By Mark Gutglueck
YUCCA VALLEY—In what appears to be a recurring pattern with San Bernardino County’s charter schools, state auditors have found what they say is evidence that the former executive director of the Hope Academy Charter School exploited the trust of the parents of students in the district and misappropriated more than $900,000 in public money.
The results of an audit into the Hope Academy Charter School completed by the State Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team at the behest of the California Superintendent of Schools became available this month, 13 months after the former director, Jared Mecham, resigned from Hope Academy on April 14, 2015.
Following suspicions expressed by the top administrator with the Morongo Valley Unified School District relating to multiple fiscal irregularities, questionable expenditures, nepotistic arrangements and inappropriate related-party transactions at the charter school, the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools requested the audit.
After three Morongo Valley Unified School District teachers developed the concept of a school devoted to underserved at-risk students in the Yucca Valley region and they originated a petition to create a charter school, Hope Academy, Inc. was incorporated on April 6, 2011. The Morongo Unified School District approved the petition to operate as a charter school for five years starting July 1, 2011 and running through June 30, 2016. More than three years later, on December 3, 2014, Hope Academy was granted status as a nonprofit public benefit corporation, a 501 (c)(3) in the state of California.
Red flags had been raised from the outset, when Hope Academy commenced operations during the 2011-12 fiscal year as “a non-classroom-based learning environment” serving students in the Morongo Basin, revolving around a resource center which opened in Yucca Valley in August 2011.
Once comfortably established, Hope Academy expanded operations in several adjacent counties and districts located in San Bernardino, Kern and Riverside counties without the district’s express permission or knowledge, despite a requirement that any proposed expansion for a new independent study resource center outside the district’s boundaries would be explicitly communicated to the Morongo Valley District. In 2013, two of the original founders resigned from the charter school.
The academy has several resource centers, supporting the Structured Time Enrichment Program (STEP) for students in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade, operating from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily as well as independent study programs in several counties for students in grades kindergarten through 12. Resource centers opened in fiscal year 2013-14 in Beaumont, Bloomington, Indio, Palm Desert and Victorville and in fiscal year 2014-15 in Apple Valley, Big Bear, Bakersfield and Tehachapi. The Apple Valley resource center closed during the current fiscal year.
On November 23, 2015, the Morongo Unified School District superintendent wrote a letter to the superintendent of the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools expressing concerns regarding conflict of interest. The concern focused on the involvement of the former superintendent/executive director of Hope Academy serving as a majority owner in SavantCo Education, the charter school’s back-office service provider. The master services agreement with the academy called for SavantCo Education providing finance, accounting and payroll services, business consulting, board meeting support, attendance and student information system management, charter development, grant administration, as well as financing support.
According to the auditors with the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, Mecham, while yet serving as charter school superintendent, used Hope Academy’s relationship with SavantCo Education to reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for himself and his wife.
According to the audit, “At Hope Academy, the lack of internal controls and integral relationship between the founder superintendent/executive director and related family members particularly between the founder, his spouse and extended family and his private businesses, created an environment that allowed the essential elements of fraud to occur, including motivation and opportunity.”
It appears that Mecham made these questionable payments without the authorization of the academy’s board of directors. Mecham’s exploitation of the trust placed in him was immediate and brazen. As the superintendent/executive director of the 1,744-student Hope Academy, Mecham arranged a $220,275 annual compensation for himself. This contrasted favorably or dwarfed the pay provided to the superintendent in the 8,905-student Morongo Unified School District, who received $157,278; the superintendent in the 23,735-student Hesperia Unified School District, who received $156,260 annually; and the superintendent with the 3,789-student Oro Grande Elementary School District, who receives an annual salary of $159,497.
Mecham’s wife, Christine, who was originally hired as a teacher, was promoted from teacher to senior director of programs in August 2013. In that position, she was paid $159,583 during the 2014-15 school year. Her salary was increased during the 2015-16 school year to $195,666 but she only received half that, $97,833, through December 2015, when her tenure with the school was terminated.
Mecham did not stop at securing comfortable salaries for himself and his wife. According to the audit, he also set up three companies that existed essentially to provide services to Hope Academy: SavantCo Financial, Inc. for automobile lease agreements; SavantCo Education, Inc. as a “back-office service” provider; and Savantech, Inc. for technology services.
According to the audit, “Until July 2014, the academy contracted with EdTec Inc., a back-office service provider, for accounting, finance, payroll, and attendance, grant administration, human resources, governance support, board presentation, compliance and accountability and facilities services. The monthly fee was $9,771.25. On March 11, 2014 the Hope Academy governing board approved a master services agreement with SavantCo Education effective July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015 for a monthly fee of $58,000, almost six times the amount previously paid to EdTec for similar services. The fiscal crisis management and assistance team found invoices from SavantCo Education to Hope Academy from as early as January 2014, before the board authorized a master services agreement, totaling $130,890.40 in addition to the EdTec monthly charges of approximately $10,000. These invoices include several charges that should not have been charged to Hope Academy.”
The charges included $103,440 for what was referred to as a “monthly retained fee,” an apparent bonus for just showing up.
According to the audit, “On June 25, 2014, the founder signed the master services contract in his capacity as superintendent/executive director of Hope Academy while he was also a principal officer in SavantCo Education, Inc. His partner, another officer of SavantCo Education, countersigned this agreement. The Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team could not locate disclosure documentation or a reference in board minutes that publicly discloses the relationship of the founder as a principal officer in SavantCo before board approval of the master services agreement. The contract was terminated December 2015, and a new back-office vendor was approved as of January 2016 to provide equivalent services for $22,000 per month with a $20,000 initial set up fee.”
The audit also found that Mecham “recommended to the governing board the purchase of a 2004 Bounder 27’ Class A motor home as a mobile web lab to fulfill the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) requirements for science. According to the founder, the intent was to remodel the motor home into a mobile lab that would provide hands on science to students at the various resource centers for academy students in order to be compliant with WASC. The governing board approved the purchase for $60,855.34 at the June 9, 2015 board meeting. According to the new superintendent/executive director, the founder did not disclose that the motor home was registered to his parents-in-law in Montana and that the amount of the purchase was the exact amount of the payoff from Commerce Bank. The founder’s spouse signed the check dated June 15, 2015 for the payoff to her parents from academy’s general bank account. Renovation costs to convert the motor home into a mobile wet lab were prohibitive, causing the board to declare the motor home surplus property at the October 13, 2015 board meeting in conformance with Board Policy 3011.1. The motor home was sold for $9,000 at public auction, a loss of $51,855 four months after the original purchase.”
According to the audit, Hope Academy skirted state regulations pertaining to state funding for nonclassroom-based instruction by fudging on its facility expenditures and miscoding the management service fees, which were actually bonuses paid to staff, legal fees, audit fees and other fees as direct educational services to meet requirement criteria the California Department of Education used in calculating reimbursement for instructional services, books and supplies.
In addition, according to the audit, Hope Academy misrepresented, through documents filed by its accounting firm, that the Hope operations involved no conflicts of interest, specifically that the academy had no business transactions with a current or former officer, director, trustee, or key employee, a family member of a current or former officer, director, trustee, or key employee or an entity of which a current or former officer, director, trustee or key employee was an officer, director, trustee, or direct or indirect owner.
