In a bid to assist Alan Wapner in his mayoral effort, Ontario Councilwoman Daisy Macias is jumping into the November 3 race.
At the behest of Wapner, who has offered her assistance in funding what both have agreed will be a token campaign not intended to succeed in getting her elected but rather to divide the city’s Hispanic vote, Macias took out mayoral candidacy papers, Ontario Assistant City Clerk Claudia Isbell confirmed on August 4.
Wapner was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994, and had contemplated running for mayor in the 2005 special election to replace former Mayor Garry Ovitt after Ovitt left the mayoral position to serve as Fourth District San Bernardino County supervisor following his election to that post in 2004, but did not do so when Paul Leon, who had been on the city council since 1998 beat him to the punch by declaring he was going to seek the office. Leon prevailed in that contest over Sam Crowe, Ontario’s former city attorney and former city councilman.
Wapner and Leon thereafter found themselves on the same electoral cycle, such that each was up for reelection, Leon for mayor and Wapner for councilman, in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. At each juncture, Wapner deferred his ambition to become mayor to some future point. Wapner was hampered from achieving the city’s highest elective post by the consideration that Leon held the upper hand of being the incumbent and the even more important advantage of his Spanish surname, which redounded to Leon’s benefit in a city which at that time had a population that was then 63 percent Latino and which in the last 21 years has transitioned into being 68.8 percent Hispanic.
At various times during their combined tenure as city leaders, the relationship between Leon and Wapner has broken down and broken into open hostility. In 2009, their enmity reached what was previously a nadir, when Wapner joined with two other members of the council to reduce the mayor’s stipend by $30,000 to match what was paid council members and he hired attorney/private investigator Loerena Nesci to dig up dirt on Leon, and then had Nexci trumpet to the community that Leon was carrying on with Diana Huizar, an executive secretary working at the Ontario Convention Center. Wapner had hoped the matter involving Huizar would damage Leon’s reputation sufficiently to dim the mayor’s prospects for reelection in 2010 or convince him to discontinue in office entirely. When a pollster who took the pulse of the community reported back to Wapner that the Huizar affair had not made sufficient inroads on Leon’s popularity with the city’s electorate and that polls showed Wapner losing to Leon in an head-to-head contest, Wapner opted out of running for mayor in 2010. Instead, he engineered a rapprochement with Leon, and Leon, Wapner and Jim Bowman, another incumbent councilman who shared the same re-election cycle, represented themselves as “Team Ontario,” the trio of dedicated and competent city fathers who were responsible for Ontario being the most economically successful of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities. All three were reelected, and in the election years since, Leon and Wapner remained in their respective mayoral and council lanes, endorsing one another for reelection, along with Jim Bowman.
In 2024, the veneer of civility that had existed between Leon and Wapner began to crack when Wapner poached Daisy Macias from Leon as one of his allies. Leon had long been grooming Macias as a potential member of the city council, having hired her to work as a secretary at the church where he is pastor, then assisting her in getting positions in the real estate industry, including most recently a high-profile and lucrative position with Community Renaissance, an affordable housing developer founded by Jeff Burum, who has proven over the years to be one of the deepest-pocketed donors to San Bernardino County politicians, including Leon and Wapner. In a move to begin a redraft of Ontario’s political landscape, Wapner transferred $40,000 out of his political war chest to Macias to assist her in what was to Leon a surprise run for the city council in Ontario’s recently-formed Fourth Council District. Wapner then arranged for a host of donors he had come to rely on to fill out his own campaign coffers to make donations to Macias. In this way, Macias proved successful and was elected Fourth District councilwoman. Once in office, she aligned herself with Wapner.
Last year, when Leon downplayed the concerns expressed by some of the city’s residents about the aggressive tactics of federal law enforcement officers with the onset of Donald Trump’s second term as president, in particular Border Patrol and Department of Immigration and Customs rounding up undocumented aliens, Wapner perceived that to be a major stumble on the mayor’s part, one that would alienate him from a portion of his natural constituency. He seized the day, making statement to the effect that he was horrified by the Leon’s insensitivity to the Latino community. He then reformulated his campaign committee, which was formerly intended to raise money for his 2026 council reelection campaign, instead declaring that he was seeking the mayoralty. Wapner then moved to secure the backing of all of Ontario’s municipal employee unions, including AFSCME, SEIU, the Firefighters Association, the Ontario Police Officers Association and the Ontario Police Management Association. In addition, Wapner, who over the three decades he had been in office had already established himself as the most prolific fundraiser among local elected officials in San Bernardino County history, outhustled Leon in preparing for the 2026 election. From January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, Wapner took in $326,100 in political donations. In the same timeframe, Mayor Leon collected $48,600 in contributions. In the first six months of this year, Wapner brought in another 323,199.08 in donations. Leon was able to touch his supporters for $47,849 from January 1 until June 30, 2026. In this way, Wapner was able to obtain $652,248.08 in political donations to fuel his effort in the 2026 mayoral contest, which was 676 percent of the $96,449 in political contributions Leon put together.
With his endorsements and monetary lead, Wapner was confident that he would be able to overcome the two advantages Leon possessed, namely being the incumbent and the readiness of Ontario’s predominantly Hispanic population to embrace a Latino as mayor rather than a Caucasian.
Wapner, however, encountered a major speed bump in the race to become mayor on July 28, when the FBI served search warrants at his home and business office, as well as at the headquarters of the Ontario International Airport Authority, where he is the president of the airports board of directors, as well as at the homes and offices of two of his closest associates, San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is a member with Wapner of the airport authority board, and Wapner’s personal attorney, Frank Lizarraga. Word on the street was that the FBI already had strong indication that Wapner and Hagman were taking bribes and receiving kickbacks, and that in serving the search warrants the federal agents were looking for even more damning evidence in that regard.
Seeing what had occurred as a major setback to to his mayoral elective effort, Wapner called upon Macias to enter the mayor’s race. Though some saw having another challenger run against Mayor Leon as a questionable strategy, Wapner’s logic is that Macias will siphon off something close to 20 percent of the city’s Latino vote and only a negligible number of the voters that will be voting for Wapner. In this way, Wapner believes, Macias’s presence on the November 3 ballot, will redound to his benefit and likely result in his being able to outpoll Leon, thereby allowing him to take possession of the mayor’s gavel.
