(May 28) Given the party affiliations of the four candidates in next Tuesdays contest in the 40th Assembly District, the interesting competition appears to be that for second place
Three Democrats and a single Republican are vying against one another for the voters’ nod to represent the geographically dispersed 40th, which runs from Rancho Cucamonga, and then spans the narrow and virtually unpopulated swath across the I-15 Freeway into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, then down into a portion of the city of San Bernardino, and then all or most of Redlands, Highland, Loma Linda and Grand Terrace. Squaring off in the contest are Democrats Art Bustamante, Kathleen Marie Henry, Melissa O’Donnell and Republican Marc Steinorth.
At this point it is a foregone conclusion that Steinorth will garner the most votes in next week’s primary. There is only nine-tenths of a percent difference in the number of registered Democrats versus Republicans in the district. It is a fair assumption that Steinorth will pull in most of the Republican votes and at least a portion of the votes of those who have declined to state a party affiliation. At the same time, most of the Democratic votes are expected to be divided among O’Donnell, Henry and Bustamonte. The winner among those three – i.e., the  second place finisher overall – will then face off against Steinorth in November.
Kathleen Henry, a current San  Bernardino Community College District Board Member, said she is seeking election to the Assembly to spur economic growth in her district and throughout the state by facilitating “the sustainable growth of small businesses” and to improve the quality of childhood education and ensure high school graduates have access to affordable quality instruction at public universities and colleges. Moreover, Henry said, she wants to dispense with divisiveness in politics and governance.
She said her work as an educator and her experience as a college board member gives her a leg up on the competition in seeing how education can be applied to boost the economy.
“Education flows into different things – economic growth, diversity of business, creating jobs,” she said. “Our work is not just about creating jobs. We need a diversity of business. We have to create a diversity of work opportunities for individuals who are getting educated.  We do not now necessarily educate our students into programs that offer them assurance of employment. There are only a certain number of jobs out there and only a certain number of types of jobs. We have jobs that are technology related. We have jobs that are not particularly technology-dependent. We have jobs in the hospitality field. There is land here that is under-utilized. We could interest corporations and employers to locate here if we had the infrastructure in place to support their business operations. Infrastructure could create opportunities for our educated students.  Economic growth is often about infrastructure: roads, public safety, sewer treatment systems. San Bernardino has an aging sewer system.”
There should be investment in infrastructure and she said citizens will support new taxing regimes if they understand that the taxes will result in a long term economic progress.
“If we impose taxes, we are imposing taxes upon the already taxed, but if that tax creates something that allows companies to set up here or flourish and make a profit off that, people will realize the benefits and accept the tax, even if they don’t see too much of a return on it right away. It just takes time,” she said.
Melissa O’Donnell carried the standard for the Democrats in 2012 when she ran against Bill Emmerson in California State Senate District 23, garnering 45 percent of the vote in that Republican-leaning district.
O’Donnell has worked as a teacher, has sold real estate and she now owns an education company, Time To Learn Fast.
O’Donnell characterizes the residents of the 40th District as “hardworking” and she said they deserve representation that will create opportunity and support for their efforts.
“I would concentrate on convincing corporations to take advantage of our trained and skilled workforce,” she said. “I would give those corporations incentives to come to the area and with that I think we can bring a lot of progress to the area.”
O’Donnell said she is acutely conscious of the range of diversity and different opinion within the sprawling 40th District and that she believes she can bridge the differences between Republicans and Democrats.
Art Bustamonte, a seventeen year member of the Chaffey Joint Unified High School District Board of Trustees, is a former police officer who is now working as an investigator for the public defender’s office.
“I want progressive policies to promote the  middle class because the middle class has been neglected,” he said. “I want to be able to bring jobs to the district, help single parents, especially single women who have children, with daycare so they can work, and I want to be able to provide jobs with higher wages.
Saying he sees the main issue in San Bernardino County as rejuvenating its economy, Bustmonte said, “We need to improve our schools. We need to have a more stable political arena. To stabilize our politics, we need to end corruption in government because companies will not come here or relocate here unless we have good schools and the politics are stable. No company is going to want to come into an area where we have unsafe streets and neighborhoods. We need good law enforcement and political stability and an educated workforce. The first thing companies look at is will they have employees who are trained or who they can easily train, and is there police protection and  political stability that allows government to function and be fair. We need to work on those things.”
Bustamonte said a more coordinated effort among the various political and governmental entities and jurisdictions is needed.
“The counties and cities have their own economic development departments to lure business into their respective cities or into the county,” he said. “We are not working together in unison. It is important that we get everyone working together to bring manufacturing jobs to the county. We have good infrastructure to make that possible. We are not working in unison.  We need to bring jobs to the county.”
Bustamonte said the district and San Bernardino County in general have to attract businesses that produce finished products, and an end needs to be brought to the local economy’s dependence on poorer paying jobs in the service industry.
“I believe I can help create a consensus and work with cities to lure more business to this area through tax incentives if those businesses commit to hiring a certain number of employees,” he said. “We’re losing manufacturing companies. More are going out to other states are than are coming in. California has twelve percent of the nation’s population. We should have twelve percent of the manufacturing activity. We need to stop the migration of jobs to other states and overseas.  The state needs to look at the reality that businesses are needed to create jobs. The most important challenge to the state is to stop businesses from leaving. By being a part of the majority party – because I am a Democrat – I should be able to do something about that. My goal as part of the majority is to have a voice in getting things done versus if I were in another party.”
Marc Steinorth, a member of the Rancho Cucamonga City Council, said he believes he can offer representation to the 40th Assembly District on the strength of his experience in both the public and private arenas.
“I have 20 years of private sector business experience,” said Steinorth, who runs an advertising and marketing firm in Rancho Cucamonga, Atlas Buying Group. “In addition to understanding the daily challenge of running a small business, I also have public sector experience on the city council. I have seen the impact of the state government’s action on the business community. I am equally aware of what many in the private sector and in the general public do not realize, which is the degree to which local governments are challenged by having to deal with mandates by the state, every bit as much as small businesses must deal with mandates by the state. I am convinced that the state government does not have enough private sector business representation. It is easy to say you want to go to Sacramento and create jobs. That is the mantra we have heard for the last four or five years from our politicians. What is different about my candidacy is I have actual experience in helping to create and grow businesses.”
