The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued San Bernardino County and the cities of Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga and Redlands, alleging all four governmental entities failed to submit water conservation reports required by the state for three consecutive years.
There is a suggestion that the county and the three cities were singled out as guinea pigs to determine if a slew of similar suits can be employed against more than 55 percent of the state’s 542 cities, towns and counties. San Bernardino County, Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga and Redlands are “named respondents” in the complaint and approximately 300 cities and counties are in the “proposed respondent” class.
The  Natural Resources Defense Council, known by the acronym NRDC, is a non-profit environmental organization established in 1970 with offices in Santa Monica, San Francisco, states other than California and offshore.
Represented by San Francisco-based attorneys Barbara Chisholm and Merideth Johnson, the NRDC contends in the suit that there has been “widespread failure of hundreds of cities and counties throughout California, including San Bernardino County and the cities of Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga and Redlands, to report annually on the results of their permitting programs for new irrigated landscapes and major renovations of irrigated landscapes, in violation of state law, as set forth in Section 495 of Chapter 2.7 of Title 23 of the California Code of Regulations. The use of landscaping in urban areas provides significant benefits to the quality of life in California. Urban landscapes can offer fire protection, prevent erosion, clean the air and water, replace ecosystems lost due to development, and provide areas for recreation. However, the use of landscaping in urban areas also requires a significant amount of water. Roughly half of California’s potable water supply is used for urban landscape irrigation. Substantial water savings can be gained through water-efficient landscape design and proper installation. Such water-efficiency measures help to make more effective use of current water supplies and to enhance California’s resilience to drought conditions in the future.”
According to the suit, “Since 2015, the state has required cities and counties to report on their local landscape permitting programs. This reporting requirement is a key element in a broader set of requirements imposed on cities and counties pursuant to the Water Conservation in Landscaping Act, and its implementing regulations. The Act, passed in 1990, is intended to promote ‘the conservation and efficient use of water and to prevent the waste of this valuable resource.’ Under the Act, California cities and counties are required to meet certain water efficiency standards in landscaping by either adopting, implementing, and enforcing the Department of Water Resources’ Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance, known as the model ordinance, or a comparably effective local ordinance.  The Act thus places the responsibility on local governments, not water suppliers or users, to ensure that new irrigated landscapes in their jurisdictions are designed and installed to be water-efficient. In 2014, then-Governor Edmund G. Brown proclaimed a state of emergency throughout California due to the severe drought conditions, and in 2015, as part of the state’s response to the drought, then-Governor Brown issued Executive Order B-29-15, which directed the Department of Water Resources to revise the model ordinance. As so revised, the 2015 version of the model ordinance sets more stringent water efficiency requirements, which are necessary to address the increasingly critical need to avoid waste and excessive use of drinking water supplies in California.”
According to the suit, “This petition does not challenge any particular jurisdiction’s failure to adopt or enforce the model ordinance or a comparably effective local ordinance. Instead, it challenges the widespread failure of respondents and numerous other cities and counties throughout California to comply with the ministerial duty to submit annual reports to the Department of Water Resources, as required by the water efficiency reporting requirement.  The continued failure by respondents and members of the proposed respondent class to comply with this ministerial duty of providing information that enables the state and the public to assess compliance with water efficiency standards cannot be countenanced in the face of the worsening threats of drought and water insecurity in this state.  During the state’s most recent drought, the state’s water supply became severely depleted, with record low snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, decreased water levels in reservoirs, reduced flows in rivers, and shrinking water supplies in groundwater basins.  The drought conditions caused severe problems, including drinking water shortages in communities across the state, diminished water for agricultural production, degraded habitat for many fish and wildlife species, depleted groundwater, and increased risk of subsidence and wildfires, among other harmful effects.”
The suit states, “On information and belief, named respondent San Bernardino County failed to submit annual reports regarding its water efficient landscape ordinance, and implementation and enforcement of that ordinance, for the calendar years 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.”
The suit states, “On information and belief, named respondent City of Chino Hills failed to submit annual reports regarding its water efficient landscape ordinance, and implementation and enforcement of that ordinance, for the calendar years 2015, 2016, and 2017.”
The suit states, “On information and belief, named respondent City of Rancho Cucamonga failed to submit annual reports regarding its water efficient landscape ordinance, and implementation and enforcement of that ordinance, for the calendar years 2015 and 2016.”
The suit states, “On information and belief, named respondent City of Redlands failed to submit annual reports regarding its water efficient landscape ordinance, and implementation and enforcement of that ordinance, for the calendar years 2015, 2016, and 2017.”
Neither Rancho Cucamonga City Attorney Jim Markman nor Redlands City Attorney Dan McHugh responded to requests from the Sentinel for comment on the suit.
Chino Hills City Attorney Mark Hensley told the Sentinel, “The City of Chino Hills had met all of the necessary requirements re: water conservation activities (it did so timely over the years) but did not submit the reports prior to the lawsuit being filed. The city has subsequently filed all of the necessary reports. The city has an excellent record re: water conservation activities and actual conservation of water. The city was really surprised that NRDC filed its lawsuit as the city had communicated to the NRDC in November that it had complied with all of the conservation requirements and would have the reports out shortly.”
San Bernardino County Spokesman David Wert told the Sentinel, “This lawsuit has nothing to do with public health or safety or even water availability. This lawsuit is simply about an obscure and relatively new reporting requirement that the county and apparently most local agencies in the state didn’t even know about. The county is now working to become compliant going forward. It is unfortunate that this fund-raising organization chose to waste public resources and seek publicity for itself by filing lawsuits rather than just advising cities and counties of the mandate and providing them with a reasonable opportunity to comply. The county would have gladly been in compliance had it known about the new requirement.”