In fact, such transactions had occurred, according to the audit. Moreover, the San Diego-based accounting firm, Hosaka, Rotherham & Company Certified Public Accountants, according to the state audit, “supported the inaccurate filings prepared by the academy and failed to properly reclassify expenditures in the correct categories” and falsely certified that Hope Academy had a written conflict of interest policy requiring its officers, directors or trustees and key employees to disclose annually interests that could give rise to conflicts. Mecham signed under the penalty of perjury the misleading documents prepared by Hosaka, Rotherham & Company. Subsequently, two Hosaka, Rotherham & Company employees who were responsible for the Hope Academy accounting were hired as employees of Hope Academy.
Hope Academy paid $108,577 to Mecham’s uncle and his legal firm, in Royal Oak, Minnesota, for legal services in 2015. Christina Mecham signed three of the checks to the law firm, totaling $23,316. The district was billed by the law firm after Mecham resigned. Its bill related to research into the California Political Reform Act and other provisions of state conflict-of-interest law, an indication Mecham recognized he had run afoul of the law.
Efforts by the Sentinel to reach Mecham included efforts to reach him by phone and track him down at his home in Yucca Valley. His residence at 58437 Campanula Street in Yucca Valley appeared to be uninhabited and his phone – (760) 365-5423 – was disconnected. His Apple Valley phone – (760) 810-0501 – had been augmented with a mechanism that terminated all incoming calls upon reception.
On April 7, the Morongo Valley Unified School District, citing poor academic testing performance on the part of Hope Academy students and the unauthorized expansion of the academy beyond the district, elected not to renew Hope Academy’s charter.
In the 2015 state assessments, 19 percent of the students at Hope Academy met or exceeded the English standards and 9 percent met or exceeded standards in math, contrasting unfavorably with Morongo Unified students in general, among whom 44 percent met or exceeded English standards and 32 percent who met or exceeded math standards. Just 53 percent of Hope Academy’s students graduated, compared to an 84 percent graduation rate in Morongo Unified overall. A partial explanation of the disparity in those statistics is that Hope Academy caters to academically challenged students.
In further justifying not renewing the charter, district officials said the Hope Academy had branched out into a geographical area some three times the size of the district and that its operations therefore could not be reasonably monitored.
Kyle Hannah, Mecham’s successor as superintendent, told the Sentinel, “Unfortunately, what has occurred has cast us in a negative light. That was all in the past and this was something that occurred under the founder and previous superintendent. We are actually glad its out in the open. If the story is fully told, people will see that we worked with the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team in helping to bring this information out. We had a big part in that. We hope to move forward from that situation and continue to do what we do for kids.”
Hannah said Hope Academy is seeking to undo the Morongo School District’s rejection of the academy’s petition for rechartering. “We are appealing the Morongo School District’s decision through the San Bernardino County Department of Education,” Hannah said. “We are hopeful we can get them to see that we have responsible and dedicated people who are doing tremendous things for underserved students who, for whatever reason, are disenfranchised from the school district. We want to show them that it was the students who were the ones hurt by what happened during the previous administration, and we are committed to not let that happen again.”
The public hearing on the appeal is to take place at the office of the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools on July 8, with the county school board scheduled to vote on granting or denying the appeal August 1. .
Tom Baumgarten, the superintendent of the Morongo Unified School District, is credited with having been the linchpin in the effort to push Mecham out of Hope Academy and the instigator of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team audit.
He said his suspicions were raised when “I was not able to get certain reports from them.” That suspicion went critical, Baumgarten said, when some documentation became available. “Eventually I was able to get some things, one of which was a signed document that looked like there was a conflict,” he said. “That was the one he signed while he was superintendent with a company he owned, the master agreement for services with SavantCo. I asked them [the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and California Department of Education] to review it in November 2015.”
Additionally, Baumgarten said, “I turned what I had over to the sheriff and district attorney. They were waiting upon the completion of the audit and will determine now if there is a case for the misappropriation of funds.”
Asked whether he believed the Hope Academy was a misadventure from the start or that it had simply been driven off of its rails by Mecham, Baumgarten said, “Jared Mecham played a vital role. I think unfortunately this was an example of things having not been done right. Like with everything else, sometimes what is intended and what is possible in the best sense doesn’t get accomplished.”
Baumgarten did not go so far as to say that the abuses perpetrated by the Hope Academy operators delegitimized the charter school concept.
“This was a real challenge for us, but I don’t think I am qualified to take what the Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team had found in this case and look beyond that to make a conclusion beyond what occurred here.”
Nevertheless, there have been multiple instances of scandal plaguing charter schools in San Bernardino County in recent months and years, nearly all of which involve the founder or superintendent exploiting the operations for personal profit.
The most egregious example is that of the California Charter Academy, founded by C. Steven Cox.
Shortly after the California Charter Academy’s first campus was founded in 2000 under the auspices of the Snowline-Joint Unified School District, which exists in the High Desert communities of Phelan and Pinon Hills, Charles Steven Cox managed to expand the California Charter Academy in relatively short order into the largest charter school operator in California. He convinced Snowline to charter a second academy, then obtained two more charter sponsorships, one from the Orange School District in Orange County, and one from the Oro Grande School District, located in San Bernardino County’s High Desert.
Simultaneous to his founding of the non-profit California Charter Academy, Cox created Educational Administrative Services Corporation (EASC), a for-profit company which was then hired by all four charter schools to manage the day-to-day operations of the charter schools and provide academic supplies such as books, paper, pens, pencils, desks, chairs, projectors, computers, etc. The rates charged by EASC reflected in the billings were inflated. In some cases, educational materials that were paid for by the charter schools were never delivered.
By 2003, teachers at several of the schools were going public with accounts of how students’ educations were being neglected and books and other educational materials were not being provided. In 2004, the superintendent of the California Department of Education, Jack O’Connell, launched an investigative audit into California Charter Academy, alleging financial irregularities. In August 2004, four years after California Charter Academy’s creation, it ceased operations abruptly, throwing teachers out of work and forcing students to hurriedly matriculate back into public schools.
On April 14, 2005, MGT of America, an auditing firm hired by the California Department of Education, and the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Team released their joint financial audit of California Charter Academy, showing $23 million in taxpayer money paid to the private management company Educational Administrative Services Corporation was misappropriated. Among the findings were that Cox had hired several of his family members into what were essentially do-nothing clerical and non-productive administrative positions, that Cox, his family members, other EASC and Charter Academy employees were provided with luxury automobiles, and that among the expenses accumulated by Charter Academy were accommodations in Las Vegas, at Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel, studio musical recording equipment, spa visits, fishing trips and jet skis. The audit alleged multiple conflict-of-interest violations, the improper conversion of private schools to public charter schools, and the falsification of documents and claims to receive public funds.
Ultimately, 147 yet outstanding criminal charges against Cox and his associate, Tad Honeycutt, were filed by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office. That case has yet to go to trial.
