By County Friedrich von Olsen
Just down the road in Pasadena, Caltech scientists have made what is potentially the breakthrough of the decade, or perhaps the century or even the millennium. They have created a sheet of graphene that measures one centimeter by one centimeter. What is so significant and important about a wafer thin piece of carbon that is less than .0656 square inches wide? It turns out that I did not need to go far to get an explanation of that, but merely mention the subject to the Sentinel’s publisher…
It turns out Mark Gutglueck has a passion for the subject of graphene and possible ways of manufacturing it. I will let him explain, first, what it is. “It is simple carbon,” Gutglueck said, “but different from almost every other form of carbon. Graphene is just one-atom thick. It occurs in nature, but only by chance and only in the most minute of quantities. It has extraordinary properties. Once formed it has unheard of resiliency. It is stronger than titanium. Compared to it steel would be like a fluffy down pillow. And it also is capable of conducting electricity exceedingly efficiently, far more efficiently and speedily than silicon, which the current generation of computers is based on. Computer chips or hard drives composed of graphene would have a storage capability hundreds of thousands of times greater than the computers in use today and would feature processing speeds magnitudes beyond our fastest processors. Not only that, graphene is light and compact. The miniaturization of computerized devises has already achieved impressive levels, in my mind. Graphene offers the possibility of miniaturization that is beyond comprehension.” Okay, so the stuff has possibilities…
I was a bit surprised to learn that the Sentinel publisher is a scientist. When I said as much, it provoked a hasty rebuke. “Look, I’m no scientist,” he said. “And I really don’t want to be put on the spot by some real scientist who will make me look like some kind of fool when he or she starts talking to me like I am one.” The best I could do was to get him to admit, “I have an understanding of scientific method. I have an interest in nanotechnology.” I picked up on the subject of graphene again. He said that up until the apparent breakthrough in Pasadena there has been all order of highly creative, sophisticated, disciplined and technologically advanced approaches to fabricating, or trying to fabricate, graphene. “A whole lot of clever and well thought-through methods have been tried,” Gutglueck said. “There are over 8,000 patents on ways to create it. The thing is, none of them really worked, or worked effectively in ways that could be consistently replicated. The most reliable way, up until now, of making it was pretty low tech and pretty chancy. What they would do is take a piece of tape, adhesive tape, and set it sticky side down in some carbon. Then they would lay the tape on a surface and press it down. When the tape was pulled up, it would leave a film of carbon on the surface. About one out of every 800 or 900 times that was done there would be patch of graphene left on the surface.” Pretty low tech…
That’s where Gutglueck’s interest in this came in. He was eager to try out a number of theories he had for a systematic and reliable method of manufacturing graphene. “My first approach was to do it electrostatically,” Gutglueck said. “The concept was to create an electric field that would envelope the carbon and to keep the field – a relatively low level field – flowing until the molecules distributed themselves evenly. The trick it seems to me is to ascertain what degree of voltage would work. It would have to be a very precise level, probably dependent upon the amount of carbon you are dealing with. I found out later that others were attempting something on the order of my idea. You can uniformly distribute carbon electrostatically, it turns out. But the problem, as I understand it, is that when you shut down the current, you get a ripple across the layer of carbon. I still think doing it electrostatically might work, but you would need to create a device to gradually, very gradually, excruciatingly gradually, lower the voltage down to zero.” So much for that approach…
Many of the other methods of creating graphene he contemplated were expensive and involved, requiring equipment that is hard to come by or is monopolized by others in the scientific community for experiments they are carrying out. A common approach requires heating the carbon to extremely high temperatures, in some cases approaching 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. “The application of heat and pressure is a standard approach when we are talking about building graphene,” Gutglueck said. “At the University of California at Riverside they have an oven with a chamber that can generate heat in excess of 1,600 degrees and in which you can increase the atmospheric pressure to a magnitude that will essentially flatten or compress commonplace items. I was interested in experimenting with those possibilities, utilizing different pressures and different levels of heat and different media as substrates. I was never able to do that because I don’t have a laboratory of my own and it is very difficult to get access to the equipment that does exist so you can carry out experimentation. There is a demand for the use of that equipment and a backlog of people, all of whom have legitimate experiments pending, who want to use the equipment.” He thus never personally utilized the heat and pressure approach…
