By Mark Gutglueck
Nearing half a decade after a move by the governor and the state legislature to close out municipal re-development programs, provisions that replicate at least some of that authority have been reestablished.
It is worth noting that while the dissolution of redevelopment agencies was both roundly criticized for depriving cities and counties of a useful tool in eliminating blight and conversely praised for stemming the abuse and corruption of that authority, the mechanisms the governor and legislature have created to replace it reproduce both the positive and negative features of the old system.
Redevelopment agencies were formerly adjuncts to local governments which were chartered to reduce blight in local communities and generate economic development. Those redevelopment agencies were empowered to utilize money available from the state and federal government, otherwise obtain loans or financing, or to use their own authority to issue bonds, the proceeds from which were used to eliminate blight and build infrastructure. The improvements from this redevelopment activity would then, theo-retically, result in an increase in the value of the property within those redevelopment agency project areas. The increased property tax revenue from those areas, referred to as tax increment, would be ear-marked to pay back the loans or debt service the bonds, that is, pay the bondholders.
In 2011, the state legislature at Governor Jerry Brown’s instigation passed legislation, ABX1 26 and ABX1 27, closing out the more than 400 municipal and county redevelopment agencies in California.
Brown asserted that there were recurrent abuses of the redevelopment system and that the money would be better utilized for public education and public safety programs.
A confederation of California cities and counties challenged ABX1 26 and ABX1 27, but ultimately the California Supreme Court ruled that both bills passed by the legislature and signed by Brown passed constitutional muster and redevelopment agencies were dissolved on February 1, 2012, and successor agencies were created to wind down their affairs. A primary function of those successor agencies was to ensure that the financial commitments made by the redevelopment agencies when they were active, such as the sale of bonds to bond purchasers which had to be debt serviced over the 20-year to 25-year to 30-year to 35-year life of the bonds, were met.
Two or three score of the cities throughout California, including four – Twentynine Palms, San Bernar-dino, Rancho Cucamonga and Chino – in San Bernardino County, sought to exploit the unexplored le-gal issues relating to the standards under which these successor agencies were to function to preserve a vestige of their redevelopment authority. Those efforts met with varying degrees of success and failure.
By far the most aggressive and successful of the San Bernardino County cities in waging this effort to prolong the use of its redevelopment agency was Twentyine Palms.
Even before AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 were passed in 2011, the 25,048-population city in San Bernar-dino County’s remote desert outback hatched a plan to protect its redevelopment funding. As the rede-velopment agency-dissolution legislation was being considered in Sacramento, the Twentynine Palms City Council, which doubled as the city’s redevelopment agency board, issued two tax allocation bonds for a downtown revitalization undertaking known as Project Phoenix, which is to include a community center, a 250-seat theater, classrooms, a civic plaza, a park, a walkway, residential units, a wastewater treatment plant, and improvements to the downtown fire station. That bond money was made available before the law went into effect but was never expended.
Having made that precautionary move, the city of Twentynine Palms in 2012 embarked on a feisty challenge of the state Department of Finance in its effort to wrest back $31 million in bond proceeds.
Twentynine Palms City Attorney A. Patrick Munoz, of the law firm Rutan & Tucker, then filed legal action on behalf of the city in Sacramento Superior Court, the venue where the legislation required any litigation pertaining to cities’ use of redevelopment money had to be filed. The case was heard by Sac-ramento Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny.
Muñoz asserted in filings with the Sacramento Superior Court that the non-taxable bonds issued in 2011 created specific obligations between the city, as the issuer, and the bond purchasers, and as such are enforceable obligations and any use of the money for a purpose other than what the city had speci-fied in marketing the bonds to the bond buyers would constitute fraud.
The California Department of Finance in December 2013 told Kenny that the Twentynine Palms Rede-velopment Agency, like several other redevelopment agencies/cities, “rushed to encumber future tax increment revenues” ahead of those agencies’ legislated demise in December 2011. The department al-leged that in March 2011, Twentynine Palms “conceived, authorized, issued and sold $12 million in tax allocation bonds for the Project Phoenix downtown development and an affordable housing plan with-out contracts to build or a definite plan for spending the proceeds.”
Ultimately, however, Kenny ruled against the California Department of Finance in April 2014 and granted the petition for a writ of mandate on behalf for the city of Twentynine Palms as successor agency, allowing the city to utilize the bond money for the fulfillment of Project Phoenix. In June 2014, the Department of Finance filed an appeal of Kenny’s ruling.
Thereafter, the Department of Finance suffered multiple setbacks with regard to several cities’ efforts to control the spending of redevelopment agency money appropriated in 2011. On May 14, 2015, the department sent a letter to several cities, Twentynine Palms among them, announcing it would no long-er oppose those cities’ moves to preserve their last remaining redevelopment agency projects.
Twentynine Palms is now free to carry Project Phoenix forward.
Whereas Twentynine Palms succeeded in its effort to extend its redevelopment agency’s existence, the City of San Bernardino saw its effort end in abject failure.
San Bernardino, which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in 2012, sought to convey $108.3 mil-lion from its redevelopment agency to a newly created municipal adjunct, the San Bernardino Econom-ic Development Corporation, to thwart the state’s seizure of that money. That $108.3 million consisted primarily of property that had been landbanked by the redevelopment agency over the last several dec-ades. In anticipation of the passage of AB X1 26, the San Bernardino City Council on March 17, 2011 approved the transfer of the real property assets to the San Bernardino Economic Development Corpo-ration. But in March 2013, California Controller John Chang and the controller’s office’s chief auditor, CPA Jeffrey V. Brownfield, informed city officials in a 53-page document that the transfer of the assets to the nonprofit the city chartered was an illegitimate attempt to have the city maintain control of redevelopment money that was supposed to be transferred to the state. Chang and Brownfield rejected as misrepresentations the city’s contentions, propounded in November 2012, that “All of the asset transfers to the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation occurred during the period of January 1, 2011 through January 31, 2012, and the assets were not contractually committed to a third party prior to June 28, 2011.”
Furthermore, according to Brownfield, “The board of directors for the San Bernardino Economic De-velopment Corporation is made up of city of San Bernardino council members, who previously acted as the board of the redevelopment agency. The City of San Bernardino and the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation share common governing boards and have coterminous boundaries. The City of San Bernardino provides administrative and related business support for the San Bernardino Eco-nomic Development Corporation.”
Chang ordered that the city of San Bernardino “direct the San Bernardino Economic Development Corporation to reverse the transfers of assets in the amount of $108,372,060.20 and turn over the assets with any outstanding related liabilities to the successor agency. The successor agency is directed to properly dispose of these assets in accordance with [AB X1 26].”
Three other San Bernardino County cities made efforts to shelter their redevelopment agencies and their assets from the ravages of AB X1 26 and AB X1 27.
When the state embarked on the legislative move to close out redevelopment agencies, the City of On-tario asserted that $21,677,224 in sales-tax money generated within what had been Ontario’s redevel-opment agency project areas was not subject to seizure by the state under the auspices of AB XI 26 and AB XI 27. Ontario utilized the money in question to fund major portions of its police, fire and other service programs.
The state laid claim to $21.7 million in sales tax revenue Ontario moved into accounts for the Ontario Housing Authority, which was utilizing the money on its mixed-use Town Square Project.
At the direction of Governor Brown, California Director of Finance Ana Matosantos on August 19, 2013 sent a letter to the state Board of Equalization, ordering the board to withhold Ontario’s sales tax revenue beginning in September of 2013. “Despite numerous orders by the Department of Finance, the city has refused to remit to the San Bernardino County auditor-controller $21,677,224 in unencum-bered low-to-moderate income housing fund assets of its former redevelopment agency that are in the city’s possession,” Matosantos wrote. She instructed Cynthia Bridges, the executive director of the Board of Equalization, to withhold from Ontario distribution of “sales and use tax” equal to the sum of $21,677,224. “If the sums withheld in the first month are insufficient to satisfy the $21,677,224 that the city owes to the affected taxing entities, we direct the Board of Equalization to continue the withholding in each successive month until the owed amount is fully retired,” she wrote.
