Robert Shuey, whose violent 30-year existence left a train of ruined lives in its wake, met an equally violent end, information provided to the Sentinel this week by a reliable source indicates.
There have been conflicting accounts as to Shuey’s April 2021 demise. In one he was felled by an effort to ensure he was unable to cooperate with law enforcement authorities or testify, and in another he was dispatched in a revenge killing. A third featured him as a victim of a professional hit commissioned by an international drug cartel. There were two suicide scenarios promulgated, one involving him shooting himself and another in which he was said to have willfully overdosed. He was also said to have accidentally overdosed.
In its original public notification of the incident, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s department characterized Shuey’s death as a murder. Subsequently, however, the department represented it as an unexplained death, and the department did nothing to stem a billowing rumor that Shuey had succumbed to a drug overdose. There were discrepancies between that suggestion and certain known facts. Other anomalies and developments pushed others to the conclusion that the sheriff’s department was withholding information from the public to assist its homicide investigators in cracking the case.
Shuey’s body was found inside his Blue Jay home sometime in the morning of April 27, roughly 10-and-a-half to 13 hours after his April 26 death.
On the sheriff’s department’s call/dispatch log, available online, the matter was referenced as a 187, that is, a showing that the sheriff’s department considered the matter to be a homicide, Penal Code Section 187, defined as the intentional killing of another. In a highly irregular development, the sheriff’s department’s call/dispatch log was subsequently altered to reference the matter as a “DB,” i.e., a dead body. An indication the department initially considered the matter to be a homicide consists of a screen shot in the Sentinel’s possession showing the log as it was originally posted prior to its alteration.
Shuey’s body was discovered by an as-yet unidentified female, who was either one of Shuey’s immediate or extended family members, a girlfriend or an acquaintance. When she arrived at his home, it was was locked. She gained entry, either using a key or some other means. Inside the home was Shuey, who was dead. Shuey had bled profusely from his nose. This led to a report that he had been shot point blank in the face.
Indications were that Shuey’s three-and-a-half-year-old daughter was in the house at the time of his death, and she remained there with her father’s corpse for at least ten and perhaps more than 12 hours until sheriff’s personnel arrived the next morning. The Sentinel was told in April that after investigators arrived and took stock of the situation, they, in recognition of the delicacy of the situation, arranged to have a child psychologist/child and family services expert speak to the girl, and she said that the night before a man she did not know had come to the house to speak with her father, and that her father had told her to hide before he engaged with that individual.
Thereafter, the unofficial story circulating in the mountain communities was that Shuey died at his own hand, either purposefully as a suicide or unintentionally from a drug overdose. The sheriff’s department did nothing to discourage the suicide narrative from gaining currency. Multiple sources in the Lake Arrowhead District have told the Sentinel that the sheriff’s department went so far as to convey to Shuey’s family that he had died of an overdose.
While an autopsy on Shuey’s body was completed within a week, the pathologist’s report and the autopsy protocol was either not compiled or withheld for more than two months and three weeks.
Word has reached the Sentinel that the autopsy protocol provides an indication that Shuey had indeed been shot in the head, though not in front, as was previously stated, but rather from behind, and at close range.
The Sentinel immediately sought to verify that report through the coroner’s office, which is a division of the sheriff’s department. While the coroner’s office did acknowledge that the autopsy results and the pathologist’s report was available, the records clerk who is authorized to release it was not available this week, and will return on Monday August 2, at which time the Sentinel was told, those documents will be available.
It was indicated to the Sentinel that in addition to Shuey having sustained a single gunshot wound, fentanyl, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid, was present in his body at the time of his death.
Recurrent in the unverified reports relating to Shuey’s death is that he was entangled in a circumstance involving an international drug distribution ring, one involved in the importation of both methamphetamine and fentanyl from Mexico.
In his 30 years, Shuey was charged with 13 separate felonies and more than 20 misdemeanors stemming from 17 different cases/arrests in San Bernardino County alone. He was convicted on seven of those felonies and 11 of the misdemeanors. At the time of his death, two felony charges stemming from a single incident on May 21, 2020 were pending against him, those charges being first degree burglary and assault by means of force likely to cause great bodily injury.
Since turning 18 years old, Shuey was sentenced to prison or jail terms totaling seven years and 257 days. Records indicate he served less than half of that time in actual incarceration.
Among the felony convictions Shuey sustained were for drug dealing, theft, assault, burglary and weapons charges. Several of his misdemeanor charges involved fighting or assault. At the time of his death, the district attorney’s office was considering filing charges, either as misdemeanors or felonies, relating to two physical assaults – indeed severe beatings – he had administered. Simultaneously, Shuey was yet facing a charge of burglary together with assault with a deadly weapon resulting in great bodily injury relating to the incident he was involved in on May 21 of last year in Blue Jay. Shuey was arrested by San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies working out of the Twin Peaks sheriff’s substation in the aftermath of that incident. Shuey and his attorney maintain that the arrest and charges were inappropriate and unsupportable in that Shuey was the victim, and what had actually occurred was Shuey’s motorcycle had been stolen by the individual he was charged with assaulting and that the theft he was charged with was his successful effort to take back possession of his stolen motorcycle.
Shuey had drug-related convictions including drug-trafficking, in particular dealing methamphetamine. There is indication that he was involved in the importation of methamphetamine manufactured in Mexico and that he was associating with a drug dealer working in the San Bernardino Mountains communities, Johnny Garcia. Garcia was formerly involved in the distribution of methamphetamine and more recently began trafficking in fentanyl. Unverified reports are that there were six fentanyl-related deaths in the mountains between early April and mid-May of this year as Garcia’s distribution of that very powerful synthetic opioid intensified, and that the sheriff’s department was closing in on Garcia. Growing out of this circumstance are allegations that it was Garcia who killed Shuey out of concern that Shuey, in an attempt to have the assault and theft charges that were pending against him dropped, was cooperating with the sheriff’s department, and had already implicated or was about to implicate Garcia in the fentanyl distribution activity tied to the spate of overdose deaths in the mountain communities.
The sheriff’s department has not confirmed whether it suspects Garcia of being involved in the distribution of fentanyl that resulted in the overdose deaths in the San Bernardino Mountains earlier this year or in having killed Shuey. In June, word on the street was that Garcia had departed the Lake Arrowhead district in an effort to elude law enforcement authorities, perhaps having gone to Mexico. This week, the Sentinel was told Garcia is lying low in the Riverside area.
While the withholding of the pathologist’s report and the autopsy protocol may have been a ploy to assist the sheriff’s department in making a case against a suspect such as Garcia by providing investigators with a possible opportunity to elicit from the suspect during an interrogation details of Shuey’s death contained in the autopsy protocol that would be known only to his killer, the release of the coroner’s report would seem to indicate that the sheriff’s department either has sufficient information to make a case against a suspect or alternatively that it does not yet have a viable suspect, and that it can no longer forestall the public’s access to the information contained in the coroner’s examination of Shuey’s body.
-Mark Gutglueck

Amsel Crossings, in his dotage, met the sister of one of his former classmates while he was living in a cottage at the complex for a rest home he had been committed to.

Jennifer Parker was a decade and a half younger than he, but at this stage of her life, she was no spring chicken

As had Adelanto and Fontana before it, the City of Grand Terrace this week turned to G. Michael Milhiser to fill the gap as its city manager in the aftermath of the departure of its previous top municipal administrator.