-Mark Gutglueck

This week, ahead of an anticipated revelation that he had allowed himself and the ruling coalition on the city council he heads to be taken in by a conman now under federal investigation, San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia first asked and then unsuccessfully pressured City Manager Teri Ledoux to use the authority Valdivia had vested in her to rescind the contract his action engendered after the city was burned for nearly $37,000 in the deal.
Following Ledoux’s refusal to help Valdivia make the problem with now-discredited lobbyist Michael Esposito go away quietly, the city council is now scheduled to deal with the issue very publicly next week.
Last year, in June, Valdivia and his then-chief of staff, Bill Essayli spearheaded a proposal to make a combined $160,800 in cuts to the pay provided to the city attorney and city clerk, whose status as elected officials will expire in March of this year in accordance with the revamped city charter that was approved by voters in November 2016, and divert that money to hiring what Valdivia and other city officials euphemistically refer to as “advocates,” and who in reality are lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Before legal challenges by City Attorney Gary Saenz and City Clerk Georgeann Hanna succeeded in nixing the combined takeaway of their salaries and benefits through March and necessitating that the city reinstitute their wages with backpay, Valdivia and his new chief of staff, Matt Brown by late September had convinced a majority of the city council to go along with the hiring of two lobbying firms. City Manager Teri Ledoux and her support staff had invited various lobbying firms to submit proposals to do that work and then did a survey of those responding to determine which ones might be considered by the city council as suitable candidates to serve as San Bernardino’s state and federal legislative and governmental advocates. According to Ledoux, Sacramento-based Joe A. Gonsalves & Son topped the list of the city’s best options for representation in the state capital and Washington, D.C.-based Townsend Public Affairs qualified as the best fit to work on behalf of the city in the nation’s capital. The city council took up the prospect of hiring a lobbying firm at its October 2 meeting. After hearing from city residents Treasure Ortiz and Luis Ojeda, who inveighed against using city funds to employ the firms for what they considered questionably-effective efforts that would take money away from other more meaningful and productive efforts, Councilman Henry Nickel insisted that having federal and state lobbyists is de rigeur for a municipality in this day and age, rejecting Ortiz’s and Ojeda’s objections as juvenile naïveté. “Any city of our size and caliber has an advocacy team working for them in the state and at the Capitol,” Nickel said, asserting that employing lobbyists is how the city wrings more money for itself in state and federal pass-through funds. “We’re the largest city in the county, the county seat,” he said, before derisively referring to Ortiz and Ojeda as “individuals who’d say we don’t need this.” Paying lobbyists may have seemed penny foolish to the likes of Ortiz and Ojeda, Nickel said, but expending the money was truly pound-wise he insisted. “This is how we get that revenue back,” he said. “As your elected officials, [we] work to get that money back to use to your benefit. We need this service.”
Councilwoman Bessine Richard concurred, saying hiring a lobbyist was tantamount to making an “investment” in the city.
It was at that point that Valdivia, who normally has no vote on the seven-councilmember panel, leapt in to convince the council that it should rethink the recommendation that Ledoux had made with regard to the federal lobbyist. Suggesting that he had spoken directly with Mike Esposito, Valdivia indicated he had gotten him to reduce from $120,000 the bid Esposito had made for his company, Federal Advocates, to work on behalf of the city annually to $100,000. Councilman Jim Mulvihill said he did not think that Esposito’s direct contact with Valdivia in the midst of the city’s bid evaluation process was appropriate, indicating that should not have altered the city’s decision-making process. “Getting a phone call from somebody shouldn’t change what the staff recommendation has been,” Mulvihill said, a reference to the consideration that despite the price cut, Federal Advocates was still deemed to be the third-place finisher in the competition for the lobbying assignment among four firms.
Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra offered a substitute motion to postpone the city securing advocacy services until the city redressed the issue with the salaries of the city clerk and city attorney. That motion failed with her vote and that of councilmen Mulvihill and Fred Shorett in support of it and the opposition of councilmembers Richard, Nickel, Ted Sanchez and Juan Figueroa. Sanchez then made a motion, seconded by Nickel, to employ Federal Advocates as the city’s federal lobbyist at the rate of $100,000 per year and to hire Joe Gonsalvez and Son for $50,000 per year to provide state advocacy. That passed 4-to-3, with Richard, Nickel, Sanchez and Figueroa prevailing over Mulvihill, Shorett and Ibarra in opposition.
Later that month, Esposito’s status as a superlobbyist began to unravel. Somewhat inexplicably, he had risen, through a combination of circumstance, misinterpretation, mystique and outright deception to become one of the most sought-after lobbyists in the nation’s capital during the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency, rocketing skyward on a trajectory before plunging earthward in the days, weeks and months after the City of San Bernardino hired his firm.
An airline pilot by trade, Mike Esposito is the son of  Sante Esposito, an attorney who has been active in government and politics most of his career, as a staffer and lawyer on Capitol Hill for nearly two decades, a lobbyist after that and then as the owner of his own lobbying firm, Key Advisors, which he founded in 2006. Sante Esposito at one point was associated, at his son’s invitation, with Federal Advisors. In 2016, however, foreseeing difficulties ahead, Sante Esposito disassociated himself with Federal Advisors and his son. Sante Esposito has long been associated with the Democratic Party and was the Democratic chief counsel of the House Transportation Committee. His son, Mike Esposito, shared that association with the Democratic Party.