Steinorth said that to be effective as an advocate for the private sector within the context of serving in government, one has to be prepared to tirelessly promote the application of common sense to the regulatory function of government. Steinorth addressed the impact of state mandates on local government.
“AB 109, the public safety realignment or prison realignment to reduce prison overcrowding was not intended to be a threat to my family’s safety but that is the end result,” Steinorth said. “The state has simply ignored the prison overcrowding problem for more than 20 years.  This most recent emergency is really nothing more than an example of poor planning by our legislative leaders.”
Steinorth, the best funded of all of the candidates in the race, said he saw the campaign as “one of multiplication and addition, not subtraction.”He said he is enjoying the exchange of ideas among those running for the office. “I don’t feel I am running against any opponent as much as I am running for opportunity. My key care-abouts are helping the businesses in the region navigate the state bureaucracy and directing the district office toward providing constituent services, including both businesses and residents. My second major goal is to restore funding to our local courts. I understand the challenges [San Bernardino County] Presiding Judge {Marsha] Slough is faced with, but our county is much too large to be undergoing a reduction in its judicial forums and our residents need to have access to the justice system.”

VICTORVILLE (May 28)—The Securities and Exchange Commission has reasserted accusations that the city of Victorville and its assistant city manager improperly benefited from the sale of   municipal bonds in 2008.
In April 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that fraud was committed by the city of Victorville, the Southern California Logistics Airport Authority and Keith Metzler, who fills the dual roles of assistant city manager and executive director of the airport authority, when misrepresentations were allegedly made to the purchasers of bonds, the proceeds from which were intended to assist in the development of Southern California Logistics Airport, specifically with regard to bonds issued in April 2008.
The airport authority was formed by the city of Victorville to facilitate the conversion of the former George Air Force Base, which was shuttered by the Department of Defense in 1992, into a civilian airport. The Southern California Logistics Airport Authority, which has as its board of directors all five members of the Victorville City Council, issued bonds which were sold to investors to generate revenue to be used in converting the base to civilian use.
Fundamental to the SEC complaint is the allegation that the defendants made misrepresentations with regard to the value of four airport hangars that Victorville referenced in its official statement for an April 2008 bond offering. The value of all four hangars was listed at $65 million. The county assessor later valued the hangars at $27.7 million. The SEC alleges that the authority used the inflated estimated values to mislead bond investors.
In August 2013, two separate responses to the SEC complaint were filed, one from attorneys with the law firm of Arent Fox, which represents Victorville and the airport authority and another from the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, representing Metzler.
U.S. District Court Judge John A. Kronstadt heard oral arguments on those motions last October, including assertions by defense attorneys that the SEC had not presented any evidence to show the city or Metzler had benefited from the sale. In November Kronstadt threw out the portion of the lawsuit alleging the city and Metzler improperly benefited from the bond sale. “Given that the SEC has engaged in a three-year investigation into this matter, its decision to present no allegations to support (the claims) is significant and telling,” Kronstadt wrote in his decision. Nevertheless, he granted the SEC an opportunity to amend complaint with proof, at which time the original charges could be reinstated.
On May 21, the SEC did just that, providing the court with an amended complaint containing 20  previously unpresented elements relating to what the SEC maintains was Metzler’s failure to disclose the hangars’ true value to investors on documents related to the bond sales. The complaint was further amended to state that the proceeds from the bond offering benefited the city.
A specific benefit of the bond sales, according to the SEC was that $50 million from the 2008 bond sale was pooled with money from a 2007 bond sale to make a down payment on an electrical plant turbine purchased from General Electric.
The original SEC complaint consists of nine claims for relief and one prayer for disgorgement. The authority is named in the first two claims for relief. Kinsell, Newcomb and DeDios [KND],  the underwriter for the bond offerings, is named in the third, fourth and eighth claims for relief. KND and Jeffrey Kinsell, KND’s owner, are named in the fifth and sixth claims for relief. Victorville, Jeffrey Kinsell, KND investment banker Janees Williams and Metzler are named in the seventh claim for relief.  Jeffrey Kinsell and Williams are named in the ninth claim for relief.
In the prayer for disgorgement, which is a request for restitution of ill-gotten profits from security law violators, all the parties are named. Establishing that the city or its employees benefitted from the bond sale is necessary to force disgorgement of the money.
Arent Fox maintains that even if the hangar valuations were overstated, they were not material misrepresentations by which the financing of the bonds in terms of the city’s and airport authority’s ability to continue to make payments to the bondholders was threatened.
“Unfortunately for the SEC, the conclusions in the complaint are inconsistent with the mathematical analysis that the SEC had to perform to bring the action in the first instance,” Arent Fox’s reply brief filed last year on behalf of the city and the airport authority states. “As a matter of mathematical fact, regardless of whether the alleged misstated hangar value is used ($65 million), or whether the alleged correct hangar value is used ($27.7 million), the debt service ratio remains above 1.25 in either case.”
Terree Bowers of Arent Fox, the former US Attorney for the Central District of California, is representing the city and the SCLA. This week he told the Sentinel, “We still contend that there is no basis for disgorgement.  Their figures are a gross exaggeration. We are determined to vigorously fight the case. We think it is entirely counterproductive to propose disgorgement in a case like this just when cities are starting to recover from the great recession.”
Bowers has until June 5 to answer the amended complaint and in doing so has the option of moving to strike it entirely.

(May 27) The primary race in the 31st Congressional District has devolved into the most intensive exchange of personal attacks of any of the current political contests in San Bernardino County, with four of the seven candidates taking part in the mudfest.
Two years ago, the Republicans used the peculiar rules of California’s open primary, which had once again been reestablished in the Golden State, to capture the Congressional seat in the 31st District despite the Democrats eight percent registration advantage.
Of the district’s registered voters, 127,690 or 41 percent, are affiliated with the Democratic Party.  Registered Republicans in the district number 104,938, or 33.7 percent.