In the Chino Valley Unified School District, Sue Roach, an award winning and respected educator and the principal of that district’s best performing school, in 2010 was entrusted with $3 million of the district’s revenue to Oxford Preparatory Academy. Roach’s formula, which involved intense academics and parent participation, proved successful and Oxford Preparatory in short order established itself as one of the highest performing schools in San Bernardino County, with its students having the highest scores on state standardized tests of any county schools three of the first five years of its existence. When the school’s charter came up for renewal earlier this year, however, Chino Valley Unified Superintendent Wayne Joseph, who was closely aligned with and highly supportive of Roach in the past, recommended against renewing Oxford’s charter and the school board supported him in voting to make that denial. Joseph pointed to Roach’s creation of a for-profit company, Edlighten Learning Solutions, which then was given a contract to serve as Oxford Academy’s  “charter management organization,” which called for ten percent of Oxford’s revenues to be diverted to Edlighten for that service. Furthermore, Joseph decried other “consulting work” to be done for the academy that was likewise scheduled to be steered to Edlighten.
Roche had engaged in “arrogance, overreach and greed” in the administration of the academy, Joseph said in recommending against the charter renewal in March, adding, “This is a classic example in which a very, very successful charter school, somewhere along its journey, lost its way.”
In March 2015, Excelsior Charter Schools made an ugly public display when it conferred severance packages upon former superintendent Bill Flynn and former assistant superintendent of student services Minda Stackelhouse. Unofficial reports were that the severance packages Flynn and Stackelhouse received were $635,000 and $298,000 respectively when they made their departure from Excelsior the previous month. Excelsior is chartered under the authority of the Victor Valley Union High School District, serving students in grades seven to twelve. It consists of five schools, two in Victorville and one each in Phelan and Barstow as well as in Norco in Riverside County. On February 19, 2015 Flynn and Stackelhouse resigned, but no indication was given as to why. Their lawyer maintained they were due the remaining amount under the nearly four years unexpired in Flynn’s contract and the nearly two years remaining in Stackelhouse’s contract.
In 2011, the Adelanto School District revoked the charter it had granted to the Adelanto Charter Academy in 2009 after it was demonstrated that a number of public figures, including indicted and now convicted former San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, Hesperia School District board member Anthony Riley, indicted former California Charter Academy founder Charles Steven Cox, Peggy Baker (Cox’s sister-in-law), then-San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, Mitzelfelt’s field representative Jessie Flores, indicted former assistant assessor Adam Aleman and indicted local businessman John “Dino” DeFazio all siphoned off money from the Adelanto Charter Academy or entities deriving money from the academy.
On November 30, 2015, the Adelanto School District’s Board of Trustees, in support of Superintendent Edwin Gomez’s recommendation, voted unanimously to deny Debra Tarver’s application for the charter renewal of the school that had been installed two years previously at Desert Trails Elementary School following a “parent trigger” takeover there. Debra Tarver, the owner/operator/progenitor of the LaVerne Preparatory Academy, came in to serve as the “director” at Desert Trails, which underwent a name change to Desert Trails Preparatory Academy.
Gomez cited “flaws” in the way Desert Trails Prep was being operated, including a lack of academic achievement, inadequate academic testing and action bordering on or crossing into the arena of a financial conflict of interest, when Tarver shifted governance to Ed Broker’s Educational Services, a company which Tarver owns. The district cited Ed Broker’s Educational Services as being the governing corporation for LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, founded and also owned by Tarver, located in Hesperia. Tarver receives a salary of $100,000 per year from Desert Trails to serve as the School’s CEO/executive director while she was devoting a third of her time to Desert Trails Preparatory Academy a third of her time to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy and another third of her time to the LaVerne Academy’s corporate function.

SAN BERNARDINO—Two years after city officials set out to do so, the San Bernardino City Council approved giving city residents the opportunity to jettison the city’s 111-year-old charter and consider adoption of a newly drafted one, which advocates say represents a more streamlined and logical set of guidelines for governing a modern city.
While all seven of the council members appeared to be in favor of adopting a significantly transformed governance blueprint, two councilmen dissented from the approval after three of their colleagues pushed to alter the format of the new charter as it was proposed by a committee which had spent two years working on it. They inserted language that makes reference to a municipal police department. That move came less than two months after the city took final action to dissolve its 137-year-old municipal fire department and replace it with a division of the county’s fire department.
Among the elements serving as an impetus toward the charter reform was the desire to reduce costs associated with the provision of public safety services in the city. The current charter, which has been in effect since 1905 and was revamped in 1939 with provisions that committed to provide pay levels to policemen and firemen deemed competitive with the remuneration offered to law enforcement officers and firefighters in similarly sized California cities, presented obstacles to the city council and city management as they sought to move to a conclusion its 2012 filing for Chapter 9 bankruptct protection by reducing salaries and benefits to city employees.
Phil Savage, the chairman of a nine-member charter revision committee appointed by the council in 2014 shortly after current mayor Carey Davis took office, made reference to the city’s fiscal difficulties in previewing the new charter proposal to the city council Monday night, May 16.
“I can’t say that our charter has caused our financial difficulties,” Savage said, “but it is clear it has been a significant contributing factor leading to the financial situation that finds us. As is stated in the bankruptcy recovery plan, until fundamental government management issues are resolved, it will be difficult for San Bernardino to operate in a modern, efficient manner.”
Savage said the committee’ two year effort was to create a governing structure “based on best practices for cities in California” which would give the council and staff flexibility and “set forth principles and standards, not detailed rules and procedures, enabling the city to operate in a business-like manner, be transparent, [and be] not legalistic but understandable by everybody.”
Savage said the committee “wanted to change the residency requirement in order to run for local office from 30 days to 180 days” but that “we found out since from legal counsel that cannot be legally done.” Thus, he said, the city would keep its 30 day residency requirement for running for office, the current requirement and the longest permissible under California law. He said the charter keeps in place each individual council member’s ability to appoint committee and commission members. He said there was “discussion about having police service referenced in the charter” but it was decided to “leave up to council to determine how police services are provided as to an internal police department or some other [provider]. We thought it best to leave that in the council’s hands and not tie the police department in with a charter provision.”
Savage said the most sweeping difference in the proposed new charter over what is in place now is that it will “change the manner of government to being a council manager form of government rather than a mixed form that we have, which is partially like a strong mayoral form of government and partially like a council manager [form] and it is actually a mixture of the two. Secondly, as part of that, the city manager becomes the CEO of the city government, with most department heads selected by the city manager. The city clerk, city attorney and city treasurer would no longer be elected. The mayor and council would be elected by plurality and [there will] no longer be run-off elections. The mayor would no longer be the one to appoint department heads. Boards, commissions, committees would be appointed by the council and mayor. The water department takes over all sewer, that is wastewater, responsibilities.”
Savage said the new charter preserves the current “six year terms for water board. We will still have a mayor elected at large. He still has tie-breaking power.”
The mayor will also retain veto power, but vetoes could be overridden, Savage said, with five votes. Early in the discussion of new charter provisions the concept of reducing the number of city wards from seven to six and making the mayor a full voting member of the council was considered. That did not make it into the charter proposal previewed Monday night. Rather the members of the council will, Savage said still be “elected from the existing seven wards” and the mayor will continue to preside over the council meetings, controlling the ebb and flow of discussion and debate, but will not be empowered to vote unless there is a tie. The mayor’s power will be attenuated somewhat further in that he will lose his ability to appoint department heads, Savage said.
Elections will no longer be held in odd-numbered years but now correspond with presidential and gubernatorial elections in even-numbered years.
The new charter, Savage said, envisages a water department and library that are “still independent, as they have been. The civil service department continues as the appeals [forum] of disciplinary action.”