Those Democratic leanings, however, did not keep the younger Esposito from involving or intertwining himself in business dealings involving Republicans or those involved with Republicans. Sometime after his father’s creation of Key Advisors, Mike Esposito became active himself as a lobbyist, although he did not always act in this capacity directly, sometimes shrouding himself in mystery or using cut-outs or stand-ins to engage in activities or skulduggery when he did not want to be identified or when what he was doing for one client ran counter to the interests of another client. Something that was kept a secret from the outer world but which was known by at least some of those within Esposito’s circle was that he had created an alter ego,  Mike Ferrari, under whose identity he carried out a good deal of his activity. One of the more remarkable elements of the entire matter relating to Mike Esposito was that right up until the time Donald Trump was elected, like his father he was a major Democratic Party operative. Then chameleon-like he transformed, somehow without those within the Beltway or the rest of the county catching on, into a Trump sycophant, reaping a benefit of approaching or exceeding $50 million in doing so.
An illustration of this is that in October 2016, at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, Esposito was making postings in which he was referring to Donald Trump as an “idiot.”  In the guise of Mike Ferrari, using the identification “ferrarimike,” Esposito, referring to himself as a lobbyist in Northern Virginia in the weeks just ahead of the election, posted a prediction on Reddit that Donald Trump would lose the election in a landslide that would embarrass himself and the GOP. At the same time, he lionized Hillary Clinton.
“You can scream rigged and unfair all you want but you all nominated the idiot,” ferrarimike wrote in a pointed jab at the Republicans. “There’s something wrong with you if you can’t see how more qualified she is compared to that doof. It’s almost insulting that she has to stand on the same stage as him.”
Magically, however, after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Esposito slithered off his Democratic skin and entirely reinvented himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.
Key to his establishing himself as a rock-ribbed Republican was to step up his conspicuous consumption, showing up in high profile places in luxury vehicles such as Rolls Royces, Lamborghinis and Ferraris, decked out in Louis Vuitton, Cesare Attolini,  Luigi Borelli and Luciano Barbera suits. He then made substantial donations to Republican candidates or conservative causes, most often using money collected from others which he pooled and provided in his own name. In one way or another, he wangled an appointment to the Republican National Committee Chairman’s Advisory Board, an honorary position that can be claimed by donors contributing at least $5,000 to the Republican National Committee. Despite his previous close association with the Democrats, Esposito had the foresight in 2016 to make $2,700 in contributions to two Republicans vying for reelection to Congress, though at the same time he had made $5,950 in contributions to Democrats seeking reelection to the House of Representatives.
By June 2017, Esposito was fully involved in financing Republican candidates, particularly ones who were deemed to be potentially vulnerable in the upcoming 2018 election, such that his efforts brought with them some attention. He gave Senator Dean Heller $5,000. He has since provided another $114,000 to Republican members of Congress since the spring of 2017. He provided $5,400 to Trump’s reelection campaign.
Esposito, who could lay claim to but a single federal client for his lobbying firm in 2012, was making humongous strides by the summer of 2017. To help himself, he shouted out that he was a “former staffer on the House Transportation Committee.” That was a prevarication. While his father had worked on the committee for more than a decade, Michael Esposito had never been an employee of the committee. The closest he had come to that was when, while his father was yet on the committee’s staff, he had briefly done a seven-month internship there. By mid-2017, Michael Esposito had divested himself of any vestige of his Democratic Party-affiliated past. In his biography on Federal Advocate’s website, he is described as “an integral part of the senior-most leadership of the RNC and directly advises the chairwoman on issues of significance to the nation.” Michael Esposito is, according to the Federal Advocate’s website “a major player in Republican party politics.”
Indeed, Esposito and Federal Advocates at that point began to shun any clients vaguely associated with the Democrats, focusing exclusively on companies or entities looking to get the ear of the Republican establishment. That strategy worked. Those who did not have complete amnesia with regard to Michael Esposito’s past, at least experienced brain fade. Simultaneously, Esposito was making a series of bold, indeed outlandish, claims about his firm’s, and his own personal, closeness not only to the Trump administration but to the president himself and his family. Remarkably, for two years, Esposito got away with it.
Not only did he get away with it, he profited incredibly by doing so.
In 2014, Esposito could rightfully claim but a handful of federal clients. By 2016, he was doing somewhat better, with Federal Advocates having brought in $907,000 from clients that year. In 2017, Federal Advocates made a major leap forward, pulling down $3.25 million, prompting Bloomberg Government News Service to proclaim Federal Advocates the “best performing” lobbying firm of 2017. Other media outlets followed suit, and Esposito was suddenly being celebrated as the most influential lobbyist in all of Washington, D.C. In 2018, Federal Advocates’ income grew to $4.66 million.
In 2019, Federal Advocates appeared to be moving so rapidly up the charts that the trajectory could not be shown on a single page. Moreover, the firm was beginning to take on international clients. On December 21, 2018, Esposito registered to represent three overseas entities: the Justice political party in Ukraine; Citizen, a nonprofit led by a Justice party lawyer; and a Poland-based company called Zeset Sp. In the spring of last year, more foreign clients signed up with Federal Advocates. One Ukrainian client wrote the company a $500,000 check. The Chinese technology company Huawei paid Federal Advocates $1.65 million. Simultaneously, cities and counties around the country were racing each other to land Federal Advocates as their lobbyist. The City of San Bernardino appears to have been one of the last of these.
At this point, Federal Advocates and Esposito appear to have been undone in part by the company’s success and in part by Esposito’s misrepresentations. It was perhaps the contract with Huawei or maybe the work for the Ukrainian clients or both, together with Esposito’s boast, freely written in scores of work solicitation letters to local municipalities, that Esposito had a “strong personal and professional relationship with President Trump” or variously, “No other government relations firm possesses the level of personal and professional relationships with President Trump, his family and senior advisors in the White House” that finally rang alarms. In some of those letters, it was stated that Esposito had “independently represented both the Kushner and Trump families’ businesses for over a decade.” It was a claim that Esposito has “an open line of communication to the President of the United States” and is in “regular” contact with the president, which ultimately resulted in a November 1 tweet from the president which at last exposed Esposito as someone who was trading on access that simply did not exist.