Well before the state followed up with a letter to the San Bernardino County auditor-controller’s office, instructing it to distribute the money to county schools, the county and other local agencies, then-Ontario City Manager Chris Hughes wrote to Matosantos, informing her that “Since the city is not in possession of the funds, the Department of Finance does not have the legal authority to order the city’s sales and use taxes to be withheld.” Hughes’ assertion that the city did not have possession of the funds was based upon his contention that the Ontario Housing Authority is an entity that is separate and distinct from the city of Ontario.
Ontario was better equipped than most cities to carry out an expensive and protracted legal battle with the state, possessing a revenue stream greater than any other municipality in San Bernardino County, with a total of more than $462 million into all of its funds in fiscal 2013-14. Ontario Mayor Paul Leon said at that time, “The state never had the right to make that money grab and the way they are doing it is completely wrong. It is fiscally irresponsible at the state level for them to be peering into local coffers and taking what they see. I will be darned if the city of Ontario is going to make it easy for them. If they have a right to recoup that money, they are going to have to prove it and they are going to recoup it from legal sources, and that does not include the general fund of the city of Ontario or the pockets of the people of Ontario.”
Ontario officials told the state in no uncertain terms that it would seek an injunction barring the Board of Equalization from garnishing the funds.
Indeed, Ontario’s determination and its ability to back its claims with a spirited legal challenge is credited with having convinced the state that some concession with regard to making a tool to eradicate blight available to cities was needed.
Two other San Bernardino County cities – Rancho Cucamonga and Chino – did not take the state’s action lying down, either.
Before AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 went into effect, Rancho Cucamonga was in the process of using its redevelopment authority and bonding capability to widen a portion of Foothill Boulevard on the west side of town, to undertake an I-15 interchange improvement project at Base Line Road on which the city has already spent $11 million and to make improvements to the public works yard on the southwest corner of Ninth Street and Hellman Avenue.
Because elements of those projects were not bid out at the time the redevelopment agency was closed down, the state maintained that money previously earmarked for those redevelopment efforts could not be used to see those projects to completion. The California Department of Finance held that bond pro-ceeds for contracts made after AB X1 26 and AB X1 27 passed and were signed into law on June 28, 2011 are not “enforceable financial obligations.”
The city of Rancho Cucamonga appealed the state Department of Finance’s decisions in that regard and began exhausting all other administrative remedies in seeing that the money would be freed up. At the same time, the city solicited bids for the uncompleted work. City emissaries were dispatched to Sacramento to see if the Department of Finance would entertain the validity of the city’s claims.
City attorney Jim Markman vowed that if the state continued to deny the city access to the money, he would file suit against the state in Sacramento Superior Court to test his interpretation of the law that bond proceeds can be utilized for “ongoing feasible projects.”
That threat of legal action, simultaneous with the passage of new legislation, Assembly Bill 1484, strengthened Rancho Cucamonga’s position. AB 1484 became law June 27, 2012 one day short of a year after AB XI 26 and AB XI 27 were passed, and allowed newly created “development agencies” to seek the return of bond proceeds that were taken away by AB XI 26’s and AB XI 27’s dissolution of redevelopment agencies. AB 1484 allowed remnants of previously available redevelopment money to be allocated to the successor development agencies, pursuant to a strict accounting and auditing re-gime.
Consequently, the necessity of Rancho Cucamonga’s threatened legal action passed, and upon Markman’s advice, the city council voted to utilize available money in the city’s capital-improvement fund for the completion of unfinished redevelopment projects with the intention of the city seeking re-imbursement from the proceeds of its already issued bonds as soon as they became available.
At the same time, Markman stood ready, if the state were to again seek to hold up the funding, to switch back into a litigative mode.
The city of Chino also refused to back down in the face of the state’s effort to commandeer its redevel-opment money.
In April 2012, the city of Chino’s redevelopment successor agency, taking stock of the consideration that the city of Chino had made more than $15 million in loans to its redevelopment agency for im-provements in its redevelopment agency project areas, submitted to the state Department of Finance a recognized payment schedule for the first half of 2012 that called for the successor agency to begin re-tiring the debt on more than $15 million in promissory notes issued by the Chino Redevelopment Agency and held by the city of Chino. In May 2012, the redevelopment successor agency followed up on its April action, and submitted to the state a recognized obligation payment schedule for the second half of 2012 that cited payment on the promissory notes as an outstanding obligation.
The Department of Finance, according to Jeff Oderman, an attorney for the Chino redevelopment suc-cessor agency, rejected the approved list, holding that loans made to the redevelopment agency by the city that founded it were, with the dissolution of the redevelopment agency, invalid debts. According to a number of attorneys, however, the promissory notes from the Chino Redevelopment Agency held by the city of Chino, like many other debts pursuant to loan arrangements involving other cities and their respective redevelopment agencies, were enforceable under AB X1 26 and AB X1 27. Chino then threatened it own litigative remedy in Sacramento Superior Court.
In reaction to the ending of redevelopment authorities, some cities sought to substitute in financing mechanisms such as Mello-Roos bonds, Marx-Roos bonds or the creation of community facility dis-tricts to pay for building streets, sidewalks, sewers, schools or such appurtenances to development. But Mello-Roos and Marx-Roos arrangements entailed votes of those to be assessed in ratifying the as-sessment districts, which would then require that residents or business operators in the district pay year-ly assessments to debt service the bonds used to pay for the upfront creation of the infrastructure. Any home-, land-, or business-owners coming into the district in the future would be saddled with the as-sessments, even though they had not voted them in. For the creation of an assessment district to pass, a 2/3s vote of the residents/land owners in favor of the district creation was needed. Few approvals of such districts occurred in the 2011 to 2014 time frame.
By 2014, the state legislature relented, somewhat.
On September 29, 2014 Governor Brown signed Senate Bill 628 into law after both houses of the legis-lature had approved it on the last day of the 2014 legislative session. Senate Bill 628, which was intro-duced by Senator Jim Beall (D-San Jose), authorized municipalities and counties to create enhanced infrastructure financing districts, known by the acronym EIFDs, to fund infrastructure development and community revitalization. EIFDs can be created with greater ease than Mello-Roos or Marx-Roos districts and community services districts, not requiring a 2/3s vote, but rather by an act of the county board of supervisors or a city council. Or they can be put into place, involving the issuance of bonds and the devotion of tax increment funding to pay down that bonded indebtedness, on the authority of a vote by the people in which it needs to pass, not by 2/3s, but rather by at lesser 55 percent of the elec-torate in the district to be created.
Enhanced infrastructure financing districts can entail a bond payback period of up to 45 years from the date of the bonding approval, which is 15 years longer than was common with traditional redevelop-ment agency bond debt retirement arrangements.
Senate Bill 628 also allowed for the Enhanced Infrastructure Funding Districts to be utilized for a broader range of purposes than traditional bond funding mechanisms, including transit projects, low- and moderate-income housing, and environmental cleanup.
EIFDs are distinct from redevelopment agency bonding in one key respect. The tax increment devoted to cover redevelopment agency debt was diverted from education. That is, the property tax on property included in a redevelopment area was signed over entirely to the redevelopment agency. In the case of the enhanced infrastructure funding districts, any pre-existing property tax that is earmarked for schools will continue to go to that purpose. Nor can EIFDs divert property tax revenues from any non-consenting taxing entity within the jurisdiction of the district to be created.
During the 2015 legislative session, AB 2, which authorizes the establishment of redevelopment agen-cies under certain conditions and for certain purposes, was passed. It was signed into law by Governor Brown on September 22, 2015. AB 2 provides for redevelopment agencies authorized to utilize eminent domain to eradicate blight and, with limitations and under precise constraints, issue bonds financed by tax increment revenues derived from a defined blight eradication project area.

By clicking on the portal below, you can download a PDF of the January 1 San Bernardino County Sentinel

Sentinel 01-01-16

Sentinel readers will note that this PDF contains several corrections to the print version of the January 1, 2016 edition of the Sentinel.

By Mark Gutglueck
In the face of evidence that Matt Brown, San Bernardino County’s current assistant auditor-controller-treasurer and the one-time chief-of-staff to former county supervisor Paul Biane, engaged in the wholesale laundering of political contributions, questions are emerging about San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos’s action in protecting Brown from prosecution.