The new charter, Savage said, “establishes clear lines of authority and responsibility. The city council makes policy and major financial decisions. The mayor leads the city. The city manager runs the city and is its chief executive officer.”
Savage said it was his belief the new charter will “help the city recover from bankruptcy. Why has San Bernardino been unable to deal with its many challenges? I’m convinced our underlying governmental structure has significantly hindered our government leaders from accomplishing what you have been trying to do.”
There was some opposition and protest over the charter reform effort.
In addressing the council, Scott Olsen angled his body toward those assembled in the council chambers rather than those on the dais. He said, “In the country we live in, one of the first things any voter, citizen or resident should pay attention to is when the government tells you they can’t work within the rules given to them by the voters, and the government wants you to change those rules so the government can do more of what they want. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The political nature of this charter change and what it is tied to – our former mayor, who bankrupted our city by the way – is obvious to anyone who looks at it. This is basically two years of wasted time on a political agenda. They talk about an antiquated charter. Look at history. How many people wanted to change this charter before mayor [Patrick] Morris? We had a lot of great charter changes… This charter goes down to 14 pages. It guts the entire essence of why we have a charter in the first place. This is all about regionalism. It’s about the loss of power at the local level by government officials who think that the next level up should be the one in control. It’s why we are now going to a county fire [department].” Olsen said that under the charter, residents will no longer be able to get action out of the city by approaching members of the council and will instead need to lodge requests for service with city manager.
“The city charter prohibits interfering with the city manager, an unelected, appointed individual,” Olsen said. “We had to pay $250,000 to get rid of the last city manager as part of a gentleman’s agreement, similar to what we are trying to get passed now. It’s not the city manager’s fault they want to dump all the responsibility on him. It’s the city council people who don’t want to do anything for you. If the new charter comes in, police protection – it’s gone. All we have to do is look at the fire department.”
Among the capacity crowd in the council chambers was former mayor Patrick Morris, who advocated on behalf of the charter change.
“I have been deeply impressed with the studious nature of the study, hard work and trying to bring to you lawmakers the best possible manifestation of the city charter,” Morris said. “Three years ago as we were looking to put our city’s finances back in order under the protection of Chapter 9, we recognized that our fiscal crisis was in large part due to the political dysfunction embedded in the structure of an antiquated charter. Some of it is unique in this state and in this nation, unique in the worst sense of that word. Every knowledgeable professional, city manager, public administrator, adviser, consultant, academic, business person, any responsible citizen who has taken the time to read the 46 page charter and the dozens of attached explanatory legal opinions would tell you that very same thing. This is a charter document that’s a piece of history. It doesn’t work administering a modern, complex city. During my eight years as mayor of this city, every city administrator who came to serve here as a city manager – Fred Wilson, Mark Weinberg, Charles McNeeley, Andrea Travis-Miller – all left in short order, shaking their heads and saying to me, “Mayor, I cannot successfully administer this city within the structure called for by this charter. In 2009, the city council invited Dr. John Nalbanian, distinguished professor of local government at the University of Kansas, and author of two books and dozens of articles governing American cities, to lead a three day retreat at the Orange Show with the council. His first observation to the council then, after he read the charter and the attached documentation and legal opinions, was, ‘I have no idea how this city can function or any city can function with the provisions of this charter.’ You have all acknowledged that fact and the 14 members of your distinguished core committee, the group you appointed after our bankruptcy, advised you to ignore the charter and do a work-around in order to manage this city through the bankruptcy. You all agreed. And you all signed that work-around document, to work within the framework of a new city manager council from of government. Now you have before you the work product of the charter commission: hard work, quality work, two years in preparation. This is not a rework of an old document. This is a new charter, a modern charter, solidly filled with best practices identified by the national civic league and matching the guiding principles of the charters of other well managed California cities of similar size. This is our opportunity, then, to approve their work and move it to the electorate for a vote. I urge you to do it without alteration, or to amend, add to or delete from this recommended new charter. If you do that you open it up to the allegation that it has been politically massaged and that may jeopardize in some measure its passage in November, and indeed, you limit future councils from acting in a successful way in managing the resources of the city. I urge you further to expend the time and energy required to put this on the ballot, to educate the voters on the importance of the provisions of this new charter. We took Measure Z to the electorate in my first term as mayor. We asked them for a quarter cent sales tax increase to improve public safety. We did an important educational effort with public resources as allowed by law to educate our citizens on the importance of that vote and it received over 65 percent thumbs up on that important provision. This vote is important if not more important than your votes taken to exit bankruptcy, for this sets our course for the future and it serves us so that we will have a city management structure that can work and guide us out of the pit of the dysfunctional nature of our city today and hopefully into a renaissance of the city we all love and care so much about. I urge you, again, pass it as it is placed before you.”
Before the council could do as Morris asked, councilwoman Virginia Marquez, who had been one of Morris’s closest allies on the council when he was mayor, signaled that she wanted the document that is to be presented to the voters tweaked to include a reference to a municipal police department. While Marquez’s reference was vague, the council’s two strongest advocates for maintaining a municipal police department – councilman John Valdivia and Henry Nickel – were galvanized. They interpreted Marquez’s comment as support for language essentially preventing the police department from being outsourced.
Councilman Fred Shorett objected to making any amendment to the document as drafted, citing Morris’s admonition along the way. Ultimately, however, he lost and the council voted 5-2, with Shorett and Jim Mulvihill dissenting, to present the new charter, with an amendment that references a municipal police department, to the voters for approval or disapproval in November. Councilwoman Bessine Richard and Benito Barrios swung behind Marquez, Valdivia and Nickel in that vote.
Nevertheless, the full implication of the vote is unclear, as the motion as stated did not explicitly lay out that the charter is to have language prohibiting an outside entity from providing contractual law enforcement services and thus serving in the capacity of the municipal police department. What was at issue is the concern of some that the city will contract with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for police service in the same fashion it transferred fire protection service in the city from the municipal fire department to the county. In 2002, the City of Adelanto dissolved its police department and contracted with sheriff’s office. In 1989, the City of Needles had likewise rid itself of an in-house police department to go with a contractual arrangement with the sheriff’s department. In the City of Rancho Cucamonga, the sheriff’s department is officially referred to as the police department.
The task of drafting the language to go into the charter now falls to the city attorney’s office. How restrictive or how loose that language will be is yet to be seen.
Whatever that language, the new charter proposal will lack Section 186, a provision put into the San Bernardino charter by means of a citywide vote in 1939 requiring that the city’s public safety employees – firefighters and police officers – be paid on a scale equal to the average pay of police officers and firefighters in ten similarly-sized California cities.
San Bernardino, the county seat and the largest city in the county, has a population of 213,708. Yearly, city officials and police and fire union heads start with a list of California cities with populations between 150,000 and 250,000. In turns, each removes a city from that list until ten remain. Salaries are then computated upon the average pay to that particular group – firefighters or fire department management or policeman or police management – in the remaining ten cities.
Previously, Morris – a former prosecutor with the district attorney’s office and a Superior Court judge, lamented that Section 186 was crippling the city in its effort to get its financial house in order as 68 percent of the city’s budget consisted of police officer and firefighter pay.
If voters pass the new charter in November, Section 186 will be eliminated and the police union will no longer have the safety net of being able to press the city to equal the pay offered a cross section of policeman elsewhere and will instead be subject to a collective bargaining process in which city representatives will be able to angle for lower salaries and pensions.