He had a good dozen other ideas, some of which at least sound intriguing. “One approach I think might have viability,” he said, “is vibration. If we take a substrate and measure it precisely, we can calculate by weight how much carbon we would need to cover the substrate’s area to a depth of one atom of carbon.” What he means by a substrate is simply a flat plate. “What you would do is put that precise amount of carbon on the substrate and then enclose it with a border,” he went on. “By vibrating the substrate, my theory is you could get the carbon to distribute evenly over the surface. If you continued the vibration, and by vibration I mean a very minute but even oscillation, up and down, forward and backward, side to side, eventually you would get what I would label pre-graphene. You would then cease the vibration and allow the graphene to set. Assuming you didn’t tear any of the carbon away when you removed the border or separated the graphene from the substrate, I think you could create a sizeable sheet of graphene.” Another proposed method he came up with is a variation on the vibration approach delineated above, involving a substrate and a superstrate. A superstrate is a flat plate placed on top of the substrate. “If you measure out the precise amount of carbon you need on the substrate, you could then compress the carbon with the superstrate. You would slowly, very slowly, narrow the gap between the substrate and superstrate to the thickness of a single atom of carbon. If you did it right, at least according to my theory, you would then have graphene.” It’s anybody’s guess as to whether these methods would actually work…
I asked him what he knew or thought of the success achieved at Caltech. “What I know is the fellow who came up with this method of construction is named David Boyd, who somehow introduced methane into the derivative process. This new technique allows for the graphene to form at a relatively cool temperature, something around 850 degrees, which is considerably lower than what a lot of people were accustomed to thinking of as necessary before. I’m impressed. I’d like to talk to Mr. Boyd. I had considered the use of gasses in the process might be the key. I hadn’t considered methane specifically, but it occurred to me that if you experimented around with all kinds of gases, oxygen, fluorine, krypton, argon, nitrogen, the whole range of organic gases, and inorganic gases, helium, etcetera, you could potentially create a medium in which graphene would form, either spontaneously or with prompting. I had this intuitive feeling, which was not really based on anything empirical, that this could be done without having to use extreme temperatures. Something I heard is they now think constructing graphene at room temperature is likely. My sense of it all along was there is probably more than one technique that will work. When you look at all of the possibilities and consider that you have to catalogue through them by trial and error until you achieve success, it is pretty daunting. The perfect marriage of conditions and method is out there somewhere, but what is it? Where is it? I’m convinced that sometimes being unconventional or creative or lucky or inspired works better than endless repetitive experimentation. I also think that proves I’m not a scientist.” Who am I to contradict the boss?

By Mark Gutglueck
Walter A. Shay, Jr. was one of San Bernardino County’s most celebrated lawmen. Though he began his law enforcement career at the relatively advanced age of 33, he went on to wear or carry numerous badges, including deputy sheriff, city marshal, police chief, special agent for the Pacific Electric and Santa Fe Railroads, special district attorney’s investigator and San Bernardino County sheriff. After he donned a police uniform, he figuratively never took it off, becoming the first and only San Bernardino County sheriff to die in office.
He was the youngest son of Walter Alexander Shay, who was born in Nova Scotia in 1812 and Elizabeth Goshen, born in North Carolina in 1829. Walter Alexander Shay, Jr. was born in San Bernardino on June 29, 1866, when his father was 54. The older Shay was a robust farmer, operating a 190-acre farm located along Baseline Road in what is now East Highlands Ranch. Walter Junior had four siblings, John Joseph Shay (1854 – 1931), James Thomas Shay (1857 – 1932), William Henry Shay (1860 – 1942), and Mary Ann Shay Hutchings (1863 – 1950). His mother died in 1869.