In 2012, two Republicans, Congresman Gary Miller and then-state senator Bob Dutton, ran, as did four Democrats, Pete Aguilar, Justin Kim, Renea Wickman and Rita Ramirez-Dean. Under California’s open primary arrangements, voters can cross party lines and vote for whichever candidate they choose and are no longer restricted to voting only for a candidate who identifies him or herself with that particular voter’s party of registration. The November election is then held between the two top vote-getters, regardless of political affiliation. In the June 2012 Primary, the first election held after the redistricting that followed the 2010 Census, the aforementioned four Democrats – Aguilar, Kim, Ramirez-Dean, and Wickman – sought election, as did incumbent 41st District Republican Congressman Gary Miller and another Republican, Bob Dutton. Despite the seven percent Democratic voter registration advantage in the 31st, simple mathematics hurt the Democrats as their vote was divided four ways, while the Republican vote was split two ways. Dutton and Miller proved to be the two top vote-getters and under California’s open primary arrangement, the Democrats who ran third, fourth, fifth and sixth in the June race were shut out and the November general election came down to a race between Republicans Miller and Dutton. Miller prevailed in that race.
Miller in February announced his decision to retire at the end of his current term, throwing this year’s race wide open. Again four Democrats came forward to run – Aguilar, who was the top vote-getter among Democrats in 2012 as well as former Congresman Joe Baca, Colton-based attorney and Democratic Party activist Eloise Gomez-Reyes and San Bernardino City Unified School District Board Member Danny Tillman. For a time it appeared that the Republicans might repeat the scenario they used in 2012 to capture the seat in the Democratic leaning district when two members of the GOP – Lesli Gooch, who had worked on Miller’s staff, and local anti-drug use crusader Paul Chabot qualified their candidacies. Subsequently, however, another Republican, Ryan Downing of Whittier, got in the race. Though Downing resides outside the 31st District, he is eligible to run there because under the rules of Congress, a member need not live within the district he or she represents and must merely reside within the state where the district is located.
Of the seven candidates in the race, Downing is the least well-funded and some members of the Party of Lincoln remain hopeful that Chabot and Gooch will lose only a minimal number of Republican votes to Downing and will still be able to outpoll all four Democrats to make the November race in the 31st an all Republican affair.
Remarkably, first Chabot and then Gooch, following Chabot’s lead, appeared committed to reducing that possibility.
Using emails early on, Chabot tore into Gooch, criticizing her as a carpetbagger in emails that accused her of being a resident of Alexandria, Virginia and reregistering in the 31st District just a day before she declared her candidacy.
Despite that complaint, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee endorsed Gooch, which aggravated Chabot.  He and his strategist, John Thomas, sought to undercut Gooch where it would hurt her most, sending letters to her supporters and donors in an attempt to cut her off from the mother’s milk of all politics, funding to run her campaign. Chabot personally called upon Gooch to withdraw from the race and then attacked her on the basis that she is, or at least was, a lobbyist based in the nation’s capital whose first loyalty was to her clients and not the constituents in the 31st District.  Letters were then sent out to Gooch’s political donors, which celebrated that Gooch had as a client a non-profit low income housing foundation created by Jeff Burum, a Rancho Cucamonga-based developer who has been indicted in a case pertaining to alleged payoffs to county officials that resulted in the county making a $102 million settlement payout to end litigation brought against the county by another of Burum’s companies. Burum has not gone to trial on that matter and continues to assert his innocence.
“Voters should be appalled and disappointed to discover that Leslie (sic) Gooch has not only been dishonest about hiding her past as a lobbyist, but she has represented indicted individuals in our region’s biggest political corruption scandal,” Thomas said in the letter.
The Gooch campaign’s initial responses to Chabot’s attacks were relatively mild and low key, with Gooch campaign spokesman saying merely that Chabot had become “unhinged” over the central committee endorsement going to Gooch. Subsequently, however, the Gooch campaign sent out a mailer to high propensity Republican voters in which Chabot was lambasted as a “failed lobbyist” who was “a political bureaucrat for Bill Clinton.” The mailer went on to accuse Chabot of misrepresentations and misuse of governmental grant money utilized by his non-profit foundation “Partnership For A Drug Free California.”
“Paul Chabot pocketed nearly $1million of taxpayer money funneled through non-profits on failed government programs and government salaries. We can’t afford Paul Chabot’s costly decisions,” the mailer states, further tagging Chabot with “A history of reckless decisions costing taxpayers millions.”
On the Democratic side, the two most financially enabled candidates appeared, like their Republican counterparts, to be intent upon carrying the campaign against members of their own party.
In one of the first Democrat-trashing-Democrat mailers in this year’s 31st District race, Gomez Reyes took aim at Aguilar.  “Some career politicians always have their hand out for money and perks,” the front of the mailer states. “Pete Aguilar is one of them,” it states on the flip side. The mailer goes on to accuse Aguilar of “using his position to make personal profit,” of engaging in “pay-to-play schemes to raise campaign cash” and of “taking thousands [of dollars] in taxpayer-funded perks.”
Aguilar, who has been provided with over $1 million in donations coming largely from Democratic donors beyond San Bernardino County, fired his first salvo at Baca, excoriating him for what he claimed was Baca’s lack of  action in working to mitigate pollution while he was previously a member of Congress. “San Bernardino County has the worst smog pollution in the county,” the mailer targeting Baca from Aguilar stated. “So what did Joe Baca do?” the mailer asks, going on to answer, that he “opposed laws” that would have redressed the air and water pollution problem. “Joe Baca voted repeatedly against laws to protect our air and water.”
Baca also found himself as the focus of a mailer put out by Gomez Reyes, though he was lumped together with Aguilar, Gooch and Chabot in that piece of electioneering material. On the front page of the mailer, Chabot, Aguilera, Baca and Gooch are depicted in what appears to be a photoshopped image sitting at a table.  Bearing the header “Four lobbyists?” the mailer states, “They put themselves and their special interest friends first. Not you.”  At the bottom of the page, it reads, “You have a better choice,” accompanied by arrows to prompt the reader to open the mailer and view a photo of Gomez Reyes.
Not to be outdone, Aguilar hit back with an attack ad vectored at Gomez-Reyes, zeroing in on her tax delinquencies. The hit piece bears the Headline “Eloise Gomez Reyes Candidate For Congress Issued Three Tax Liens By The State.”
Charging Gomez Reyes with “a record of unpaid taxes and liens,” the mailer states, “Your tax dollars pay for essential services in San Bernardino County, like highway repair, health care for seniors and support for local schools and colleges. Despite this, Eloise Gomez Reyes has a record of not paying her taxes. In fact, the State of California has issued not just one, but three tax liens against her for failing to pay taxes. Her approach to taxes is not one San Bernardino County can rely on.”