Some residents and many advocates for the police department equate higher police pay with public safety. Marquez came across as being at one with that philosophy and when a break in the council proceedings was taken shortly after the vote, she made a beeline to the president of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association, Steve Desrochers, who was seated at the back of the council chambers.
In addition to the language to be added to the charter by city attorney Gary Saenz with regard to the police department, there is a possibility further tweaking of the charter’s form will take place, as two more public hearings on it are to be held on yet-unannounced dates. “I think there can be some reasonable, modest revisions we can make to make sure this is palatable to the citizens we represent,” Nickel said. “I think there’s some fine-tuning we need to do.”
Since Saenz stands to lose his elected status in the proposed new charter, the language will be vetted by an outside law firm before the final draft is handed over to the registrar of voters so it can be analyzed and the measure relating to it can be placed upon the November 8 ballot.

The attorney for Jeff Burum, the lead defendant in the Colonies Lawsuit Settlement Public Corruption Prosecution, has filed a motion alleging prosecutors destroyed evidence and calling for the dismissal of the case.
Prosecutors allege Burum paid former supervisors Bill Postmus and Paul Biane, former sheriff’s deputy union president Jim Erwin and Mark Kirk, the chief of staff to former supervisor Gary Ovitt, $100,000 bribes in the form of political contributions to obtain in 2006 a $102 million settlement of a lawsuit relating to flood control issues Burum’s company, the Colonies Partners, filed against the county.
In a motion filed May 13 in San Bernardino Superior Court, Larson, a former federal judge, alleged email exchanges between former Deputy California Attorney General Gary Schons and former county counsel Ruth Stringer and deputy county counsel Mitch Norton dealt with issues that threw into doubt the validity of the charges against Burum, Biane, Erwin and Kirk.
According to the motion, prosecutors maintain the emails in question were destroyed and they have not been produced. The district attorney’s office, according to the motion, initially asserted “the People were never obligated to produce” the emails. .
The prosecution has not disputed that the emails existed or that they contain potentially exculpatory information, but the California Attorney General’s Office indicated that it has a 90-day policy for retaining emails until they are automatically destroyed.
“Due process requires the state preserve evidence in its possession where
it is reasonable to expect the evidence would play a significant role in the defense,” Larson’s motion states. “Because the People have again chosen to stonewall, deny, and refuse even to represent that the destruction of relevant emails was made… Mr. Burum respectfully requests that the Court grant this motion and dismiss the indictment in its entirety as a result of the Attorney General’s destruction of exculpatory evidence.”
Prosecutors were unavailable for comment.

As residents in the city of San Bernardino find themselves caught up in a classic social dilemma which pits community opposition against a company that maintains it must undertake an energy infrastructure project to meet both growing demand and governmental mandates, those residents have in the last fortnight obtained a heartening ruling from an administrative law judge and have what appears to be favorable support from a majority of the California Public Utility Commission members.
But the battle is not over and the upper hand the residents took in this most recent skirmish will yet be subject to countervailing considerations down the road.
For well over a half century, Pacific Gas & Electric, which serves large portions of Northern California, has utilized a pressurized line to import natural gas drawn out of the oil fields of west Texas across New Mexico, Arizona, the Colorado River, a major portion of the Mojave Desert and then northward toward San Francisco. In California, two other large energy companies, Southern California Gas, and Enova Corporation, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, were also well established. In 1998 Southern California Gas and Enova Corporation merged, forming Sempra Energy.
Sempra now has a proposal to construct a natural gas pipeline system into California originating at Needles on the Colorado River. The pipeline would run from Needles to Adelanto at which would be located another pressurization station, and from there 65 miles southward to Moreno Valley and a pressurization station there, which would give the natural gas its final push to San Diego. It is a portion of that 65-mile stretch from Adelanto to Moreno Valley, much of it paralleling and closely proximate to the 15 Freeway, down Cajon Pass and then east along the 215 Freeway and then through the city of San Bernardino to Reche Canyon and over the hills to Moreno Valley that has so people agitated.
Sempra – Southern California Gas Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric – are undertaking a two-tracked effort, seeking rate increases to pay for the project, which is projected to cost $621.3 million, and obtain clearance to construct the project, consisting of a 3-foot-diameter pipeline traversing close to 350 miles. Sempra asserts the pipeline is needed to secure a reliable source of additional natural gas for its customer base and that natural gas is a clean energy source. It is being pushed, Sempra says, by the State of California to have a reliable supply of natural gas on hand. The expansive region Sempra serves is currently reliant on a single natural gas supplier and one mishap, disaster or other problem could cut the supply off, the company maintains.
“SoCalGas believes this new infrastructure is the best and most cost-effective way to address this,” a company spokesman maintains. In its application for a permit to complete the pipeline system, Sempra said it has “an obligation to provide safe, reliable service to all of our customers.”
As part of the California Public Utilities Commission’s deliberative process, elements outside of San Bernardino rallied against the project, based less on objections to the impact on the area through which the pipeline would pass than on the cost of the undertaking and the resulting impact on ratepayers.
Karl J. Bemesderfer, the administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission hearing the matter rejected the bulk of SoCal/Sempra’s arguments, ruling in favor of customer groups and ratepayer advocates who said less-costly solutions, including baseload contracts and tighter balancing requirements could bolster gas supply on the southern system.
Sempra had posited an argument that as Mexico increases its use of natural gas there will be a concomitant reduction in gas availability for consumers and power plants in California’s Inland Empire, Imperial Valley and San Diego County.
Bemesderfer was basically unmoved by that claim, saying that three competing pipeline projects covering different routes but eventually terminating in San Diego could meet future demand requirements at a lower cost. He also said those other routes would entail fewer safety risks than SoCal’s North-South Project.
SoCal’s strongest argument for construction of the pipeline “is that it ensures against such disruptions of supplies coming into California via the El Paso Natural Gas (EPNG) pipeline at Blythe,” the judge said. “But even if we accept that argument, it is clear from the record that the alternative physical solutions proposed by TransCanada, Transwestern and EPNG all provide redundant pipeline capacity at a significantly lower cost than the North-South pipeline.”
Last week the California Public Utilities Commission took up the issue. Ultimately, the commissioners postponed their decision, though indicating during the discussion that they were leaning against the project. Commissioner Mike Florio, who has been under fire for what many consider to be improper ties to utility companies, voiced the strongest opposition, calling the project “unjustified.”
No decision was made and the issue will be revisited at the commission’s May 26 hearings. The delay came about due to a request of commission president Michael Picker that the commission’s vote to deny the project permit be done without prejudice, allowing the project to be resubmitted at a future date.
A number of San Bernardino residents, who had somewhat belatedly and with less coordination and organization than the advocates for ratepayers protested the project, were encouraged by both Bernesdorfer’s ruling and the commission’s generally expressed sentiments against the project.
Still the same, much of the local protest dwelt on issues of less than primary consideration for the commission. A major irritant for residents is the disruption the project will entail during the construction phase. The project will involve the dredging of an 8-foot trench which will entail a 50-foot right-of-way. Over the year-to-year-and-a-half life of the project, some streets and boulevards will experience lane closures that will result in traffic jam. There is particular concern this will interrupt operations at Cal State San Bernardino and that it could wreak havoc on already struggling retail operations across town. There is also worry that in pushing to complete the project, Sempra may grow coercive, using eminent domain to force landowners to sell their property deemed needed to complete the project.