The malfeasance on Brown’s part had been due for a public exposition at some point later this winter as the Colonies Lawsuit Settlement Public Corruption Prosecution was scheduled to go to trial on February 1. It was widely anticipated that once the trial was under way, Brown would have been subject to several hours or maybe even days of grilling on the witness stand. But Judge Michael Smith’s decision to postpone the start of the trial until October has given Brown, and by extension Ramos, a temporary reprieve from exposure with regard to a host of issues that throws the integrity of both men and the consistency of the district attorney’s offices standards for prosecution into question.
This matter is playing out against a backdrop in which politicians and their associates in San Bernardino County have historically been pretty much at liberty to test, bend, break or even flagrantly shatter the rules and laws relating to the collection and distribution of political money as is codified in the State of California’s election, government and criminal codes.
In decades past, politicians in San Bernardino County, their campaign managers and advisers, their cronies and confederates have made use of a number of devices ranging from the crude to the very sophisticated, to capture campaign donations and steer that money to themselves or other politicians, to mask in some cases where the money originated and where it was actually spent or to divert what contributors intended to be money to further a specific cause or candidate to some other purpose or candidate or brazenly convert those donations into cash that simply went into someone’s pocket or personal bank account.
A tried and true method for carrying out this political money laundering is the formation of political action committees, known by the acronym PACs. PACs do many things and can be a legitimate collecting entity for people of a given political mindset to pool their money and effectively vector it to a cause in which they collectively believe. A political action committee can also be used more nefariously, however, and serve to allow a candidate to receive money from an individual or entity with an unsavory reputation or record, who or which, if directly connected to the candidate, might hurt his or her electability.
By early in the first decade of the current century, Matt Brown, a self-styled Republican Party activist, in Horatio Alger-fashion had lifted himself by his boot straps into a position whereby his political activism was transformed into a career. In 2002, Rancho Cucamonga Councilman Paul Biane, a real estate professional and the scion of the Biane family, descendants of Marius Biane who established what was perhaps the grandest winery in the Cucamonga Wine District at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century, 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 several years, the relationship between Brown and Biane had been 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 a PAC of their own. This was in time augmented by a bold move by Postmus, 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 central committee meetings. He 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 exclusively, all of whom were employed by him as members of his supervisorial staff. 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 public office achieve success without first paying homage to Postmus, and by extension, to Mitzelfelt, Biane and Brown.
This 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 Central Committe were expected to show their gratitude and allegience by firing up their own fundraising machinery which by virtue of incumbency was able to put the arm on potential donors, and kickback to the PACs 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 PACs, some of which were used to fund political campaigns near his home turf, such as races for the Grand Terrace City Council or Colton City Council. Those were peripheral efforts, however. Brown’s primary PAC was the San Bernardino County Young Republicans, which he set up in 2005.
Two years later, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans would play a critical role in what now-California Governor 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 the San Bernardino County and its flood control district in 2002 by 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 fall of 2007 made three separate $100,000 payments to the San Bernardino County Young Republicans; another political action committee set up by Ovitt’s chief of staff, Mark Kirk, known as the Alliance For Ethical Government PAC; and to the Committee for Effective Government PAC, 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 PAC and the Conservatives for a Republican Majority PAC, both of which were associated with or controlled by Postmus.
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 was later hired by Postmus to serve as assistant assessor after he was elected to that position. 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 unindicted coconspirators were Burum, Richards, Biane, public relations professional Patrick O’Reilly and Kirk. 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. But in March 2011, Postmus 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 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. The defendants were also charged with conflict-of-interest and misappropriating public funds. No substantive counts of extortion were charged in the superseding indictment and 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.
After more than four years of legal sparring between defense attorneys 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 was set to go to trial a month from today, on February 1, but last month was delayed until October because of a health issue involving Biane’s attorney, Mark McDonald.
In October 2016, Burum will come to court to stand trial on charges of aiding and abetting of bribery, and misappropriation of funds, as the conspiracy charge against him and the others that is key to the case has been thrown out on statute of limitations grounds. Erwin will face charges of aiding and abetting, tax evasion and failure to properly report gifts or income, and perjury. Biane will need to contest acceptance of a bribe charges and Kirk will be obliged to fend off charges that he received a bribe in the form of the $100,000 donation from Burum to his political action committee in exchange for influencing his boss, Ovitt, to vote to approve the settlement and that he misappropriated $20,000 from that political action committee for his own use.
The prosecution, yet faced with the burden of proving its case to a jury, had previously been set to rely upon Postmus to reprise his role before the 2011 Grand Jury as the central witness. As an admitted participant in the bribery scheme, Postmus held promise of being a damning witness, one whose testimony as to his intent and the action of others would likely sway jurors that something with regard to the payout of $102 million was gravely amiss. But in the intervening four and a half years since the indictment, the defense has made severe inroads on Postmus’ credibility, succeeding in portraying him in court documents and in arguments before Judge Smith that he had developed an addiction to methamphetamine well before he left public office and that his use of the drug continued, even up until the time of and after he provided testimony to the grand jury. That resulted in the prosecution moving toward an alternate strategy of relying less on Postmus and more on Brown to provide a narrative that will support their accusations. Prosecutors are, or at least were, hopeful Brown can serve to propound information they believe is damaging to the defendants and lay out a context of events crucial to the understanding of what occurred. But Brown presents some major credibility challenges of his own that will need to be overcome if the case is to go the way prosecutors want. And inherent in Brown’s status as the “King of San Bernardino County PACs” are issues which will literally stand logic on its head when jurors are asked to make a finding of guilt with regard to Kirk, Ovitt’s chief of staff, when it is demonstrable that Brown, as Biane’s chief of staff, engaged in conduct far more egregious than Kirk’s.
Key to the bribery element of the indictment is the $400,000 in donations Burum and/or his company, the Colonies Partners, made to political action committees controlled by the other three defendants and Postmus over the seven month period following the settlement.
On March 20, 2007, Burum made out a check for $100,000 to what prosecutors say was the then-nonexistent Committee for Effective Government PAC. Prosecutors say Erwin then created the Committee for Effective Government PAC on March 23, 2007, establishing himself as chairman, Clyde Boyd-vice-chairman, Elizabeth Sanchez-secretary, Betty Presley-treasurer, Gloria Affatati-Boyd-director, and Steven Hauer-director. On March 28, 2007, Erwin deposited the $100,000 check into the Committee for Effective Government PAC’s bank account.
On May 16, 2007, Burum wrote a check for $100,000 from the Colonies Partners to the then-nonexistent Alliance for Ethical Government PAC. On May 25, 2007, Kirk, according to prosecutors, directed his accountant to complete the establishment of the Alliance for Ethical Government PAC. On May 29, 2007, Kirk deposited the $100,000 check into the Alliance for Ethical Government’s bank account.
On June 15, 2007, Burum and the co-managing principal with the Colonies Partners, Dan Richards, signed a check for $100,000 from Colonies Partners to the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC, which prosecutors maintain was secretly controlled by Biane.
On June 29, 2007, Burum signed a check for $50,000 from the Colonies Partners to the Inland Empire PAC, which publicly listed Dino DeFazio as chairman, Mike Gallagher as vice-chair, Jeff Bentow as community outreach director, and Mike Richman as executive director, but which prosecutors say was secretly controlled by Postmus. On June 29, 2007, Burum signed a check for $50,000 from the Colonies Partners to the Republicans for a Conservative Majority PAC, which listed Mike Richman as the sole member of the board of directors and executive director but which was, prosecutors maintain, secretly controlled by Postmus.
Prosecutors allege the provision of these political donations to the various PACs was an elaborate ruse to launder bribes
The model upon which the other involved PACs were designed, prosecutors allege, was the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC, which prosecutors allege was controlled by Biane, but which was actually set up by Brown. Brown founded at least four political action committees used to vector money to various political candidates and campaigns.
The Sentinel has learned that after the district attorney’s office had begun looking into the Colonies lawsuit settlement in earnest, in the spring of 2009 district attorney’s investigators Hollis Randles, Schyler Beaty and Robert Schreiber confronted both Kirk and Brown, aggressively questioning them with regard to action they had taken on behalf of Ovitt and Biane, suggesting the PACs they had set up had been used to launder kickbacks.