Only Tillman and Downing, who are less well-funded than the others and  are not  considered viable candidates in the race, have escaped being the targets of the negative campaign materials.

JOSHUA TREE (May 27)—Concerted and vigorous opposition by members of the public and a group of teachers succeeded in convincing the Morongo Unified School District Board of Education to not confer a raise upon district superintendent Dr. Cecelia English last week.
English has been with the district for roughly a year. An agenda item at last week’s board meeting proposed that she and the district’s three assistant superintendents, Doug Weller, Tom Baumgarten and David Price, receive raises in pay.
The board, however, was greeted by speaker after speaker expressing opposition to the raise for English in particular, given her relatively short tenure in the post.
In March members of the Morongo Teachers’ Association express the opinion that English was not bargaining in good faith with them over salary issues.
A point of contention last week was a clause within the four proposed contracts that granted the superintendent and assistant superintendents raises that match in terms of percentage those  negotiated by the Morongo Teachers’ Association and the California School Employees Association.
The propriety of conferring upon the district’s administrators the same employment terms given to the district’s personnel when those administrators may be involved in negotiating the terms was called into question.
Moreover, board member Karalee Hargrove expressed the view that English had been provided with a substantial increase in pay over what she had been paid as the director of academics at the Newark School District in Northern California, where she was working before being hired by Morongo Valley Unified.  “We cannot afford to do any more raises at this point,” Hargrove said.
Board member Chris Proudfoot sought to avoid an immediate decision on the raises, saying the district needed to make “comparisons” with what other similarly sized districts are paying their personnel. The rest of the board, however, pressed forward, giving Weller, Baumgarten and Price 5.77 percent raises, raising Weller and Baumgarten to $132,109 per year and Price to $129,555 per year. Those were approved on a unanimous vote.
Only board member Donna Munoz supported giving English a raise, and the motion to approve English’s pay increase died on a 1-4 vote.

By Ruth Musser-Lopez
May 30, 2014.  Memories of loved ones who put their lives on the line or actually lost their lives in the cause of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness was my way of spending my Memorial Day…all while I was at work—pursuing my own happiness–doing the work I love: that is, recording Native American rock art.
I was working not exactly in San Bernardino County but near the “Point” where California (San Bernardino County), Nevada, and Arizona come together, particularly that area surrounding Needles, California; Bullhead City, Arizona; and Las Vegas/Laughlin, Nevada.  While everyone else was watching fire works explode from casinos, I spent my day in the hills with archaeologists of the Basin and Range Heritage Consultants on a mission to document ancient ruins that had been torn apart by pothunters.
So what we found on Memorial Day was nothing short of remarkable to me, better than fireworks–a previously unrecorded, intact, undisturbed rock art site.  And what was the art? What did we see?  A depiction of a flock of bighorn sheep pecked into a flat, vertical rhyolite cliff face, a art panel raised high above eye level, large enough for all to see—as if it were a celebration of the past, like fireworks.  And these were not just ordinary bighorn sheep images, but the type of stylistic line drawing incorporating a very distinguishable ovoid belly that represents an iconic motif indicative of very old northern Mojave Desert rock art.
So stylistic was this panel of big horn sheep art that I was tasked with the job of rechecking with the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) for updates on their categories of big horn sheep styles, how old each style is and if they could be linked to any particular culture. Kind of like a design on a dinner plate, archaeologists have found that big horn sheep image patterns on rock changed through time and depending upon the style pattern or a repeated iconic image perhaps are symbolic for and can be linked to a particular cultural group.
By the way, coincidentally, the ARARA will be meeting in Laughlin for their annual meeting on Memorial Day weekend next year, 2015 at which time they tentatively plan to visit San Bernardino County rock art sites.
Since I am a member of ARARA, I have been following some of the attempts to classify rock art styles by age and cultural affiliation.  There are actually several types of iconic stylistic big horn sheep motifs that can be found repeatedly in the Mojave Desert.
Just west of San Bernardino County, in Ridgecrest, Alexander K. “Sandy” Rogers of the Maturango Museum synthesized and integrated findings from various sites associated with Mojave Desert rock art to estimate the initial production ages of three bighorn sheep rock art style motifs.  The sheep rock art that he studied was found in the Coso Mountain Range, also bordering near San Bernardino County on the northwest.  He used obsidian hydration dates, xray florescence and cation ratio data to determine the ages.  He presented this taxonomic chronology to the ARARA in 2009.
Cation ratio dating is a technique for dating the natural patina or varnish that develops over petroglyphs after they are made.  One of the reasons why scientists ask people not to touch the rock art is because of the oily deposits on fingers that could leave deposits, causing  deterioration of the art and preventing the researcher from extracting reliable data from it.
The three different Mojave Desert bighorn sheep motifs that Rogers studied can be seen in his “Table 2” above “Taxonomy for bighorn sheep images.”  Strong evidence exists that these motifs are associated with ancient ancestral Puebloan, Fremont and related early Uto-Aztecan speaking people.  Note that the Type I style shown in the figure is the type that was found at our “Memorial Day” site.  The sheep is viewed in profile, a side view, and has excessively long horns in side view as well, as opposed to a front view as in the Type III sheep.  The body is oval shaped as opposed to rectangular as in the Type II sheep or the boat-shape, commonly called “jelly belly” of the Type III sheep.
Based mainly on archaeologist Amy Gilreath’s 1999 obsidian hydration data, Rogers found that the characteristics of our Type I sheep figures first appeared at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.
Obsidian obeys the property of mineral hydration, and absorbs water, when exposed to air, at a well-defined rate. When an unworked nodule of obsidian is initially fractured, there is typically less than 1% water present. Over time, water slowly diffuses into the artifact forming a narrow “band,” “rim,” or “rind” that can be seen and measured.
Analyzing artifacts associated with rock art, like prehistoric tools made of obsidian, is something that archaeologists do to determine the age of rock art and the culture associated with it.
Many rock art enthusiasts attempt to interpret rock art as if the images represent a language or  an attempt to communicate a message.  They treat rock art as if it is something that can be read like a book, like picture writing, similar to icons on the tee pees or blankets of plains Indians.
For example, LaVan Martineau wrote in his 1973 book “The Rocks Begin to Speak” that bighorn sheep images are a metaphor for travel, where the length of the legs indicates the length of the trip and the shape of the belly indicates the roughness of the terrain ahead.  This is an example of torturing meaning from images where there is no objective basis. He said, “Bighorn sheep petroglyphs with a deeply rounded belly show the contour of the country to consist of deep valleys, in other words rough country with plenty of mountains and valleys to cross.”