As a young man, Water Shay, Jr. ran a freighting business catering to the desert communities. Subsequently, he took on the responsibility of assisting his father in farming the 190-acre spread.
In 1892 he married Virginia Matilda McCoy, known as Tillie. They initially lived at 495 N. “C” Street. They had four children: Weston Walter Shay (1894-1982); Emmet Livingston Shay (1898 to 1978), who was himself a lawman and sheriff of San Bernardino County; George W Shay (1903 – 1905) and Nell Shay Patton (1910 – 1997).
In 1898 Walter Shay, Jr. took a job as a sheriff’s deputy under Sheriff Charles Rouse. The following year, his father was killed in a horse riding mishap on December 2, 1899.
After four years as a sheriff’s deputy, he ran for San Bernardino city marshal and was elected. The position of San Bernardino marshal had been created in 1853 by Brigham Young when San Bernardino was yet a Mormon settlement. For the first fifteen years, the marshal’s post in San Bernardino had been an appointed one. In 1868 it was converted to an elected one. From 1853 until 1906 15 men served as the town marshal of San Bernardino: Bud Rollins, Stewart Wall, George Mattheson, Frank Kerfoot, Charles Landers, Mark Thomas, John C. Ralphs, L. Van Dorin, Joseph Bright, Hughes Thomas, David Wixom, William Reeves, John Henderson, Ben Souther, and Walter A. Shay.
In 1905 the city of San Bernardino instituted new rules of incorporation. A mayor and what was referred to as a “common council” was formed and members elected to office, including Hiram M. Barton, who was elected mayor. The new council was sworn in on May 8, 1905. Two years remained on Walter Shay’s term as marshal. The newly constituted city government structure no longer featured the position of marshal. One of the first orders of business for the new mayor and council was to appoint a new police force to take office at 12 noon on May 15, 1905. Mayor Barton read a proclamation naming the eight officers to the newly formed police department – John Bell Ketring, Robert O’Rourke, John A. Henderson, William H. Hurley, Edward Poppett, Benjamin Emerson, Richard Curtis, Robert Nish. Walter A. Shay Jr. was proclaimed the chief of police. He was thus the last marshal of San Bernardino and the city’s first police chief.
He remained as police chief for two years but left that office to take a position as a special agent for the Pacific Electric railway. Two years later, San Bernardino Mayor S.W. McNabb persuaded Shay to return to the position of San Bernardino police chief. Two years later, Shay resigned as police chief to go to work as a special agent for the Arizona and coast line division of the Santa Fe Railroad. He remained in this position for four years. At that point San Bernardino Mayor George H. Wixom, to whose daughter Violet Shay’s son Emmet would be married in 1920, convinced him to head the police department for a third time.
In 1916 Shay again departed as San Bernardino police chief to go to work for the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office as a special investigator. He remained in this role for a year-and-a-half. In 1918 he ran, successfully for county sheriff, succeeding J.L. McMinn. He was reelected three times, in 1922, 1926, and 1930.
In 1921, he instituted the modernization of the department by introducing the use of police technology, in particular the identification bureau, the first specialized division organized within the sheriff’s department.
In 1922, he would be at the forefront of converting law enforcement agencies into paramilitary organizations. In 1921, his deputies had a particularly rough time in apprehending highwayman Juan Barron. In response, in early 1922, Shay requisitioned from the U.S. Army surplus grenades left over from World War I, which were provided to his deputies to assist them, according to the San Bernardino Sun “to dislodge highwaymen in dugouts.”
In 1924, he devoted considerable department resources in tracking down bootleggers. In one month alone, July of that year, 33 were arrested for trafficking in moonshine or other intoxicating beverages.
Prior to his 1926 reelection, the San Bernardino Sun credited him with solving all eleven murders that had occurred in the county over the previous several years.
As sheriff, Shay created a “dry squad,” which was assigned to ferret out illicit bootlegging operations and drinking establishments and shut them down. He appointed deputies J.A. Larson and later Ira B. Castor to head this team.