Kirk initially responded to some of the questions but became increasingly reluctant to continue, and resisted efforts to wring from him statements implicating Ovitt. He insisted that the interrogation be brought to a close and refused to make any further statements outside the presence of an attorney.
When the investigators isolated Brown, they subjected him to accusations that he had acted illegally on Biane’s behalf  as well as in tandem with him in a criminal conspiracy. Panicked, Brown acceded to cooperating with the district attorney’s office.
Of immediate interest to Schreiber, Beatty and Randles was the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC. Campaign finance records show that the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC became a political force to be reckoned with after the $100,000 check from Colonies Partners was deposited into its account in June 2007. The criminal charges filed in 2010 and the 2011 indictment allege that the series of $100,000 donations to the political action committees founded and controlled by Postmus, Brown, Kirk and Erwin were in fact quid pro quos – bribes – paid in exchange for the approval of the settlement. Prosecutors allege that Biane, through Brown, secretly controlled the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC.
Indeed, political action committees Brown and Biane were involved with raised numerous questions, and not just with district attorney’s office investigators. The Sentinel is informed that a complaint was filed in 2011 with the state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) citing a PAC founded by Brown in 2008, the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association, which is separate from the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC alluded to in the indictments. Offiicals have acknowledged that both the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association and the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC were under scrutiny in that investigation.
On March 17, 2008, Brown formed the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC and named J.M. Olchawa as the PAC’s treasurer. Both Brown and Olchawa are residents of Grand Terrace. Olchawa endowed the PAC with its first operating capital in the form of a $100 contribution. Less than a month later, on April 9, 2008, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC contributed $40,000, which had apparently originated with the $100,000 contribution from the Colonies Partners the previous year, to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC. The following month, on May 29, 2008, one of the political action committees controlled by Postmus, the Inland Empire PAC, infused the San Bernardino County Taxpayers PAC with $3,000 and the month after that, on June 2, 2008, with another $2,000. That $5,000, too, had apparently been originally provided by the Colonies Partners.
Based upon investigators’ exchanges with Brown, prosecutors with both the California Attorney General’s Office and the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office had grounds to allege the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC had been used as a vehicle to launder bribes and kickbacks to Biane.
In the less than two month period between the $40,000 contribution from Brown’s own Young Republicans PAC on April 9, 2008 and Postmus’ Inland Empire PAC’s $2,000 donation on June 2, 2008, the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC received a substantial amount of money in the form of both contributions and loans, all from other political figures. On April 25, 2008, the Committee to Elect Paul Biane gave the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC a $15,000 contribution. On April 29, 2008 the Committee to Elect Dick Larsen provided the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC with a $10,000 loan. Larsen was then the county treasurer. On May 5, 2008 the Committee to Elect Gary C. Ovitt made a $15,000 contribution to Brown’s San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC. That money may have originated with the Colonies Partners before being provided to Kirk’s Alliance For Ethical Government PAC and then being provided to Ovitt. On May 9, 2008, the Josie Gonzales for Supervisor campaign provided a $15,000 contribution to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers PAC. On May 16, 2008, Bill Emmerson for Assembly 2008 made a $5,000 contribution to Brown’s recently formed PAC. The same day, the San Bernardino Public Employees Association PAC provided Brown’s San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC with a $10,000 contribution. On May 23, 2008, the Committee to Elect Gary C. Ovitt provided Brown’s PAC with a $10,000 loan. On May 27, 2008, the Hansberger for Supervisor Committee made a $25,000 contribution to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC. The next day, May 28, the Paul Cook for Assembly 2008 Committee provided Brown’s PAC with a $5,000 loan. The same day, the Committee to Elect Paul Biane made a $10,000 loan to Brown’s PAC. On May 29, Bill Emmerson for Assembly 2008 made a $5,000 contribution to the PAC and on June 2, 2008, the Hansberger for Supervisor Committee made a $15,000 contribution to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC.
The lion’s share of the money Brown’s PAC took in was used to fund Hansberger’s effort to be reelected as county Third District supervisor that year. According to campaign disclosure documents, the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC on May 18 provided the Hansberger for Supervisor Committee with $57,030.70 and on June 30, 2008, more than three weeks after Hansberger had lost the election to Neil Derry on June 3, Brown’s PAC gave the Hansberger for Supervisor Committee $100,920.29.
The Fair Political Practices Commission interested itself in the lack of any subsequent accounting for the $35,000 in loans made to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC by the Larsen, Ovitt, Cook and Biane campaign committees. All references to those loans disappeared from subsequent campaign filing statements made on behalf of the PAC by Olchawa. The loans in question appear to be outstanding. No explicit reference to repayments to any of the lending parties can be found in any of the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC’s financial disclosure statements. While the online filing made by the Committee to Elect Gary Ovitt shows an outstanding loan of $10,000 to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association PAC as of 12/31/2010, online filings for the other lending parties have never been made available. There is no indication in any available documentation showing any of the loans were repaid.
This is highly problematic legally, as FPPC requirements dictate that loans from one political entity to another must be repaid or designated as forgiven.
There is no explicit explanation of what occurred with regard to any of those loans. Rather, Brown simply slipped out the back door, walking away, at least temporarily, from both the San Bernardino County Young Republicans as well as the San Bernardino County Taxpayers Association. For four years there was no accounting whatsoever for the money being handled by the San Bernardino County Young Republicans.
After it was formed in late 2005, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans filed finance reports with either the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters or the California Secretary of State’s Office or both on 1/31/2006, 3/22/2006, 7/31/2006, 10/05/2006, 1/31/2007, 5/31/2007, 6/01/2007, 7/12/2007, two on 7/31/2007, 11/02/2007, 1/25/2008, 1/31/2008, 5/21/2008 and on 1/13/2009. For five years, from the beginning of 2009 until 2014, the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC went dormant in terms of fundraising activity, and took in no contributions in the 2009/10, 2011/12, and 2013/14 reporting periods as defined on the California Secretary of State’s website. Similarly, the PAC made no contributions to any entities in 2009/10, 2011/12 or in the first half of 2013/14. The only financial activity the PAC engaged in during those years related to $388.83 in federal taxes paid on interest income generated from money held in an interest bearing account; payments made to the PAC’s accountant, Betty Presley, for her services in the amounts of $2,240 for 2009, $2,400 for 2011, $1,800 for 2012 and $1,100 in 2013; and $1,700 paid to another company, Campaign Compliance Group, Inc. for professional services and software fees. During this period, it is not clear who was at the helm of the organization, though Brown was the last principal of record. At last, on 02/03/2014, a California Form 410 Recipient Committee Statement of Organization was filed on behalf of the PAC, which gave Jen Slater as its treasurer and named Tim Johnson, Brown’s former political associate who had worked as field representative for Biane when Brown was chief of staff, as its principal officer with the title of “president.” With regard to purpose, the document stated, the “committee will support Republican state & local candidates & issues.”
Its next and last filing with the county is a notice of termination, dated September 18, 2014 and filed on September 23, 2014. It shows that Johnson at that point was no longer the principal officer, with Russ Sevy having taken his place under the title of “chair.” Heather Rouhana is also listed as a treasurer in addition to Slater.
The September 23, 2014 filing makes no mention of any disbursements of funds. However, the Secretary of State’s website shows that 08/20/2014 the San Bernardino County Young Republicans cut two separate checks to The San Bernardino County Young Republican Professionals, for $23,500 and $6,800.
On April 4, 2014, a recipient committee organization report was filed with both the California Secretary of State’s Office and the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters for the San Bernardino County Young Republican Professionals, stating it had qualified as a committee as of December 1, 2013 and that Yekaterina Kolcheia was its treasurer and Ross Sevy was its chairman. Its stated purpose is “to recruit inform and empower young Republican professionals throughout the cities of Chino, Chino Hills, Ontario, Montclair, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana Rialto, San Bernardino, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland Redlands, Yuciapa, Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley, etc.”