One can see how confusing that interpretation can be when you have a whole flock of petroglyphs clumped together as in our Memorial Day site.  How twisted would it be to have just crossed a rough mountain range only to find on the opposite side a petroglyph sign depicting a long legged bighorn sheep with an extended belly?  “So now you tell me ‘rough road’.” Now, that’s an understatement!
It is important that archaeologists have found that rock art styles changes through time and that they can perhaps use these style changes to make interpretations about how old an associated archaeological site nearby is and perhaps what culture lived there.
Boundary markers, maps, trails markers, water rights, territorial boundaries, place markers, clan or individual’s names, birthing places, puberty and fertility ritual and rites, rites for renewal of earth, commemoration of events, ceremonial or religious symbolism, counting, hunting magic, time keeping, marking solstice and other astronomical events and many more explanations are all potential reasons for rock art.
Undoubtedly, there is meaning associated with rock art motifs.  There are also many interpretations.   Often people assign their own meaning depending upon their own culture projecting their own experience into their interpretation. Ultimately though, most often individual interpretations can’t be proven. Nevertheless making interpretations is great fun and a memorial cultural experience in itself as people share their creativity and intuitiveness.

Syndicated 2014, Ruth Musser-Lopez— Permission to reprint this article may be obtained by contacting Ruth at the Archaeological Heritage Association (AHA) 760/885-9374 or via email at Ruth@RiverAHA.org.

By clicking on the portal below, you can download a PDF of the May 23 San Bernardino County Sentinel

Sentinel 05-23-14

(May 22) There has been a rash of suicides among students enrolled at Riverside Preparatory School  in the Oro Grande School District.
The school is an accelerated learning facility, with a strong emphasis on academics. Three students at the school have taken their own lives since February. After the death of the second student in February, there was widespread speculation about the cause, including concerns that the academic rigors and demands on the school’s students had resulted in morbid depression among some members of the student body.
The latest death occurred sometime late on May 21. Sheriff’s deputies in the early morning of May 21 responding to a call found the body of a 13-year-old male who had apparently committed suicide. Later on May 22, it was confirmed that he was a student at Riverside Preparatory School. The identity of the deceased had not been released by press time.
His death follows that of 15-year-old Ashley Payton, of Victorville in early February, and that of  Christopher Shutter, 16, later that month.
Speculation of a suicide pact among some of the school’s students ensued, triggering a sheriff’s department investigation in which cell phones belonging to several students were confiscated by detectives, who then evaluated the call history of the students, including determining if they had contact with the deceased, as well as evaluating the contents of text messages that had been sent over the devices.
Subsequently, public statements by Payton and Shutter’s parents indicated that Payton’s motivation likely stemmed from bullying she was being subjected to by her peers and that Shutter’s action was precipitated by grief he was experiencing.
Riverside Prep is a publicly funded charter school of Oro Grande School District featuring accelerated learning programs for all grade levels. Any student living within the state of California is eligible to attend Riverside Prep, but most of its students live within the communities of Oro Grande, Victorville, Apple Valley, Hesperia and Adelanto.  Enrollment is done by means of a lottery of applicants, with far more applicants than classroom seats available.
Riverside Prep entails elementary, middle school and a high school. The elementary school is located on 3rd Street in Oro Grande and is comprised of six classrooms per grade level. The middle school is located on a campus off the National Trails Highway about three blocks away from the elementary school. The High School is adjacent to the middle school.
There has also been speculation that the sheer academic intensity of the school may have been a contributory factor in the deaths.
According to the school’s website, “Our school is committed to the growth and positive development of students through an experimental learning approach that strives to engage the student, enlighten the mind and empower the future. We want our students to be the ‘Best’ without reservation or qualified restrictions. We seek to promote a diverse, challenging and supportive environment of firmly grounded, tolerant, respectful, accountable and academically motivated students.”
A sense of how intensified the instruction regimen at the school is can be gleaned from the school’s mission and vision statement, also posted on the website, which is “Good enough is not good enough; Excellence is our standard! Our mission is to empower every student to become a successful learner.”

(May 22)  ADELANTO—The city of Adelanto appears to be set on an  inevitable course to become the second municipality in San Bernardino County to file for bankruptcy protection.
Two years ago, San Bernardino, the county seat and the largest city in San Bernardino County, filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection.
And while Adelanto’s leaders are casting about for ways to keep the city of 27,139 afloat financially, there have been increasingly poignant indicators that the fiscal battle in the desert city is being lost.
Mayor Cari Thomas, city manager Jim Hart, and finance director Onyx Jones have been seeking for more than a year to formulate a strategy to redress the hemorrhaging of red ink at City Hall, but have so far been unable to do so.
As the economic downturn of 2007 continued into each succeeding year, Adelanto was as hard hit as any of the cities in the county, with the possible exceptions of San Bernardino and Grand Terrace. For five years Adelanto managed to stagger forward, but as the end of fiscal year 2012-13 approached last June, city manager Hart dispensed with any pretense that the city could truly balance its budget.  Projecting the city would end 2012-13 with a $2.6 million general fund deficit, Hart prepared an item calling for the declaration of a fiscal emergency, clearing the way for a citywide vote with regard to creating a taxing mechanism. In the meantime, the city council passed a budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year calling for spending more than what Hart knew would be available in income but provisionally balanced upon the use of reserves.  That budget projected revenue and transfers of $17,488,513 and expenditures of $17,487,446.
City officials pinned their hopes on city residents’ willingness to pass a utility tax.  A phone poll of a cross section of city residents, however, indicated that the prospect of the tax’s passage was marginal, at best. City officials had hoped to put the tax measure on the ballot this June but have since opted for shooting for a vote in November, by which time they hope to carry out an “informational campaign” to convince city residents to approve imposing the tax on themselves.
During her state of the city address in February, Thomas fired the first salvo in that effort, stating that if the tax is not approved, the city will need to consider a bankruptcy filing.
A month later, however, Thomas tempered that alarmist rhetoric, declaring that a scouring of the city’s books and review of its accounts showed that the city would remain solvent, albeit while relying to a degree on the use of reserves, through the end of fiscal year 2014-15 in June 2015.
