By Mark Gutglueck
After only a brief vacancy, the San Bernardino mayor’s chief-of-staff position has been filled by an experienced political operative whose long and storied track record offers a strong indication of the direction the city’s leadership will take over the next two years.
Mayor John Valdivia’s choice of Matt Brown to succeed Bill Essayli, who remained in place as chief of staff for less than seven months, taken together with other recent developments, presages Valdivia’s intention to leap to another political position next year, most likely either California state senator in the 23rd District or Fifth District San Bernardino County supervisor. Moreover, the move is an indicator of Valdivia’s recognition that the city’s re-immersion into bankruptcy within the next three years is virtually inevitable.
Valdivia’s decision to associate himself with Brown is a revealing one.
By the last few years of the last century and in the first years of the Third Millennium, Brown was looking for a way to monetize his interest in politics or perhaps make a career out it. Taking stock of San Bernardino County as one of the last bastions of Republicanism in the Golden State, the Grand Terrace resident made himself into a self-styled Republican Party activist. In Horatio Alger-like fashion he lifted himself by his bootstraps into a position whereby his political activism was transformed into something tangible.
In 2002, Rancho Cucamonga Councilman Paul Biane, a real estate professional and the scion of the Biane Family wine-making dynasty within the by-then fading Cucamonga Wine District, challenged and defeated longtime Second District San Bernardino County Supervisor Jon Mikels. Both Biane and Mikels were Republicans; Biane represented the up and coming generation of West End Republicans; Mikels, once an upstart himself, had aged into a member of the Old Guard. With Mikels’ vanquishing, Biane turned to a set of Young Turks, in this case Brown and Tim Johnson, another youthful GOP acolyte, to assist him in his role as supervisor, making them his chief-of-staff and senior field representative, respectively.
Shortly after taking his new position with the county, Biane formed a political alliance with another up and coming young Republican, Bill Postmus. Within two years of his election to the board, Biane would accede to the position of vice chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, second only in the county GOP hierarchy to Postmus, who was then chairman. Three years later, at the height of his political power, Biane would obtain the simultaneous positions of chairman, like Postmus before him, of both the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.
The foundation of Biane’s advancement to that enviable position of power had been laid by Brown working on his behalf. For the next several years, the relationship between Brown and Biane would prove a synergistic one. In 2003, Brown, newly enabled and newly empowered by his status as Biane’s chief of staff, had embarked on an energetic project to upgrade Biane’s recent electoral victory in the Second District into a political machine – the Biane Political Machine in which he would be the vicar. As part of this effort, Brown worked to extend Biane’s reach – and that of his own – beyond the Second District. This involved the creation of political action committees that he would control at Biane’s behest and which would gather sizable contributions from Republican donors which the pair could then dole out to candidates of their choosing, including those vying for municipal, county, state and federal office. In this way, their efforts matched those of Postmus and his chief of staff, Brad Mitzelfelt, who likewise created political action committees of their own. This was in time augmented by a bold move by Postmus, Biane, Mitzelfelt and Brown who in 2005 asserted that the sheer expanse of 20,105-square mile San Bernardino County prevented many of the GOP’s representatives in the furthest-flung sections of the county from attending the county Republican Central Committee meetings. Postmus and Biane proposed, and the central committee accepted, creating an executive committee of the central committee that would be empowered to vote in the central committee’s stead on all issues related to the county Republican Party. Postmus then set about naming himself, Mitzelfelt, Biane and Brown as four of the executive committee members and recruiting the remainder of the executive committee members from the ranks of those loyal to him and Biane exclusively, all of whom with the exception of one who were employed by him or Biane as members of their supervisorial staffs. The four – Postmus, Biane, Mitzelfelt and Brown – had become virtual kingmakers in a county which at that time had more registered Republican voters than registered Democrat voters. In only the rarest of circumstances could a candidate for major public office achieve success without first paying homage to Postmus, and by extension, to Mitzelfelt, Biane and Brown.
This circular homage often took the form of tribute – monetary tribute – after a candidate was elected with money doled out by the Central Committee. Once in office, those endorsed by the Republican Central Committee were expected to show their gratitude and allegiance by firing up their own fundraising machinery which by virtue of incumbency allowed them to put the arm on potential donors, and then give back to the political action committees controlled by Postmus, Mitzelfelt, Biane and Brown, i.e., make fund transfers to those accounts for future king-making efforts.
For his part, Brown, a resident of Grand Terrace, created several political action committees, some of which were used to fund political campaigns near his home turf, such as races for the Grand Terrace City Council or the Colton City Council. Those were peripheral efforts, however. Brown’s primary political action committee was the San Bernardino County Young Republicans, which he set up in 2005.
Two years later, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans entity would play a critical role in what Jerry Brown, who was in 2010 California Attorney General, said at that time was “the most appalling corruption case in decades, certainly in the history of San Bernardino County and maybe California itself.”
Then-Attorney General Brown’s reference was to the events and circumstances leading to a $102 million payout of taxpayer money in 2006 to settle a lawsuit brought against San Bernardino County and its flood control district in 2002 by the Colonies Partners over flood control issues at the Colonies at San Antonio residential and Colonies Crossroads commercial projects in northeast Upland. The Colonies Partners was a consortium of investors led by managing principals Jeff Burum and Dan Richards.
After Postmus and Biane together with then-supervisor Gary Ovitt voted, with then-supervisor Dennis Hansberger and supervisor Josie Gonzales dissenting, to confer upon the Colonies Partners a $102 million payment in November 2006 to end the lawsuit, Burum and Richards in the late winter, spring and early summer of 2007 made a $100,000 donation to the San Bernardino County Young Republicans; a $100,000 donation to a political action committee set up by Ovitt’s chief of staff, Mark Kirk, known as the Alliance For Ethical Government political action committee; and another $100,000 donation to the Committee for Effective Government political action committee, an entity controlled by former sheriff’s deputies’ union president Jim Erwin. Burum and Richards also made two $50,000 donations to the Inland Empire political action committee and the Conservatives for a Republican Majority political action committee, both of which were associated with or controlled by Postmus.
In May 2009, Hollis Randles and Maury Weiss, investigators with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, approached both Mark Kirk and Matt Brown, aggressively questioning them with regard to the $100,000 contributions to the Alliance For Ethical Government and the San Bernardino County Young Republicans, suggesting that they constituted quid pro quos, i.e., kickbacks, provided in exchange for the approval of the $102 million settlement. While Kirk and Brown initially cooperated with the investigators by agreeing to undergo questioning, Kirk ultimately lawyered up. Unbeknownst at that time to any of his associates, Brown, in exchange for an assurance that he would not be prosecuted, agreed to cooperate with the district attorney’s office. That cooperation included Brown wearing a wire – a hidden audio recording device – while he was at work in Biane’s supervisorial office in an attempt to capture utterances by Biane that would implicate him in bribe taking. That Brown would engage in such drastic action indicates the district attorney’s office actually had, as District Attorney’s Office Investigator Hollis Randles suggested during its interrogation of him in the spring of 2009, sufficient evidence against him to obtain a conviction. Brown’s understanding with prosecutors included his agreement to turn state’s evidence by testifying against those with whom he was formerly closely affiliated.
In 2009 Brown went before a criminal grand jury and testified that he believed there were quid pro quos in involved in the $102 million settlement and the political donations that Burum made following it, and it appeared that Burum delivered payoffs to the supervisors that supported the settlement.
In February 2010 prosecutors with the California Attorney General’s Office working in tandem with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office charged Postmus with receiving a $100,000 bribe, paid in the form of the two $50,000 installments to the Inland Empire and the Conservatives for a Republican Majority political action committees he controlled. Also charged was Erwin, who worked as a consultant to the Colonies Partners during their efforts to have the lawsuit settled and who was later hired by Postmus to serve as assistant assessor after Postmus was elected county assessor. Prosecutors alleged Erwin participated with Burum in an extortion scheme targeting Postmus and Biane that preceded the November 2006 vote and assisted in the delivery of bribes to them after the vote was made. Identified in that criminal complaint as unnamed and uncharged co-conspirators were Burum, Richards, Biane, public relations professional Patrick O’Reilly and Kirk. Conspicuous by his omission from the complaint as an uncharged co-conspirator was Brown. Both Postmus and Erwin, who were charged  variously with a host of crimes including conspiracy, extortion, soliciting bribes, accepting bribes, perjury, filing falsified documents and other violations of the public trust, pleaded not guilty to those charges.