With the hiring, Mike Milhiser, already the most traveled city manager ever among San Bernardino County cities, can boast having held the top spot on the staffs of one-fourth of the county’s 24 municipalities.
For 14 years and four months, from March 1978 until June of 1992, Milhiser was Montclair’s city administrator. For two years and seven months, from June 1992 until December 1994, Milhiser was city manager in Ontario, where his father, Charles L. Milhiser, Sr., was city treasurer. Milhiser was hired as city manager in Upland in June 1996 and remained there for eight years and ten months, until March of 2005, at which point he was forced to resign by Mayor John Pomierski.
Milhiser subsequently, from June 2005 until July 2007, served as the interim executive director of the Tri-City Mental Health Center in Pomona. For nine years and eight months, from July 2007 until February 2017, Milhiser was the chief administrative officer with the Morongo Band of Mission Indians near Banning.
Beginning in February 2017, he served a five-month stint as Adelanto’s interim city manager, departing when that city promoted its development director, Gabriel Elliott, to become city manager. But within three months, then-Adelanto Mayor Rich Kerr grew disenchanted with Elliott after he opened up back channel communications with the FBI in which he fingered Kerr and his council colleagues, John Woodard and Jermaine Wright, as being recipients of bribe money from multiple marijuana-related business applicants. In January, 2018, Milhiser was brought back to Adelanto to serve again as interim city manager. In May 2018, he was succeeded in Adelanto by interim City Manager Brad Letner.
In July 2019, Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, with the support of her council colleagues John Roberts, Jesse Armendarez and Phil Cothran, Jr., tapped Milhiser to serve as interim city manager in the aftermath of the departure of Ken Hunt as Fontana city manager. Milhiser remained in that position until January 2020, at which point he was succeeded by Mark Denny.
Milhiser, 74, lives in Montclair and is a board member with the Monte Vista Water District. His wife, Laurie, was considered as an appointee to the Montclair City Council two years ago. His brother, James, is currently the treasurer in the City of Ontario.
Milhiser attended Chaffey College and obtained a bachelor of arts degree in public administration from Chapman University in 1969. He then earned a master of arts degree in public administration from Claremont Graduate University.
A retiree who is pulling a $209,389.32 per year pension from the California Public Employee Retirement System based upon his work with Ontario, Upland and Montclair, Milhiser under the rules governing retirees can work only 960 hours per year under contract for a public agency.
Thus, at 40 hours per week, Milhiser will be able to remain in Grand Terrace no later than January 12, 2022, given his start date of July 28. At present, the city is seeking to recruit a city manager to replace former City Manager G. Harold Duffey, who resigned June 22, effective July 20, to take on the position of public works director in Oakland.
Steven Weiss, Grand Terrace’s planning and development director, served as acting city manager from last Friday until early Wednesday morning.
Milhiser is respected in many circles and has proven qualifications, skill and experience in managing municipal operations. Nevertheless, he has not been immune to controversy or criticism.
During his last four years and four months as city manager in Upland, John Pomierski was that city’s mayor. Shortly after coming into office, Pomierski began taking bribes and kickbacks from individuals and companies with project applications as well as contract and franchise bids for work with the city. Those close to City Hall and observant onlookers knew the score. Pomierski sought to include city employees in the graft, providing them with raises and benefit increases to induce them to allow his depredations to continue uninterrupted. There is evidence to suggest that Milhiser, in his function as city manager inadvertently and very likely early in Pomierski’s time as mayor, was enabling Pomierski in his running of a corrupt municipal regime in Upland. At some point no later than December 2004, it became clear to Milhiser that Pomierski was violating the public trust in his elected role, and that the mayor was bending staff to his will in order to get it to cut corners for those who were doing business with the city and paying him off. When Milhiser signaled that he was no longer willing to go along with Pomierski’s machinations, Pomierski forced Milhiser into resigning as city manager, replacing him with Robb Quincey. Pomierski arranged to provide Milhiser with a $200,000 severance package when he departed in March 2005, which effectively bought Milhiser’s silence. Ultimately, in 2011 Pomierski was indicted by a federal grand jury on political corruption charges, convicted in 2012 and sentenced to two years in federal prison.
During Milhiser’s tenure in Adelanto, the three members of the controlling majority on the city council who had hired Milhiser to run the city in 2017 were taking money from applicants for cannabis-related business operations in the city in exchange for providing those entities with permits. Between Milhiser’s two stints as interim city manager there, Councilman Jermaine Wright was arrested by the FBI for receiving a bribe from an undercover FBI agent posing as an applicant for a marijuana-related business license in exchange for Wright’s assurance that the business would not be subjected to city code enforcement action that would shut it down. Unlike Gabriel Elliott, the city manager between his two runs as Adelanto city manager, Milhiser maintained an amicable and cooperative relationship with Wright and Mayor Rich Kerr and Councilman John Woodard, as they approved multiple marijuana-related business applications in their city while receiving substantial amounts of money provided to them by those business operators in the form of political donations and cash provided to Kerr’s wife, Misty, in envelopes during her attendance of city council meetings.
Ken Hunt, the city manager in Fontana whom Milhiser replaced when he assumed the interim city manager role in July 2019, had been highly thought of by the city council, which in 2011 rewarded him by making him San Bernardino County’s highest paid city manager. By 2016, Hunt’s pay was boosted even further, such that he was the third highest paid city manager in California. In 2018, he was the second highest paid city manager in California. When Hunt’s level of remuneration was challenged, Mayor Acquanetta Warren and three of her colleagues on the council were insistent that Hunt’s performance level was such that his pay was justified, and they indicated that they were hopeful of keeping him in place until 2026, which was five years beyond the duration of his contract which was set to elapse in 2021. Nevertheless, in 2019, Warren forced Hunt to resign after he became aware of bribes she was accepting. To buy Hunt’s silence, Warren conferred upon him a $1.1 million severance package, and brought in Milhiser to replace Hunt. There have been suggestions that Milhiser, based on his experience in Upland with Pomierski, had an understanding of what was transpiring between Warren and Hunt.
Even as Milhiser was hired by the Grand Terrace City Council to serve as interim city manager and was being welcomed into the city, there were questions about the arrangement.
Under the contract he has with Grand Terrace, Milhiser is to make $18,000 a month, with no benefits. Over the last decade, Grand Terrace’s municipal operations have been slashed to the bone. At present, the city, which is San Bernardino County’s third smallest in terms of population at 12,640 and the smallest in terms of land area at 3.5 square miles, employs six people, including the city manager – five full time and one part-time employees. When Milhiser was hired to replace Hunt as city manager in Fontana, that 43.07 square mile city had 214,547 residents within its city limits, making it San Bernardino County’s second largest city population-wise. Fontana at that point had over 1,200 employees, and to oversee them, Milhiser was with a straight $148 an hour, with no other benefits beyond the provision of a vehicle. That $148 per hour translated into $25,456 per month.
While Milhiser’s hiring by Grand Terrace passed on a 4-to-1 vote of the council, Councilman Bill Hussey, reflecting the attitude that paying Milhiser $4,186.04 per week to ride herd on five-and-a-half employees was not justifiable, cast the dissenting vote.