Simultaneously, city officials are still plugging the utility tax, one that as currently proposed would entail a surcharge of 5.95 percent to 7.95 percent on residential and business utility bills.
In the meantime, the level of city services are diminishing and infrastructure maintenance, repair and construction are being neglected or outsourced. In the arena of wastewater recovery, the city joint ventured with a Costa Mesa-based company, PERC, for a $14 million expansion of its wastewater plant. That arrangement involved the use of Adelanto Public Utility Authority bond funds to finance that undertaking, though carrying the program forward became mired in problems with the shuttering of redevelopment agencies statewide in 2011-12. The city council voted in February 2012 to have PERC, a water infrastructure company that designs, constructs and operates water recycling facilities nationwide, take over the operation and maintenance of the city’s wastewater treatment facility and to design an expansion of that facility. That entailed increases in the sewer service rates paid by city residents and business operators.
Last year, Hart revived talk of outsourcing the city’s water department, again referencing PERC as the logical inheritor of the water system. Hart has calculated that the city could save money by transferring city water division employees to PERC’s payroll. This would avoid layoffs and reduce city costs. The water division employees would very likely stay at the same salary level. The downside would be that benefits to those employees would be reduced and city residents would end up paying higher water rates.
Adelanto, which formerly had its own police department, dissolved that operation in 2002 and began contracting with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement service. In entering into that contract, the city gave up the ability to internally control the cost of providing that essential service. In recent years the city has trimmed staff by  23 percent, or 19 positions, and diminished the coverage provided to city residents and businesses under its public safety service contracts as part of its attempt to remain solvent. More than fifty percent of the city’s budget is eaten up by its current contracts with the  San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the San Bernardino County Fire Department.
Overall in 2012-13, according to Jones, the city reduced its expenditures by $2.5 million and has carried those economies over into the present budget, which expires on July 1.
City officials point out that the city is at an inherent disadvantage with regard to its tax base. The deal the city brokered with the county years ago for distribution of property tax revenue among all of the cities governmental agencies provides the city with just 1.75 percent of the amount of money collected, such that the city sees only about $200,000 per year in property tax revenue. In the mid-1990s, the state of California instituted the so-called Educational Revenue Augmentation Program, which confiscated tax revenue from cities that had redevelopment areas in place.
By its declaration of a fiscal emergency last year, the city triggered a provision in state law that will allow it to place a general tax measure on the ballot that could be approved by a simple majority of voters rather than the otherwise required two-thirds majority.
The ballot measure city officials are proposing would impose roughly a $20 per month per household increase on utility bills. Those residents who did not pay it would run the risk of having their utilities turned off or in the alternative, have liens recorded against their properties, which after three years could result in the tax sale of their homes to satisfy the arrearages.
Last week, Adelanto city officials tried to put on a brave face once again, but moved yet closer to an anticipated bankruptcy filing by hiring Orange-based Urban Futures, Inc. as a consultant to deal with its burgeoning fiscal crisis.
Recently, Urban Futures guided the city of Stockton with regard to its bankruptcy filing. Adelanto city officials sought to suggest that the retention of Urban Futures, at an initial cost of $30,000, was a ploy to avoid bankruptcy.
Councilman Jermaine Wright, however, was skeptical about that claim and he insisted that Hart and Jones could provide the information and direction Urban Futures can offer by merely “reading a spreadsheet. We don’t need consultants to tell us we’re broke,” he said.

By Mark Gutglueck
(May 22) While the $180 million federal lawsuit filed on behalf of six of the county’s detention facility inmates by a legal team headed by a respected former Superior Court judge has put the issue of violence against San Bernardino County’s incarcerated population into the limelight as perhaps never before, the abuse of inmates within the county’s jail system is not a new issue.
Indeed, the dual specters of brutality at the hands of law enforcement officers against those they have brought to justice and the toleration of violence among incarcerated suspects and prisoners against each other have hung over San Bernardino  County for over a century.
More than forty years ago, allegations of the mistreatment of county prisoners was taken up by the San Bernardino County Grand Jury and  two county judges, leading to a bruising fight between the judiciary and the county sheriff.
Earlier this month, on May 7, attorneys Stan Hodge, Jim Terrell and Sharon Bruner filed a lawsuit in U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles on behalf of John Hanson, Lamar Graves, Brandon Schilling, Christopher J. Sly, Eddie Caldero and Michael Mesa, all of whom were housed at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga between January 1, 2013 and the end of March 2014.
According to that lawsuit, Hanson, Graves, Schilling, Sly, Caldero and Mesa were subjected to horrific treatment inflicted directly by deputies Brock Teyechea, Nicholas Oakley, Russell Kopasz, Robert Escamilla,  Robert Morris, Eric Smale, Daniel Stryffeler and Andrew Cruz, as well as two civilian jailers, one of whom has been identified as Brandon Stockman and another whose identity remains unclear.  Also named in the lawsuit are San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon and the commander of the West Valley Detention Center, captain Jeff Rose,
The suit alleges that the inmates underwent treatment which amounted to “applications of unreasonable and unlawful force” that “deprived the plaintiffs of their right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States.”
Specifically, according to the suit, during their incarceration “the plaintiffs were subjected by defendants to beatings, torture including but not limited to extending the handcuffed arms behind the plaintiffs causing extraordinary pain to plaintiff’s body, electric shock, including electric shock to their genitalia, sleep deprivation, had shotguns placed to their heads and sodomy. All these actions were taken without any legitimate purpose. As a direct and proximate result of the conduct of the defendants the plaintiffs have suffered extreme physical and emotional injury. The conduct of the defendants was willful, malicious and designed to inflict pain.”
The treatment was institutionalized, the lawsuit states, in that both the sheriff and those supervising the jail had knowledge of the activity.
“The defendant John McMahon and the defendant Jeff Rose and their subordinate administrators sued herein had knowledge that the abusive conduct by which the plaintiffs were deprived of their civil rights were taking place and were going to take place in the future and failed to take any action to cause the violation of plaintiffs’ rights to be prevented,” the lawsuit states.