At some point in the spring of 2010, Biane became aware that his chief-of-staff was using a hidden electronic recording device and seeking to entrap him. There ensued strained relations between the two. Brown was put on paid leave after he filed a claim in which he alleged he was being harassed. Brown was then transferred to the county auditor-controller/recorder-county clerk’s office, then headed by Larry Walker. Walker installed Brown as his second-in-command, i.e. as the assistant auditor-controller. In so doing, Walker ousted his longtime assistant and close associate, Betsy Starbuck, who was ignominiously sacked after having served more than twenty years as Walker’s right hand woman, both when Walker was Fourth District supervisor, the position he held before he ran for county recorder/auditor-controller, and as county recorder/auditor controller.
Starbuck’s displacement, after she had served more than eight years in the position of assistant auditor-controller and practically ran the division, to accommodate the inexperienced Brown was imposed on Walker by County Chief Executive Officer Greg Devereaux as part of District Attorney Mike Ramos’s effort to protect a witness seen as crucial to the prosecution of the criminal case that had grown out of the Colonies lawsuit settlement.
In March 2011, Postmus reversed his earlier not guilty pleas and pleaded guilty to all fourteen counts contained in the charges filed against him the previous year along with one other unrelated drug possession count, and agreed to turn state’s evidence. He was the star witness before a newly-impaneled grand jury that heard evidence and testimony from a total of 45 witnesses, including Brown, in April 2011. In May 2011, that grand jury handed down a superseding 29-count indictment that collectively charged Erwin, Burum, Biane and Kirk with conspiracy relating to the alleged bribery scheme. Erwin was hammered with multiple counts, including receiving a bribe, acting as Burum’s agent, perjury, filing falsified documents and tax evasion. Biane was charged with soliciting and receiving a bribe in exchange for his vote. Kirk was charged with receiving a bribe in exchange for influencing his boss, Ovitt, to vote to approve the settlement. Burum was not charged with bribery. Rather, prosecutors fashioned charges against him that alleged aiding and abetting Postmus, Biane and Kirk in receiving bribes, tortured language that was necessitated by the elapsing of the statute of limitations relating to the bribery at the heart of the case, which had occurred some four years previously. The defendants were also charged with conflict-of-interest and misappropriating public funds. No substantive counts of extortion were charged in the superseding indictment. The extortion counts against Erwin in the February 2010 criminal complaint were dispensed with, although extortion implications were wrapped into the broad conspiracy count contained in the May 2011 indictment.
Brown’s testimony before the grand jury in 2011 was a key element in broadening the criminal case to include the three additional defendants.
A paradox running through the indictment was that Brown, who like Kirk was the chief of staff to one of the three supervisors whose votes were crucial to supporting the $102 million settlement and who like Kirk was the founder of and had control over a political action committee that received, just as Kirk’s political action committee had, an identical $100,000 contribution that prosecutors alleged was a kickback provided in exchange for the vote supporting the settlement made by the supervisor each of them served as chief of staff, Brown was not indicted while Kirk was. The clear implication was that Brown, who had been caught up in the alleged criminal activity every bit as much as Kirk was, had avoided prosecution and was allowed to remain in a lucrative position with the county as a consequence of his willingness to assist the prosecution in making a criminal case against his former political associates.
For more than five-and-a-half years, Brown remained as Walker’s top assistant, which included working with him through a reorganization in which Walker handed responsibility for the recorder’s function over to the assessor’s office and took on the added assignment of treasurer and tax collector. In 2014 Walker was reelected to the treasurer-tax-collector-auditor-controller’s office. Less than two years later, in early 2016, he resigned from the post. When the board of supervisors complied with Walker’s recommendation that it appoint Oscar Valdez to serve out the remaining two years of his term as country treasurer-tax collector-auditor-controller, Valdez kept Brown in place as the assistant auditor-controller. Brown thus retained the status, stature and credibility of being an assistant county department head.
After more than five years of legal sparring between defense attorneys for Burum, Biane, Erwin and Kirk and prosecutors, including demurrers filed on behalf of the defendants, several of which were granted by the Superior Court, sustained upon appeal by the prosecution at the appellate court level and ultimately overturned by the California Supreme Court, the long-delayed case against the four defendants went to trial in January 2017.
At that trial, in February 2017, Brown was called as a prosecution witness.
The two prosecutors handling the case, San Bernardino County Supervising Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope and Supervising Deputy California Attorney General Melissa Mandel, were counting upon Brown to blow a hole below Biane’s waterline and wreak similar damage to Burum, by responding to selectively tailored questions which would essentially replicate his testimony before two grand juries almost eight years and nearly six years before. The expectation was that Brown would lay out for the two juries hearing the case – one impaneled to consider the case against Burum, Biane and Kirk and the other deciding the fate of Erwin – that at Biane’s direction he had used the San Bernardino County Young Republicans political action committee to launder the bribe his boss had received from Burum in exchange for his vote to approve the $102 million lawsuit settlement, and that he, Brown, was himself caught up in the corrupt political machinations of Biane, his one-time boss and best friend and closest political associate.
Upon coming into the courthouse and coming face-to-face with Biane, whom he had not seen or spoken with for nearly seven years, Brown lost his nerve. On the stand, just three months shy of eight years after Brown made a decision to cooperate with investigators and betray Biane, who had elevated him to the position of chief of staff in his office and whom Brown in his testimony described as his best friend and the best man at his wedding, Brown came across as reluctant to fulfill the role the district attorney’s office had taken as an article of faith he would live up to. To dozens of questions put to him by Supervising Deputy California Attorney General Melissa Mandel, Brown responded that he did not know or that he could not remember. Generally, the questions being asked of him were ones he had fielded before, during his appearances before two grand juries, one in 2009 and the other in 2011. Indeed, it was in some measure on the strength of those previous statements that the indictment had been handed down. Prosecutors had expected that Brown would essentially recapitulate his earlier testimony, this time in front of the two juries that were hearing the case.
Brown’s comportment in the witness box under direct examination discomfitted the prosecution. Unable to get Brown to freely and fluidly provide the jury the testimony she had been anticipating, Mandel sought to salvage the prosecution’s case as best she could, trying to revive the case narrative by having Brown read portions of the transcripts of his grand jury testimony or statements to investigators to refresh his recollection before she would then direct questions to him. By quoting passages of that testimony or those statements, she was able to prod him into grudging answers that paralleled his previous testimony that was in some measure damaging to the defendants. But that process was both tedious and awkward, and in some of his responses and remarks Brown was able to express or cast doubt with regard to the complete accuracy of his previous statements. Moreover, by his demeanor, Brown was outwardly conveying that he was being forced to testify contrary to his own volition. This, combined with his assertions he vouchsafed in his testimony that he been bullied and intimidated by the district attorney’s investigators, conveyed the impression that he might have previously been telling investigators what they wanted to hear rather than what he knew or believed to be the truth. Mandel was so frustrated by Brown’s intransigence that at the close of his first day of testimony after he and the jury had exited the courtroom, she told Judge Michael Smith, the judge presiding over the trial, that “This is a very different Mr. Brown than we expected to see. Obviously, something has gotten to him.” Judge Smith concurred, stating, “I’m making a finding he [Brown] is being intentionally evasive.”
After Brown endured two-and-a-half days on the witness stand under direct examination by Mandel, he was thereafter subject to cross examination by defense attorneys, who for months had been preparing an aggressive line of questioning for the witness meant to severely damage his credibility. Yet, that strategy was suddenly deemed inoperative in light of Brown’s bearing and the apparent hostility he had evinced on the stand toward Mandel.
Indeed, Brown’s tenure as a witness at the trial would evolve to feature what can be described as surreal overtones, as the prosecution on occasion found itself seeking to impeach its own witness while the defense filled the role of seeking to uphold the credibility of an individual who had been instrumental in assisting investigators and prosecutors in assembling the case against the accused.
Stephen Larson, the lead defense attorney for Jeff Burum, was able to elicit from Brown that he was essentially unconvinced, despite his earlier testimony before two grand juries and the suggestions of district attorney’s office investigators to the contrary, that there had been anything improper or illegal about the $100,000 contribution his San Bernardino County Young Republicans political action committee received in June 2007 from the Colonies Partners. Larson doubled down, getting Brown to say as well that he did not believe there was anything illegal about the county’s $102 million settlement with the Colonies Partners, which again ran contrary to Brown’s grand jury testimony.
Brown’s testimony under cross examination revealed that he was interviewed/interrogated by district attorney’s office investigators, who were in the main led by Hollis Randles, nine times in person and 12 times over the phone from April 2009 through April 2010, totaling 20 hours of recorded conversations. Many of those contacts with the investigators related to efforts by Brown to audio-record Biane, and on at least two occasions, Postmus. All told, between September 2009 through April 2010, Brown surreptitiously recorded 87 conversations totaling about 26 hours, most of those with Biane.