“Many people say they know me, claiming to be ‘best friends’ and really close etc., when I don’t know these people at all,” President Trump tweeted. “This happens, I suppose, to all who become president. With that being stated, I don’t know, to the best of my knowledge, a man named Michael Esposito.”
Instantaneously, Esposito and Federal Advocates found themselves under the mcroscope of media scrutiny. In short order, the FBI opened an investigation. Uncovered in the course of that was Esposito’s efforts to involve himself in business ventures with a number of politicians or their family members, activity which the FBI focused upon as potential money laundering, bribery and kickback schemes. On January 2, the FBI served search warrants at Esposito’s home and at the offices of Federal Advocates.
This week, as the implication of what had occurred with Esposito and Federal Advocates was registering across the country, Valdivia, who is himself under investigation by the FBI for allegedly receiving bribe money from the proprietors of businesses or the owners of business licenes applicants in San Bernardino, took note as well. The Sentinel is informed Valdivia approached City Manager Teri Ledoux and requested that she use her authority to cancel the city’s contract with Federal Advocates that was approved by the city council, upon his urging, on October 2. Ledoux told Valdivia she was not willing to scrap a contract approved by council action. This has created a situation in which the matter has now been put on the agenda for next week’s January 15 meeting of the city council. The council will at that point consider rescinding the contract with Federal Advocates, which has been paid or is due to be paid $36,827.62. Since Federal Advocates was given the contract in October, it has not achieved any results for the city.
Valdivia was unwilling to make any public comment on the matter.
Councilman Henry Nickel, who in October had insisted that hiring a federal lobbyist was a necessity and seconded and then supported the hiring of Esposito and Federal Advocates, this morning somewhat sheepishly told the Sentinel, “I don’t think we want to be doing business with someone who is under federal investigation.” He acknowledged, without being specific, that “In the past we had experience with a lobbyist who was a shady figure and we ended that relationship. I think we have to be consistent. I believe next Wednesday we are to reconsider who will be handling our federal advocacy going forward. I still support the advocacy of our city in Washington, D.C. and in Sacramento, for that matter, but I think we will need someone different than we currently have for the federal end of that.”
Nickel said he believed the recommendation that is coming will be to hire Townsend Public Affairs, the firm that Ledoux had earlier recommended and which he and his colleagues had jettisoned in favor of Federal Advocates in compliance with Valdivia’s prompting in October.
-Mark Gutglueck

I wore a long dress with boots, and missing was a leather jacket with fringes. Looks like 2020 is the year for leather. It is popping in all sorts of colors and you will see it from head to toe. Meaning shirts, jackets, pants, dresses, and etc.… You can do leather all year long and it’s a fun feel-good material, too. Something about leather adds contour to any outfit. You can really inspire any outfit with a hint of leather. Try a jumpsuit with a leather jacket, a leather suit, or a leather skirt with a plaid blazer. Have fun with whichever leather piece you choose to run with this year. I’ll be looking out for fringes on the street.
“A leather jacket always makes you look cooler, sometimes more chic, and it elevates your look to make you look like you’ve purchased something expensive to set yourself apart.”  -Tan France

By clicking on the blue portal below, you can download a PDF of the January 3 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 01-03-20

Two-and-one-half months after state agricultural officials optimistically hailed what they thought might be significant process toward the extirpation of Newcastle disease in Southern California, there has been in the last month-and-a-half a flare-up of the poultry-killing virus.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture has intensified a quarantine on all of Los Angeles County and the roughly westernmost halves of San Bernardino and Riverside counties to head off a repeat of the epidemic that between May 2018 and Summer 2019 necessitated the euthanization of 1.2 million birds, most of them chickens.
The quarantine protocol calls for isolating a chicken that has, or chickens that have, been potentially or actually exposed to the contagious illness, preventing it or them from contact with the rest of a flock. That bird is then killed.
Of the 1.2 million fowl killed as a result of the 2018/2019 outbreak, more than 1.1 million were chickens being raised agriculturally for commercial purposes. Close to 100,000 of the birds killed were pets or show birds.
Newcastle disease is a highly contagious viral bird malady affecting many domestic and wild avian species. While it is transmissible to humans, among whom it manifests in relatively mild forms of conjunctivitis, also known as pink eye, and influenza-like symptoms, it seems to pose no other significant hazard to people.
Newcastle’s effects are most notable among farm-raised chickens due to their high susceptibility and the potential for widespread infestation throughout the poultry industry.
Newcastle typically results in swelling around a bird’s eyes, a purplish swelling of the wattle and comb, a large amount of fluid coming from the beak and nasal areas, a twisting of the neck and head, loss of appetite, green diarrhea, and sudden death. No treatment for Newcastle exists.
Transmission occurs by exposure to fecal and other excretions from infected birds, contact with contaminated food and water, as well as through human interaction as when a person moves infected birds, equipment or feed or by coming into contact with unaffected birds while wearing the same clothing or shoes worn when that person had contact with infected areas.
The 2018/19 epidemic, which included cases in Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, had significantly declined throughout the summer, and by September had been isolated to four known locations. There were no further outbreaks in October. That cessation in the disease spread did not last.
According to a “virulent Newcastle disease update” issued by State Veterinarian Dr. Annette Jones on December 23, “Over the past month, virulent Newcastle disease cases have increased because people have violated the California Department of Food and Agriculture Virulent Newcastle Disease Regional Quarantine by moving infected birds or contaminated equipment and secondary spread to neighboring flocks. We now have 20 new cases under investigation, all linked to the recent Bloomington area outbreak. Most of the cases are in San Bernardino County, with two in Riverside County and one in Los Angeles County. Backyard flocks as well as retail pet/feed stores are involved.”