It is the institutionalization of the violence against county jail inmates that has struck an historical chord. San Bernardino County has been struggling for decades, unsuccessfully, to overcome its image as a crass backwater jurisdiction, where justice is meted out by lawmen who are quick on the trigger but slow in, if not entirely neglectful of, their duty to investigate the actual facts of the crimes they are seeking to solve, and determine the guilt of those assumed to be the perpetrators.  An indelible impression of this careless ethos was provided by the 1969 movie, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” which concerns itself with the 1909 pursuit of Willie Boy, a Chemehuevi Indian fugitive who was run to ground by three separate posses, one led by San Bernardino County Sheriff John C. Ralph.  Despite contradictory versions of events, what is known is that Willie Boy was arrested in Victorville in 1906 and spent time in the San Bernardino Jail, where he allegedly was accorded mistreatment that may have fueled his later action.
Willie Boy had amorous intent toward one of his cousins, 16-year-old Isoleta Boniface, who lived with her father, Mike Boniface, also known as Old Mike, an elder at the  Chemhuevi Indian Tribe Reservation in Twentynine Palms. On the night of September 26, 1909, the then-28-year-old Willie Boy shot and killed Mike Boniface and fled on foot with Isoleta accompanying him. Two posses formed, one from San Bernardino County, led by Ralph, and two from Riverside County, one of which was led by Riverside County Sheriff Frank Wilson.
On September 30, in the Pipes Canyon area, Isoleta was killed by a gunshot wound to the back. Law enforcement officers would claim that Willie Boy, frustrated at Isoleta’s inability to keep up with him in his flight from justice, shot her at point blank  range through the heart. When the posse brought her body back to Banning, however, the coroner, whose last name was Dickson, concluded “She was shot in the back at a distance of at least 100 yards by parties unknown.”
On October 7, the posse tracked Willie Boy to Ruby Mountain in what is now Landers. A gunfight ensued and a deputy, Charlie Reche was wounded. The posse left the scene to transport Reche for medical treatment. A third posse, one composed of citizens from both Riverside and San Bernardino counties, formed, and apparently caught up with Willie Boy near Old Woman Springs. There he died, reportedly from a self inflicted wound, while surrounded by the third posse. Accompanying that posse was a news reporter, Randolph Madison, a descendant of the fourth president. Madison took inconclusive photos of the body. Then, in a deviation from normal protocol, the posse, instead of bringing the body back for an examination by the coroner, burned it.
Some 49 years later, San Bernardino County’s reputation for aggressive, indeed excessively heavy handed and brutal, enforcement of the law was confirmed by Lowell Lathrop, the San Bernardino County district attorney first elected in 1950, who served six terms before retiring in 1974. In a speech before the Victorville Chamber of Commerce in 1958, Lathrop lamented that a series of rulings by both the California Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court had deprived his office and the county’s law enforcement agencies of the tools they had come to rely upon for making arrests, obtaining evidence, and gaining convictions. Explaining why it was growing increasingly difficult to keep criminals off the streets of San Bernardino County, Lathrop told those assembled at that day’s luncheon that sheriff’s department deputies could no longer pistol whip suspects to obtain a confession from them as they did in the past and that if they persisted in using that technique, the confessions obtained in that manner would be deemed inadmissible in court.
Lathrop was yet district attorney when 12 years later, the county grand jury took up the issue of the abuse of jail inmates. Raymond Pryke, was the foreman of the Grand Jury that had been impaneled in 1970. Today, he is 91, but evinced a remarkably clear recollection of the grand jury inquiry that took place more than four decades ago.
“I was talked into getting on the grand jury by Joe Katz, who at that time was the presiding judge,” Pryke told the Sentinel this week. “I really had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I am originally from England and grand juries are an archaic institution there. They were outlawed in England in 1931 because they are considered to be a star chamber, where the rights of the accused are completely violated, so as soon as I accepted the position, he [Katz] appointed me foreman and I was having second thoughts. I decided then that if I was going to go through with it, I would do something meaningful. But that was quite difficult because I had to get the rest of the grand jury on my side. Most of them wanted to go after welfare queens. So I had to explain to them that what was really significant were the government officials and the big wheels with all the administrative power who handle the money that needed to be looked into. It took some doing, but eventually I got their support. During that term of the grand jury, which in those days ran from the beginning of the calendar year to the end of the year in December rather than like it does now from July 1 to June 30, information came up about what was going on out at the jail at Glen Helen. I had gotten Jim Mealey, who had been  the trainmaster at the railroad yard, appointed as foreman pro tem. He was the head of the committee looking into the running of the jails and one night we used our authority as the heads of the grand jury to go down to Glen Helen at midnight, pretty much unannounced, or at least at short notice. We got there and we were met by inspector Hughes. We told him who we were and said we were there to inspect the jails and he just put his hand to his lips and pointed to where there was a microphone in the room. Then we went outside and he told us, “The sheriff knows you’re here. He’s on his way now. Look, I’ve got eight children and a lot to lose. I need to be careful here.” So, he took us back inside and number one, the first thing we see is this man in this cage. It wasn’t even a cell, and he is hanging on the bars. He was obviously insane. I said, “It’s illegal to have someone who is clearly mentally ill confined like that. Inspector Hughes didn’t know what to say. That was just the way things were done.”
Pryke continued, “Right after that was when [sheriff] Frank Bland came in. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, but then he wanted to know what we were doing there. I said, “Well sheriff Bland, we’re just following our instructions from Judge Katz and we are going to be doing a report about conditions in the jails and we’d like to see ‘the hole.’ That was where they kept prisoners in isolation. So, the sheriff took us down a hall where there were, if I remember, five separate doors. So he opened the doors one at a time, to let whoever was in there out and we said to each of them, ‘We’re with the grand jury and we want to know how they are treating you.’ One of them was a guy who would go along the highway with donkeys and some other animals selling things and that was illegal. So he went to court and was fined and when he didn’t pay the fine, he got thrown in jail. They wanted him to cut his hair and shave his beard and he said, “No, my hair and my beard are part of what I do,” and he wouldn’t let them cut his hair and so they put him in the hole for thirty days. I told the sheriff, ‘That seems a little extreme to me.’ I asked the sheriff, ‘What do you think?’ It was like he didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘I think you have to let him out, just like the guy you have in the cage. You can’t keep an insane person in a cage.’