Larson, in his cross examination of Brown, also focused on the fashion in which the investigators, in particular lead investigator Hollis Randles, browbeat and sought to intimidate him while seeking to extract from him statements to further the case the district attorney’s office was attempting to build, despite Brown’s repeated assertions that the words they were laboring to place in his mouth were not true.
“They were trying to get you to change your answers, correct?” Larson asked Brown.
“Correct,” Brown said.
Larson questioned Brown about the prosecution’s contention that Biane had secretly controlled the San Bernardino County Young Republicans political action committee, one of the recipients of the $100,000 contributions made by the Colonies Partners in 2007 which prosecutors characterized as disguised bribes.
Brown acknowledged that Biane had control over the political action committee along with him and another Biane staff member, Tim Johnson, but indicated there was nothing secret about it and that Biane had openly and actively raised the majority of the money brought into the committee.
Larson elicited from Brown that it was his idea to create the San Bernardino County Young Republicans club and its accompanying political action committee.
“It wasn’t created to receive bribe money, was it?” Larson asked.
“No,” Brown said.
Larson pressed Brown to state that his statements to investigators and before the grand jury were based in large measure on rumors, his opinion rather than his direct knowledge or his efforts to placate his interrogators to get them off his back. With regard to Brown’s statements before the grand jury to the effect that the Colonies settlement was tainted by graft or bribery, Larson asked, “You speculated before the grand jury?”
“Yes,” said Brown. “I think it was my opinion and I trusted my gut feeling.”
Brown’s retreat during the trial from his testimony before the two grand juries he went before in 2009 and 2011 proved disastrous for the prosecution. Ultimately, after an eight month trial, Burum, Biane and Kirk were acquitted of all of the charges against them. The jury deadlocked on all of the charges against Erwin, after which the prosecution moved to dismiss the case against him.
Mandel, Cope and then-District Attorney Mike Ramos considered bringing perjury charges against Brown, but put that on hold while the trial was yet ongoing. When Burum, Biane and Kirk were acquitted and his jury failed to convict Erwin, the district attorney’s office and the California Attorney General’s Office forsook bringing criminal charges against Brown.
By 2017, most of the high ranking county officials who had been in on the deal with Brown by which he was spared prosecution and rewarded beforehand with a lucrative and prestigious sinecure in what turned out to be the county treasurer-tax collector-auditor-controller’s office were no longer in place. County officials in 2010 were willing to make the trade for Brown’s anticipated testimony because a convincing performance by him during the trial held out the promise that the $102 million that was paid to the Colonies Partners in 2006 and 2007 in the lawsuit settlement might be recovered. After Brown’s testimony during the actual trial, at the county’s command echelon, among the county’s top administrators in county’s chief executive office suite, there was a sense that Brown had put one over on everyone. Nevertheless, cashiering him in the immediate aftermath of the failed prosecution of Burum, Biane, Erwin and Kirk would have been unseemly, and Oscar Valdez, the county treasurer-tax collector-auditor-controller, kept him in place as the assistant auditor-controller.
In the 2018 election, Valdez’s effort to hang onto the post he had been appointed to following Walker’s exit proved unsuccessful, when Ensen Mason, who had vied against Walker in 2010 and 2014, outpolled Valdez in the November 2018 race.
Upon coming into the office in January, Mason made clear that he intended to fill the assistant auditor-controller position with a licensed certified public accountant. He agreed to keep Brown in place during his transition into the office while he searched for a suitable long term assistant auditor-controller, giving Brown an opportunity to find another position.
This week came word that Valdivia had settled on hiring Brown to replace Bill Essayli, who voluntarily departed as the mayor’s chief of staff last month.
The reviews of Essayli’s performance in San Bernardino were mixed. An attorney who had been a member of the bar since 2010, Essayli was employed for a time as an assistant U.S. Attorney. Restricted by the Hatch Act, Essayli left the U.S. Attorney’s Office to vie in 2018 for the Assembly in California’s 60th District, which encompasses the northwestern corner of Riverside County. Meanwhile, he went to work with the Irvine-based law firm of Pacheco & Neach. After his defeat in the 2018 election, having been introduced by others within Republican Party circles to Valdivia, Essayli accepted employment as Valdivia’s chief of staff. Pacheco & Neach indulged him in filling that assignment, yet keeping him of counsel with the firm.
Essayli is credited with assisting Valdivia in making his transition into office in replacing immediate past Mayor Carey Davis, whom Valdivia defeated in the November 2018 election.
Valdivia’s mayoralty was hampered in some measure by the city’s voters’ 2016 passage of a revamped San Bernardino Municipal Charter, which superseded the city’s 1905 Charter. Whereas the 1905 Charter had endowed the mayor with not only political power but administrative power that nearly equaled that of the city manager, the 2016 charter redraft perpetuated the mayor’s political power while it virtually eliminated the position’s administrative reach.
Valdivia’s intent in seeking the mayor’s post was to be able to orchestrate the city’s official action in a way that was more consistent with the power the mayor had formerly exercised. Upon coming into office, by beefing up his personal staff from four existing positions answerable to the mayor and city council to 14 positions working under the council with nine of those directly answerable to the mayor, Valdivia appeared to be seeking to undo the strictures that had been imposed on the mayor with the charter change.
Though Valdivia started off as mayor in December with what looked to be majority support on the council, he and Essayli encountered rough sledding as they moved to increase the mayor’s influence at City Hall. From late February and throughout March and into April, it appeared that defections from Valdivia’s political team on the council had left him unable to control the city. Ultimately, it appears, Valdivia was able to overcome that with the May election of one of his political protégés, Juan Figueroa, who moved into the position on the council, Third Ward councilman, that Valdivia had to resign from to move up to the mayor’s post in December.
Ultimately, Essayli was able to assist Valdivia in consolidating power and ultimately taking political control of the council, while asserting himself administratively by terminating former City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller and replacing her with Miller’s assistant, Teri Ledoux, who is widely considered to be Valdivia’s puppet, based upon a number of backroom arrangements between the two which were intended to remain outside of public scrutiny but which have since seen exposure.
Essayli’s efforts on Valdivia’s behalf also included delving into matters which were previously played close to the vest by city staff, such that much of the information formerly intimately guarded by the city’s senior administrators and department heads has been provided to the city council up front, allowing the council to formulate policy as opposed to being presented with prepackaged action items by staff. Along the way, however, Essayli came into conflict with Councilman Fred Shorett, Valdivia’s most vocal opposition on the council, as well as Councilman Jim Mulvihill, who is equally at odds with Valdivia but less openly expressive of his disapproval of the direction the mayor is seeking to usher the city toward. For a time, Councilman Henry Nickel, who had been Valdivia’s primary ally during the last several years of Mayor Davis’s tenure, had fallen out of synchronization with Valdivia and Essayli as well. That rough patch appears to be over.
The most formidable challenge to Essayli and Valdivia existed, and in Valdivia’s case continues to exist, in the form of the financial abyss the city finds itself precipitously teetering over. In 2012, the city was forced to take refuge in Chapter Nine bankruptcy, remaining in that state for nearly five years, during which it stiffed some 209 city creditors for more than $350 million. Upon emergence from bankruptcy in 2017, it was believed the city could remain on an even financial keel going forward. But the city’s expenses continue to outrun its incoming revenue, and if the current trend continues, by October or November of 2020, it will have blown through all of the reserves the city was able to cultivate while it was being artificially propped up by the protection of the bankruptcy court. At that point the city will need to contemplate yet another bankruptcy petition filing.
When Essayli, with Valdivia’s support, this spring sought a raise over the $96,000 salary he was being paid, the move gained no traction.
Essayli’s replacement by Brown, an old political hand who was instrumental in engineering Biane’s rise to a position on the board of supervisors as well as the successful candidacies of dozens of others in the 2000 to 2010 timeframe, may be an indication that Valdivia is contemplating jumping from the mayor’s post to another elected position, perhaps that of Fifth District County Supervisor or 23rd District California Senator, both of which are up for election in 2020. With a second bankruptcy about to descend upon San Bernardino and with Valdivia and his team reportedly despairing of any way to stave it off, Valdivia may feel it necessary to detach himself from San Bernardino before he becomes permanently identified with the city’s second sojourn into bankruptcy. It is a historical fact that San Bernardino filed for bankruptcy just six months after Valdivia was sworn into his council office in San Bernardino’s Third Ward in 2012. That bankruptcy destroyed the political careers of Pat Morris and Carey Davis, Valdivia’s two predecessors as San Bernardino mayor. Were Valdivia to be at the helm of the city when it makes another bankruptcy filing within a decade of its last, his viability as a politician would plummet.