It was immediately infused with $1,339 consisting of a $1,000 contribution from Chris Mann and Chris Mann For State Assembly 2014 and $339 in contributions of less than $100 each from unidentified donors. It drew in $163 more from unidentified donors as of the end of June 2014. On 8/22/2014, $23,500 and the $6,800 from the San Bernardino County Young Republicans, which was still referenced as being based in Grand Terrace, was reported as being received. The specification of Grand Terrace as the location of the PAC headquarters is an indication that the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC was until its termination yet controlled by Brown, though he is not explicitly mentioned.
Sevy, who is now a staff member with Assemblyman Jay Obernolte, this week told the Sentinel that in 2013 when he and other Republican activists were looking to create a PAC, they settled upon the name Young Republicans, but learned that the name was already in use. They substituted the name Young Republican Professionals and were later contacted by a former treasurer with the San Bernardino County Young Republicans, who offered to make the $30,300 in that group’s account available to the start up.
Despite prosecutors’ allegation that the lion’s share of the San Bernardino Young Republicans PAC’s operating funds originated as a bribe, clear indication that the San Bernardino County Taxpayers PAC was used to launder political funds, further indication that state laws and regulations with regard to the dispositions of the loans made to the San Bernardino County Taxpayers PAC have never been resolved and are in defiance of state law and that Brown for five years neglected to make any accounting for a political action committee he had created as is required under state law has not elicited the district attorney’s office’s interest.
It is now unclear whether the questions relating to the monetary transfers Brown’s PACs have been involved in along with other outstanding issues have soured prosecutors on the idea of using him as a witness in the prosecutions of Burum, Biane, Kirk and Erwin.
After Brown was approached by investigators in the Spring of 2009 and he agreed to become an informant for the district attorney’s office, he surreptitiously provided information and material to prosecutors intended to put his boss, close political associate and friend – Biane – in prison. That cooperation with prosecutors 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 he would engage in such drastic action indicates the district attorney’s office actually had, as D.A. investigator Hollis Randles suggested during its interrogation of him in the spring of 2009, sufficient evidence against him to obtain a conviction.
About a year before the superseding indictment was handed down in 2011, the district attorney’s office, assisted by the county’s senior administrators, went to extraordinary lengths to protect Brown and separate him from Biane. With much fanfare, Brown, who at that point in 2010 was still Biane’s chief of staff, filed a claim against the county, alleging Biane was retaliating against him. In the claim, Brown disclosed that he had been cooperating in the district attorney’s office’s investigation of Biane.
Biane, who had been the best man at Brown’s wedding and still considered Brown a trusted and close friend, was completely and utterly taken aback by the claim. He had no inkling, he said, that his chief of staff was working as an informant against him. More to the point, Biane was that year standing for reelection. The publicity about the matter redounded to his political disadvantage and after placing second in the June primary, he ultimately lost to his most successful challenger, Fontana councilwoman Janice Rutherford.
Before the 2010 election, at the apparent direction of county executive officer Greg Devereaux, county auditor-controller-recorder Larry Walker brought Brown into his office as his second-in-command, making him assistant county auditor-controller, despite his lack of experience or expertise with regard to the duties of the office. In doing so, Walker forced into early retirement Betsy Starbuck, who had long been one of his most loyal and trusted assistants, going back to his 12 years in office as a member of the board of supervisors before he successfully ran for auditor controller in 1998. Both Walker and Starbuck are highly active Democrats, which makes Walker’s acceptance of Brown into the assistant auditor controller’s post even more puzzling. Moreover, the manner in which Brown simply walked away from his duties overseeing the PAC he founded and controlled, neglecting its financial auditing for five years and leaving the situation with regard to the loans it had received unresolved would seem to shed discredit on his suitability to function in capacity of the second highest ranking member of the auditor controller’s office.
Brown remains as Walker’s top assistant following 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. Brown retains the status, stature and credibility of being an assistant county department head.
It remains to be seen whether Mike Ramos and the other members of the prosecution team will bring him in as a prosecution witness when the Colonies Lawsuit Settlement Public Corruption Prosecution goes to trial and will count upon him to blast a hole below Biane’s waterline, responding to selectively tailored questions to testify that at the former supervisor’s direction he had used the San Bernardino County Young Republicans PAC to launder the bribe Biane had received from Burum in exchange for his vote to approve the $102 million lawsuit settlement and that he somehow became innocently caught up in the corrupt political machinations of his one-time boss and best friend and closest political associate.
Even if he is not called as a witness for the prosecution, there is an increasing likelihood that Brown will be brought in for questioning by defense attorneys, who will not likely allow it to escape jurors’ attention that had the same standard of conduct that was applied to Kirk been applied to him, he would have been indicted as well. And defense attorneys will probably also ask withering questions about the transferences of money into and out of the other PACs he founded or controlled, making it difficult for him to sell the idea that he had been a naïf manipulated by Biane in his operation of the San Bernardino County Young Republicans.
The degree to which Judge Smith will deem such questions to be relevant and how well Brown holds up under such a cross-examination should it be allowed to be pursued could impact the outcome of the trial and whether the defendants will be convicted or exonerated.

The trial for Dr. Stephen Kinzey, the tenured professor of kinesiology at Cal State San Bernardino accused of running a methamphetamine distribution ring, will not go to trial at least until February, more than four-and-a-half years after his August 2011 indictment.
A total of eleven defendants were charged in the matter involving Kinzey: Kinzey, Holly Vandergrift Robinson, Jeremy Disney, Eric Cortez, Edward Freer, Chelsea Marie Johnson, Hans Preszler, Elaine Flores, Wendi Lee Witherell, Christopher Allen Rikerd, and Stephenie Danielle Padilla.
In relatively short order, seven of those charged with Kinzey pleaded guilty to elements of the criminal case brought against them. Witherell pleaded guilty September 2011 to reduced charges. Flores, Padilla, Johnson, and Cortez all pleaded guilty in October 2011 to reduced charges. Freer and Rikerd pleaded guilty to reduced charges in November 2011.
Preszler, who along with Kinzey, Robinson and Disney maintained his innocence for 22 months after the arrests, in June 2013 pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit a crime.
Kinzey, now 49, was charged with drug dealing, running a street gang and possessing illegal firearms. Robinson, his live-in girlfriend and a former Cal State San Bernardino student, is accused of helping him run a handful of meth dealing operations in what law enforcement officials saw as a small-time enterprise that was on the verge of expanding. According to investigators and prosecutors, quantities of methamphetamine, believed to be in the pound to kilogram range, would be provided to drug dealers from the home that Kinzey and Robinson shared in a quiet and relatively upscale neighborhood in Highland.
Kinzey has a PH.D in kinesiology from the University of Toledo, and previously earned his masters at Indiana State and his bachelor’s degree at Wayne State. He began teaching at the University of Mississippi in 1995 and transferred into the California State University system in 2001 and eventually became the chairman of the San Bernardino campus’s kinesiology department’s curriculum committee. Kinzey also had an interest, bordering on an obsession, with motorcycling and motorcycle clubs. A Harley-Davidson owner, Kinzey joined a local chapter of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club while he was a professor in Mississippi in 1997.
After coming to San Bernardino County, the birthplace of three of what are referred to as outlaw biker gangs – the Hells Angels, the Vagos and the Devils Diciples, Kinzey intensified his biker club associations. Kinzey started two local motorcycle clubs in Southern California while he was teaching at San Bernardino State. Curiously, his status with each of the clubs he founded eroded and it appears he was forced out of both.
In time, Kinzey moved on to form a new chapter of the Devils Diciples, a biker gang that originated in Fontana in 1967 but which now has its national headquarters in Detroit. Kinzey formed a San Bernardino Mountain chapter of the club and until his arrest was actively promoting the affiliation, selling Devil’s Diciples shirts, helmets and rider paraphernalia from a website.
There is a degree of mystery with regard to the case and whether investigators worked the case from the ground up or the top down, that is whether local investigators came across indications of drug dealing activity at the street level and traced that activity up the ladder, ultimately reaching Kinzey or whether an investigation at the national level that had as its overarching target the alleged network of drug manufacturers and distributors working in conjunction with organizations such as the Devil’s Diciples came across Kinzey as investigators, in this case those with the FBI, worked their way down the chain of command or geographically across the country to California.
