county is insisting on too large of a share of property tax to defray fire department operations in the county seat where the county fire department is the de facto municipal fire service provider, the way is now open for cities such as Upland, Twentynine Palms and Needles to revisit whether they are paying too much of their limited revenue toward the provision of fire service.
-Mark Gutglueck

Having waltzed into a buzz-saw of controversy and resistance with its January move to straightjacket truck drivers living within the confines of the City of Progress with a $1,000 parking fee for tractor-trailers on residential property, the Hesperia City Council this week relented, eliminating the charge entirely for drivers/residents with no more than two tractor trailers.
The city early this year imposed the parking fee on local truckers as part of an effort to refurbish damage to local roads caused by big rigs and defray the cost of having code enforcement officers catalog and keep constant track of where the trucks were located.
City officials justified the ploy to raise revenue on multiple grounds. Historically, Hesperia has had tremendous difficulty with its road system. City officials asserted, with some degree of logic and justification, that big rigs – 18-wheelers pulling 53 foot long heavy loads – are far more damaging to the city’s streets than standard passenger vehicles. Hesperia is a largely blue collar bastion, and what were formerly agricultural-residential properties in the 73.21-square mile city, many of a half-acre dimension or more, have served as a magnet to truckers, who park their rigs on their property. The money generated by the permits was intended to help defray the cost of repairing or repaving the city’s damaged roads.
It is not as simple as that, however.
From its outset, Hesperia has suffered from an infrastructure deficit, and the city has never caught up.
In April 1954, the father of modern Hesperia, M. Penn Phillips, purchased a 36-square mile tract, representing roughly 90 percent of what was then the entire township of Hesperia, for $1.25 million from the Appleton Land and Water Company and the Lacey Estate, which had owned the land jointly since 1888. He advertised Hesperia as Southern California’s newest residential community. Phillips, a quick buck artist, thereafter constructed streets for Hesperia that were of a decidedly low standard, consisting of a mixture of desert sand used as aggregate and bitumen to create a road that was no more than one-and-a-half inches thick. When new, the roads looked good, but under the withering sun and use, they began to deteriorate almost at once, and were fragmenting within three to four years. The flash floods the desert is prone to further washed out the roads over the following decades, leaving many of Hesperia’s streets in poor condition, including some that eventually returned to being nothing more than dirt roads.
Roads built subsequently were equally or almost as shoddy. In the more than three decades since the town’s 1988 founding, more than three-fourths of the city’s council members – Percy Bakker, Mike Lampignano, George Beardsley, Bruce Kitchen, M. Val Shearer, Ed Pack, Theron Honeycutt, Dennis Nowicki, Bill Jensen, Jim Lindley, Tad Honecutt, Mike Leonard, Thurston Smith, Russ Blewett, Eric Schmidt, Rebekah Swanson, Jeremiah Brosowske and Paul Russ – proved out as shills for the real estate and development industries, and were unwilling to insist that each succeeding round of developers in the city provide adequate infrastructure to accommodate the projects they were building, which were layered in on top of or next to projects that already featured inadequate infrastructure. In virtually every case, those elected officials drew heavy support from the development community, and in justifying why they allowed homes with poor quality roads to be built in the city they used the rationale that requiring home builders to provide adequate infrastructure would discourage economic development and progress.
While the council’s passage of the big rig parking permit program carried with it the prospect that the city was seeking at long last to get a handle on its infrastructure challenges, the program’s fee structure was widely seen as lacking proportionality, one that scapegoated the trucking industry by punishing them with hefty permit fees for having moved into homes built by developers who had paid off the city’s elected decision-makers with generous political donations in exchange for not being required to provide adequate infrastructure to accompany their projects or adequate development fees to defray the cost of the city providing that infrastructure, including durable roads.
Truck drivers called the truck parking permits, which did not previously exist, an illegal tax, and they said the city’s action in January was an unconstitutional overstepping of the city’s authority that intruded on their rights as homeowners.
On Tuesday night, the City Council voted 5-to-0 to change the fee structure to allow truck drivers/big rig owners to park up to two tractors and two trailers on a single property. Thereafter, homeowners must pay $100 for each additional tractor and $400 per additional trailer. The fee applies to trailers whether they are loaded or empty.
-Mark Gutglueck

Danelle D. Harrison has been tapped to lead the San Bernardino National Forest as its new forest supervisor. She reported for duty Monday, August 16, replacing Tom Hall, who temporarily led the forest over the last four months and is now returning to his position in Washington D.C. as a legislative affairs specialist.
As forest supervisor for the San Bernardino National Forest, Harrison will oversee a large staff covering all aspects of the forest, including fire and aviation management, recreation, natural resource management, partnerships and community affairs.
“I am not only excited, but am privileged to serve in this role,” Harrison said. “Community is everything, and I am delighted to roll up my sleeves with such engaged employees, partners and stakeholders.”
Harrison is continuing a long career with the U.S. Forest Service, which began in 1999 on a seasonal trail crew on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest outside Seattle.. Since then, she’s enjoyed a wide variety of experience, such as conducting entomological research at the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in Louisiana, serving as a pre-sale forester on the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, and leading an integrated resource restoration pilot program for the agency out of its Washington D.C. headquarters. Harrison was later the deputy forest supervisor on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit and has served as an acting forest supervisor on the Cleveland and Modoc national forests. She most recently was the post fire recovery coordinator for the Pacific Southwest Region.
Her education includes a bachelor of science degree in forest resource management from Tuskegee University and a master of science degree in urban forestry from Southern University and A&M College.
In her spare time, Harrison enjoys traveling, visiting museums and describes herself as a voracious reader and an adventurous eater. Harrison loves sunshine and the outdoors and is very interested in the watersheds and ecology of Southern California.