As assistant auditor-controller, Brown was being paid  $157,943 in salary together with some $78,000 in benefits, bringing his total annual compensation to roughly $236,000. The San Bernardino mayor’s chief-of-staff position pays from $96,120 to $116,832 per year with benefits valued at roughly $40,000 annually. Reports are that Valdivia pulled strings to have Brown hired above the $96,120 starting step, a move which had already prejudiced some city employees against him, with charges that he was being given compensation that was improper or illegal. Whatever pay grade Brown will begin with in San Bernardino, it represents a substantial pay cut over what he was earning with the county.
Brown is vested in the county’s retirement system, known as SBCERA. The city participates in a separate retirement program through the California Public Employees System. Government pensions are calculated by a multiplier of 2 percent, 2.25 percent, 2.5 percent, 2.75 percent or 3 percent, depending on the age of the retiree and his or her number of years in place, times the number of years employed times the highest salary earned by the retiree over a one-year period.  Because they are separate systems, Brown will not be eligible to use the $157,943 salary multiplier he now has with SBCERA in his calculation for his California Public Employees Retirement System pension until he has been employed for five years with the city or another governmental entity functioning under an arrangement with the California Public Employees Retirement System. If Valdivia departs as mayor next year by getting elected to another office. Brown will be obliged to leave the city’s employ as well, such that he will not be able to convert his city retirement into the same formula he is eligible for under his vesture with SBCERA. If, however, Valdivia succeeds in winning next year’s race for supervisor, and Brown follows him there to become his chief of staff, he can re-immerse himself into the SBCERA system. If Valdivia vies for and succeeds in winning the 23rd District California Senate position, Brown can perpetuate his participation in the California Public Employees Retirement System and potentially achieve the five years within that program to make him eligible to marry his SBCERA pension benefits to his California Public Employee System pension benefits.
Brown previously applied, and was considered by Valdivia, for the chief of staff position last year. Ultimately at that time, Valdivia elected to hire Essayli.
Some observers were perplexed by Valdivia’s choice of Brown to serve as his chief of staff, given Brown’s history of having cooperated with law enforcement in seeking to arrest, prosecute and imprison his former boss, Biane. This consideration is especially addling, given that Valdivia is under scrutiny by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies over allegations of bribe-taking and accepting campaign money in exchange for political favors.
Despite the naysayers, some individuals familiar with both Brown and Valdivia believe that Brown will make a perfect fit as the chief of staff to the San Bernardino mayor.
One of those is Neil Derry, a former county supervisor as well as a former San Bernardino city councilman.
Brown’s bona fides, credentials and experience in government, particularly his role as Biane’s chief of staff in the county’s Second District, qualifies him to hold the chief of staff post in San Bernardino, Derry said.
“I worked with Matt personally while I was at the county,” Derry said. “I believe he will do a good job for John, who is smart enough to listen to him and use him in ways that would be most effective. Matt has organizational skills, people skills, political skills, project skills and a strong policy background. He is very familiar with San Bernardino. He is dialed in on what it will take to manage the city, which is facing a host of challenges. My sense of it is he is the perfect choice for the job.”

In apparent defiance of the prevailing sentiment on the Upland City Council and a ruling by Superior Court Judge David Cohn, Upland City Attorney Jim Markman is pushing ahead with the final processing of San Antonio Regional Hospital’s purchase of a portion of Upland’s Memorial Park.
On March 26, 2018, with 72 hours notice, the Upland City Council as it was then composed voted 3-to-1 to reduce the grounds of historic Upland Memorial Park by more than four-and-one-half acres, handing the difference off to San Antonio Regional Hospital to be used to accommodate a multi-story parking structure.
That came after months of quiet, indeed private and secret, discussions between the city’s senior staff and the management of the San Antonio Regional Hospital. At the March 26, 2018 meeting, after the city council adjourned into a closed door session with then city manager Bill Manis, then-community development director Jeff Zwack and city attorney James Markman, the final terms of the sale of the park property were explicated to the council. At the council’s open public session for its regularly scheduled meeting that took place later that night, the council approved selling 4.631 acres of park property to the hospital, the primary campus of which adjoins the 38.5 acre park.
In approving the purchase and sale agreement, the council authorized Manis to execute all necessary documents to approve the sale.
According to Zwack, the city used an independent third party appraiser to reach a conclusion that the park property has a value of $893.975.38 per acre, making the 4.631 acre parcel worth $4,140,000. Zwack further reported that San Antonio Hospital agreed to a purchase price slightly above $906,931.55 per acre, such that the hospital is paying $4.2 million to acquire the property.
While 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 was not present at the meeting. It was suggested at the time that Robinson was opposed to the sale but was unwilling to cut crosswise of the council majority, with which he was aligned.
It was anticipated that the sale would raise the hackles of the community. As such, the council, at Markman’s recommendation, authorized him to file 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, which would then be heard by a judge rather than being subjected to a vote. The 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 validation procedure was directed to the courtroom of Superior Court Judge David Cohn in San Bernardino.
Part of the calculation made by the city council majority and senior city staff, which counted Manis and Zwack among its ranks, was that no one would go to the expense of hiring an attorney to make an answer to the validation petition.
That calculation proved mistaken, however, as Marjorie Mikels, an attorney living in the city, as well as Cory Briggs, an attorney based in both Upland and San Diego, filed answers to the validation action. Mikels did so on behalf of herself and some of her sister and fellow residents. Briggs did so as an attorney retained by other Upland residents.
Those responses took issue with the sale on multiple grounds. Among those was that the city selling off a slice of the park – in particular the one sold by the council on March 26, 2018, which includes a 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.
Having miscalculated in his assumption that no one would come forward to contest the sale in the course of the validation proceeding, Markman was faced with having to make a convincing case that the city council, acting on its own authority, was within its rights to sell off city land. Faced with 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 sought to convince Judge Cohn that selling the property did not constitute an abandonment.
The matter complexified, at least for Markman, when as a consequence of the November 2018 election, there was a three-member changeover on the city council in which Timm and Filippi, who supported the sale, and Robinson, who had not opposed it, were moved out of office. Replacing them was at least one new member – Rudy Zuniga – who viewed the sale of the park property unfavorably. The two other replacements on the council – Ricky Felix and Billy Velto – are either not strongly or in any way supportive of the parkland sale.
Ultimately, some 14 months after the sale of the park property was approved by the city council, on May 29, Judge Cohn, after hearing the responses to the validation action, dismissed the city’s petition for validation.
At its July 8, 2019 meeting, the Upland City Council considered whether the city should appeal Cohn’s decision. The council, with Elliott, Zuniga and Velto prevailing, voted 3-1 against doing so, with Mayor Stone dissenting and Councilman Felix abstaining.
At this point Markman, having been shut out in Cohn’s courtroom and directed by his political masters on the council to forego trying to legally justify the sale, inexplicably is seeking to push through with the sale. Markman has seized on two points in allowing the sale to proceed. The first is the consideration that Judge Cohn, in rendering his ruling dismissing the validation action, had not determined specifically whether or not the sale of the park property constituted an abandonment thus requiring voter approval of the sale. In this way, there has been no ruling one way or the other about the validity or legality of the sale, according to Markman. Secondly, the city council has not taken any specific action to to rescind the sale. Thus, according to Markman, the sale is still on.
The hospital must proceed at its own peril in making the purchase, however. Because of Judge Cohn’s dismissal of the validation action, anyone with standing is free to sue both the city and the hospital over the sale. Whether that will occur is subject to further calculation. While at least some Upland residents were, as demonstrated, willing to file an answer to the validation petition, the more expensive proposition of actually filing suit to stop the sale is another matter.
The rationale for Markman’s recent maneuverings is opaque. Though his support of the sale in 2018 and his filing of the validation effort was consistent with the wishes of the majority of the council at that time, the changeover in three-fifths of the council since has made it relatively clear that the current council is not in favor of perpetuating the sale. The July 8 vote by the council against appealing Judge Cohn’s decision resounded as a signal that sentiment on the council is currently moving against closing the deal with San Antonio Community Hospital on the park property purchase.
The next Upland City Council meeting will not take place until August 12. That meeting’s agenda will not be generated until August 8, at which point an item calling for a recission of the sales agreement may or may not be included on that schedule of possible council action.
-Mark Gutglueck

Over the contrary sentiment of a majority of the city’s residents present at its July 16 meeting, the Redlands City Council gave tentative passage, on a 3-to-1 vote, of an ordinance that will accommodate the cellular communication industry in its intention to erect what are projected to be ubiquitous mini-cellular towers on public rights-of-way throughout the city.