Jones’ update continued, “Based on phylogenetic analysis and epidemiologic studies, we understand how the disease spreads in Southern California. This highly contagious virus has been spread when people move exposed birds or equipment, or when people carry the virus to their own unfortunate flock on their hands and feet. It moves long distances as people illegally move birds or equipment. When introduced to a new area, it is amplified as the previously uninfected poultry succumb until the environmental virus load is so great, the outbreak spreads from yard to yard. Exposed poultry around a newly infected flock are the ‘virus amplifiers,’ particularly just before they show signs of disease.”
Speaking directly to bird owners, Jones said, “Put simply, your birds can spread the disease before they show symptoms, so the only way to stop it is to not move birds – period – if you are in the  California Department of Food and Agriculture Regional Quarantine Area.”
In San Bernardino County that quarantine area includes the jurisdiction’s western half, and all of the county’s inland valley’s and mountains, including all municipalities except Yucca Valley, Twentynine Palms and Needles.
The somber tone of Jones’ December 23 update was a stark contrast to the more positive missive she had put out on October 22, which read: “The California Department of Food and Agriculture/U.S. Department of Agriculture Virulent Newcastle Disease response team has started the ‘freedom of disease’ phase in which we continue surveillance and testing of birds to detect and quickly eradicate any small pockets of infection (if present). There have been no new positive detections of virulent Newcastle disease since early September, but the regional quarantine is still in place at this time. A sufficient number of negative virulent Newcastle disease tests from the community will help meet international standards to demonstrate freedom from virulent Newcastle disease and allow the regional quarantine to be lifted. This phase will take place over the next few months, bearing in mind that if any positives are found, it would potentially create a setback to this process. We are sincerely grateful for the continued cooperation and support from the community.”
Twenty-four days later, however, Jones on November 15 reported in an update, “There were new detections of virulent Newcastle disease on November 14 at two neighboring residential properties in western San Bernardino County. These are the first detections of virulent Newcastle disease in Southern California since September 4. These cases were identified when a bird owner at one of the properties contacted a veterinarian.”
That was followed by a November 19 update from Jones, which stated, “A new detection of virulent Newcastle disease was identified on November 18, 2019 at a retail feed and pet store in western San Bernardino County. The store is linked to the two recently confirmed positive premises in western San Bernardino County. This new premises is approximately 1 kilometer outside the boundary of the current control area and control area expansion is being reviewed.”
On December 9, Jones put out another update that informed the agricultural community that “In November and December of 2019, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have detected a total of 6 new confirmed cases of virulent Newcastle disease in backyard poultry and at a retail feed store in western San Bernardino County. Information gathered so far indicates that these cases are linked, but we are still working to find additional connections and potentially more cases. As a result of these findings, we have euthanized poultry on confirmed infected and exposed properties in the Bloomington-area and have intensified testing in the neighborhoods surrounding the infected flocks. In an effort to minimize the impact of this new pocket of disease on the entire area, our epidemiologists continue to explore multiple disease response strategies with an eye towards preventing a major outbreak from reoccurring.”
In the December 9 update, Jones said, “All strategies currently under consideration will involve more testing in areas we have already tested at least once, including in Los Angeles and Riverside counties. While these recent cases are in San Bernardino County and our last positive cases in Los Angeles and Riverside counties were in May 2019 and September 2019, significant historical evidence shows that infected birds are moved frequently between these counties, so as long as we have remaining pockets of disease, a substantial risk of spread exists. We are hoping that we can keep moving toward eradication and freedom from disease. Success depends on community efforts. Stay vigilant, report sick birds, and take actions to protect your birds and your community’s birds from disease. Do not move birds and do not allow new poultry on your property.”
Jones was critical of a subset of poultry raisers who are engaging in irresponsible and illegal action that is endangering the region with further contagion.
“While the vast majority of people in affected communities have made the commitment and sacrifice needed to stop this outbreak, some have ignored our quarantine and even encouraged others to ignore the quarantine,” she said. “We all need to work together so we can eliminate this virus entirely from California and return to an environment that supports healthy backyard birds and poultry farms.”
Historically, Southern California has weathered worse Newcastle outbreaks than the one that manifested in 2018 and has persisted now into 2020.
In 2002 and 2003, a Newcastle epidemic resulted in the euthanization of 3.2 million birds. In 1971, a major outbreak occurred among 1,341 commercial poultry flocks in Southern California, necessitating the killing of just under 12 million birds.
The means used to head off the spread of Newcastle disease can be brutal. Public health officials, agricultural inspectors and regulators, as well as farmers have engaged in what are perceived by many members of the public to be ruthless and cruel means when the disease appears to be raging out of control. Flocks of birds, such as egg producing hens in an area where Newcastle has been detected, even if no birds on that particular farm have been confirmed to have the virus, have on occasion been uniformly slaughtered. One of the means of by which this is effectuated involves loading thousands of chickens into an enclosed garbage truck. A hose is then run from the truck’s exhaust pipe into an aperture so the carbon monoxide can be introduced into the enclosure containing the chickens. Those chickens not crushed to death by the weight of the chickens above them succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning.
-Mark Gutglueck

The City of Upland’s recreation manager abruptly departed the city last month, becoming the fourth casualty among Upland’s high-ranking municipal and institutional employees tripped up over what opponents of the city’s effort to reconstitute city parkland into a parking lot for San Antonio Hospital say is an unacceptable and illegally orchestrated disposition of city property.