At Tuesday night’s meeting at which the vote to hire Milhiser took place, Milhiser said he was “excited” at the prospect of his new job, and the “opportunity for me to continue in the profession I’ve always loved, which is that of city management and working with elected officials [and] working with the community. I really appreciate the mayor and council’s confidence in me to serve in this capacity. I will do everything I can to continue what I consider great momentum the City of Grand Terrace has in development and taking care of their residents.”
-Mark Gutglueck

A conflagration on the water at Lake Arrowhead’s north shore on July 16 that destroyed seven boats and did substantial damage to five others has been deemed to be “highly suspicious” by the team of investigators with the San Bernardino County Fire Department who have looked into what occurred.
Damages in excess of $2 million were sustained in the fire that broke out on or next to Dock #4 at Lake Arrowhead’s North Shore Marina shortly after 4 a.m. Friday July 16. The 20-slip dock and seven of the boats there were total losses. Two of the boats were entirely consumed to the point where little more than the keel and an entirely charred boat deck was all that was left, such that the vessels were left visually unidentifiable.
A first call came into the fire department’s dispatch center at 4:05 a.m. It is believed that an effort to reach the Arrowhead Lake Association safety office was made prior to the call summoning the fire department. At that hour, the safety office was not manned.
Upon the arrival of the first fire crew, which had been dispatched from Fire Station 92, ten boats were already aflame, as was the dock. Fire Station 92 is located at 981 North State Highway 173 in Lake Arrowhead, roughly 1,000 feet east of Lake Arrowhead’s east shore.
The crew quickly manned Fireboat 92, and moved into close proximity to the dock.
This entailed some danger, as there were explosions from fuel stores on some of the boats.
Using the watergun on the fireboat’s deck as well as hoses, the firefighters sprayed the flames, while a land-based crew maneuvered into position from the other side of the dock.
In addition to braving the fires, the crew was subjected to the hazard of noxious fumes, as the boat hulls were largely composed of fiberglass.
Within a half hour of the fire team’s arrival, the flames had been doused.
Nevertheless, damage was extensive.
In the aftermath of the fire, there was charred debris spreading out from the dock toward the middle of the lake and fanning in both directions from the dock along the shore.
Arson investigators, led by Hector Trevino, were doing a chemical analysis of the debris, the ships and the dock to determine if an accelerant was present. That so many boats and the dock caught fire so quickly is highly unusual. There was no word on the results of the chemical analysis of the fire remnants.
Witnesses, consisting primarily of residents of the north shore, reported that individuals carrying flashlights were seen and heard near the gate to the dock within an hour prior to the fire. There were also reports of vandalism to boats that were not damaged in the fire.
-Mark Gutglueck

By clicking on the blue portal below, you can download a PDF of the July 23 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 07-23-21

The California Attorney General’s Office today took civil action against the City of Fontana in an effort to stem the oversaturation of the 217,237 population community with warehouses.
Targeted in the lawsuit filed by California Attorney General is the latest warehouse to be approved in the 43.97-square mile city.
On April 20, 2021, the Fontana City Council entrusted to that city’s planning commission land use authority to consider a proposal by Michael Weber and his Irvine-based company, Duke Realty, to consolidate seven parcels into a single parcel of approximately 8.61 acres at the southwest corner of Slover Avenue and Oleander Avenue upon which a proposed 205,949-square foot warehouse was to be built. The warehouse is intended to feature 22 truck docks, 40 truck parking spaces, and 95 standard parking spaces.
The planning commission approved that project, signing off on the construction of the warehouse, its design review and its tentative parcel map, whereupon Elizabeth Sena, a Fontana resident, appealed that project approval to the Fontana City Council.
The city council heard that appeal on June 22.
Fontana’s political leadership has embraced warehouse development as a means of economic development, to the point that Fontana’s mayor since 2010, Acquanetta Warren, is known by the sobriquet “Warehouse Warren.”
On June 22, Warren and her three allies on the council, John Roberts, Phil Cothran, Jr. and Peter Garcia, were able to sidestep the opposition that Sena raised, and the voices of protest that joined with hers, consisting of Carlos Tinoc, Tina Tinoc, Sunny Renteria, Julian Rambila, Julia Avina, Gabriela Mendez, Brian Culdy, Rosa Culdy, Yolanda Rivera, Jasmine Cunningham, Veronica Perez, Eddie Lopez, Ben Vasquez, Paul Salazar, Debrah Seldon, Cynthia Gonzalez, Alejandra Collazo, Andrew Noriega, Annelle Torres, Rebecca Gonzalez and Jose Valdez.
The council, in a 4-to-1 vote, with Warren, Roberts, Cothran and Garcia prevailing and Councilman Jesse Sandoval dissenting, denied the appeal, upholding the planning commission’s decision to let Weber/Duke Realty proceed with the project.
In filing his lawsuit today against the City of Fontana, California Attorney General Rob Bonta challenged the approval of the Slover and Oleander warehouse project, noting the project site shares a border with a public high school and that it is located in one of the most polluted areas in the state.
“Under the California Environmental Quality Act, the City of Fontana is required to implement all feasible mitigation measures to reduce harmful air pollution and other significant environmental impacts of the Slover and Oleander Warehouse project,” Bonta said.
In the lawsuit, Bonta argues that the city’s limited environmental review of the project and its failure to appropriately analyze, disclose, and mitigate the project’s environmental impacts violates the California Environmental Quality Act.
“Plain and simple: Everyone has the right to breathe clean air where they live and where they work,” Bonta said. “As attorney general, I have a responsibility to enforce the state’s environmental laws, and as the people’s attorney, I am committed to standing up for communities who live at the intersection of poverty and pollution. Fontana residents shouldn’t have to choose between economic development and clean air. They deserve both. Unfortunately, the City of Fontana cut corners when it approved the Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project. We’re going to court today to compel the city to go back and take a hard look at the environmental impacts of this project – and do all it can to mitigate the potential harms to local residents and workers – before moving forward.”
Bonta continued, “The Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project will be constructed in a low-income south Fontana neighborhood that suffers from some of the highest pollution levels in all of California. Over 20 warehouses have already been built within a mile of the project site, in an area that encompasses two public high schools and serves as home to hundreds of Californians. Collectively, these warehouses generate thousands of daily heavy-duty diesel truck trips. As a result, local residents and workers suffer from some of the highest exposures statewide to fine particulate matter, which are inhalable microscopic particles that travel deep into human lungs and are linked to increased risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and asthma attacks. They are also heavily exposed to ozone and toxic chemicals that can cause a wide array of other concerning health problems.”
The warehouse will worsen conditions in the area, Bonta said, saying it “is expected to generate approximately 114 daily truck trips and 272 daily passenger car trips during the project’s round-the-clock operations. In addition, one quarter of the warehouse space is equipped for cold storage, a use that attracts highly-polluting trucks with auxiliary diesel engines needed for refrigeration. Despite this, the City of Fontana concludes that the project will not have significant environmental impacts and omits mitigation measures such as exceeding green building efficiency standards or using low-emission construction equipment that would reduce the pollution burden to local residents and create additional jobs and improve on-site worker safety.”
In the lawsuit, Bonta maintains the City of Fontana violated the California Environmental Quality Act in its approval of the Slover and Oleander warehouse project by failing to prepare an environmental impact report despite substantial evidence that the project will have significant environmental impacts, and that the city did not disclose the existence of dozens of other industrial warehouses in the area. The city further did not disclose, Bonta asserts, that the city has approved and is planning additional warehouse developments within blocks of the project and it did not account for those nearby warehouses in its cumulative air quality analysis.