According to Gail Karish, an attorney with the law firm of Best Best & Krieger who specializes in aspects of the law relating to communications technology who was retained by the city, federal law adopted in 1996 preempts local jurisdictions from imposing their own standards with regard to the safety provisions relating to communication devices relying upon radio frequency or electronic emissions. Standards relating to what constitutes a safe level of exposure specific to each frequency have been set by and are controlled by the Federal Communications Commission. Efforts by municipalities to deviate from those standards or impose more exacting safety or distance standards have generally failed, she said, as federal law prohibits local governmental authority from having say over “any effects of radio frequency emissions if the applicant can demonstrate that they meet the FCC standards,” Karish said. “You can’t create rules or make decisions that would effectively prohibit the provision of personal wireless services,” she told the city council.
In general, municipalities’ reach in regulating cellular communications facilities is limited to the aesthetics and appearance, Karish said. “Local authority has been chipped away by state and federal laws,” she said. In the main, Karish said, “What can be done at the local level is require that they [cellular service companies] demonstrate they meet the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] standards.”
In general, cities’ authority does not extend to controlling where the cell towers are to be located, with line-of-sight requirements to allow for the communications systems to function efficiently taking precedence. Because local jurisdictions are required to make public space available as hosting sites for cell towers, and because of the proximity of that public space to residential areas, it is not uncommon for antennas to be placed near residences. The city is powerless to prevent that, according to city staff and Karish.
Karish said the FCC has different standards for different frequencies as to what a safe exposure is. She said local jurisdictions do not have the power to regulate a cell service provider’s choice of the level of technology to be employed in its operations.
The city’s consideration of the new ordinance was prompted by the advance of technology, in this case so called “5G” cellular systems, that is fifth generation cellular devices, ones that handle larger amounts of data and process it much more quickly. Crown Castle, which installs the facilities, has made application for permits to erect the facilities in Redlands. An example given of the 5G capability is that the entirety of a two hour movie could be downloaded onto a device in less than two seconds.
The demands of the 5G system are such that rather than relying on one large, indeed massive, distant tower, the communications are to be effectuated through a series of smaller but much more widely distributed and therefore closer antennas, referred to as small cell wireless facilities.
Redlands Development Services Director Brian Desatnik said the higher frequencies of the 5G system emanate effectively to a shorter range, and therefore must be placed “closer together to create this type of a mesh network between themselves.”
He said the federal government requires local jurisdictions streamline the approval process for erecting cellular antennas and remove barriers to their placement. He said the small cellular towers will normally stand no higher than 30 to 40 feet in height. The ordinance under consideration, he said, would add Chapter 12.60 to the city code, making the the facilities and community services department the lead agency in considering and approving the cellular facility applications. He said that since the ordinance was drafted, it had been changed to make the appellate body hearing resident objections to the granting of permits the city manager rather than the city council. Permits would be granted for a 10-year period and would remain in effect a decade, after which the permits would need to be renewed. The radio frequencies emanating from the towers, and their power, he said would be modulated in compliance with FCC guidelines.
The antennas will be attached to existing power poles and other already existing public infrastructure, such as streetlights and sign poles, with the antennas masked or shrouded in compliance with aesthetic standards dictated by the city. In places where no existing poles exist, ones mimicking streetlights or perhaps doubling as actual street lights will be erected.
While staff’s pitch and that of Karish was that the city council should essentially go along with the ordinance as drafted and resign the city to accommodating the various communications companies in their efforts to establish their facilities pretty much anywhere they choose, a significant number of vocal residents said the city council should not allow itself to be dictated to by commercial interests who might be profiting by subjecting city residents to the danger and harm of electromagnetic radiation.
Desatnik indicated he anticipated applications for hundreds of the facilities in the near future, saying staff may need to be augmented by an outside consulting firm to process those applications.
Dr. Nancy Baker said the threat represented by bombarding city residents with radio frequencies at close quarters was real, including potentially elevating cancer levels or other untoward conditions. She urged the council to consider proposals made by residents relating to the city expanding its options on where the cell facilities are to be located.
“Put them in safe places,” said Baker. “Don’t put them in front of our children. The City of San Ramon was able to adopt an ordinance that gave specific preferred locations that placed these in commercial and industrial areas along arterial, collector or local streets as a most preferred location. Less preferable locations [specified in the San Ramon ordinance] include mixed use districts along arterial and collector streets with placement along the median islands if possible. Prohibited locations in San Ramon included not placing small cells in public right of way within residential districts or within 300 feet of any structure approved for residential use. Other cities in California are able to do this. Why are you not able to do this? Put them in industrial areas. Put them in commercial areas. Don’t put them in front of our homes and schools. Don’t sell our children for money.”
Steve Rogers said the ordinance was “flawed and it is therefore premature to consider it.” He said the terms in the ordinance were “misdirected and misapplied.” He said the consideration of how to deal with the small cell towers was “more properly handled by the municipal utilities and engineering department. The municipal utilities and engineering department has been purposefully left out of the development and staff recommendation process for approval by the Redlands City Council, which shows a continuing pattern of willful neglect concerning the appropriate practice of civil engineering by staff, which is being condoned as is by assigning an unregistered individual, Chris Boatman, to be the interim utilities and engineering department director, which is also the de facto city engineer position per the department director’s memorandum of understanding with the City of Redlands. The Redlands City Council will be aiding and abetting the unlicensed practice of civil engineering, which is a violation of state and federal law.”
An individual who was identified by Mayor Foster only as Dr. Sharf, with no reference to his first name, identified agricultural areas along with industrial areas as the optimum locations for the cell facilities. He said the city by not taking a stand and contesting a 23-year-old federal law, when cellular communication technology was dawdling in its first generation, was taking “the easy way out” by electing “to do nothing.” He said the cities of San Anselmo, Ross, Novo, Calabasas, San Mateo, Fairfax, Palos Verdes, Sonoma and Monte Vista have passed ordinances which placed health concerns into their proper perspective. “You can do the same,” he said. “Petaluma voted to protect its residents for 4G and 5G sensification, putting the towers 500 feet from homes. Napa, Danville, San Rafael and many other cities are doing the same fight. We implore you to act. If you tell us it can’t be done, then you’ll have to explain to us why so many other cities have been able to do so. Please remind us of why we elected you our city officials, and listen to the citizens.”
Howard Fecund said the city’s accommodation of the cellphone industry was prioritizing speed over safety. “The two hour download of a movie in one second is not that important,” he said. He said that committing the city to the latest technology that might soon become obsolete was not a well considered policy. He said that the chairman of Verizon had indicated the company was backing away from utilizing small cell capability already. He said that the placement of the radio frequency emitting devices proximate to homes was unconscionable. “That lamppost is 57 feet from where I sit, sleep and eat. It is not fair for me to have to endure that,” he said.
Ann Benton said that examining and regulating the applications to erect small cell towers based only upon their visual and aesthetic impacts was inadequate given the cell towers’ potential impacts on electromagnetically sensitive residents.
Melissa Castro told the council that the current cellular systems in use are adequate.
Castro said, “A microwave oven does use about 2.45 gigahertz frequencies to cook food. Currently 1, 2, 3 and 4G towers use between one to 6 gigahertz frequency. According to the California Brain Tumors Association, 5G technology will use up to 90 gigahertz frequency. That’s a huge difference. The higher the frequency, the more dangerous it is to living organisms. Radiation directly affects our cellular membranes, which hold our cells together, causing tumors.”
Castro said, “There have been hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies done on radiation, linking it to severe health problems such as cancer, reproductive system and DNA damage, especially in fetuses in the first 100 days after conception. The World Health Organization has also classified radiation as carcinogenic.”
Andrea Viggers said that homeowners selling their property would be legally required to report the proximity of a cell tower to the home being sold as an environmental hazard, an indication that the facilities would have a negative impact on property values of the residences near which they are located.
Ernest Ah told the city council it should consider having Redlands band together with other cities to sue the FCC over the imposition of its regulations without the city being able to fine tune them as is appropriate.
Eugene Van Dyke said there had been a lack of notification about the erection of the towers. In his case, he said, there was a cell facility 42 feet from his house. He said there was incomplete information in the planning documents relating to the permits for the towers. He said the cellular facilities represented a hazard in that they could potentially interfere with pacemakers and defibrillators
Herman Fograbe pointed out that industrial safety standards required that shielding be provided to workers in an area where a six megahertz emission is made. He said the emissions from the small cell towers exceeded nine megahertz.
Mayor Paul Foster, both before the public input and after it expressed his certainty that any city efforts to augment FCC regulations with the superimposition of municipal regulations would not survive a legal test. He pointedly refused to identify Dr. Sharf by his first name when calling Sharf to the public speaker’s podium, making it difficult for those who wanted to contact Sharf thereafter to do so.
