Making the fifth managerial advancement in his 31-year career, Twentynine Palms City Manager Frank Luckino is leaving San Bernardino County’s 17th most populous municipality to take the administrative helm in the Riverside County city of Desert Hot Springs.
Luckino applied to be considered in the running to succeed Luke Rainey as Desert Hot Springs’ city manager after the latter resigned abruptly in February. He was one of 29 competing for the job.
The field of 29 was reduced to around a half dozen by late August and Luckino was one of at least six candidates interviewed in early September. He was brought in for a second and final interview late in September.
The Desert Hot Springs City Council ultimately determined that Luckino’s considerable experience in managing cities and agencies in the desert has rendered him better qualified than those he was competing against, including some very experienced and accomplished municipal professionals, to take the reins in the 33,132-population city. The Desert Hot Springs City Council in a specially-called closed session on October 3 voted to hire Luckino.
His move to Desert Hot Springs from Twentynine Palms, where the population currently stands at 27,491, represents a modest move for Luckino up the municipal evolutionary chain. Continue reading →

Pete Renteria, who killed his grandparents and an uncle during what is believed to have been a psychotic episode in January, was taken into custody on Saturday, September 30 following his murder of another man.
At the time Renteria was captured, authorities did not know who he was or of his connection to the January slaughter of his relatives.
On January 30, 2023, one of the residents of a home located at 4804 Ramona Place, a usually quiet cul-de-sac in the unincorporated San Bernardino County area known as the West End situated north of Chino, south of Montclair, west of Ontario and east of Pomona and the Los Angeles County line, came into the domicile just after 9 p.m. There he found the lifeless bodies of three other residents of the home, Sonia C. Ramirez, 68; her husband, George M. Ramirez, 72; and their son, David Ramirez, also known as David Renteria, 43. The three had sustained multiple gunshot wounds.
Deputies with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department were summoned to the 1,350-square foot, two-story three-bedroom home at 9:09 p.m. Deputies working out of the Chino Hills Sheriff’s Station, which is roughly 6.4 miles from the home, were dispatched to the scene, arriving there after a driving time of about 11 minutes.
During the initial investigation, nearby residents said they heard what they thought were fireworks going off earlier in the evening. Continue reading →

Yucaipa residents who have already expressed concern that City Manager Chris Mann’s stewardship of the city has set it on a trajectory that will see its semi-rural character obliterated by aggressive urbanization are citing policy changes now being enacted that will facilitate a first wave of conversions of seven of the city’s 42 mobilehome parks into what will essentially be apartments and condominiums as proof of their suspicions.
The best calculations available indicate the 547 mobilehome spaces in those parks will be transformed into 1,128 dwelling units.
This intensification of land use, according to those residents, is part and parcel of Mann’s approach to managing city operations.
Mann, who is a developer himself, is the principal in Mann Communications, which serves as a leading advocate on behalf of developers, land speculators, landowners, the building industry and those intent on building homes, apartments, commercial centers and warehouses.
Mann was hired as city manager on January 9 in the same fell swoop by which Mayor Justin Beaver, Councilman Bobby Duncan and Councilman Matt Garner forced the resignation of former City Manager Ray Casey. Continue reading →

“Consistency,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Civic leaders in Upland appear to have taken Emerson’s admonition to heart, particularly with regard to its policy on who should serve on the city planning commission, for how long and in what capacity, pursuing a variable tact when it comes to sustaining the tenure of members and promoting them into the panel’s chairmanship.
The planning commission in the City of Gracious Living is of no little consequence. As the penultimate and in some cases the ultimate arbiter of what sort of development will take place in the 15.62-square mile city with 79,838 residents, the planning commission plays a key role in Upland being able to maintain its top-drawer status among municipalities in San Bernardino County. Set below picturesque Mt. San Antonio and its two accompanying lower elevation summits of Ontario Peak and Mount Harwood, Upland, which occupies the highland above Ontario, was established as an upscale neighborhood where the movers and shakers in the Ontario business community at the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th Century made their homes. It became a paradise of Victorian, then Edwardian and eventually Craftsman homes intersticed among citrus groves. From the time of the city’s founding in 1906 onward into the middle of the 20th Century and then into the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Upland rivaled Redlands on the Inland Empire’s east side for the disputed claim to being the county’s most stately city. Continue reading →

Redlands Planning Commission Chairman Steven Frasher yesterday resigned from the commission, two days after his arrest by the San Bernardino Police Department Tuesday on charges that pornographic images of children were among data contained on his personal cybernetic devices.
There were anomalies pertaining to the case developed against Frasher that have, at press time, been given no explanation.
According to the San Bernardino Police Department, “On 10/03/2023, detectives with the San Bernardino Police Department Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and Specialized Crimes Unit served a residential search warrant in the City of Redlands, referenc[ing] suspected producing, possessing, and disseminating child pornography.”
The police department statement continued, “Internet Crimes Against Children detectives previously received a cyber tip indicating that the suspect, 62-year-old Steven Frasher of Redlands, was downloading illicit child pornography images on the internet and had them saved within an internet storage account. Additionally, the suspect was found to be in possession of numerous images of child sexual abuse material on his electronic devices. The investigation is ongoing, and a forensic examination of the electronic devices will be conducted. The suspect was arrested and booked into a local jail facility, awaiting a court appearance.” Continue reading →

On September 27, Steve Carrigan was a municipal managerial ace, one who was so in demand that California’s 17th largest city, San Bernardino, was clambering for his services and its 33rd largest city, Salinas, was desperately trying to hang onto him. Carrigan was in a position, as the saying goes, to write his own ticket. Less than a week later, on October 3, he was thoroughly unemployed, having burned his bridges with both cities.
What happened?
Carrigan’s progression toward the top of the municipal managerial trade – a respectable and well remunerated one – followed a progression only slightly different than most of those in the profession.
In 1996, the then 33-year-old Carrigan, who had a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the University of Arizona and had fair-to-middling success in the private sector, resolved to try his hand in the public sector. Having started as a governmental employee at a slightly more advanced age than most, he had to work some basic, virtually entrance-level assignments as a public employee initially, but advanced relatively rapidly. In his late thirties, he struck pay dirt, landing the first of a string of impressive positions, in this case that of economic development director in Stockton. He lasted in that post eight years. Thereafter, he worked as the assistant city manager of 25,000-population Sanger in Fresno County. In 2013, he was hired as the city manager of 37,000-population Los Banos in Merced County. While there, Carrigan was a prime mover in an effort by city officials to develop a 1,585-acre industrial park along Interstate 5 and Highway 165. Continue reading →