Federal authorities and other law enforcement agencies have been striving, for some time, to make drug trafficking cases against the Devil’s Diciples. Federal Prosecutors in 2009 charged the club’s national president, Jeff Garvin, “Fat Dog” Smith and 17 other Diciples members with drug trafficking, but then dropped the case six months later. In July 2012, 41 members and associates of the Devils Diciples, including Fat Dog Smith and national vice president Paul Anthony Darrah, were indicted on a variety of criminal charges, including racketeering, drug trafficking, illegal firearms offenses, obstruction of justice, illegal gambling, and other federal offenses. Eighteen of the defendants, including Smith and Darrah, were charged with violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
What is known is that ultimately Kinzey became the target of an investigation that involved intense surveillance which tracked his movements and saw his communications, both telephonic and via the internet, closely monitored.
Somewhat ironically, as law enforcement sought to close the net in August 2011 and began rolling up the individuals in his immediate orbit involved in drug trafficking and descended on Kinzey’s upscale East Highlands Ranch Spanish-style home where they nabbed Robinson and found a pound of methampetamine, loaded handguns and rifles and Kinzey’s biker leathers, Kinzey, who was known by the moniker “Skinz,” slipped the grasp of the agents who had been monitoring hims so closely for months and avoided arrest. He subsequently came to court with his lawyer to surrender, posted $300,000 bond and was released without being arrested, booked, photographed or fingerprinted.
Last month, on December 3, Judge Cheryl Kersey scheduled a preliminary hearing on the case against Kinzey and his two remaining codefendants for February 1.
Kinzey, Robinson and Disney are being prosecuted by deputy district attorney Jill Gregory.
Despite Cortez, Freer, Johnson, Preszler, Flores, Witherell, Rikerd, and Padilla having turned state’s evidence, Kinzey, Robinson and Disney are continuing to fight the charges and there has been close cooperation between their attorneys’ James Glick, Stephen Sweigart and Ann Cunningham, which has prevented Gregory from being able to play the defendants off against one another.

Upland, which has long touted itself as the City Of Gracious Living, more recently finds itself beleaguered with a somewhat less flattering reputation as the host of a handful of low class houses of ill repute.
These houses of prostitution are not the more resplendent establishments of earlier American tradition with velour-upholstered couches and a piano player on the ground floor with comfortable rooms upstairs where one might actually spend the night if so inclined but rather the quick, in-and-out and you’re out the door with $40 or $50 less in your pocket variety.
Perhaps the most obvious signal of the prostitution trade’s advent in Upland is one that has existed for years, the Tropical Lei Theater near the western extreme of the city on Foothill Blvd. In its earlier manifestation as an adult bookstore, it became the battleground over locking doors on its video-viewing booths, where the city said prostitution activity was ongoing. The city eventually won that first round, but the bookstore has been displaced by a topless bottomless female review, where it is no secret customers, for a fee, can get themselves taken care of.
The other factor boosting the flesh trade in Upland stems from the more than half- century long tradition of massage establishments in San Bernardino County serving as fronts for prostitution operations and the more recent trend of massage businesses setting up operation in Upland.
At least since the 1970s, a large number of massage parlors have proliferated in and around the unincorporated areas of Bloomington, Devore, Red Mountain and Muscoy as well as in the unincorporated county land surrounding, between and adjoining the Ontario, Montclair and Chino. The illicit prostitution trade was able to flourish in some measure with the indulgence and under the protection of the sheriff’s department, as several successive sheriffs and operators of houses of ill repute throughout the far flung county had worked out a modus vivendi, which included bribes, payoffs, graft, political support and other arrangements of accommodation. Vestiges of that more open era yet survive, as the bordellos that are thinly veiled as massage parlors along the span of Mission Boulevard in the unincorporated county area bordering Ontario and Montclair north of Chino attest.
In recent years, societal and demographic shifts have resulted in the sex trade in the particular form involving massage parlors expanding out of the unincorporated county areas into cities. Nowadays, internet and websites and blogs pointedly reference the availability of sex for sale, providing in some cases exacting specificity as to services rendered and locale. Relatively recently there has been a significant rise in the number of Asian immigrants operating such establishments in San Bernardino County. Because political and jurisdictional nuance is lost on many of these new practitioners of the prostitution trade, they have established their operations in city’s such as Upland. A manifestation of this new reality loomed into view roughly a decade ago when massage parlor operators set up their operations not in the unincorporated county districts distant from the county seat where the lax enforcement activity of the sheriff’s department and the county code enforcement division would allow them to operate in the shadows, but rather in the business districts of incorporated municipalities, which are subject to the more concentrated and focused scrutiny of local officials and the enforcement activity of police departments rather than the sheriff’s department. In such locales, the activity could not remain unremarked for long.
In Upland, “massage parlors,” many of them owned and operated by Asian immigrants, are proliferating along West Foothill Boulevard, in relatively close proximity to the Tropical Lei, as well as south of Foothill on Central Avenue.
Reports are that prostitution activity at many of those locations are ongoing.
“I believe the reports you are getting are accurate,” said Upland Police Captain Ken Bonson. “There is indication some of the city’s massage businesses serve as fronts for prostitution. We have several active investigations ongoing.”
Bonson said success in obtaining sufficient evidence to make any sort of case is hit and miss and that generally there is greater success at catching the woman engaged in the activity than in making a case against the actual operators of the establishments.
“The challenge is getting the owner,” Bonson said. “If we can get some proof the owner is involved, we can go through a process where we can revoke their conditional use permit.”
Almost invariably, Bonson said, when a woman is snared, the owner of the business will maintain he or she had no knowledge of the activity and that the prostitute was acting on her own, then making a show of firing the offending woman.
“That sounds believable if it is just one or a few, but when we know there are three or five at one location, it is obvious to me that at the very least the owner knows and is not doing anything about it,” Bonson said.
Despite that facade of innocence the owners attempt to perpetuate, they are in reality, Bonson said, part of a sophisticated “network where the women rotate from place to place. If they are arrested, they are sent to another city and someone from that city comes in to replace them. They move around. We may know what is happening but being able to prove it is something else.”
The California Legislature enacted Assembly Bill 1147, known as the Massage Therapy Act on September 18, 2014, significantly revising state law in a way that made licensing of massage therapists a function of the the California Massage Therapy Council, located in Sacramento. The act, which took effect a year ago today, on January 1, 2015, greatly limited local oversight of the massage license certificate holders and their conduct.
“Cities used to regulate massage parlors,” Bonson said. “We had inspections with all types of criteria. We’re talking about a background check, a health test, fingerprinting. The practitioner had to take a written test to prove they know something about massage therapy. Now, if they are licensed by the state, the city cannot revoke their licenses. This is challenging for us and it is challenging for the legitimate places.”
Bonson said that “Code enforcement can still regulate these business to some degree. We can still, for example, make sure that these businesses have a public restroom available, but we have no authority over who is licensed and who isn’t.
Obviously, prostitution laws can be enforced but they are pretty good about not taking chances in the way they operate. We can send an undercover officer in, and we have, but usually if the officer tries to discuss something directly they immediately shut down.”
Bonson said intent to engage in prostitution is difficult or impossible to obtain beforehand and is complicated by the consideration that during many or even most legitimate massage sessions the customers are told to undress. An implicit rather than explicit protocol attends these illicit encounters, Bonson said, which includes payment that is coded as a gratuity.
“There isn’t really any discussion about it,” Bonson said. “The customer will get the massage with a happy ending, so to speak, and the masseuse gets a tip after the services are rendered, in addition to the normal hourly rate. Oftentimes in our investigations we end up spinning our wheels.”
Bonson said there is some desire on the part of certain elements of the community to have the police department act, but that some others consider it to be “a victimless crime. But that is not really the case. When you look into it, you will see there is a
human trafficking element to this. I don’t have proof that is the case in our city, but when you talk to some of these women, you can come away with the impression they are not doing what they are doing voluntarily.”
Bonson said an undercover operation in December inside the Tropical Lei had netted an arrest of a woman on suspicion of engaging in prostitution.

Mike Spence, the chief of staff to Fourth District San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, is looking to leave that position as early as this spring to make a run for Hagman’s former post as assemblyman in California 55th Assembly District.