In the spring of 1931, while he was yet in office as sheriff, he began to experience discomfort in his abdomen. In June of 1931, he was diagnosed as having carcinoma of the stomach. On July 12, 1931, he had an operation performed by Dr. Emmett L. Tisinger at his office at 575 Fifth Street in San Bernardino. Tisinger’s tissue examination revealed that the lawman’s illness was terminal.
Shay asked to be returned to the Shay family residence at 495 Arrowhead Avenue in San Bernardino. For the next three weeks, with his mind alert and completely conscious, he spoke lucidly with those who had come to see him. On August 2, 1931, at the age of 65 years one month and three days, he was still communicating with family members who had gathered around him that afternoon. At 6 p.m., with the sun not yet set, he dozed and then passed into eternity.
In its August 4, 1931 edition, the San Bernardino Sun said of him, “This county has lost an able, a conscientious and an honest official and thousands of people have lost a real friend. To have served more than three terms as sheriff and before that three terms as chief of police is an accomplishment that only can come through earnest service to the public. Sheriff Shay gave that kind of service. He never faltered in his duty. He never gave up the hunt for a criminal. Walter Shay never lost touch with the masses of the people. That San Bernardino County is a better place in which to live because of Sheriff Shay, there are many to attest. There was no compromise with the enemy of society in Sheriff Shay’s makeup. He both commanded and demanded respect for the law.”

VICTORVILLE —(March 19) The Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority earlier this month placed Angela Valles, the authority’s director of administration, on paid administrative leave, pending the conclusion of an investigation.
That investigation has grown out of action the authority’s board of directors took on February 27 to retain the San Bernardino-based law firm of Mundell, Odlum and Haws to investigate claims made by seven former Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority employees in writing and at a February 19 board meeting that Valles had engaged in a host of actions unbecoming to the authority and prejudicial to the departed employees.
Those employees – Katherine Beyers, James Bryant, Gina Cloutier, R.C. Elliot, Elaine Gutierrez, Natalie Mirmontes and Haik Seropian – charged Valles with a host of inappropriate acts. Some alleged that Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority General Manager Logan Olds and his second-in-command, director of operations Gilbert Perez knew of Valles’ comportment but had ignored it or even encouraged it.
The board, however, has left Olds and Perez in place.
The Sentinel has learned that Valles, the agency’s director of administration overseeing day-to-day finance operations and human resource functions, between July and December of 2014 filed complaints with several investigative bodies such as the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the Fair Political Practices Commission, the Attorney General through Congressman Paul Cook’s office, and the FBI, alleging a criminal conflict of interest involving San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Robert Lovingood based upon the entangling relationship between his company, Industrial Clerical Recruiters, Inc, (ICR) and the Victor Valley Water Reclamation Authority, which formerly utilized ICR to provide contract workers for authority projects. After the ICR contract with the authority was terminated, ICR filed a $3.6 million claim against the authority.
The Victor Valley Water Reclamation Authority is an agency of the state of California which provides wastewater treatment service along the Mojave River in the Victor Valley. It is a joint powers authority, which by its charter has as its board members one member from each of the Hesperia, Victorville and Apple Valley councils as well as the San Bernardino County First District Supervisor. Lovingood has substituted himself out of the Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority board post and has been replaced by Third District Supervisor James Ramos.
The Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority’s legal counsel, Piero Dallarda was unable to provide any definitive statement with regard to Valles’ leave.
It is unknown how widely or narrowly the Mundell, Odlum and Haws firm will focus its inquiry. It appears, based upon the firm’s insistence that Valles be absent from the authority’s premises while it is carrying out its inquiries, that it is taking seriously charges that Valles, who was prior to going to work for the Victor Valley Water Reclamation Authority the warden of the privately operated 550-bed, adult male, Victor Valley Medium Community Correctional Facility in Adelanto, was dictatorial in her interactions with authority employees, retaliated against others, conspired to have some laid off or fired and compromised some of their confidential personnel and medical information. While the information Valles forwarded to the several investigative agencies is available in a compendium since made available to the Sentinel and other entities, it is not clear whether Mundell, Odlum and Haws have been authorized to take up those issues.