Simultaneously, however, what is playing out in San Bernardino is a demonstration of how a small percentage of the population that is strategically located can block or delay infrastructure siting projects that are critical to larger community and regional goals through what those with a pro-development orientation derisively refer to as the “not-in-my-backyard or NIMBY phenomenon,” or what is less abrasively described as “reaction to a locally unwanted land-use (LULU).”
While energy and other types of infrastructure projects are often socially needed in a larger context, often they are unwanted by the community in which they are proposed to be sited. Equal participation in the governmental process thus requires that local quality-of life-concerns and community opposition be addressed, even as the balancing of those concerns against development intent can lead to legal battles, civil conflict, and long delays in getting the projects approved and constructed, together with increased cost of the product ultimately delivered to consumers.

A company founded and operated by several of the individuals recently charged in the Beaumont embezzlement, malfeasance and political corruption scandal were involved in the City of Adelanto’s issuance of $58 million in bonds in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
On May 17, seven former high-ranking Beaumont city officials were charged by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office with misappropriating nearly $43 million from that city. A central element of that illicit scheme was the use of outside entities and consultants to both serve in official municipal staff capacities or as specialists whose function related to the issuance and expenditure of bond money.
Municipal bonds are securities issued by cities and other governmental entities. The proceeds from the sale of the bonds are used, or are intended to be used, for public improvement projects.
The bondholders are paid back at a set percentage over a 20-to-35-year period by the increase in property tax revenue that is supposed to be a consequence of the higher property valuations resulting from the improvements.
Arrested and charged in the matter were Beaumont’s former city manager Alan Kapanicas, former economic development director David Dillon, former public works director Deepak Moorjani, former planning director Ernest Egger, former finance director William Aylward, former city attorney Joseph Aklufi, and former police chief Frank Coe.
In 1993, Dillon and Egger, who had worked together with Temecula-based Trans-Pacific Consultants when that firm had a contract with Beaumont to facilitate the construction of a long-delayed sewer-treatment plant, left Trans-Pacific and formed their own consulting outfit, Urban Logic, with Deepak Moorjani, an engineer from Yorba Linda.
In roughly the same general time frame Kapanicas went to work as Beaumont’s contract city manager and formed a company called General Government Management Services through which he billed the city.
According to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, Beaumont brought in Dillon, Egger and Moorjani, working under the aegis of Urban Logic to serve as the city’s contract department heads overseeing economic development, planning and public works, respectively. Simultaneously Aylward was hired as finance director and Akulfi as city attorney.
In their capacities, Dillon and Egger set the stage for the conspirators to loot the city by devising a $655 million debt-financing plan for Beaumont to pay for public improvements over a 25-year span beginning around 1995, according to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. The district attorney alleges that the defendants collectively, minus Coe, then used “their roles in advising the city to issue new bonds while at the same time making payments to their own company.”
In addition to that, after Beaumont in 2003 adopted an ordinance
mandating that the city collect transportation mitigation fees on all new development, Kapanicas, Akulfi, Dillon, Egger, Moojani and Aylward rigged it so that the transportation mitigation fees did not go to a regional agency as was required but rather maintained control of the funds and used the money on projects in Beaumont, awarding the work to their own companies.
All told, according to the district attorney’s office, the defendants diverted to their own use or enrichment $42,967,421.90 over the complete span of the conspiracy.
Coe, who was the police chief, was caught up in the scheme because, according to the district attorney’s office, “From 2010 to 2013, Kapanicas, Aylward, and Francis
Coe, who was the Beaumont Police Chief at that time, came up
with a way to loan then-chief Coe $45,000 of city money, interest free. In total, the defendants loaned $113,773 of city money — interest free — to members of the Beaumont Police Department. The defendants never asked the Beaumont City Council for approval of these interest free loans.”
Information put out by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office implies, but does not directly state, that the no-interest loans to key police department members were intended to buy the others freedom from investigation.
Well across the San Bernardino/Riverside County Line, out in the High Desert city of Adelanto, some of the alleged conspirators were involved in municipal operations there, including questionable uses of bond money.
In the mid-1990s, Adelanto was engaged in an effort to convince the Department of Defense to convey title of the then-recently shuttered George Air Force Base to it and/or its redevelopment agency. The City of Victorville had a competing proposal and there ensued a lengthy bureaucratic and legal battle between the two cities over civilian conversion rights to the aerodrome. Adelanto, in a move that was later determined by the courts and the State of California to be illegal, issued redevelopment bonds to fund that effort.
In 1995 and 1996, Urban Logic headed up a team of consultants that included lawyers who prepared documents that related to the issuance of $32.8 million in water bonds. Subsequently, some of the lawyers who were part of the team that readied and completed those bond issuances were paid for their other work for the city by the proceeds from those bonds. Also in 1996, Moorjani drew up a water management and conservation plan for Adelanto.
In 2000, Urban Logic again was retained by the City of Adelanto to assist it in completing documentation and applications for $25.2 million in utility bonds that were issued and sold, and then debt serviced with the sewer fees the city imposed on residents.
In 2007, Aylward, who was not a principal in Urban Logic but was one of the co-conspirators caught up in the Beaumont scandal as alleged by the Riverside County District Attorney and acted in league with Urban Logic, Akulfi, Kapanicas and Coe, in 2007 served as finance director in Adelanto.
The Sentinel is informed that Adelanto city officials have begun an inquiry into the work Urban Futures, Moojani and Atkward did for the city. A lawyer told the Sentinel that little is likely to materialize from that effort, since the statute of limitations on any criminal offenses has likely elapsed.

The public comment period for the plan to widen the 210 Freeway at its furthest eastern/southeastern extreme opened this week and will run until June 16.
Local transportation officials, in San Bernardino County known by the collective acronym SANBAG intend to widen the 210 from Sterling Avenue in San Bernardino east to the interchange at San Bernardino Avenue near what is referred to as the Donut Hole, an island of unincorporated San Bernardino County property surrounded by Redlands. Transportation officials also are slated to improve the freeway interchange at Base Line in Highland.
SANBAG, which stands for San Bernardino Associated Governments, is San Bernardino County’s transportation agency. Its board consists of a representative, either a councilmember or mayor, from each of the county’s 24 incorporated cities, as well as all five of the members of the county board of supervisors. SANBAG has discretionary spending authority over Measure I funds. Measure I is the countywide half cent sales tax measure initially approved by voters in 1989. Measure I money is devoted strictly to road and transportation improvements.
The 210 Freeway runs essentially southeast from its western terminus at the Golden State Freeway (I-5) near the Sylmar district of Los Angeles through the northeastern San Fernando Valley and the Crescenta Valley, then through northern Glendale to a junction with the Ventura Freeway (State Route 134) in Pasadena. From that point on it is known as the Foothill Freeway, an east-west thoroughfare that parallels the southern periphery of the San Gabriel Mountains and the Angeles National Forest. At Rancho Cucamonga, it crosses the Cajon Gap and then runs along the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. Near Highland, the freeway makes a radical curve south before terminating in Redlands at the 10 Freeway. Along this last span, the freeway closes down to just two lanes in either direction.