With reference to the multiple calls for intensifying the city’s regulations beyond that provided for in federal law, Foster vectored Karish back into the discussion after the public input session was concluded. Karish, sensing the direction Foster was intent on taking, said, “Not every ordinance has been looked at closely by the industry and so I always in giving advice on what your parameters are say that in talking about it in terms of litigation risk, there may be ordinances out there that adopted some provisions that are more aggressive than what staff has proposed, but that doesn’t mean they would withstand scrutiny if they were challenged in a court.”
Foster did not explore with Karish whether she and her firm are representing any municipalities that are seeking to expand municipal reach in layering onto their cellphone facility application processes further restrictions beyond what is contained in the FCC regulations.
With respect to the questions about what the city might do to protect its residents outfitted with pacemakers or in-body defibrillators, Karish said that federal law does take into consideration the “cumulative impact of other antennas nearby,” but she said that federal law features “no standards on prohibitions to protect pacemaker owners.”
Karish indicated efforts in the legal realm to hold cellular service providers responsible for the deterioration of property values in the areas where cell towers are erected have proven fruitless.
On dual motions by Foster, the council approved Ordinance No. 2894, adding Chapter 12.60 to the Redlands Municipal Code, establishing a process for managing, and uniform standards for acting upon, requests for the placement of small cell wireless facilities within the public rights-of-way of the city, along with Resolution No. 8002, adopting design guidelines for small cell wireless facilities within the public by a vote of 3-to-1, with Councilman Eddie Tejeda dissenting and Councilman Paul Barich abstaining.
-Mark Gutglueck

Dismayed that the county is not interested in partnering with the city to operate a large scale animal shelter, San Bernardino City Councilman Jim Mulvihill has resigned from the ad hoc animal shelter committee that Mayor John Valdivia created in May and to which he appointed Mulvihill to head.
There has been heightened discontent among those in San Bernardino concerned with animal welfare since changes were made in the way in which the city’s animal control division is run. A crisis at the city’s aging animal shelter, located at E Street and Chandler Place, has been brewing for years. San Bernardino, which declared bankruptcy in 2012, has reduced services in keeping with its diminishing revenues, even as the need for animal control had intensified in the 62-square mile, 220,000-population county seat. Several years ago, animal control duties were transferred to the police department, which ran the shelter and oversaw the city’s dogcatchers and personnel assigned to license animals and encourage neutering and spaying.
Within the police department, however, the constant drain on the attention of five sworn officers who were assigned off-and-on to the animal control division was considered a squandering of the department’s resources. The police department began pushing the city toward the option of contracting with Riverside County for animal services.
A wide cross section of the city’s advocates for the animals, who have never been fully pleased with the police department’s management of the animal services division, were nevertheless unsettled by the prospect of the city essentially surrendering city autonomy over animal control to Riverside County. The fear was that Riverside County’s employees at its animal shelter would be less caring of animals originating in San Bernardino, and would be quicker to, in the euphemism used to soften the consideration of brutal reality, put them to sleep.
The city council, wrestling with financial challenges which kept it from prioritizing the humane handling of the city’s lost, dispossessed, missing, runaway or feral animals in a manner consistent with the animal activists’ expectations, still the same pledged to keep the city’s animal shelter open for a year while options such as contracting with Riverside County were contemplated, negotiated and perhaps settled upon.
An unexpected exacerbation of the situation in September 2018 occurred when for a yet-undisclosed reason, the shelter’s manager, Oscar Perez, was placed on administrative leave. He was replaced by Police Lieutenant Frank Macomber.
Macomber, true to the machismo-rich nature of a Hemingwayesque character after which he had been, either deliberately or inadvertently, named, showed decidedly less compassion for the animals which were made his charges than had Perez, who had evinced a genuine passion for preserving the animals brought to the shelter and arranging for their adoption into caring households.
Indeed, animal activists keeping a tally reported that almost immediately after Macomber’s watch had begun, there was a substantial increase in the number of animals that made their way to the San Bernardino dog pound being euthanized. Moreover, according to the activists, Macomber lacked the requisite regard for the welfare of the animals that survived, as he regularly spurned the efforts of volunteers, animal groomers and others offering critical services to assist at the shelter. In a curious move, he ordered the removal of blankets from the beds in the kennels, those familiar with the shelter reported.
Beginning late last year, while former Mayor Carey Davis was yet in office, and continuing this year, advocates for the animals called upon the city council to dedicate money toward a permanent fix of the situation. The council, however, did not react with alacrity to those requests. Overwhelmed with demands on multiple fronts and with less than adequate funding to address any of them, the council was not in a position to offer anything approaching what the animal advocates considered to be a satisfactory resolution of the matter. Indeed, a majority of the council, along with senior city staff, felt the city’s best option was to close out the city’s delapidated animal shelter and go with the contract with Riverside County. This was anathema to the animal activists, who at one point sought to stave that eventuality off by providing assurances they would, indeed offering a committing that they were able to, raise with their own grassroots effort sufficient funds to replace the city’s shelter at E Street and Chandler Place. Despite that assurance, the group, which was functioning largely under the umbrella of the San Bernardino Animal Care Foundation, was unable to raise anywhere near enough money to undertake a shelter modernization project, as the lowest estimates on the cost of a new a facility is $14 million, with a more realistic price tag being $18 million.
While the members of the city council did not want to anger the advocates for the animals, as they represented a galvanized constituency that could certainly complicate the reelection efforts of any one of them, the reality of the city’s financial position did not provide them with the ability to meet the group’s expectations. In an effort to simply be done with the issue as well as reduce the $2.6 million the city is spending on the totality of animal control services annually, a 5-to-1 majority of the city council ratified the city entering into a $2.1 million contract with Riverside County, which under contract already provides shelter services for Colton, Fontana, Grand Terrace and Rialto, to have it take on responsibility for the animal control function, animal shelter and animal licensing within the San Bernardino City Limits for one year.
San Bernardino’s animal activists at once went to work on lobbying the Riverside County Board of Supervisors against entering into the arrangement. Ultimately, on May 21, Riverside County Supervisors Kevin Jeffries, Jeff Hewitt and Chuck Washington voted against entering into a $2.1 million contract with San Bernardino to take over the city’s animal field, shelter and licensing services for one year.
Mayor John Valdivia, who had hopes that the contract with Riverside County would alleviate a continuing financial burden on the city and put to rest an issue of controversy that was roiling the city during the initial phase of his mayoralty, was unable to mask his frustration.
“The Riverside County shelter is the only facility in the region that has the capacity to shelter our animals,” he said. “The County of Riverside recently rejected a proposal to transfer our animal control servies to their animal services department. The proposal represented a cost savings to our city and a short term solution for the crisis at our animal shelter. The San Bernardino animal shelter is in terrible shape. The building is over fifty years old and it’s crumbling. It would take several millions of dollars to bring the shelter into compliance with current standards for animal shelters. This is money our city does not have at this time. The cost to build a new shelter is estimated at approximately $18 million. This is also money we do not have. City staff will continue operating the current shelter with our limited resources available, but we need to take bold action and find a permanent solution for our city and our animals. I am very proud to announce that I have been speaking directly with neighboring mayors in the County of San Bernardino who have expressed an interest in forming a joint powers authority to construct a new regional animal shelter for our area. This is a long term project, and will take several years to complete. It won’t happen overnight, but I have made efforts and great progress toward that endeavor. It is important that we get this process started today and we start now.”
Valdivia added that “We are paring down and streamlining our organizations. We are creating those efficiencies that it is tough to tell the public about.”
Casting about for what he termed “an acceptable solution for our shelter within our financial means,” Valdivia picked up on reports that San Bernardino County was contemplating closing out its own aging animal shelter in Devore and constructing from the ground up a state-of-the-art facility in an area closer to the East and Central valleys. A gameplan that materialized on the fly was to provide the county with the land for such a facility in San Bernardino and then join in a joint powers authority for operation of that center.
Valdivia on May 29 created what was dubbed the city council ad hoc animal shelter committee, which was intended to find for the city the means to resolve the city’s animal control crisis. He appointed Councilman Jim Mulvihill chairman and designated Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra and newly elected and sworn-in Councilman Juan Figueroa as its members.
Abruptly this afternoon, just two months and four days after the committee was formed, Mulvihill tendered his resignation from the committee.