Cooper’s dogweed, which is also referred to as Cooper’s dyssodia, bears the Latin names Adenophyllum cooperi and Dyssodia cooperi). Of the family Asteraceae, Cooper’s dogweed is a low growing, subshrub with short, upright stems and spiky leaves. It will achieve a height of about 18 inches, usually lower. Generally inconspicuous on the landscape, this plant sports leaves with oil glands. When brushed or stepped on, the plant releases a pungent, unpleasant odor.
A relatively common component of vegetation communities in the Eastern and Southern Mojave Desert, the plant ranges to all areas of San Bernardino County’s desert area. It has within the last two weeks been noted on Fort Irwin, as well as along Kelbaker Road and Kelso-Cima Road in the Mojave National Preserve, and on Highway 247 south of Barstow. It is common along roadsides and on well-drained sandy, gravelly, and rocky soils in washes and on upper bajadas and moderate slopes into the lower mountains in creosote bush scrub areas, Joshua Tree woodlands, Lower Sonoran and Upper Sonoran and pinyon-juniper woodland life zones from 1,800 feet to 4,500 feet.
Cooper’s dogwood blooms in the spring and has yellow, orange and gold ray and disk flowers with the ray flowers sitting lower than the disk flowers. Its leaves are alternate, sessile, stiff, roughly an inch long, oblanceolate with coarsely toothed or shallow lobes. The lobes have spines at the edges. At the base of each leaf are two oil glands, with one more at the tip. The stems are erect and numerous.

By Grace Bernal
The days are happy again with the high heat temperatures in San Bernardino County. Nothing but happiness with all the different activities that are finally happening with the changing of the season. The warm weather is here and were breaking into spring. The spirit of the people is looking like a strip tease down here. No jackets, no socks, and a lot of showy flesh. The parks are a wonderful destination for BBQ, bike riding, and playing ball. January, and February are gone and no more sweaters are being worn. Everywhere you look the shorts, sandals, hats, and sleeveless tops are being worn. With sunny days here again the heat is on down here in San Bernardino county. So, get out and finally get the new fresh air. Enjoy the magical color the season has to offer and have fun dressing for it.
‘In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.’ —Elsa Schiaparelli

You can download the A.M. Edition of the March 20 San Bernardino County Sentinel by clicking on the portal below.

Sentinel 03-20-15

By clicking on the portal below, you can download a PDF of the March 13 edition of the San Bernardino County Sentinel.

Sentinel 03-13-15

(June 12) The worst is feared as two women from geographically disparate areas of the county have gone missing recently under suspicious or troubling circumstances. The personal effects of each turned up in a way that could suggest either one or both could have hastily fled or encountered someone who might have taken them hostage.
Twenty nine-year-old Krystie Stuart left her home in Lucerne Valley for a dentist appointment in Apple Valley on March 2. She never returned home and on March 8 her white Dodge Dakota was found near a burned-out structure in an unincorporated area in northern Apple Valley. Sheriff’s department investigators combed through the vehicle, seeking possible clues relating to her disappearance or whereabouts but had little success finding possible evidence or information about her whereabouts. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department declared her officially missing on March 11 and brought in one of its helicopters to carry out an aerial search of the area surrounding where her car was found.
Twenty two-year-old Sahray Astina Barber, who is a student/employee at the Art Institute in San Bernardino and lived in an apartment complex in the 1500 block of West Northpark Blvd. proximate to Cal State San Bernardino, was last seen sometime shortly after 6 a.m. on March 9 leaving for the institute.