In addition to those four departures, the parkland-to-parking lot debacle is widely perceived as having been a factor in the 2018 political demise of three of Upland’s former city council members.
Doug Story,  who began with the City of Upland in October 2015 as a development services specialist, remained in that capacity until September 2017, at which point he was provided with a promotion to the position of Upland’s recreation manager commencing in October 2017. A condition of that promotion was that Story had to do the bidding of a number of city higher-ups, which benefited the board of directors and president of the City of Upland’s major private sector entity, San Antonio Hospital. That task entailed a paradoxical giveaway of a portion of the city’s premier recreational amenity – Memorial Park – and the compromising of the function of the municipal division Story had been promoted to lead. Story gamely sought to carry out the assignment he had been given, boldly seeking to obtain an infusion of state money to offset the reduction in parkland the city was sustaining in its effort to provide the hospital with property for parking and future expansion. The hospital needs hundreds of more parking spaces than it currently has to accommodate the influx of patients it is experiencing following the 2017 conclusion of six years of construction on the hospital campus. That construction involved a series of planned expansion stages which increased the number of beds at the institution from 271 to over 400, saw the addition of the $160 million four-story Vineyard Tower at 999 San Bernardino Road, as well as another $30 million, 60,000-square-foot structure at 1100 San Bernardino Road, upped the number of stations in the hospital’s emergency room from 34 to 52, and created and outfitted 12 more intensive care units. Provision for parking was not included in the application/plans approved by the City of Upland for any of these projects as required by law.
Story applied for the maximum amount of money the city could get under Proposition 68, which was passed by the state’s voters in 2018 and reallocated a portion of California’s $7.545 billion in general obligation bonds for expanding and enhancing parks around the state. In his application, Story put together an energetic park makeover plan to utilize the $8.5 million Upland was requesting under Proposition 68 to refurbish or replace Memorial Park’s playground equipment, add a water feature splash pad, an amphitheater and an artificial turf multi-sports competition field, augment the park with walking and exercise trails, a basketball court and an intensified outdoor nature conservancy with trees and plants hospitable toward bees, hummingbirds and the like. In this way, Story hoped, Upland’s citizenry would ignore that accompanying the park enhancements would be the reduction of the 38.5 acre park by 4.631 acres.
Some five months after Story had been promoted to recreation manager, the Upland City Council as it was then composed on March 26, 2018, with 72 hours notice from city staff, was presented with a proposal that had emanated from Story’s immediate boss, then-Development Services Director Jeff Zwack, along with then-City Attorney Jim Markman and then-City Manager Bill Manis. The Zwack/Markman/Manis proposal called for the city selling 4.631 acres of the southwestern portion of Memorial Park, which contains a baseball field that is actively used by the city’s youth sports leagues. The main campus of the hospital immediately adjoins the park, and the hospital wanted to convert the baseball diamond and some of the greenland around it to a parking lot to accommodate the hospital’s burgeoning clientele.
In compliance with the recommendation by Manis, Zwack and Markman, the city council voted 3-to-1 to approve a purchase and sale agreement between the hospital and the city, with San Antonio Hospital committing to paying $906,931.55 per acre, or a total of $4.2 million, to acquire the 4.631 acres. Mayor Debbie Stone and then-council members Gino Filippi and Carol Timm went along with making the sale. Councilwoman Janice Elliott opposed it. Then-Councilman Sid Robinson, who normally voted in lockstep with Stone, Filippi and Timm, was not present at the meeting.
Manis, Zwack, Markman and the three prevailing members of the council, sensitive to San Antonio Hospital’s status as the city’s major institution and largest employer, considered accommodating its needs to be paramount.
In approving the sale, the city council also authorized City Attorney James Markman to undertake a so-called validation proceeding intended to foreclose any procedural or future legal challenge to the sale. In its validation action filed with the court, the city invited anyone opposed to the sale to lodge a protest. A challenge to the validation had to be filed within 60 days. Once the court validated the sale, any future lawsuits contesting the sale would be barred. The calculation by those favoring the sale was that no one would go to the expense of hiring an attorney to make an answer to the validation petition.
The validation procedure was directed to the courtroom of Superior Court Judge David Cohn in San Bernardino. To the chagrin of city and hospital officials, Marjorie Mikels, an attorney living in the city, as well as the Inland Oversight Committee represented by Cory Briggs, an attorney based in both Upland and San Diego, filed answers to the validation action. Those responses took issue with the sale on multiple grounds, among which was that the city selling off a slice of the park – in particular the one sold by the council on March 26, 2018, which included the long extant and actively used baseball field – is tantamount to abandoning public property. Such abandonments, under state law, cannot be effectuated without a vote of the citizens residing in the jurisdiction that owns that property.
Faced with not one but two challenges to the sale he had not anticipated, City Attorney Markman sought to convince Judge Cohn that the city council, acting on its own authority, was within its rights to sell off city land. In response to the argument that a municipality’s abandonment of property it owned and was putting to beneficial public use had to be subjected to a vote, Markman asserted that selling the property did not constitute an abandonment.
Ultimately, some 14 months after the sale of the park property was approved by the city council, on May 29, 2019, Judge Cohn, after hearing the responses to the city’s filing, dismissed its petition for validation. Judge Cohn’s ruling cleared the way for anyone with standing – meaning essentially any city resident – to file a lawsuit challenging the sale.
Penultimately, hospital officials have resigned themselves to the necessity of subjecting the sale of the property to a citywide vote. It earlier appeared that balloting would take place in conjunction with the March 2020 California Primary election. Now, however, it appears that the vote, if it is to take place at all, will not come until the November 2020 general election.