In cooperation with the California Department of Transportation, SANBAG plans to widen the 210 between Sterling and San Bernardino avenues to reduce congestion and improve operation of the freeway. Transportation officials say the project will minimize hazards for vehicles entering and exiting the freeway, and eliminate existing traffic bottlenecks.
The project will also widen Base Line from Buckeye Street to Seine Avenue to alleviate traffic congestion.
The northeastern San Bernardino/Highland area has experienced significant growth over the past decade, including commercial and residential development along Base Line near the 210 Freeway, according to SanBAG.
This week, on Monday May 16, the public circulation of what officials call the draft environmental document for the project began. A public hearing on the interchange project is scheduled for May 25 at Highland City Hall. A second public hearing on the lane addition will be June 2 at Beattie Middle School, 7800 Orange St., in Highland.
On June 16, the public comment period ends, so those members of the public who wish to weigh in on the undertaking should do so by then. It is not anticipated that anything members of the public put forth will dissuade officials from moving ahead with the project, which is estimated to cost $132 million and will involve the aforementioned widening from Sterling Avenue in San Bernardino east to San Bernardino Avenue in the Donut Hole, adding one mixed-flow lane in each direction from property taken from the existing freeway median; adding an auxiliary lane in each direction between Base Line and Fifth Street interchanges; providing a deceleration lane on the eastbound freeway between the Sterling Avenue undercrossing and proposed two-lane off-ramp at Highland Avenue; building an acceleration lane at the Fifth Street eastbound on-ramp; widening nine bridges within the proposed project limits; and improving drainage, adding ramp metering systems at the Fifth Street/Greenspot Road interchange, relocating utilities and adding retaining walls as needed.
Completion and approval of final environmental document and final project approval is anticipated by September or early October. By Spring 2018 officials believe they will have in hand the completed final design and will have acquired all needed right-of-way. The project is slated to begin in Fall 2018 with the project completed and new lanes open by Fall 2020.
The funding sources for the project are Measure I revenues, and state and federal monies.
Construction of both projects is scheduled to begin in fall 2018 with anticipated completion in fall 2020. SanBAG has completed the draft environmental documents and technical studies for both projects. Public review of the environmental documents for the interchange project is underway. Public review for the 210 Freeway begins Monday. The comment period ends in June.

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
I am back from my mid-spring vacation, which was as much toil as it was a pleasure, since I had to tend to my holdings on the Continent. I will not bore you with the details, other than to say I had to carry out the singularly unpleasant task of firing the caretaker at my chalet in the Italian Alps, as he had allowed the side garden to fall into an appalling state of dishevele. Everything was shipshape at the port de plaisance in Marseille, and the castle in Bayern is as resplendent as ever, though it does get to me that those I employ to keep both of those places up are enjoying them far more than I. Ahh, the burden of noblesse oblige…
As I was saying, I am back, but of course anyone near the San Bernardino Mountains already knew that. They, no doubt, could hear echoing down the canyons my gloating, which I am told, resounds as a deep tonal chortling at an impressive distance. And why am I gloating? Because, you see, Hillary Clinton has, for all practical purposes, wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president. This means, of course, that come next January 20, the White House will have as its resident a Republican…
It astounded me, quite frankly, when early last year the former First Lady bolted to the head of the Democratic pack. The only prodigious things about her are her nerve, arrogance and power of self delusion. How does this woman think she is qualified to run for president, let alone be the leader of the Free World? How did she get to where she is? On the dubious merit of having been publicly humiliated by her better half’s dalliance with an intern. She parlayed the sympathy that came her way because of that farcical chapter of American History into being elected senator from New York. She was thereafter the beneficiary of the current president’s ill-considered appointment of her to Secretary of State, a post once held by Thomas Jefferson. Her lackluster performance in that role hardly qualifies her for advancement…
One of the striking things about her is she does not seem to understand just how poorly equipped she is. What it comes down to is that she thinks that having been the wife of someone who at best was a third rate president recommends her to the office. During interviews and debates, she falls back continually on references to what she contributed to her husband’s administration of the country, doing so with the presumption that the Bill Clinton era was the Golden Age of America. Not even her fellow Democrats believe that. Here is my prediction: As the spotlight of scrutiny intensifies, this self delusion will become ever more apparent to the American people, including many who currently count themselves in her camp. Every politician must engage in self salesmanship, which is always a risky proposition. Telling the world how great you are is problematic, because if you really are great, you don’t need to tell anyone about it. Hillary Clinton has already oversold herself. And she will need to sell herself yet more. Ignore what Donald Trump will say about her. She will do more damage to herself than he can ever inflict, as she tries to puff herself up to heroic proportions she most obviously cannot fill herself into…
Already, to get where she is, she has allowed her ambition, which outweighs her skill by a ratio, as best I can figure, of 524 to 1, to drive her into engaging in underhanded tactics, such as indulging in these unseemly backroom maneuvers involving super-delegates to prevent members of her own party from choosing fair and square the candidate its members as a true collective think will best represent them and their values. Nevermind that I personally don’t share those values and I loathe Bernie Sanders and his socialistic demeanor every bit as much as I dislike Hillary – he is, after all, a Democrat – it is obvious to me that she has cut him off at the pass illegitimately. Her ruthless loading of the dice against Bernie Sanders, whose ideas she steals or co-opts on a weekly basis, demonstrates her guiding ethic is her own political advancement and not principle. More and more of those in her own party are now seeing her for what she is, which is a hypocritical megalomaniac, engaged in hiding her true nature. As Democrats come to realize she is posing as crusader for the downtrodden when she is treading all over anyone else who would compete in the marketplace of ideas with her, droves of those she has so far succeeded in fooling will abandon her…
Mark my prediction: A Republican will inhabit the White House in 2017…

Lewis Cutler was a key participant in the expansion of San Bernardino County into a major agricultural region and into what was one of the leading citrus producing districts in the world at the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th Century and shortly thereafter. His contribution came as both a farmer and developer of the irrigation systems that supported the nearly 100 square miles of orange, lemon and grapefruit groves that blanketed the region by the 1920s.
Lewis Tasheira Cutler, who was born April 6, 1871 at Santa Paula, California was the son of Jonathan Peter Cutler and the grandson of Abligence Waldo Cutler.
Abligence Cutler was born in Massachusetts in 1797, the son of Jervis Cutler and Philadelphia Cutler. Jonathan Cutler was born in Tennessee in 1837.
Jonathan Cutler was a California pioneer whose enterprise would come to be directed in a particularly fortunate way for the development of the Cucamonga District.
Jonathan Cutler came with his family to Iowa and by the early 1850s was among a crew driving an ox train across the plains to Carson City, Nevada. He settled there and for a time was engaged there as a mercantilist, handling hay, grain and provisions, obtaining most of his commodities in San Francisco and making numerous trips to the coast while in this business.
On one of his trips to San Francisco he married Mary Gasting, a native of New York State, and in the early 1870s he took his family to Ventura, where he was engaged in ranching until 1884. In that year he moved to the Jomosa tract, now known as Alta Loma, where he bought twenty acres of wild land.