Her disappearance came in the aftermath of several recent attacks/attempted rapes on women on the Cal State San Bernardino campus. Those included a March 4 attack on a woman in the stairwell at the John M. Pfau Library, which ended with the assailant fleeing, and another on March 8 at the library in which a man attempted but failed to abduct a woman. Barber was not a student at Cal State San Bernardino, but many of those who reside in her apartment complex are students. Several of her personal items, including her laptop and cell phone, were found abandoned in bushes at that apartment complex.
Cal State police released a computerized sketch of the suspect in the two Pfau Library attacks, showing a Hispanic man with black curly hair and no facial hair, roughly 19 to 21 years old. He is described as between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 8 inches tall, and weighing 135 to 145 pounds.
In the case of Stuart, it is believed that as a result of her disappearance she does not have access to prescription medications she needs. She is described as a thin white woman, 5 feet 9 inches tall and 107 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a camouflage hat, white shirt, black pants and white shoes.
Anyone with information about Stuart or her whereabouts is asked to call detective Bill Doemner at the Victor Valley Sheriff’s Station at 760-956-5001 or 760-552-6800.
In the case of Barber, as of press time an intense search for her has been underway for three days, ranging from the area around Cal State San Bernardino to Live Oak Canyon in Redlands, where a lead brought investigators. Bloodhounds were used to track her from her apartment door to the complex’s front gate, at which point the trail went cold, suggesting she had left in a vehicle. Anybody with information about Barber’s whereabouts is asked to call Detective Dan Han at 909-384-5623 or the detective’s bureau at 909-384-5615.

(March 11) The county seat’s seemingly interminable and intractable financial challenges have claimed yet one more city official, as Scott Williams, San Bernardino’s finance director hired in December, has been placed on administrative leave pending his separation from the city.
Williams’ short tenure is a barometer of how much stress municipal officers face in attempting to right the city’s listing financial ship.
Williams’ predecessor, David Cain, lasted 18 months in the position, having been hired in March 2013 and exiting in September 2014.
While the city in the current 2014-15 fiscal year is functioning under a nominally balanced budget – one that anticipates $123,809,391 in revenue into the general fund and expenditures of $117,354,540 out of the general fund – that budget was strenuously reworked last year by Cain and city manager Alan Parker, entailing drastic cuts to bring the spending plan into the black after a previous draft reflected a $22.8 million deficit. The provisionally balanced budget represented a considerable feat for the city which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in August 2012.
The budget, however, was reworked from previous drafts, which at reflected a $22.8 million deficit.
The Herculean task of arriving at a budget for the county seat took its toll on Cain, who upped and quit three months later. A telling feature of his exhaustion was that in June, after having put the unwieldy fiscal figures onto paper, Cain was not up to the task of attending the city council meeting where the budget was passed, where he would have needed to withstand the firestorm of protest over the cutting he had done. Parker did not attend that meeting either.
Both of Parker’s predecessors as city manager, Charles McNeely and interim Andrea Travis-Miller, were undone by San Bernardino’s financial challenges. McNeely left just prior to the city’s bankruptcy filing. Travis-Miller was understandably overwhelmed at taking the helm of a financially foundering city. She has since moved on to become the executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments, a regional joint powers planning agency.
Williams was riding herd on a team of auditors and financial consultants seeking to put together a bankruptcy exit plan and its attendant documentation for presentation to U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Meredith Jury, who is overseeing the city’s bankruptcy case. Jury has set a May 30 deadline for the presentation of that plan. Parker gave indication that assistant city manager Nita McKay will now take on Williams’ assignment.
Given the manner in which William’s change of active status with the city was announced, there was a suggestion that he was being relieved for some act of misfeasance. City officials would not go beyond stating that he had been placed on administrative leave. None denied that like his predecessor Cain, who had been driven to distraction in attempting to lift the city out of its financial abyss, Williams, who had been the lead financial adviser for the Regional Governmental Services Authority in Napa and the finance director in Sonoma before coming to San Bernardino, was overwhelmed by the crush of putting a bankruptcy exit plan together while seeking to administer a porous budget, which included deferring $10.6 million in payments being demanded by creditors, many of whom have been lined up for two years in seeking payment following the city’s bankruptcy filing.