In approving the project the city did not ensure that all significant environmental impacts of the project will be mitigated, Bonta claims.
Mayor Warren said that in approving the warehouse project in question, “I think we have taken every effort legally to keep people safe. This project met all the necessary environmental standards. It is going to create jobs. These environmentalists need to get out of the way and quit standing in the way of economic development.”
-Mark Gutglueck

A specially-called criminal grand jury looking into the actions of a couple who threw a so-called gender-reveal party last September at which a pyrotechnic device touched off a fire that raged out of control and thereafter killed a firefighter and scorched 22,680 acres has indicted the pair on a total of 30 charges.
In the indictment unsealed on Tuesday, July 20, Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr. and Angelina Renee Jimenez are charged with a single count of involuntary manslaughter, three felony counts of recklessly causing a fire resulting in great bodily injury, four felony counts of recklessly causing a fire to inhabited structures and 22 misdemeanor counts of Penal Code Section 452, recklessly causing a fire to private property.
What became known as the El Dorado Fire was sparked September 5, 2020 at approximately 10:23 a.m. when the Jiminezes used a pyrotechnic device, referred to as a “smoke cannon” intended to release either blue or pink smoke to reveal the gender of a baby Angelina Jimenez was carrying, lit dry grass beneath it. The couple had invited a number of friends and extended family members to El Dorado Park in Yucaipa to the event.
A surveillance video from a camera at the park depicts several people, a number of them children, walking onto the grass at the edge of the park. An adult male is seen in the video lighting the device. Shortly thereafter, the dry grass and vegetation near the device is seen to ignite, and the video shows individuals scurrying in a futile effort at dousing the flames with water from water bottles. At the time the fire initiated, the temperature in Yucaipa had already reached 90 degrees, and would attain 110 later that afternoon.
The fire spread from the park to the north onto Yucaipa Ridge that separates Mountain Home Village and Forest Falls from the City of Yucaipa. After initially burning northward early on September 5, the fire circled back as it was pushed by inconsistently-directed winds, first pushing east, then northward, taking at one point a substantial westwardly shift on the evening of Saturday, September 5, and on Sunday, September 6 moving south. The fire thus spread in four different directions.
Over 23 days, the fire consumed 22,680 acres in the Oak Glen/Yucaipa Ridge area and within the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area of the San Bernardino National Forest. Firefighting efforts, directed from from a command post established at Yucaipa Regional Park and involving 1,351 personnel, did manage to prevent the fire from moving into populated areas. As such, the conflagration raged into the area’s rustic canyons and, ultimately, the heavily wooded National Forest. Twenty mostly isolated structures, five of them homes, were burnt to the ground. Another four residences were significantly damaged.
On the twelfth day of the effort to control the fire, September 17, Charles Morton, a specialized “hot shot” fire suppression team commander with 14 years experience as a firefighter, was killed.
Hot shot crews are highly mobile and specially-skilled hand crews intended to be flexible with the migration of a fire, and are trained, conditioned, equipped and qualified to be utilized in combating wildland fires. Hotshots are often employed in using shovels and other tools in seeking to reroute the direction of a fire’s progression, often on very difficult terrain at locations remote from the main body of firefighters in a given area. The crews function without water or hoses. At sometime around 10 p.m. in the evening of September 17, while he was with others “engaged in fire suppression operations,” a windshift resulted in flames overrunning Morton.
Another 13 firefighters were injured throughout the El Dorado Fire ordeal.
The fire, which required 60 miles of fire lines to suppress and ranged from a minimum elevation of 3,030 feet to a maximum of 10,640 feet, forced the evacuations of Oak Glen, north Yucaipa, Mountain Home Village, Forest Falls, and Angelus Oaks.
The firefighting effort was manpower intensive and extremely costly. The 1,351 firefighters involved included those functioning under two interagency incident management teams rotated into place throughout the operation, those being California Interagency Management Team 11, supervised by Commander Chris Fogle, and California Interagency Management Team 13, led by Incident Commander Mike Wakoski. There were 17 hand crews working the fire lines, 177 fire engines, 20 water tenders, 17 bulldozers, and 10 helicopters. Numerous fixed-wing tankers were brought to bear in the effort, including a DC-10, which engaged in aerial fire-retardant drops. Three Canadian Fire Bosses and a single-engine air tanker water scooper, operating from a base at Big Bear Airport & Lake, were also used for the first time in Southern California in the effort against the El Dorado conflagration.
The fire was not considered maintained until September 29.
The indictments of Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr. and Angelina Renee Jimenez were handed down after the grand jury heard from 34 witnesses during four days of testimony and reviewed 434 exhibits.
On July 20, both Refugio Jimenez or Angelina Jimenez, who were not in custody, were arraigned in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Colin Bilash. Both entered not guilty pleas. They are being prosecuted by Deputy District Attorneys Lisa Crane and Jill Gregory.
Refugio Jimenez is being represented by Michael Scafiddi.
Angelina Jimenez is being represented by Steven Mitchell.
Both defendants agreed to extend their preliminary hearing date to November 16.
-Mark Gutglueck

By Mark Gutglueck
Within the last year there has been a substantial shift in the political center of gravity in Ontario, which over the last three decades has been one of the most stable of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities in terms of governance.
Time will tell if Mayor Paul Leon’s repositioning to align himself with his longstanding rival on the council, Alan Wapner, and the two council members who have composed Wapner’s ruling coalition for more than a decade will result in a radical rocking of the keel of the ship of state in the 193,594-population city.
Whichever way things play out, the change is a remarkable one, perhaps heralding what will be, next year, the first serious challenge to the mayor and the glacially evolving status quo in the city in more than a decade-and-a-half.
A key factor in Ontario’s stability has been the fashion in which its ruling elite has endeavored to make certain governance in the city is administered in as low of a profile as possible. Despite sometimes vicious differences among the city council’s members on other points, they have been in perfect consonance with one another on keeping their squabbles out of the public eye, away from the headlines and out of the evening news broadcast from Los Angeles.
For the most part, that strategy has worked for Ontario’s city leaders. With the latest political shift and the maneuvering by the now-lone isolated member of the council, Ruben Valencia, who is casting about for the leverage he needs to assert himself as an equal among his colleagues and prevent himself from being consumed by political irrelevancy, Ontario’s ethos of governmental secrecy is about be subject to an exposition that is likely to betray activity that will embarrassingly illustrate what those officials have so ruthlessly been attempting to hide.
The central element in this sordid chapter is a nearly-eight-year-old event that the council, through the efforts of one of its previous members who has since become county district attorney, went to elaborate means nearly seven years ago to hide. The scandal of secrecy deepened with action by that branch of the city staff dedicated to preserving city records destroying last year the documentation relating to the events and actions in question.