In an email to City Manager Teri Ledoux, Mulvihill wrote, “I’m formally resigning from the council’s ad hoc animal shelter committee. When I consented to join the committee, I was assured that the county was interested in a JPA, and there were other local jurisdictions interested as well. In fact, those assurances couldn’t have been more wrong. The county is committed to building an animal shelter in Bloomington – with Highland, Yucaipa, and Fontana likely joining them. All other nearby jurisdictions either have their own shelters or long term contracts with those cities already possessing shelters. From my view, there’s no reason to pursue a JPA [joint powers authority] on the animal shelter issue now or for the foreseeable future.”
In a subsequent email, Mulvihill stated it was Bill Esayli, who was formerly Valdivia’s chief of staff, who had indicated that the county would be willing to work out a joint powers arrangement for animal control services involving San Bernardino.
According to Mulvihill, “I’ve spoken to, or heard from, virtually all cities within the East Valley. I said there was no need to meet because I couldn’t find any potential JPA partners. No partners, no JPA.”
Mulvihill did not explain why it was in his view not possible to work with the county and the cities of Highland, Yucaipa and Fontana as well as the community of Bloomington in forming a joint powers authority.
After his resignation, Mulvihill said that Ibarra and Figueroa could continue their efforts to resolve the issues relating to the animal shelter and the provision of animal control in the city.
Ibarra, who earlier this year in response to the outpouring of public sentiment in favor of keeping local control over the city’s animal control services surfaced as the sole voice on the council questioning whether the city should enter into the contract with Riverside County, indicated she was willing to continue the effort to find a cost efficient solution that would meet with the animal activists’ expectation that animals collected from the streets of San Bernardino are dealt with humanely and not simply thrown into a euthanasia mill.
“I am willing to step up to the plate and come up with alternate solutions if a joint powers authority is out of the question,” Ibarra told Mulvihill.
In a public statement, Ibarra said, “In my view, it is unfortunate that Councilman Mulvihill as the chairman of the committee never called for a meeting in the two-plus months since we were appointed. I sent emails requesting we meet, provided ideas, and asked questions. Ad hoc committees can’t meet until the chairperson calls a meeting. Now we have to wait for the mayor to name a new chairperson and add another council member to the committee. Hopefully, he makes the announcement at the next council meeting so we can get to work as a team. He gave us a deadline of the first week of September, less than a month from now.”
-Mark Gutglueck

Wes Simmons this week was sworn in as Chino’s 18th chief of police, replacing former Police Chief Karen Comstock, who retired July 25.
The ceremony for Simmons’ elevation to the department’s top job was held on August 1 at the police department headquarters, with some 300 people, including the department’s personnel, the city’s dignitaries and local residents in attendance.
Simmons began with the department in 1995, shortly after he graduated from Cal State University at Fullerton with a bachelor of arts degree in criminal justice. During his 24 years with the department he promoted up through the ranks to that of captain.
His department assignments involved him in the areas of criminal investigations, risk management, budgeting, public safety agency coordination, emergency management and crisis response. He was a founding member of the Chino Police SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team.
Through the University of Phoenix’s extension program, which he participated in from 1999 to 2001, he obtained a master of arts degree in organizational management.
He is a Class 60 graduate of the California Police Officers Standards and Training Command College.
In 2014, Simmons sojourned to Virginia on an extended assignment where he attended Session 255 of and graduated from the FBI National Academy and obtained a graduate certification in criminal justice education at the University of Virginia.
Chino City Manager Matt Ballantyne, after considering the options of conducting a national recruitment or promoting from within the department’s ranks to replace Comstock, elected to elevate Simmons to the position. After Ballantyne made that choice, Comstock endorsed it.
A private swearing in for Simmons involving fewer than twenty attendees was held on July 25, the day of Comstock’s departure. Yesterday’s event was formal and well-attended.
Ballantyne indicated it was the respect and regard shown for Simmons by his department colleagues as well as his executive management skills that were the major factors in his selection.
Simmons was a board member with Crossroads Christian Schools from 2007 until 2017, a board member of the Kiwanis Club of Chino from 2015 to 2018, and he continues to be a volunteer with Kiwanis International.
He authored the article “Big Data Does Not Have to Mean Big Brother or Be a Big Deal” for Police Chief Magazine, a publication of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

A hearing on a petition by a West Valley Water District employee to obtain a restraining order against West Valley Water District Board Member Gregory Young this week was continued until later this month.
Naseem Farooqi, who is the public affairs manager with the water district, maintains that Young grew so angry with him that Young made a threat to kill him.
The Sentinel is informed that the contretemps evolved out of a press release that Farooqi authored and put out. The press release in question apparently referenced a vote by the water board, and Young objected to what he says was a factual error in the release, which stated that he had voted against the item being voted on when in fact he had abstained from voting.
Young’s alleged threat came when he was upbraiding Farooqi about the inaccuracy.
The atmosphere in the West Valley Water District has grown increasing tense over the last year. There is a sharp 3-to-2 divide on the district’s governing board, pitting directors Dr. Michael Taylor, Kyle Crowther and Don Olinger on one side against directors Dr. Clifford Young, Sr. and Gregory Young on the other. There is no blood relation ship between Clifford Young and Gregory Young.
Earlier this year, Clifford Young and the district’s chief financial officer, Naisha Davis, and the district’s board secretary, Patricia Romero, filed a lawsuit against the district’s general counsel, Robert Tafoya, and two of the district’s other law firms and a district consultant, Robert Katherman. In that suit, Young, Davis and Romero allege the district has engaged in improper hiring practices.
It has been suggested that some district personnel have been caught in the crossfire between the warring factions on the board. Farooqi said he had petitioned the court for a restraining order against Gregory Young because “I take all threats of this nature very seriously.”
Asked if Gregory Young’s statement was merely a joke or overstatement, Farooqi said,  “It was not a joke.  Director Greg Young was very angry and threatened me out of anger.”
The matter came before Judge Barry Plotkin on Wednesday morning, July 31, as an ex-parte hearing. It was heard starting at 9:45 a.m.
Both Farooqi and Young under oath provided their version of events to the court, with Young having been advised of his 5th Amendment rights. Thereafter, the court went into recess to allow Farooqi to call a witness, a district employee, Socorro Pantaleon. When the hearing resumed at 1:38 p.m. Pantaleon offered her testimony. An exhibit was marked for identification and entered into evidence.
After the testimony was concluded, Judge Plotkin denied the immediate granting of a restraining order, but ordered both parties to return on August 27 to see if a restraining order would be entered at that time.
Farooqi told the Sentinel, “The court found enough evidence to support my claim to set a further hearing to determine if an injunction will be issued against Director Greg Young for threatening me with bodily harm and making threats against me. Under penalty of perjury he did not deny making the threat, and instead admitted it is possible he made the threat. He did not deny the statement because he cannot do so without perjuring himself.”
Efforts to reach Gregory Young by press time were unsuccessful.
-Mark Gutglueck

By Mark Gutglueck
Word emanating from San Bernardino City Hall is that Mayor John Valdivia has made an arrangement with City Manager Teri Ledoux to reestablish for the next 17 months the administrative authority the mayor possessed under the city’s previous charter but which was removed with the passage of Measure L in 2016.
Indications of the arrangement have already manifested, and sources among the city’s more than 700 employees say there is pending action that Ledoux and Valdivia are playing close to the vest that will become apparent shortly.
Among those steps now being taken is the resolution of the leadership question within the police department that is being settled in Valdivia’s favor and the conferring of benefits upon the city’s elected officials, including Valdivia.
Valdivia was first elected to the city council in San Bernardino’s Third Ward in 2011, and he took office in the spring of 2012. Valdivia ran on an anti-reform platform, as his opponent was incumbent Councilman Tobin Brinker. Brinker was a supporter of then-San Bernardino Mayor Patrick Morris, who was among a core of municipal leaders in California who were calling for substantial reductions in the pay and benefits provided to public employees based on projections that the financial commitments governmental entities had to make to satisfy future pension obligations were overrunning available and anticipated revenues to cities and counties such that in the best case scenario municipal and county governments would no longer be able to deliver fundamental services to their residents and in the worst case scenario their future viabilities as going concerns were threatened.
Valdivia received in particular heavy support from the city’s firefighters union, which was opposed to the economies on city operations, including holding the line on city employee salaries and benefits which Morris and Brinker were advocating as a plan to head off the city’s bankruptcy. Brinker was defeated and slightly more than four months after Valdvia took his place on the council dais, San Bernardino filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. The city remained in that state for nearly five years, during which time it stiffed some 209 city creditors for more than $350 million.
The year after the city’s bankruptcy filing, Morris opted out of running for reelection, instead supporting Carey Davis, a certified public accountant who, it was hoped, would infuse the city with the fiscal discipline required to overcome its severe financial challenges.
Davis achieved election and during his term in office, a movement to reform the city’s charter took hold.