UPLAND—(March 10) The Upland City Council in a 3-2 split decision on Monday March 9 voted to postpone a citywide initiative on permitting three medical marijuana dispensaries to operate in a confined district at the extreme west end of the city along Foothill Boulevard until the November 2016 election.
Proponents of that initiative had gathered 6,865 signatures of city residents between October 21 and January 14 endorsing a petition for that initiative under the expectation that the vote would take place in a special balloting this year. That special election, which had been given a tentative date of June 16, would cost as much as $180,000 to hold, according to the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office. The city would have been responsible for covering that cost.
But city attorney Richard Adams found a loophole in the initiative’s language that he said could be interpreted as requiring that the vote be held during a regularly scheduled municipal election.
The initiative calls for an automatic “fee” of $75,000 being levied by the city upon the applicants for a dispensary permit, Adams said. But the city’s actual costs in carrying out background checks and permit processing is far less than $75,000, he said. The California Constitution defines any government-imposed fees that are greater than the cost of the service rendered as a tax, Adams said, and municipal taxes must be voted upon during a normally scheduled municipal election and not at a special election. Adams said that while the gathering of more than 15 percent of the city’s voters’ signatures on the petition mandated a special election, there is a conflict between the election code, as passed by the legislature, and the state constitution. The state constitution trumps an act of the legislature, he said.
Adams said the city council had several options, which included simply using its own authority to pass the initiative as a city ordinance without taking it to a vote of the residents; scheduling the election for June 16; scheduling the election for June 16 and placing a competing initiative on the same ballot; or holding off on the vote on the initiative until the next scheduled citywide municipal election next year.
The three members of the city council adamantly opposed to permitting the sale of marijuana medical or otherwise at Cannabis dispensaries in town – Mayor Ray Musser and council members Glenn Bozar and Carol Timm – jumped at the chance Adams’ had provided them and voted to schedule the election for November 8, 2016 election. That vote came after an earlier effort, supported by council members Debbie Stone and Gino Filippi to schedule the initiative vote for June 16.
The timing of the election was considered significant for two reasons. The first is the cost. The county registrar of voters would charge the city as much as $180,000 to handle the election as a stand-alone event this year. The city would reap considerable savings by putting the election on the 2016 ballot, when the mayor’s post, a single city council position and city treasurer spot are up for reelection. Secondly, advocates of the initiative see a special election as the forum in which sale of medical marijuana within the city limits of Upland is most likely to gain acceptance of the voters participating. Informal surveys of Upland voters show that, on balance, the city’s residents are against the initiative. But special elections normally have poor voter turnout and the initiative’s advocates believe that through the aggressive and energetic use of social media and networking among that portion of the city’s electorate most favorably inclined to the accessibility to medical marijuana and marijuana use in general, they can drive enough voters to the polls to prevail in a special election while a significant portion of the city population opposed to the concept of open access fail to participate.
A number of residents weighed in on the matter prior to the vote.
Bob Nelson said, “These dispensaries are going to invite more crime. We don’t need this in Upland. They are a front for drug activity. I hope we don’t go down this road.”
Raymond Herrera said allowing legal sales of marijuana for medical purposes would likely result in untoward activity. “How many people buy this stuff and sell it to high school students?” he asked.
Carmen Limon, who lives proximate to an existing dispensary functioning illegally, enlarged upon Herrera’s theme, saying “The amount of traffic is alarming. I see the cars lined up. I see the exchanges made. There are many children that walk by this place every day. I see this as a disaster waiting to happen. If people want this to continue, I say have them in your neighborhood, not mine.”
Others, such as former city manager Stephen Dunn and initiative proponent Nicole DeLaRosa, recommended that the city put the initiative before the voters in a special election this year.