Ontario is a city of paradox. As a municipality, it is hands down the wealthiest of San Bernardino County’s 22 cities and two incorporated towns in terms of its governmental funding. It boasts nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars running through all of its various municipal funds, which is more than two thirds that of the San Bernardino County municipality in second place, Rancho Cucamonga. It hosts the Ontario International Airport, the largest aerodrome in the county, as well as Ontario Mills, one of the largest shopping venues in the Inland Empire. And though the city has some upscale and very nice neighborhoods new and old in different parts of the 50-square mile city, it contains districts that rival those of the Third World in terms of squalor and substandard housing, whole neighborhoods where upwards of twenty and as many as thirty people live in two-, three- and four-bedroom homes with one or two toilets originally designed to house no more than a single family of four to eight. Trash, refuse and debris is often dumped on streets, parkways or yards in those districts where industrial and residential properties are mixed side by side, and the eyesore of that openly exposed rubbish remains unredressed for months or years. Though they have the financial means to do so, city officials do not have the will to deal effectively with those torn-down neighborhoods to abate that blight.
There is another discrepancy in Ontario, that which exists between the party affiliation of the city’s voters in general and its elected representatives on the city council. Of Ontario’s 85,825 registered voters, nearly half, 41,735 or 48.6 percent are Democrats. Slightly more than one fifth of the city’s voters, 19,085 or 22.2 percent, are Republicans. Republicans are outnumbered, slightly, by those 19,182 or 22.4 percent of registered voters in Ontario who express no party preference. The remaining 7 percent of the city’s voters are affiliated with the Libertarian, Peace & Freedom, American Independent, Green or other more obscure parties. Despite the Democrats’ dominance of Ontario in terms of voter registration, they have no representation on the city council. All five of the council members at present are identified, in one manner or another, as Republicans or supporters of the Republican Party.
Ontario officials, in particular their elected ones, want as little public scrutiny of their function and activity as possible. A major factor in the degree to which citizens can pay attention to what is going on locally and at City Hall is the presence of a newspaper. Ontario, from the time of its founding in 1882 until late in the 20th Century was the center of political, social and mercantile existence on the west side of San Bernardino County. It was also the home of the Daily Report, one of San Bernardino County’s leading newspapers. In 1990, the Ontario Daily Report merged with the Pomona Progress Bulletin to become the Daily Bulletin. Nearly a generation ago, the Daily Bulletin pulled up stakes and moved out of Ontario. That has left Ontario, along with adjoining Upland and Montclair, as the three cities in San Bernardino County currently without a hometown newspaper. Indeed, other much smaller cities and towns in San Bernardino County such as Needles, Big Bear, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley have newspapers which chronicle on a constant basis the actions of those communities’ governments and the comings and goings of its citizens and leaders. This has given Ontario’s politicians, if not an entirely free ride, the advantage of there being far less attention paid to their comportment than would be the case otherwise.
Consequently, for nearly two decades the residents of Ontario have been deprived of a window on the dissension within the ranks of the Ontario City Council.
That dissension, which at certain points has boiled over into outright hostility, represents another paradox, as there has been, despite the sharp division of philosophy and personality on the council, very little changeover in the panel’s membership, relatively,  in comparison to other San Bernardino County cities, going back a generation. Since the year 2000, a total of eleven individuals have served on the Ontario City Council, including in the post of mayor. Among the county’s 21 five-member city or town councils, only neighboring Montclair has had fewer than eleven members on its city council since 2000. In all others cities and towns in San Bernardino County, council members moved onto and then off of the city or town council with greater, and in some cases far greater, frequency than in Ontario. As a general rule, the more intense the dissension on a city council and the more spirited the debate, the greater the degree of changeover on the panel. Notably, Ontario might have had fewer than eleven council members in the past 21 years and could have displayed even more political stability had it not been for one of those council members, Jerry Dubois, dying in office, and another, Mayor Gary Ovitt, being elected to a higher political position.
For that reason, the vituperation between Ontario’s council members and their ability to keep it under wraps and outside the scrutiny of a significant portion of the public is all the more remarkable.
Since shortly after the turn of the Third Millennium, Ontario has had an unbroken tradition of having at least one vocal and hard-hitting dissident within its ranks. In 2000 Debbie Acker was elected to the council. Initially, while acclimating herself, Acker voted, for the most part, along with her four colleagues, Ovitt as mayor and councilmen Paul Leon, Alan Wapner and Jerry Dubois. That honeymoon did not last long, and in time Acker began to question the motives for some city actions and council votes, and she grew skeptical about the relationships between some or all of her colleagues and certain business interests with applications for projects in the city or for contracts at City Hall. Her input and protests at first were duly noted. Still, her single vote against the other four with regard to items she felt strongly enough to take a stand on did not provide the requisite political muscle to make a difference in the outcome of those votes. In 2002, in the midst of her first term on the city council, Acker unsuccessfully challenged Ovitt for mayor. As a councilwoman, she was rarely able to find a second from her colleagues on any motions for action or initiatives she proposed. The council consistently voted as a block against her on any items brought before the council wherein she questioned staff recommendations. She grew steadily more strident in reaction, which in turn provoked her council colleagues. The contretemps escalated to the point that what was going on between Acker, on one side, and Ovitt, Leon, Wapner and Dubois on the other had become the most celebrated political struggle in San Bernardino County. At one point, the council voted to censure her. In 2004, she elected not to seek reelection.
In the 2004 city council election, Leon was reelected to the council and a newcomer, Jason Anderson, was elected to come in and replace Acker. Also in the November 2004 election, Ovitt had captured the position of Fourth District San Bernardino County supervisor, which necessitated that he surrender the mayor’s gavel to move into that post. A special election for mayor was held in June 2005, in which Leon emerged victorious over former City Councilman/former City Attorney Sam Crowe. Planning Commissioner Sheila Mautz was appointed to fill the gap on the council created by Leon’s move into the mayoral position. In relatively short order, Leon, Anderson and Mautz coalesced into a ruling coalition on the council, one that was not too heavily pronounced, but evident nonetheless. In 2006, Dubois succumbed to a rare genetic disorder.
In November 2006, Leon was reelected mayor, Wapner was reelected to the council and Jim Bowman, a former city councilman as well as a former Ontario fire chief, successfully vied for election, in essence replacing Dubois on the council.
Shortly thereafter, the political lines on the council hardened. Wapner, a former Ontario Police Department detective who acceded to the position of sergeant before taking a disability retirement at the age of 40, formed a natural alliance with Bowman. Nevertheless, they were politically outgunned on the council at that point by Leon, Anderson and Mautz. Wapner and Leon had begun on the Ontario City Council in 1998, with Wapner having captured his council seat through that year’s election, and Leon having been appointed to replace Ovitt on the council following his election that year as mayor. Wapner coveted the mayoral position. He believed his having been originally brought onto the council as a consequence of the city’s residents having chosen to place him thereon with their votes qualified him for the position of mayor whereas Leon’s appointment to the council without having earned his victory through a tooth-and-nail battle at the polls rendered his having obtained the honorific of mayor undeserved. Moreover, Wapner outright believed his vision for Ontario was superior to that of Leon’s. Nevertheless, with 67 percent of Ontario’s population being Latino at that time, Wapner recognized that in a head-to-head contest with Leon for that office, he was at a disadvantage because the city’s demographics heavily favored the incumbent.
All was not doom and gloom for Wapner, however. Bowman, his ally, was a formidable political figure in his own right. In addition to having been Ontario’s fire chief, he had been elected to the Ontario City Council in 1986 to a two-year term. Bowman left the council for two years between 1988 and 1990 but was elected in 1990 and reelected in 1994, and then did not seek reelection in 1998 so he could become Ontario Fire Chief. Serving as fire chief until 2005, Bowman retired, but shortly thereafter took on a temporary assignment as Upland’s fire chief. Fully retired when he successfully sought election in 2006, he was thereafter able to devout time and energy to politics.