At that time, the area was rough, covered with chaparral and stone. With the aid of his sons, George W. and Lewis T., he cleared it. He then set about completing a task that would have a lifelong impact on his son Lewis – providing the land with water. Immediately adjoining Alta Loma was Cucamonga, an Indian word meaning “place of many waters.” Though Alta Loma and Cucamonga lay within an alluvial creek at the base of the extreme east end of the San Gabriel Mountains, the available water had to be channeled to where it was needed.
Once a rudimentary irrigation system was set up, father and sons planted the property, setting out five acres to oranges and five acres to peaches. This orchard was subsequently sold, and was one of the first plats thoroughly improved in that region. It was located well north, on Hellman Avenue. Jonathan P. Cutler also bought and developed with his son, Lewis, ten acres on Olive Street, transforming it from its wild condition. Here they built and improved and set out a larger orange grove. After selling his land there, Jonathan bought a home in Hollywood. While living there in comfortable retirement he was severely injured when his horse bolted and threw him, resulting in his death on December 18, 1914.
In their tome “The History of San Bernardino And Riverside Counties” published in 1922, John Brown, Jr. and James Boyd wrote “Jonathan Peter Cutler was hardy, honest, hard working, achieved material prosperity, enjoyed rugged health in spite of his roughing experiences, and always entertained the honest respect of his fellow men.”
Jonathan Cutler had with his wife four children: George W., later a successful businessman at Douglas, Arizona; Mary Genevieve, who eventually became the wife of R. W. Thornbury, of Hollywood; and Elsie J., the wife of J. R. Tweedy, of Walnut Park; and Lewis.
After his birth in Santa Paula, Lewis Tesheira Cutler was about thirteen years of age when the Cutler family located at Cucamonga. He attended school there, spent two years in school at Pasadena, and he and his brother did their share of the toil on their father’s ranch.
Later Lewis T. Cutler took up the business of driving water tunnels in the development of various irrigation systems, and he handled a great deal of tunnel construction and concrete work for the Arrowhead Reservoir Company. He entered the service of this company in 1892, and for eight years was in the engineering department. During that time the Little Bear Valley system was constructed. When he and his father bought a ten acre tract together, Lewis paid for his five acres out of his wages. By the early 1920s, his development work made him one of the leading fruit growers in the Cucamonga District. One of his spreads boasted avocado trees.
Nevertheless, Lewis Cutler was continuously presented with the opportunity to engage in tunnel work. In numerous instances he took tracts of wild land, improved and set them to fruit. He sold or traded these improved-upon properties to obtain more real estate, and in time counted among his holdings both farm and city properties.
Brown and Boyd wrote of Lewis, “Like his father he has been a hard worker, and has fully earned what he now enjoys. “
On March 20, 1905, at San Jose, he married Julia Johnson, who was born January 28, 1875, in Hadley, Massachusetts, the daughter of Edward and Lucy (Dane) Johnson. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Cutler had three children: Howard, born October 15, 1906, who was educated at Cucamonga and in the Chaffey Union High School; Lucy, who was born August 30, 1907, and likewise attended Chaffey Union High School; and George, born May 3, 1909. All the children were natives of Cucamonga. After his marriage, Lewis Cutler bought a now-long gone landmark, the old saloon and roadhouse and first store building in Cucamonga. In pioneer days that one-room structure housed the post office, general store and saloon. It was remodeled under Mr. Cutler’s ownership as a residence, and he and his family lived there until 1919, when he sold it. He then moved his family to a comfortable abode on East Ninth Street in Upland.
Decades later Lucy would recall that her father had taught her to drive when she was barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel, and that her father had outfitted her feet with boxes so she could reach the pedals.
Lewis Cutler was killed in a traffic accident on Mt. Baldy Road when the leather brake on the vehicle in which he was a passenger failed.

Calocedrus decurrens, commonly referred to as the California incense cedar (syn. Libocedrus decurrens), is native to western North America, and is present in the San Bernardino Mountains. It ranges from King County in Washington, through central western Oregon and most of California as well as Washoe County the extreme west of Nevada, and also a short distance into northwest Mexico in northern Baja California.
Calocedrus decurrens is an aromatic evergreen conifer with upright branching that is narrow-columnar in youth but may broaden with age to conical sometimes with a rounded crown
It is a large tree, typically reaching heights of 130 to 200 feet and a trunk diameter of around nine feet, with a broad conic crown of spreading branches. The leaves are bright green on both sides of the shoots, and the tree sports solitary fruiting cones around an inch long, which ripen in summer at the branchlet ends. Although small, the cones are very distinctive and are commonly described as resembling duckbills when they open to release their seed.
The California incense cedar is by far the most widely known species in the genus, and is often simply called “incense cedar” without the regional qualifier. This tree is the preferred host of a wood wasp, Syntexis libocedrii which lays its eggs in the smoldering wood immediately after a forest fire. The epithet decurrens is the present participle of dēcurrō, meaning running or flowing down.
These trees can live for more than 1,000 years.
The wood of Calocedrus is soft, moderately decay-resistant, and with a strong spicy-resinous fragrance. That of C. decurrens is the primary material for wooden pencils, because it is soft and tends to sharpen easily without forming splinters.
Calocedrus decurrens, particularly outside of California, is a popular ornamental tree, grown in locations with cool summer climates like Britain, Washington and British Columbia. Its very narrow columnar crown in landscape settings, an unexplained consequence of the climatic conditions in these areas, is not shown by trees in their native ‘wild’ habitat. In cultivation, these trees typically grow shorter, at 30 feet to 50 feet tall. Flattened branchlets in fern-like sprays are covered with overlapping, lustrous, rich green, scale-like foliage in whorls of four. Its foliage has an incense-like aroma when crushed. Reddish-brown, deeply-furrowed, scaly bark appears on mature trees. Synonymous with and formerly known as Libocedrus decurrens.
The incense-cedar is an important component of mixed-conifer forests, such as in white fir (Abies concolor) forests at the upper margin of the mixed-conifer zone in southwestern Oregon and northern California and giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) groves in the Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer zone of California. Incense-cedar occurs with bigcone Douglas-fir (P. macrocarpa) in southern California [140] and with Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi) and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa var. ponderosa). It grows with ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, sugar pine (P. lambertiana), and white fir throughout much of its range, as incense-cedar and Jeffrey pine are common associates on serpentine soils. It also extends into the chaparral zone.
The genus name comes from the Greek words kalos meaning beautiful and cedrus meaning cedar tree.
In its native habitat, the California incense cedar has no serious insect or disease problems, though heart rot and rust may occur in some areas. These trees flourish in deep, moderately fertile, moist but well-drained loams in full sun to part shade. While they do best in soils that do not fully dry out and they appreciates a location protected from drying winter winds, the California incense cedar is nevertheless valued for its drought tolerance and it tolerates shearing.

By Grace Bernal
Last weekend the look was about shredded jeans and boy is it moving at a fast pace. You pay for the rips too! The holes are so cool they are happening in black tie event galas. It’s a rebellious look but imaginably stylish. You wear a jeweled top with slashed torn up jeans and you’re ready for the festivities. In the 80s it was a rebel thing, and in the Warhol era it was a hip thing. Today it’s ahead of its time in an artistic way and anything can happen when it comes to clothing, no big deal really. I love the whole slashed up look of the ragged jeans with heels and a nice top. So have at it and be holy.
“I wanted to go on the red carpet with a baseball cap, t-shirt, and jeans. And I still do. Because that’s really who I am.” -Missy Peregrym