Dunn cautioned the city council against using the loophole Richards had discovered to force the election to be held in 2016, saying that it would establish a precedent that is contrary to the city’s financial interest. Using the “tax versus fee” rationale to require a vote at a general election would invite comparisons to other fees the city has established, Dunn said, and he suggested “Most of the city’s fees would not hold up under the scrutiny.” He cited $2.1 million in revenue into the city’s development services budget that could be lost. “Be careful what you do,” he said. “The reality is if you don’t send this on to the voters tonight, the proponents might look at [challenging] other fees.”
DeLaRosa said she was there to “protest your referring to the fee as a tax. It is not a tax. It is a fee and is a reasonable fee.”
Others such as Jim Richardson and David Wade charted a middle ground.
Richardson said he believed a majority of the people in town were recoiling from the concept of allowing marijuana clinics to function in the city and were opposed to the initiative but that the city council had an “obligation to look out for the minority.” He said the city should “get out in front of’ the issue and draw up a “decent set of ordinances.” He said the initiative as proposed did not have protections for the neighborhoods, customers and business owners. He called for the city to put together a better ordinance. “I don’t see why we have to accept it,” he said of the initiative.
Wade was critical of the initiative, which he said conferred a virtual monopoly on initiative proponent Randy Welty, who is a major landowner in the zone where the initiative allows dispensaries to be set up, but he chided the city for its lack of imagination in simply offering an alternative initiative that reasserted the city’s existing ban on cannabis shops.
Of note was the level of tension, vitriol and enmity evinced by two of the key initiative backers toward the city council even before the vote took place on Monday night. Previously, Randy Welty, a board member of the California Cannabis Coalition which is co-sponsoring the initiative, and Craig Beresh, the president of the California Cannabis Coalition, had been somewhat deferential toward the council. But in addressing the council on March 9, Beresh talked openly of initiating a recall campaign against the city council if it did not comply with the call to put the initiative on a special ballot this year. Welty, who owns and operates the Tropical Lei strip club and controls other property within the area along the north side of Foothill Boulevard between Airport Drive and Monte Vista Avenue where the initiative specifies the three medical marijuana dispensaries are to be located, wore a shirt emblazoned with the epigram: “You say tomato. I say f— you.” as he addressed the council.
Adams in making his presentation emphasized that the council’s vote that evening should not be framed as a judgment of the merits of the initiative but should reflect only the council’s decision on the advisability of the timing of the initiative election based upon the legal requirements and considerations. Nevertheless, in their remarks, both Musser and Bozar engaged in a critical review of the initiative itself, although Bozar did dwell on the legal issues pertaining to the city’s potential liability in scheduling the election both immediately and next year.
“There is nothing in here that is going to benefit the city of Upland,” Bozar said. “It is all to the benefit of the proponent. There is no sense rushing to spend $180,000 to do that.”
In making his remarks, Bozar caused Adams to cringe, as did Musser when, in explaining why he was voting to hold off on the initiative election until 2016, he said, “Our community is not ready for this.”
Councilman Gino Filippi during the discussion relating to the initiative expressed dismay at the manner in which Adams had laid out the city council’s options and alternatives. He suggested that Adams and staff had evinced bias toward the initiative and those who had endorsed the petitions calling for a vote upon it by providing the council with a limited set of alternatives, when the council’s direction, given at a council meeting last month, was to explore all options.
Filippi told the Sentinel, “The city attorney’s prior comments and the staff report clearly indicated a level of prejudice. There was a great effort by the city attorney and city staff in coming up with a competing ordinance to uphold the existing ban of medical marijuana dispensaries to the point that a sample ordinance upholding the ban was provided to the city council. However, there was no effort on a compromise ordinance such as was done in Yucca Valley. In addition, contrary to the staff report, there was never any discussion and/or direction from city council in closed session or public meeting to justify the direction the city attorney and staff undertook. In my view, this was a violation of law. I do think Musser and Bozar have intended on denying the petitioners their due process for a special election since the signatures were verified.”
When asked if the initiative’s proponents would undertake a legal challenge of the council’s vote and seek an injunction to force the city to hold the special election for the initiative this year, Welty told the Sentinel, “Our lawyer is looking into that right now.”