Before 2018 had fully run, the fallout from the move to sell the city park property was settling hard. In June of that year, Zwack abruptly retired as the city’s development services director. In September, Manis resigned as city manager, effective November 1, 2018. Councilman Sid Robinson, whose status in Upland had largely been based upon his involvement in the city’s youth sports leagues, suddenly found his position as a member of the city council whose voting record was virtually indistinguishable from those of Mayor Stone and council members Filippi and Timm untenable, given Stone’s, Filippi’s and Timm’s support of eradicating one of the city’s baseball diamonds. He announced he would not seek election that November. When that election was held, Filippi and Timm, who had become the object of a large number of voters’ wrath in part due to their March 28 vote to sell off 12 percent of Memorial Park, were voted out of office, while Councilwoman Janice Elliott, who had opposed the parkland sale, emerged victorious in her effort to gain election in the city’s newly created Second District, as the city held its first by-district election.
City Attorney Jim Markman, the other architect of the parkland sale, managed to survive the close of 2018. But with Judge Cohn’s ruling in May of last year dismissing the validation action the city had filed to keep the sale of the park property from being challenged, Markman found himself under siege. Not only was his legal expertise and judgment subject to question, it was painfully obvious that his militating on behalf of the hospital in its effort to obtain the park property for a parking lot was out of step with a sizable cross section of the most civically-active residents of the city. In October, as the city council was making preparations to terminate him, he resigned as city attorney.
A month before Markman’s forced departure, San Antonio Hospital CEO and President Harris Koenig had been fired by the San Antonio Hospital Board of Directors. Koening had been named the president and CEO of San Antonio Hospital in June 2011 and, using financing that consisted in large measure of $125,000,000 in certificates of participation issued using the City of Upland’s bonding authority, immediately thereafter embarked on the earlier-described six-year-long series of planned expansion stages intended to transform San Antonio into a regional hospital.  Among the board’s concerns that had brought about Koenig’s termination was the hospital’s continuing lack of profitability two years after the expansion had been completed in 2017.
The hospital’s parking lot is no longer able to accommodate the number of people seeking care who check in to the hospital, either on an in-patient or out-patient basis, to say nothing of those accompanying or visiting the hospital’s patients. Consequently, some individuals who have been treated at the hospital over the last several years, reluctant to have to deal with the torturous effort to find a place to park, are now going elsewhere in search of medical care. With adequate parking being the one element of the hospital’s expansion that had been overlooked by Koenig and others, the situation had grown acute by the spring of 2018, resulting in city officials undertaking the park property sale in an effort to mitigate the hospital’s problem.
After Judge Cohn’s ruling in May 2019, those yet hoping that the city might be prevailed upon to let go of some of the park acreage so the parking structure could be built turned to Story in a last ditch effort to formulate some way to have the city’s residents hold still for a reduction in the footprint of Memorial Park. That is when Story threw together the application for the Proposition 68 grant money.
The hope was that the community, aware of how Memorial Park for more than a decade had been neglected in its upkeep because of dwindling municipal financial resources, would be enthusiastic about the upgrades Story’s Proposition 68 application would provide – the playground equipment, the amphitheater, the splash pad, the artificial turf multi-sports competition field, the walking and exercise trails, the basketball court and the outdoor nature conservancy. The calculation was that the enthusiasm to be created by the upgrades would be so great that a critical majority of city’s residents would be willing to accept the loss of the 4.631 acres.
Some residents, astutely, questioned how it was that Story could be so confident that the city was going to receive any grant money at all based on Upland proving the Memorial Park environs was an “economically disadvantaged” area and other competitive criteria, let alone the entirety of the $8.5 million that had been applied for to ensure the Memorial Park makeover was to take place as he said it would. Story would brook no suggestion that the state would turn the city’s supplication for the grant down, and he was equally dismissive of suggestions that the city might get less than $8.5 million, which was the maximum amount a municipality could receive. He indicated that he had been assured by state officials the city would be informed of the grant reception by last month.
Word has now come that Story has left the city. Unbeknownst to Upland’s citizenry, some time ago he had applied for a position with the City of Beaumont. Beaumont’s human services director, Kari Mendoza, this week confirmed to the Sentinel that Story will begin as an employee with Beaumont on January 6.
According to a source the Sentinel deems reliable, Upland city officials were informed last month that Upland will not receive any of the Proposition 68 grant money it applied for. The Sentinel is told that an Upland resident upon review of the city’s submitted grant application determined that some of the data forwarded to the state by the city as part of the application process had been falsified and notified Proposition 68 application review staff. Furthermore, several residents over multiple council meetings asked interim City Manager Rosemary Hoerning to officially disclose this misinformation in the application to the state. It is not clear whether the city accordingly amended its application.
Specifically, according to this account of events, two criteria are applied by the state in releasing Proposition 68 money. One test pertains to an applicant demonstrating that it has a “deficit” of parkland throughout its jurisdiction such that its park area is less than three acres per 1,000 people in the city overall. A second test relates not to the entire city but to the specific park for which a grant is being sought. That test uses a factor of determination in which the park is considered as providing recreational opportunities for a specific “service area” within the city, county or jurisdictional entity making the application. If those living within that service area can be demonstrated as having an average per-household annual income of less than $51,000, the state considers that park to be eligible for improvements a Proposition 68 grant could provide, the Sentinel was told. Apparently what occurred was that the Upland resident who had access to both the grant application and city demographic data provided that data to the state to either demonstrate or convincingly allege that the city has park acreage or public recreational amenities in excess of three acres per 1,000 population and that in the neighborhood surrounding Memorial Park the average gross annual household income exceeds $51,000. Accordingly, the Sentinel is told, the state denied Upland’s grant application.