Hagman, an incumbent Republican state legislator who had spent six years in Sacramento, was elected Fourth District supervisor in 2104 in a tight race against Gloria Negrete-McLeod, who was then an incumbent Democratic Congresswoman. Spence, a city councilman in West Covina who was Hagman’s chief of staff in the state capital and all told had a quarter of a century experience in various political roles in the Sacramento, including serving as the chief of staff for then-assemblyman Joel Anderson (R- El Cajon), served as Hagman’s de facto campaign manager in the battle against Negrete-McLeod. Despite the Democrats’ edge in voter registration and Negrete-McLeod’s name recognition and more-than-adequate funding, Spence was able to direct Hagman’s forces to victory. He then followed Hagman from Sacramento to San Bernardino.
The opportunity for Spence to return to Sacramento, this time as an elected official, came about because of the decision by Hagman’s successor in the 55th Assembly District, Ling-Ling Chang, to step up for a run in the 29th State Senate District.
Spence will now have to cross swords with Chino Hills Councilman Ray Marquez,
Diamond Bar Councilman Steve Tye and Walnut Valley schools trustee Phillip Chen, all of whom are Republicans, to represent the 55th, which stretches from Chino Hills in San Bernardino County in the east to Diamond Bar, Rowland Heights, Walnut and West Covina in Los Angeles County and through Brea, La Habra, Placentia, Yorba Linda and slivers of other cities in Orange County.
Spence is an anti-tax advocate who has long crusaded for paring back the bureaucracy of government and alleviating the financial burden on taxpayers.
In 1998, the city of West Covina unsuccessfully sued Spence over his opposition to a multi-million tax increase that would have imposed several hundred dollar-per year assessments on homeowners. Spence prevailed in the lawsuit and the tax proposal failed.
Born and raised in West Covina, Spence was student body president at Edgewood High School and he then attended and graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science. He was elected six times to the West Covina Unified School District Board of Education, was a founding board member of the California Virtual Academy-L.A. High School, and is a past-president of the East San Gabriel Valley Regional Occupational Program/Technical College where he served 18 years as a board member.
The 55th Assembly district lopsidedly favors the GOP over the Democrats in terms of both voter registration and voter turnout, and Spence’s hard-edged Republican streak and longer and more intensive political experience would seem to provide him with frontrunner status.
Nevertheless, capturing the assembly post will not be a cakewalk for him as he does bring to the table some vulnerabilities which could be exploited by his rivals, particularly Marquez, who has contracted with San Francisco-based political strategist James Fisfis to carry out an aggressive, take-no-prisoners campaign. Spence is open to the charge of being a carpetbagger, since he does not currently live in the 55th District and will soon have to move across town to take up residence within that jurisdiction. He will be able to remain on the West Covina City Council, but that too may complicate his effort. It is anticipated that his opponents will make a point of his holding the high-demand job of being chief of staff to Hagman as well as serving on the city council while being engaged in a political campaign to go to Sacramento, and call upon him to either resign from his job with the county or take a leave of absence from it to ensure the taxpayers are not shortchanged while he is distracted from his nine to five job. Moreover, it appears, his rivals are loading up to make issue of the consideration that though he is an ardent pro-business Republican who advocates against excessive government regulation and bureaucracy, for most of his working life he has been a government employee, due to be eligible to pull in a six-figure government pension when he retires.

The City of Chino should join the stampede of cities moving to enact municipal ordinances limiting, prohibiting or outright outlawing the cultivation and sale of marijuana before authority to regulate such activities to the state in two months, members of that city’s planning commission unanimously recommended to the city council last week.
The Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act, an amalgam of AS 243, AB 266 and SB 643, which passed both houses of the legislature last year, is set to go into effect on March 1.The bills put in place a revamped set of regulations for physicians who recommend or prescribe marijuana for their patients and they lay down licensing requirements for the cultivation, distribution and transportation of medical marijuana, together with safety and testing requirements and protocols for the drug.
The regulations inherent in the bills, including opening the door to marijuana purveyors and producers, i.e., operators of clinics, dispensaries and farms, are not binding on municipalities that have their own prohibitions or licensing and operating protocols in place prior to March 1. But those standards will apply to those cities and jurisdictions that do not have their own ordinances codified by that date.
Anticipating a circumstance in which would-be marijuana operation applicants would be able to set up shop in Chino by meeting the state guidelines, the Chino Planning Commission last week voted 7-0 Monday to recommend that the city council adopt an ordinance to prohibit cultivation, delivery or dispensing of marijuana within the city limits.
Proposition 215, or the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, was enacted, on November 5, 1996 by means of the initiative process, passing with 55.6 percent of the vote statewide. It allows for the use of marijuana for medical purposes, but leaves open to local authorities the question of whether its sale is to be licensed and permitted in individual cities and jurisdictions. Most cities in the state have resisted permitting operations producing the plant or dispensing it.
What the Chino Planning Commission recommended is that the city adopt an ordinance that would amend the city’s zoning code to prohibit marijuana dispensaries or farms and similarly add a provision to its traffic code to prohibit the use of its streets for the delivery of marijuana within the city.
City staff is working on the drafting of such ordinances now so the city council can take them up at its January 5 meeting.
Such ordinances must be voted on twice and be given what is referred to as a first and second reading. Normally the ordinance goes into effect 30 days after the second reading. Thus, Chino is shooting for having the second reading take place on January 19 so the new codes will be in effect by February 18, meeting the March 1 deadline to keep what is anticipated to be the more liberal law that would allow marijuana-related businesses to establish themselves in Chino.
Michael Hitz, Chino’s senior planner, said the new ordinances will not prevent patients with prescriptions who live in Chino from traveling elsewhere to obtain the drug.

Those who know me, and even some people who don’t, recognize I am a fervent anti-communist. I have seen in my time enough of the world to know that the reality of communism as it was perpetrated in places like the Soviet Union, China, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania and the like never lived up to the Marxist utopian ideal outlined in Das Kapital. I took some risks and sacrificed some of my own personal treasure in what we used to refer to as the Cold War. Those are stories for another time and another column I may or may not write. I bring this up because Vietnam has lately made its way into our consciousness here in the West…
The youngsters of today are probably scratching their heads, but not really all that long ago, before they were born to be sure, but not all that long ago, Vietnam was a major focus for many of us Americans. Despite my anti-communist bona fides, I will herein confess that I was not convinced of the wisdom of Lyndon Johnson’s decision to get into that conflict. My reasoning at the time was this: Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist than an ideologue and my understanding of both human and governmental nature led me to believe there was tremendous opportunity – actually more probability than simple opportunity – for their to be a falling out between Red China and Vietnam, between Ho and Mao Tse-tung, if outside influences could be reasonably taken out of the equation. Over the long march of time, it seemed to me, if the United States just stayed out of it, the natural geographic rivalry between those two countries – a product of their proximity – would flourish. There was no need to fear, I reasoned, the growth of a consolidated communist power in Asia if nature was allowed to take its course and no one on the outside, such as the United States or others in the West, presented itself as a common enemy to both to give China and Vietnam cause to unite…
There now emerges, a half century on, vindication of my perception. Word now comes that at the request of the Vietnam People’s Navy — which is incidentally a wing of the communist party in Vietnam – the Obama Administration has acceded to a request to lift the embargo on the sale of arms to Vietnam. Our president signed an order to do just that under the proviso that the weapons be used for “maritime-related” defense. The Pentagon has earmarked just under $21 million in military assistance for Vietnam that will come in the form of equipment and machinery that will vastly uprate Vietnam’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities at sea. And already a number of American defense contractors are moving to fill orders for products on order from the Vietnam People’s Navy…
This sudden coziness between the U.S. and Vietnamese military forces is a direct outgrowth of a common objective: thwarting China’s effort to achieve dominance in the South China Sea. China is doing that by either seizing islands there, militarizing others or constructing ones from coral and sand and concrete where none existed before, while aggressively laying claim to vast portions of the South China Sea, which under international law is held to belong to no nation. For more information on this, I would commend my readers to consult one of my earlier columns, which ran in the Sentinel on December 4 this just past year…
Even though the hammer-and-sickle banner still flutters in the breeze of Hanoi and its leaders take seeming pride in their country’s existence as a single-party authoritarian state, change is afoot and its once-intransigent Marxist-Leninist rulers have consented to sitting down cheek-to-jowl with us capitalists. Am I fantasizing too much to think that before I take my leave of this planet, which cannot be all that far off given my advanced age, Vietnam’s leadership will see the value of allowing at least some of its industries, which are now entirely government-owned and run, being entrusted to private owners so their creativity will no longer be stifled and the profit incentive can be harnessed for that country’s citizens’ benefit?