Drafted and put in place in 1905, the San Bernardino City Charter conferred upon the mayor a fair amount of political power and an even more substantial degree of administrative authority. Under normal conditions, the mayor did not possess a vote on the city council; nevertheless, he or she had veto power on any 4-to-3 or 3-to-2 votes of the council, such that in actuality the mayor had two votes. Moreover, the mayor had a vote in the event of a tie among the council. As the political head of the city, the mayor could put any matter of his or her choosing onto the city council’s agenda for discussion and action. Wielding the gavel at council meetings, the mayor controlled the ebb and flow of discussion and debate. The mayor also served as the spokesman for and representative of the city.
On the administrative end of things, under the 1905 Charter, the mayor had the authority to unilaterally hire and fire city personnel. Thus, San Bernardino’s mayor was not only the most dominant political personage in the city but also in terms of management and administration, a co-regent of municipal affairs in conjunction with the city manager.
Ultimately, however, the movement to reform San Bernardino’s charter in the wake of bankruptcy took aim at the extraordinary power of the mayor. The prevailing philosophy among those driving the charter reform movement was that an arrangement by which there were two entities in control at City Hall – the mayor and city manager – created, under certain circumstances, a type of bureaucratic gridlock in which the overlapping lines of authority, whenever there was even the slightest degree of difference between the policies advocated by the mayor and city manager, left those functioning below them in a state of paralysis.
Ultimately the San Bernardino charter reform package presented to the city’s voters as Measure L in 2016 kept the mayor’s political reach intact but dispensed with the position’s administrative power. The voters passed Measure L, which also contained other changes in the city’s governmental structure, including switching the city clerk and city attorney positions from elected to appointed ones and changing city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years.
In 2018, after qualifying for a runoff against Mayor Davis in the June primary election, Valdivia outdistanced the incumbent in the November general election.
Upon coming into office Valdivia was made fully aware of the degree to which the mayor’s power had been attenuated by the new charter. The administrative power which all of the mayors before him had possessed, even if some had only used it sparingly, was gone. This was inconsistent with the fashion by which Valdivia had intended to govern the city. Indeed, he chaffed at the restrictions, and in an effort to exercise at least some of the authority he had envisioned, he sought to expand the number of city council and mayoral staff liaisons from the four budgeted positions, three of which were filled, in the mayor’s and city council’s office to fourteen positions overall, with nine of those devoted to the mayor as his clerical staff, field representatives and chief of staff. That proposal met with resistance from both city staff and three of the council’s members.
At that time, the council was down to six-sevenths strength because Valdivia had resigned from his position as Third Ward councilman to assume the mayoralty, and that post remained vacant. Thus, Valdivia found himself hemmed in and unable to empower himself or his office. Indeed, Valdivia and his then-chief of staff, Bilal Essayli, struggled through most of the first six months of Valdivia’s tenure in office simply trying to consolidate power on the council. Ultimately, Valdivia established political primacy by backing one of his protégés, Juan Figueroa, in the May election to succeed him as Third Ward councilman. With the support of Valdivia’s political machine, which provided Figueroa with more than $70,000 in electioneering funds, Figueroa was handily elected. The day Figueroa was seated on the council, following Valdivia’s direction, the council terminated City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller, whom Valdivia considered to be an obstructionist to his order of rule. Thereafter, Valdivia elevated Travis-Miller’s assistant, Teri Ledoux, to the position of city manager. Ledoux was given the city manager’s assignment despite her possession of a very thin résumé and a lack of senior managerial experience. Indeed, the 61-year-old Ledoux was nearing the end of her career and was merely looking to hang on for just another year or so before retiring, at which point she would have been eligible to pull from the California Public Employees Retirement system a  $122,472 per year pension, based upon her 25 years employment with the cities of San Bernardino, Huntington Beach and La Verne.
In providing Ledoux with the promotion to city manager, Valdivia upped her annual salary to $259,674, subject to a 3.5 percent raise as of yesterday, August 1. Thus, Ledoux will be eligible to receive an annual pension of $181,642.50 if she manages to stay in position as San Bernardino city manager for at least 12 months of her 18-month-long contract.
While the terms of Ledoux’s official contract were made publicly available at the time the contract, retroactive to July 1, 2019 and running through December 31, 2020, was ratified last month, hidden from public view are the conditions that Ledoux must meet to ensure that she is not terminated in much the same fashion her predecessor, Travis-Miller, was. Her contract allows the council to terminate here at any point without providing cause. If she does not stay in place as city manager making her current salary, $268,762.59, until July 1 of next year, she will not be eligible to receive the  $181,642.50 pension, and will revert to getting $122,472 annually once she retires. Thus, Valdivia has a ready-made inducement for her to have her do exactly as she is told.
In this way, Valdivia has essentially undone, while Ledoux remains as city manager, the limitations placed upon the mayor by the 2016 Charter. Whereas the 2016 Charter stripped the mayor of his or her previous administrative authority, Valdivia is in the position of being able to dictate administrative policy to Ledoux, who is now obliged to carry out that policy or otherwise risk losing her enhanced pension. Hence, through Ledoux, Valdivia exercises what is in essence unchecked administrative authority.
One dictate that Valdivia has made and which Ledoux is in the process of carrying out, City Hall sources maintain, is the promotion of the current acting chief of police, Eric McBride, to police chief. A number of city employees say it has become apparent that Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, who underwent knee surgery last year and was due to return to his post overseeing the department in late February but has remained on leave, will not come back to the post. Internal jockeying for the police chief’s position has been ongoing for several months, the Sentinel is informed. Valdivia favors having McBride, who is roughly two to three years off from retirement himself, to move into the chief’s position. Upon promoting to police chief, which provides for a $250,000 annual salary, McBride will max out his retirement pay. Doing that for McBride is in Valdivia’s interest, the city employees say, as part of the mayor’s effort to ensure a number of investigations involving Valdivia are resolved without any further complication. Placating McBride is a follow-through to an earlier ploy by Valdivia, those employees maintain, to silence the police department about an ongoing investigation into Valdivia’s association with a number of business interests, including his cavorting with unlicensed cannabis purveyors who are believed to have provided him with substantial sums of unreported money.
On March 20, the city council, at Valdivia’s behest, voted to reclassify seven sworn personnel in the police department, consisting of five patrolmen or detectives becoming sergeants and two sergeants becoming lieutenants. That action was taken in anticipation of the city at some future point opening police department substations at key locations throughout the city to engage in community-oriented policing and make the department’s personnel more accessible to the public and more sensitive to neighborhood needs. Curiously, however, in making those promotions the council drew short of actually committing to the establishment of the substations, which have yet to be identified as to location. Rather, the council made a vague declaration of a “future” opening of the facilities, which have not yet been purchased or leased.
“There will be no recruitment process for police chief and it won’t go to the council for approval because in this situation, where it is convenient for John Valdivia, he will argue it is the city manager’s decision under the new charter,” one well-placed city employee said.
Another administrative action Ledoux is undertaking without question to accommodate Valdivia is ensuring that the mayor and his family and city council members and their families are provided with the same taxpayer-funded health and medical care coverage as is given to the city’s management employees and their families as part of their employment contracts with the city.
LeDoux is also committed, the Sentinel is reliably informed, to reviving and facilitating Valdivia’s efforts to beef up the mayor’s staff which met with rejection earlier this year.
Valdivia has instructed Ledoux to be circumspect and discreet in carrying out her assignments on his behalf, and to keep controversial or potentially controversial issues and information under wraps for as long as possible to prevent opposition forming ahead of time which could derail the action Valdivia and Ledoux are undertaking. The idea is to spring these developments upon the public after they have already taken place or are so far toward completion that they cannot be stopped, the Sentinel was told.
“Just as she is doing the mayor’s bidding with the appointment of Eric McBride as police chief, Teri also kept the mayor’s appointment of Matt Brown as the mayor’s new chief of staff a closely guarded secret,” the employee said. “She has known about that for weeks.”
At least three of the members of the council had the expectation that Ledoux would carry out a serious recruitment effort for a longer term city manager, the city employee indicated. That is not going to take place until Ledoux is assured she will fulfill the requirement relating to her pension increase that she stay in the city manager’s position at least a year, the city staff member said.
“Even though at the last council meeting council members Nickel, Ibarra, Mulvihill and Shorett all indicated they wanted a plan at the next council meeting, August 7, for hiring a permanent, experienced and committed city manager, there won’t be any item on the agenda,” the employee said. “They will quietly continue to keep her in her position.”
Ledoux has held herself off limits to the press.

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 “Life is Better in Flip Flops”

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Sentinel 07-26-19