In 2008, both Mautz and Anderson were up for election. Debra Dorst-Porada, a registered nurse who had vied for the city council unsuccessfully in 1998 and 2004, entered the race. Bowman lent her support and direction, and persuaded Wapner to do the same. In November of that year Mautz was elected but Anderson was defeated, losing to Dorst-Porada.
Virtually overnight, Leon was no longer in control of the council or the city. Wapner, with the support of Bowman, who had the complete loyalty of Dorst-Porada, assumed the cat bird seat.
All members of the council had drawn a lesson from the Acker chapter of the city’s history. Subjecting the council to sustained negative publicity, both Leon and Wapner, had concluded, was in neither of their interest. They recognized that there were some battles royal ahead where they would both be figuratively seeking to scratch each others eyes out and choke one another to death, but knew just the same that such a spectacle could create a circumstance where both would lose and end up on the outside looking in. Accordingly, efforts were made to keep attention to their mortal political battle to a minimum.
At that point, more and more cities throughout the United States, California and San Bernardino County were taking advantage of the opportunity for government transparency the revolution in digital technology afforded them. They began broadcasting videos of governmental activity such as council meetings, planning commission meetings and town halls into the living rooms of those city residents willing to tune in, and many mounted on their websites a catalog or archive of past meetings and events that had been captured on video so that the public could watch and witness at their leisure the action of their elected officials. Ontario remained rooted in the previous century, giving their citizens no such glimpse into what they were doing on a biweekly basis. With just a handful of exceptions, other cities in the county were light years ahead of Ontario, the most economically-enabled city in San Bernardino County, in using post modern means of technology and communication to keep the Ontario City Council’s constituents informed. It would not be for several more years before Ontario’s elected officials, reluctantly, accepted the inevitable and consented to allowing a permanent record of the council meetings to be memorialized in video form, and then had those videos archived and available for viewing on the city’s website. Even though the city has now made viewing its meetings on its website possible, it restricts its archives of the council videos going back to cover a period of no more than eight months, making it impossible for residents to research council public discussions or view the council’s actions prior to that.
Upon Dorst-Porada taking her position on the council in December 2008 and the establishment of Alan Wapner as the de facto leader of the council, there ensued some vicious infighting.
If he were to become mayor, Wapner calculated, he would need to either put a good sized hole beneath Leon’s waterline or otherwise erode his willingness to stay in office.
In league with Bowman and Dorst-Porada, Wapner was able prevent any initiatives that Leon championed as mayor which made their way in front of the council from achieving fruition, and he used his vote and those of the two he controlled to vote virtually anything that originated with Leon down, robbing the mayor of his ability to claim effectiveness as a political leader.
At that time, members of the city council were given modest $800 per month stipends for their service on the council. The mayor, as the city’s representative and ambassador who was constantly attending groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings, was provided with another $50,000 per year emolument. In 2009, Wapner, Bowman and Dorst-Porada voted to rescind that.
When that did not convince Leon to toss in the towel, Wapner and Bowman played dirty, hiring an attorney, Loredana Nesci, who came before the city council and appeared elsewhere alleging, Leon, a pastor with Hope Chapel in Ontario, was a morally bankrupt hypocrite, while attempting to convince his congregation to oust him as their spiritual leader.
It so happened that Leon’s term as mayor corresponded with both Wapner’s and Bowmans’ terms as councilmen. Thus, in 2006, all three were on the ballot, as they were in 2010, again in 2014, as well as in 2018. They are on track to go before the voters again next year, in 2022. Interestingly, every four years, as their respective election seasons were approaching, a truce between Leon and his two rivals would be called, and for the purposes of their separate reelection efforts, each would celebrate the accomplishment of the council “team” they were all a part of. They would go so far as to appear together for photo opportunities on the grounds of Ontario City Hall with the media present, looking for all the world like proud brothers in municipal governance. The sniping between them would be suspended for three to four months. Each time, in 2010, in 2014 and 2018, all three were re-elected, shutting out their challengers.
The troika – Leon, Wapner and Bowman – is virtually assured of staying in office, so commanding has the fundraising advantage each of them has over any who would challenge them. By 2014, both Leon and Wapner had over a quarter of a million dollars in their campaign war chests. Bowman’s edge wasn’t quite as impressive, with his electioneering fund totaling just over $225,000.
Though Wapner was convinced that his rightful position was that of mayor and it was Leon who should be councilman if he was to be on the council at all, Wapner was never bold enough to challenge Leon for Ontario’s mayoralty, since to do so he would need to forsake running for city council, and he simply could not risk giving up his sure hold on the council spot he occupies to get into a race where Leon would be able to bring his Hispanic heritage to bear in an appeal to the city’s overwhelmingly Latino electorate.
Shortly after the elections in which they were involved had run their course, Leon would once again take up his position as mayor on a council which was composed of a majority of members at odds with his ideal self-identity as the leader of Ontario.
In the 2012 election, both Councilwoman Sheila Mautz, Leon’s last remaining ally on the council, and Councilwoman Dorst-Porada, who through her firm and fast alignment with Bowman had provided Wapner with his hold on the council and the city over the previous four years, stood for reelection. Dorst-Porada, who is one of the wealthiest council members in all of San Bernardino County and has no issue with using her personal financial reach and power of incumbency to maintain her hold on the council position she possesses, won handily. Mautz, however, lost. Replacing her was Paul Vincent Avila, who since the 1970s had been seeking political office. Avila had proven to be one of the most persistent political candidates in San Bernardino County history.
Beginning in the 1970s, throughout the 1980s, into the 1990s and then after the turn of the century, Avila became a constant candidate for political office. He ran for Congress and the California Legislature. He sought election to the State Franchise Tax Board. He vied for local office, at the municipal level as well as with local districts, such as water boards and school boards. For decades he was unsuccessful. He was a complete political unsophisticate unschooled in the art and science of campaigning, who drew little distinction between the various interest groups a successful politician needed to appeal to. He did not understand that campaigns often stand or fall on a candidate’s courting of a core of the electorate – known as high propensity voters – who are the most likely to vote. He did not recognize that such voters existed, let alone how to identify them and thereafter target them in a promotional blitz.
In the last quarter century, the period for which election data is readily available, Avila ran, unsuccessfully, for a position on the Ontario City Council in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. In addition, Avilla in 2000 ran in the open primary race for Assembly in the 61st District. In the 2002 Primary race, he ran for Fourth District County Supervisor. In 2006 and 2008, he again vied for the Democratic nomination in the 61st Assembly District.
Avila claimed that when he was a soldier in Viet Nam, one of his comrades in arms, who lay mortally wounded by the enemy, in what was virtually his last breath got Avila to promise him that if he survived the war, he would exercise his rights as a citizen and run for political office every chance he had.
After more than three decades of doing just that, Avila, with only blind determination and perseverance, had garnered a good number of campaign signs and considerable name recognition among voters. In 2005, he hit pay dirt at last, when he ran successfully for a position on the Ontario-Montclair School District Board. Five years later, after the district had changed its elections from odd- to even-number years, he was reelected.