“We called the grand jury together the following Wednesday morning and gave them a report on what we did and what we had seen,” Pryke went on. “Carl Davis, who was later a judge, was the grand jury advisor from the district attorney’s office. “He was really upset about what we were getting into. He didn’t know what to say. None of them knew what to say. We wrote up the report. One of the prisoners that was in the hole said ‘Every three days they let you out and they beat you up and claim you attacked a deputy and then they throw you back in.’ Everyone couldn’t believe we would just show up at midnight like that Frank [Bland] pretty much left us alone, because there wasn’t much he could do to stop us and he could always blame it on someone else and say ‘I didn’t know what they were up to.’ I don’t know what happened to inspector Hughes. In our report, we did not attribute to him what he had told us, to protect him. He had been open with us, and said, ‘This is the policy. We just follow it.’ Frank had to know that he had been talking to us, so I don’t imagine it went well for him.”
When the grand jury’s report came out in November 1970, Bland had an immediate, and predictably negative, reaction.
“The grand jury just doesn’t know what it’s talking about,” he told the board of supervisors.
In private conversations with those he considered to be more sympathetic to law enforcement, Bland expressed himself somewhat differently, acknowledging that jails were unpleasant places and that the experience of jail and prison was intended to make a lasting impression on those consigned to them.  Whatever experience those in jail underwent, Bland maintained, was a consequence of their own criminal acts.
Within a short span of time, his department produced a written response to the grand jury report that was intended to mollify his department’s critics.  “The report is an incredible collection of half truths and misstatements. It was obviously prepared by people who, out of idealism, inexperience, and ignorance, have not obtained all the facts.“
Bland dismissed suggestions that those jailed were subjected to mistreatment, by either their keepers or other inmates. “Inmates classified to serve their time in maximum security are considered to be escape risks due to their past history of escaping, or the fact that they are facing a major prosecution in this county or elsewhere, due to the fact that they are addicted to the use of narcotics or dangerous drugs and will go to every means to sustain their habit, or they are homosexuals and must be isolated from the other inmates for their own protection and to prevent the occurrence of criminal sex acts.”
Nevertheless, evidence of Bland’s contempt for efforts to interfere with his employment of a harsh incarceration regime crept into the response, with an assertion that his approach was one that found favor with the public at large.
“The people throughout the United States are extremely dissatisfied with the present judicial system thinking only of the rights of the defendant and failing to consider the protection of society against the criminals.”
Bland attempted and succeeded in riding out the storm.
Abuse of the county’s prisoners, however, did not end, and less than a year later the sodomizing of prisoners in San Bernardino County’s jails was again a front and center issue. Whereas before Bland had been able to retreat into the protection his status as county sheriff afforded him as well as the knowledge that the district attorney, Lathrop, had his back, this time two personages in the form of county municipal court judges threw their weight behind the grand jury’s reform effort. Judges John Lawrence and Roy Chapman turned information over to the grand jury indicating that prisoners, young prisoners in particular, had been subject to sexual abuse while in the custody of the sheriff’s department. While Lawrence and Chapman’s action had taken place on the down low and outside the view of the public, in early October 1971 Lawrence turned it into a public issue when he reduced sentences for two 18-year-old offenders to five days to be served in a rehabilitation center rather than send them to jail where he said they could be subjected to homosexual attack. Bland went ballistic, calling for the removal of Lawrence unless the judge could provide evidence to support his assertion about homosexual rape taking place in the county’s jails. Lawrence, Bland told the board of supervisors, was justifying his propensity for sentencing leniency “by saying the jails are unsafe for criminals.”
Bland becalmed himself, and asserted “All young people placed in the county jails are kept separate from known homosexuals or hardened criminals.”
As the most powerful law enforcement entity in the county, Bland moved to insulate himself further from the reach of other officials, assigning the detectives in the department’s intelligence unit as well as those attached to the department’s command staff to step up surveillance efforts against members of the county bench, members of the board of supervisors, and prosecutors in the district attorney’s office. He also insisted upon his department vetting all future members of the grand jury before they were impaneled. He then made a practice of obtaining, through contact with willing grand jury members, information about future grand juries’ ongoing investigative efforts.
Bland’s efforts in this regard were successful. In 1973, when questions again surfaced about the treatment of prisoners in the jail, Bland was able to short circuit the probe by utilizing information his investigators had accumulated to prevent Judge Joseph Campbell from aggressively examining the issue. Campbell was permitted to do a walkthrough of the jail, but only at a pre-arranged time, with Bland accompanying him. Bland effectively closed out the possibility that grand jurors, or judges or any outsiders could spring a surprise inspection of the jails on him or his department, instituting a policy that all such excursions be scheduled well in advance.
Sexual abuse in the jails remained a reality in San Bernardino County, such that its actuality, or the threat of it, was institutionalized as a tool at the sheriff’s departments disposal.  An unwritten rule in San Bernardino County is that unruly prisoners and particularly ones who threaten deputies, their wives or their families with retribution, as well as those individuals arrested for threatening or overzealously questioning public officials are to be placed into confinement among the jail’s known homosexual inhabitants for what is referred to as “attitude adjustment.”

(May 22) The Barstow City Council on May 19 approved a temporary one-year operational merger between Barstow Area Transit and the Victor Valley Transit Authority.
Currently, Barstow has a contract with MV Transit, a private company, to operate and manage Barstow Area Transit. That contract expired on December 31 and the city has extended the arrangement with MV Transit while it has looked at alternative arrangements.
Last year, San Bernardino Associated Governments, the county’s transportation agency which represents all 24 of the county’s incorporated cities and the county itself, commissioned a study examining merging transit operations with other regional transit agencies. That study concluded there could be “significant operational enhancements and administrative cost savings” if Barstow merged its transit authority with the Victor Valley Transit Authority, known as VVTA.
Caltrans, as well, has encouraged Barstow to get into a more permanent arrangement with regard to its public transit system.
An analysis shows that Barstow can expect to see substantial savings annually from merging with VVTA. According to that analysis, operational savings would total $103,003 per year, while the city could further see a savings of $263,378 on administration.
While Barstow transit contracts with MV Transit to operate its system, VVTA contracts with Veolia Transportation. Drivers currently working the Barstow route for MV would be extended an offer to take on the same routes for Veolia.
Some details with regard to the merger yet have to be finalized. Officials said they would likely be in place by July 1. Actuation of the merger would come after that date.
The five-member city council voted unanimously to approve the one year arrangement with VVTA, which was represented as a “trial run.” Depending on the success of the trial merger, a consolidation of the two transit agencies could be instituted as early as next year.