Lois Sicking-Dieter, who has been among the forefront of a contingent of city residents resisting the city’s sale of the park property to the hospital, told the Sentinel that Upland city officials’ faith that the Proposition 68 grant money would become available was an example of unjustifiable overconfidence. “Throughout California there is a lot of competition for that grant money,” she said. “For Doug Story to think the city would get any money, let alone $8.5 million, was very ambitious on his part.”
Sicking-Dieter said it was at least possible that the failure of the city to get the grant money “is the reason he [Story] no longer works for the city. Rumor is we are getting no Proposition 68 money and now, he’s off to Beaumont. He was gaining momentum in support of the changes to the park and then it all fell apart. It started to become clear, I think, when [James] Markman, who crafted a lot of the park sale, left before he got fired.”
John Chapman, who has succeeded Koenig as CEO and president of San Antonio Regional Hospital, is making the same mistake as his predecessor, Sicking-Dieter said. “At the hospital, they still believe the parkland sale is going through,” she said. “A group of us met with John Chapman, who was thinking he would convince us the hospital needs all 4.6 acres of the park property. Then, Chapman admitted that he was hoping that park supporters like us would be satisfied with the possibility of the hospital taking a smaller portion of the property instead of the original 4.631 acres. When one of our members told him that we would not give up one square inch of the park, he told us that the hospital was not going to abandon its plans to purchase some portion of Memorial Park and until our position changed future discussions would need to involve other items.”
Councilwoman Janice Elliott yesterday, January 2, indicated that it was yet the city’s official position that the Proposition 68 grant may come through. “I asked [interim City Manager] Rosemary [Hoerning] on Monday about this grant and she told me that we have not yet been informed about the grant but we should hear about it soon,” Elliott said.
Thus, the assumption that the city will not obtain the grant is premature, Elliott suggested, and attributing Story’s departure to the city’s failure to obtain the money he was seeking to wrest from the state to carry out the promised improvements at Memorial Park was not based in fact.
“Doug was offered a new position in Beaumont that he accepted,” she said. “He told me it was a significant promotion.”
-Mark Gutglueck

Dawn Rowe, the former Yucca Valley Town Councilwoman and staff member to Congressman Paul Cook who vaulted into the position of Third District San Bernardino County supervisor in December 2018 when she was chosen by her current board colleagues to replace James Ramos, is being challenged by four candidates in California’s upcoming March 3, 2020 Primary Election.
In county office elections, such as that for supervisor, a candidate can be elected outright in the primary election by capturing at least fifty percent plus one vote, bypassing the need for a run-off in the November general election. In simple head-to-head contests in which only two candidates for county office vie against one another, one candidate or the other in San Bernardino County has emerged victorious as no ties have ever occurred in such races historically. When more than two candidates are involved, the possibility that no single candidate will pull down a majority of votes exists. In situations where no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the two top vote-getters go toe-to-toe in the November election.
Technically, though Rowe is an incumbent, she is not seeking reelection, as she was not voted into office by the Third District’s voters. The board appointed her after Ramos, who had originally been elected as Third District supervisor in 2012 and was reelected in 2016, ran successfully for the California Assembly in the 40th District in 2018, and was then obliged to resign as supervisor with two years remaining on his supervisorial term.
Of note is that Ramos is a Democrat and Rowe a Republican. Upon his election to the Assembly, Ramos had suggested that his erstwhile board colleagues appoint his deputy chief of staff in the supervisorial office, Chris Carrillo, another Democrat, to replace him. Three of the board’s members – Robert Lovingood, Janice Rutherford and Curt Hagman – are, however, Republicans. They rejected elevating Carrillo to the supervisor’s position, even as the lone Democrat on the board, Josie Gonzales, advocated on Carrillo’s behalf. Though county elected positions are considered to be nonpartisan, party politics plays a major role in the election process at virtually every level of government in San Bernardino County, including races for Congress, the state legislature, county office and at the municipal level.
Upon assuming office, Rowe hired as her staff members three individuals – Suzette Swallow, Dillon Lesovsky and Matt Knox – who had been heavily involved in electioneering efforts for Republican candidates in the past. Word spread that Knox, as Rowe’s chief of staff, Lesovsky, as Rowe’s policy advisor, and Swallow, as Rowe’s communications director, were actually in place to ensure her election in 2020, as well as to work on behalf of other Republican candidates in the same election cycle.
In early 2019 it was widely assumed, and indeed Carrillo indicated, that he would challenge Rowe in this year’s election. In June, however, Carrillo reversed course, announcing he would not run for supervisor. It was bruited about the county that Carrillo, an attorney and board member of the East Valley Water District whose wife works as a prosecutor in the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, was in some fashion being blackmailed by the Swallow/Lesovsky/Knox political operations team functioning out of the Third District supervisorial office based upon information they were able to obtain using the agency-to-agency privilege at their disposal through their status as government officials.
All four of Rowe’s opponents in March are Democrats. One of them is Redlands City Councilman Eddie Tejeda. Another is Kaisar Ahmed, who previously ran for Redlands City Council in 2016 and for Congress in the 31st Congressional District in 2018. Also vying is Karen Ickes, a human services manager. Latron Lester, a minister from Barstow, rounds out the field.
Going into the election, Rowe enjoys a sizable fundraising advantage over all of her opponents, with more than 33 times as much money to spend on her campaign than all of the others combined. At present, she has $190,492.69 in her electioneering fund.  Available documentation shows that Ickes has $1,000 at her disposal for her supervisorial run. Ahmed’s campaign filings give no indication of how much money his campaign has on hand. Similarly, Lester’s filings give no indication of any money in his campaign account. Tejada, as of December 31, had $4,750 in his political war chest.
–Mark Gutglueck