Two years later, Avila, cresting on the name recognition he had garnered from being a perpetual candidate and his status as an incumbent school board member, ran for city council, challenging, along with six others, the two incumbents, Sheila Mautz and Debra Dorst-Porada. Avila finished behind Dorst-Porada but well ahead of Mautz for second place and a berth on the council.
Leon, bereft of his erstwhile ally Mautz, mulled forming a new alliance with Avila, considering all contingencies, including the possibility that either Wapner or Bowman or Dorst-Porada for some reason, potentially including appointment to another office, might vacate the council, and by forming an alignment with his or her successor and Avila, he might recapture control of the council. In a very short time, however, it became obvious that Avila was mentally unstable. This became apparent when, as the time for his being sworn in to take his place on the council approached, he declared himself unwilling to resign his position on the Ontario-Montclair School Board to assume his council position. Legal authorities, including the Ontario city attorney and the general counsel to the district, held that the two offices were incompatible. Still, Avila maintained that he had been elected to both and was therefore entitled to remain in office until the terms for each expired. He was the victim of a conspiracy of his enemies who were seeking to deny him what he was due, he said. At the last minute, Avila relented and resigned from the school board to take on the more prestigious city council post.
In many ways well-intentioned and honest, Avila instinctively found himself at odds with his council colleagues, who long before had come to an accommodation with the pay-to-play ethos of local politics in San Bernardino County, by which elected officeholders are the recipients of substantial political contributions from individuals and companies with much at stake in the decisions those politicians make, and in return those politicians vote to approve their donors’ projects, contracts or franchises. Those politicians use the money donated to them to stay in office and continue to scratch the backs of those who have scratched theirs, and so it continues. Avila sensed that there was something wrong in the way the Ontario City Council was conducting business, but he did not have the sophistication or intelligence to effectively counter it. Moreover, beyond being impolitic, he proved to be impolite and crude, as well as utterly lacking tact. He pelted Dorst-Porada with risqué and sexist remarks, sent her photos of himself shirtless, and when she rejected his advances, denied ever having done so, insisting Dorst-Porada was not physically attractive enough to have drawn his attention. Wapner gallantly flew to her defense, challenging and upbraiding Avila.
Whatever benefit might exist in forming an alliance with Avila, Leon soon recognized, would be more than offset by the liabilities of such an association. Resignedly, Leon lived with the status quo, consigned to being politically hemmed in on the council where he was mayor, and hoped for the best.
For a time, Wapner’s enmity toward Leon was diverted to Avila.
Avila began referring to Wapner by a sobriquet he had himself coined, “Old Camel Gut.” Misreading the actual dynamic that existed between Leon and Wapner, Avila came to refer to Leon as being Wapner’s “Puppet.” The hostility that had developed between Avila and the rest of the council festered, fanned by Wapner’s domineering nature and Avila’s mental illness, rendering the council meetings, on occasion, into nonproductive circuses, such that Leon, Wapner, Bowman and Dorst-Porada were grateful there were no permanent video recordings of the meetings.
It was nearly half way through Avila’s term in office that events transpired which are now resurrecting themselves to demonstrate the degree to which Ontario city government has been manipulated to the benefit of the governors at the expense of the governed.
The 2014 election season was under way in July of that year, with Avila and another inveterate campaigner, Rudy Favilla, challenging Leon for the mayor’s post, and three challengers running against Wapner and Bowman. Ruben Valencia, an Ontario resident who had already demonstrated political ambition by running, unsuccessfully, for a position on the city council in 2012, was one of the three challengers in the council race. His strategy was to take on Wapner directly and aggressively, matching in every respect that he could Wapner’s equally aggressive personality. Such might have been anticipated; both were law enforcement professionals who aspire to embody the aspect of command presence such jobs entail, Wapner at that point having been retired for some 16-and-a-half years from the Ontario Police Department and Valencia being employed as a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County.
As the various campaigns of the five candidates for city council that year – Wapner, Bowman, Valencia, Yolanda Garcia and Reina Machado – intensified, it was learned the Wapner had gone to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s City of Industry Station, out of which Valencia was stationed. There, Wapner lodged a complaint about Valencia’s political activity in Ontario, which he said was in some fashion being supported by the sheriff’s department, its premises and equipment, implying that Valencia was engaged in campaign activity while he was on the clock as a sheriff’s department employee and being paid by Los Angeles County taxpayers.
Valencia’s superiors at the City of Industry station closed ranks behind Valencia, having satisfied themselves that no misuse of Los Angeles County equipment or facilities in support of Valencia’s campaign had taken place. Valencia thereafter sought and obtained a restraining order against Wapner.
At the September 2, 2014 Ontario City Council meeting, the council adjourned into a closed session, during which the panel’s first order of business was to discuss how the city was going to respond to the restraining order that had been filed by Valencia, as well as concern that the city might be sued by the County of Los Angeles and its sheriff’s department for Wapner’s intrusion at the City of Industry Station. During the closed session, Avila made what was taken as a physical threat to Leon, and then began to advance from his position at the conference table opposite of where Leon, as mayor, sat at the head of the table. Given the narrow clearance between the wall and the chairs around the table as well as the girth of 300-pound Jim Bowman, Avila was not able to get to the mayor. An Ontario police officer was summoned into the conference room, whereupon the officer’s presence at what was supposed to be a closed-door meeting waived the city council’s claim to confidentiality, allowing the matters that were discussed therein to be disclosed to the public.
Ultimately, the city council agreed to retain for $3,000 former City Councilman Jason Anderson, who is an attorney, to represent Wapner with regard to the restraining order filed against him. Anderson was selected for the task despite the consideration that when he had been on the city council, he was on the opposite side of the political divide from Wapner. Curiously, the council sought to disguise the retaining of Anderson by disbursing the funds out of the city’s housing authority account.
Less than six weeks later, on October 7, 2014, the election heated up when a video was posted to Youtube in which it appeared Wapner was in public physically assaulting his daughter.
The footage, which was caught on a private residence’s security video, showed an event that had taken place on February 4, 2013 in the area of East Hazeltine and South Pleasant Avenue in which Wapner becoming physically aggressive in dealing with his recalcitrant then-15-year-old daughter.
According to then-Ontario Police Lieutenant David McBride, officers with his department were summoned, copies of the video were secured, witness statements were taken and Wapner and his daughter were interrogated. A report on the incident was submitted to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, which after a several month review, declined to prosecute Wapner on child abuse charges.
Surfacing as it did in the midst of Wapner’s reelection campaign, suspicion fell on Valencia, who was running hard against Wapner at the time; on J. Steve Garcia, a member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board who was running at that time for a board position with Chaffey Joint Union High School District; and the owners of the home with the security system that had captured the video. Adroitly, Wapner and his political advisors and operatives were able to sidestep some of the controversy by diverting attention from the video’s contents to accusations about who, exactly, was responsible for posting the video on the internet. One of Wapner’s tools in this regard was Anderson, who was representing him legally at the time, at Ontario taxpayers’ expense. Intimidated by Anderson and fearing that legal action that would be expensive to defend against might be forthcoming if the video were not taken down, whoever had posted it to Youtube took it down October 22, 15 days before the November 4, 2014 election. While the spectacle did minor damage to his campaign, Wapner’s overwhelming monetary advantage vis-à-vis his campaign funding allowed him to press on with electioneering efforts, stay on task, and appeal to the city’s high propensity voters, few of whom knew of the video controversy. Wapner handily won reelection, garnering 8,351 votes or 31.92 percent, slightly outpolling Bowman, with 7,645 votes or 29.19 percent. Valencia finished a distant third, with 4,760 votes or 18.17 percent, ahead of both of the other also-rans, Yolanda Garcia and Reyna Machado. In the simultaneous mayoral contest, Leon, with 11,139 votes or 69.53 percent, trounced Avila, who polled 2,578 votes or 16.09 percent, and Favilla, who managed 2,304 votes or 14.38 percent.