Alva B. Cowgill was a key figure in the development of the citrus growing interests in Redlands and, more important still, in the marketing of the product he and other growers in the area grew.
Alva Byron Cowgill was born at Spencer’s Station in Guernsey County, Ohio, on February 9, 1856, and his parents, P. C. and Ellen (Spencer) Cowgill, were also natives of the Buckeye state. His father was a merchant. Their four children were Alva, Charles, Ella and Grant, all of whom lived into the 1920s, except for Grant, who died at Oskaloosa, Iowa.
Alva was eight years old when his father left home to serve in the Civil war and nine when Lincoln was assassinated.
Alva B. Cowgill lived an involved and busy life practically from the earliest stages of his childhood. On his way to school he attended to the opening of his father’s store in the morning, then put in the regular hours at his studies, and after being dismissed from class, clerked until closing time. Later for three years he was clerk and assistant in his father’s business, and then for five years was ticket and freight agent with the Baltimore and Ohio Railway. In 1879, Cowgill, after finishing a course in a business college, entered the old firm of Graham, Bailey & Company, wholesale and retail druggists at Zanesville, Ohio. He became an accountant, making $40 a month. He learned the business as well as the routine of its accounting system, and at the end of three years had become a part owner. About that time the business was incorporated as the Bailey Drug Company. Mr. Cowgill for eight years was the head traveling representative, and was then called back to the general offices and made manager and treasurer.
Mr. Bailey in the meantime had accumulated extensive banking interests and turned over practically the entire executive management of the business to Cowgill. This proved a wised decision on Bailey’s part, as the business prospered under Cowgill’s management.
For eleven years Cowgill devoted himself wholly to the interests and welfare of the business, and at the end of that time found his health so impaired that it was imperative he seek outdoor employment. In the meantime he had achieved financial security, represented in his holdings of stock in Bailey’s successful drugstore.
Selling out his business at Zanesville, Ohio, Cowgill came to Los Angeles in 1901 and spent some time investigating the various areas of Southern California. His first purchase was a 20-acre orange grove in the Redlands district, and later he bought 16 acres of unimproved land, 10 acres of which he set to Washington navels and 6 acres to grapefruit. For five years he lived on this land and worked outside in cultivating, planting, pruning and caring for his trees. He had his groves in a most satisfactory condition and, even better, his health and strength were completely restored. He then sought an opportunity again to connect himself with some of the broader commercial work for which his previous training had so well qualified him. He therefore became one of the two principals, the other being Arthur Gregory, in the organization of the Redlands Mutual Orange Company in 1906, and after its organization became its secretary and general manager.
By the 1920s the Redlands Mutual Orange Company was one of the leading growers’ marketing organization in the Redlands district. In 1906, the Mutual Orange Distributors, a co-operative selling organization was also organized, and Cowgill served as its secretary and director. In no small degree the strength and efficiency of those organizations depended upon Cowgill, who recognized in them an important opportunity for a public spirited service to his associated growers, and he did much to improve the marketing and distributing facilities available to the producers in the Redlands section. At the same time he acquired interests in several irrigation companies that brought water to an increased area of citrus land.
He had his first ride in an automobile, a one-cylinder Cadillac, when he was 48 years old.
In 1880, Cowgill had married Miss Nellie Broomhall, who was born in Quaker City, Ohio, August 12, 1858, the daughter of W. P. and Rachel (Redd) Broomhall, natives of Ohio. Mr. and Mrs. Cowgill’s four children were all born at Zanesville, Ohio. Ethel M., born June 23, 1882, was married May 24, 1911, to Fred C. Knapp, a contractor and builder of Los Angeles. They had a daughter, Kathryn Claire Knapp, born in Los Angeles July 11, 1912.
The second child, Claire Cowgill, was born June 25, 1886, and graduated from the Redlands High School and from Smith College at Northampton, Massachusetts, with an A.B. degree.
Chester B. Cowgill, born April 14, 1890, was educated at Redlands High School, spent four years in the University of California at Berkeley, and is went into business in Los Angeles. On March 19, 1918, he enlisted from Redlands, and was sworn into military service at Rockwell Aviation Field at San Diego March 23rd, being assigned to
Squadron C. He was transferred to March Aviation Field at Riverside in August, 1918, was promoted to private first class and acted as sergeant in charge of power plants, and November 13, 1918, was transferred to the Field Artillery Officers Training School at Camp Zachary Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky, being assigned to the Seventeenth Observational Battery. He received his honorable discharge December 7, 1918.
On August 27, 1917, C. B. Cowgill married Gladys Ingersoll, of Los Angeles, who is also a graduate of the Redlands High School, the California State Normal School. She was a very talented musician, both vocal and instrumental, and before her marriage was a teacher in the public schools of Los Angeles.
The fourth child, Ralph Cowgill, was born February 6, 1894, graduated from the high school in Redlands, attended the State University and a business college, and was connected in the early 1920s with the refinery of the Standard Oil Company at Bakersfield. He married Miss Ruth E. Swan at Redlands December 23, 1916. She was a graduate of the Redlands High School. He joined the Naval Reserves for a period of four years, and was on active duty until released after the signing of the armistice in November 1918. Both of Alva Cowgill’s sons were married and held good positions, yet they waived all claims for exemption when they were called to the colors.
According to John Brown and James Boyd in their History of San Bernardino And Riverside Counties published in 1922, Alva Cowgill led “a busy life” and compiled “a record of usefulness and honor. Mr. Cowgill is truly one of the men who have been instrumental in making the country around Redlands bloom and blossom as the rose.”
In 1926, three years after Nellie Bromhall Cowgill’s 1923 death, Alva Cowgill remarried, taking as his second wife , Mary Mason Howlett Cowgill, who was born in 1877 and was the widow of Richard A. Mason (1876 – 1919).
Cowgill served as the secretary and manager of the Redlands Mutual Orange Company for 19 years and was its president for four years. A charter member of Rediands Kiwanis club, he was a regular attendant at the weekly luncheons. He was a member of Trinity Episcopal church for 15 years.
Alva Cowgill died on November 3, 1943 at the age of 87. He was stlll the secretary for Mutual Orange Distributors at the time of his death, being the only secretary of the company in its 37 year history at that time and he had continued to serve on its board of directors until a month before his death, at which time he had asked to be relieved of that duty. He was also still a director of the Redlands Mutual Orange Company at the time of his death.
J. A. Steward, general manager of the mutual Orange Distributors, said at the time of Alva Cowgill’s death, “Every member of the organization feels a keen personal loss in the death of Mr. Cowgill. The orange business was his life and I have heard him say that he would rather die than not be able to report, as he did faithfully for years, for his regular day’s stint at the Mutual Orange Distributors. He was much loved by all who knew him. Mild mannered and efficient, he took pride in his work. We considered him one of our most valued friends and co-workers.”

By Grace Bernal
When the weather is at its coolest people become extravagant with their attire. This week fashion took a turn back to the jacket, coats, and anything warm. The fashion statement of the week has been heavy and furry in the intense cold weather people broke out their classic coats, hats, boots, and scarves too. It looks terrific out there in the windy cool breezes in the cities of San Bernardino County. The people are very elegant in black and white and they are adding muffs to the coat feast attire. The eye of the fashion storm is everywhere you look when it comes to stylish warmth! The streets are full of cool warm outfits and it’s all thanks to the cold weather. The shopping windows at the departments stores look great too, as they are dressed and ready to welcome the new year. No telling what is in store this new year since we are dressing for the cold weather as it continues to cool down. People really do dress according to the weather and it’s neat to see the bundles of fashion they create with their warm pieces. To all of you happy new year and have fun surviving the cold temperatures.
Fashion is not necessarily about labels. It’s not about brands. It’s about something else that comes from within you. -Ralph Lauren