The political status quo in Ontario perpetuated. If anything, the contretemps involving Avila worsened. More and more, the outside world began to take note of the exchanges between him and his colleagues, which primarily involved Wapner, who crossed swords with him on a constant basis. On occasions, the atmosphere grew so tense or poisoned, the meetings were adjourned without all of the items on the agenda being discussed and voted upon.
In 2016, Avila and Dorst-Porada had to stand for reelection. With eight challengers in the field, Avila came in forth, behind second place Dorst-Porada and first place Valencia.
Valencia’s acceding to the city council ostensibly seemed to be an auspicious development for Leon. On the panel was at last someone with whom the mayor was by nature aligned, given their common enmity toward Wapner. Indeed, Valencia was even more sharply at odds with Wapner than Leon, and he had demonstrated no qualms about mixing it up with Wapner, matching fire with fire or low blow with low blow. If Leon cultivated Valencia, he could use him as his pit bull against Wapner, while taking the high road. Like Leon, Valencia was a Republican. More than that, Valencia had some credibility and status, gravitas even. Valencia was a career law enforcement officer, which represented a card that could be played against Wapner, whose reputation, status and authority as a councilman in part stemmed from his background as a detective and police sergeant. Most importantly, Valencia was not mentally and emotionally unstable like Avila, meaning he could be relied upon to comport himself civilly, act rationally and not represent a hazard to Leon by means of association.
Somehow, however, Leon and Valencia never hit it off.
In 2018, Leon, Wapner and Bowman were returned to office.
In 2020, four years after he was first elected to the council, Valencia was returned to that post by the voters, along with Dorst-Porada.
Earlier this year, a little more than a year-and-a-half before the November 2022 election, Valencia announced that he will challenge Leon for the mayoralty.
In preparation for that contest, Valencia and his support network have moved toward arming themselves with information and material they believe will assist Valencia in knocking Leon off.
One of those things is everything that can be learned about the city’s 2014 hiring of Jason Anderson to represent Wapner in the face of the restraining order Valencia obtained against him in the midst of the then-ongoing election campaign. Something about the way that was carried off doesn’t look right, Valencia and his supporters believe. Why, they want to know, did the city cover the cost of retaining Anderson to attempt to stand that restraining order down? Why, they ask, was it not let up to Wapner to retain his own counsel in contesting the restraining order? What, exactly, they want to find out, was the nature of the work Anderson was doing for the city? Was, they want to know, Wapner acting on behalf of the city when he went to the City of Industry Sheriff’s Station, in the middle of an election campaign, to lodge a complaint against a candidate vying against him? Why, they are curious, did the city retain Anderson through the housing authority rather than directly? How, they are asking, did Anderson’s professional efforts pertain to the housing authority? What, they want to know, became of the video seized by the Ontario Police Department during its investigation of the February 4, 2013 incident involving Wapner’s public disciplining of his daughter? What information, they are asking, was contained or not contained in the report on the February 4, 2013 incident that was sent to the district attorney’s office?
Valencia’s authority as a councilman, apparently, does not extend to his being provided with answers to those questions. Consequently, his supporter used the California Public Records Act in an attempt to obtain as much of that information as they could. In response, they received what are essentially non-answers.
In response to the public records act requests, they were informed by Assistant City Clerk Claudia Y. Isbell that all of the documents relating to the nature of the work done by Anderson, the payment made to him for that work and the product produced by that work or any reports related thereto “were authorized for destruction on May 4, 2020, and subsequently destroyed on July 1, 2020.”
As to the requests to get the materials and documents contained in the investigation into the February 4, 2013 incident involving Wapner and his daughter, Isbell wrote, “the report you have requested is confidential under Penal Code Section 11167.5 and cannot be disclosed to members of the public.”
Like sharks, those in Valencia’s camp smell blood in the water and they are circling Leon and Wapner.
Seemingly simultaneous to all of this, the bad blood between Leon and Wapner that has existed for a decade-and-a-half, has resolved itself. Apparent at Ontario City Council meetings is that the quartet of Leon, Wapner, Bowman and Dorst-Porada are functioning like a humming and perfectly tuned and well-lubricated machine with all pistons firing in precisely-timed sequence and that Valencia is the wrench that has been tossed into the works.
Leon did not deny that he has come, at long last, to a too-much delayed accommodation with Wapner. He said he was inspired to it by an act of statesmanship at the international level.
“I was reading some history about the Cold War and how it came to an end,” Leon said. “What happened was [Soviet Premier] Mikhail Gorbachev called [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later-Secretary of State] Colin Powell and he said, “You are going to have to find another enemy. I am no longer your enemy. We have been looking at each other across the Fulda Gap [the vast no-man’s land between the Soviet and American forces at the border of then-East Germany and then-West Germany, garrisoned on both sides with tanks and other heavily-mechanized military forces] for too long. I am not your enemy. The past has to get buried.”
After reading that, Leon said he then engaged in some statesmanship of his own with Wapner.
“I sat down with him and I said, ‘I am not your enemy. We have to find a way to work this out,'” Leon said. “He was genuinely touched by that. It didn’t happen immediately, I can tell you that. It took a couple of months for him to come back. He said, ‘You’re right. How do we fix this?’ I said, “First, we make up our minds to get along and then we work together.”
He and Wapner have been in harmony ever since, he said.
Leon acknowledged that he and Wapner were “in hate with each other. He tried to ruin me. It was a grudge match. Does anyone want to live with that continually? We’re both 65 now. When we serve to the end of the next terms we’ll be elected to next year, we’ll be 70 years old. We’re tired of the fight, both of us. Why would we want to spend the last five years of our time in public office fighting over something that happened almost a generation ago? We decided to lay that to rest. Now we’ve gotten down to work. We’re at peace and we’ve been good.”
Leon insisted he is not quaking in his boots over Valencia’s political challenge. Having been in municipal office in Ontario for nearly 23 years, having won seven straight municipal elections, and sitting on a campaign war chest of a quarter of a million dollars, Leon said he won’t be running scared in 2022, but rather striding confidently.
Ontario being what it is, the most accomplished and the most financially successful of San Bernardino County’s cities, is a product of sound management, sensible decisions and clear long-term vision, he said.
Valencia doesn’t have the experience or vision he and Wapner possess, Leon said, and the junior member of the council is not at this point capable of working cooperatively to accomplish anything.
“I don’t have a relationship with him, as far as I’m concerned,” Leon said. “I’m not opposed to working with him if he brings in some good ideas. In the last year I haven’t heard him recommend one thing.”
Leon continued, “I don’t necessarily say he is a bad guy, but at the same time, he obviously has no respect for anyone else on the council. He doesn’t want to be a team player and he doesn’t seem to be interested working toward a common goal.”