(April 12) The cost of monitoring the spread of contamination from Chino Airport has escalated.
This week, the county board of supervisors upped its contract with an environmental services company from $964,100 to $1,695,880 for work relating to an assessment of the extent of the underground pollution at and around the airfield.
San Bernardino-based Tetra Tech, Inc. was given a previous contract for that work, necessitated by known contamination of the water table around the airport, including a perchloroethylene and trichloroethene (PCE/TCE) plume. Subsequently, it was discovered that fifty-one drums of what is believed to have been napalm were buried at Chino Airport decades ago and remained there until they were discovered in 2010, according to documents in the possession of the Sentinel.
Leakage from those drums partially accounts for the pollution of the area’s aquifer, technicians say.
On the afternoon of July 22, 2010, three buried drums were discovered at the airport during trenching for installation of a storm drain pipeline for a new Southern California Edison facility. The county of San Bernardino Department of Airports was notified and it contacted the county fire department’s hazardous materials division and Tetra Tech, with which the county has an ongoing contract for environmental assessment.  Tetra Tech retained Double Barrel, a commercial hazardous materials emergency responder, to assess the situation.
Additional drums were discovered that day and by sunset on July 22, 2010, eight buried drums had been removed from the excavation. The drums did not have lids and contained soil on top of a tan resinous material. The contents of the drums were field tested using a chemical identification kit and determined to be a non-explosive, flammable, non-corrosive, organic resin-type material.
Soil samples were delivered to Microbac Laboratory in Riverside for analysis. Results of those tests indicated that high concentrations of benzene were present in all of the samples. Benzene concentrations ranging from 1,600 milligrams/kilogram (mg/kg) to 6,800 mg/kg were detected in the resinous material in the drums. The benzene concentration in the soil sample was 170 mg/kg. Also detected were toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, styrene, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, and naphthalene. The tan resinous material appeared to be a jellied fuel mixture.
On July 28, 2010, a geophysical survey was conducted in an effort to locate any additional buried drums. During the survey, anomalies were found in several areas to the east and west of the original excavation, and were marked as possible targets for further investigation. Tetra Tech formulated a removal strategy and submitted it to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board office in Riverside on August 9, 2010 and the staff for the board provided same-day verbal approval of that plan.  Excavation and removal of the remaining drums was conducted between August 16 and August 25, 2010. A total of 51 drums, several aluminum canisters and pieces of wood were removed from the excavation and placed into six vapor tight closed top roll-off bins. Excavated soil without obvious contamination was stockpiled and additional soil was excavated from beneath the drums, placed in stockpiles and covered. The resulting excavation measured approximately 100 feet from east to west and 20 feet from north to south. The bottom of the excavation varied from 10 to 15 feet below ground surface.
Well prior to these events, on October 17, 2006, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors approved a $200,000 contract with Tetra Tech to conduct a ground water assessment of the water table at the Chino Airport and investigate possible sources of contamination from the airport property. On September 11, 2007, the board approved a $200,000 amendment to extend the assessment services, including investigation, characterization, testing and quarterly report preparation required to identify and mitigate soil and water contamination together with preparing bid documents for an additional 24 months. On September 22, 2009, the board approved a $185,000 amendment to extend the assessment services an additional 12 months to continue the same efforts. A third amendment in the amount of $148,000 was approved by the board on February 15, 2011 to continue investigation, characterization, testing report preparation through February 2012 and perform historical research. On December 13, 2011, the board approved a $231,100 amendment to provide continued inspection and testing services and quarterly sampling/reports.
As a result of Tetra Tech’s work to this point, the county has now completed its required work to characterize the extent of the offsite plume and has filed a timely report with the California Regional Water Quality Control Board. The cleanup and abatement order now requires the county to do more work to investigate sources of contamination on the airport property that are contaminating the groundwater.
This week, the board voted to make a fifth amendment to the contract with Tetra Tech, Inc., increasing the total contract amount by  $731,780 from $964,100 to $1,695,880 and extending the contract through April 30, 2015 for professional services related to required compliance with the cleanup and abatement order, including historical site assessment, Phase ll environmental site assessments, environmental compliance audits and the ongoing annual monitoring program.
According to James E. Jenkins, the director of the San Bernardino County Department of Airports,  “At times, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board staff have expressed some frustration with the time being taken by the county to come into compliance with the orders. Unfortunately, this resulted in the issuance of a notice of violation on March 28, 2012. The informed and competent representation by Tetra Tech was essential to the county being released by the water board in February 2013 from the obligation to submit monthly status reports on the county’s compliance with its clean-up and abatement orders. These efforts resulted in the water board rescinding the notice of violation. Tetra Tech has proven to be a successful advocate and credible representative of the county to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and this continued representation will be of great value to the county as it works to complete the investigation at the airport property.”
Jenkins said the contamination survey and cleanup effort at Chino Airport has been complicated by the emergence of information, such as that represented by the discovery of the drums of napalm. “At that time, neither the actual extent nor the chemical make-up of the plume was known, and little was known about contamination on the airport property,” Jenkins said. “The work started by Tetra Tech over the last 6 1/2 years has identified the extent of the plume and its chemical make-up and has identified suspected source areas of contamination. The time needed to complete this part of the work was sometimes delayed by off-site access and permitting problems, but also it appears now that the original time estimation was simply too short to complete the work required by the California Water Quality Control Board. In order to maintain compliance with the water board orders, it is now necessary to extend the contract with Tetra Tech to continue the investigation work on the airport property to locate and identify the sources of the contaminants in the plume.”
Tetra Tech will collect water samples from each of the 33 previously installed monitoring wells at and around the airport, test the samples collected; compile and evaluate the data obtained on a quarterly basis; and prepare reports as mandated by the water board.

Robert Leone, who returned to the town council last month after a four-and-a-half year hiatus following a special election to choose resigned councilman Isaac Hagerman’s replacement, was unable to get either of his commission choices approved by his colleagues.
After outdistancing Michael Hildebrand and Jennifer Collins in the March 5 election, Leone was due to make his appointment to the park, recreation and cultural commission and planning commission. Those appointees will serve terms concurrent with Hagerman’s underlying term which Leone will now fill. That term will end in December 2014, with an election due in November 2014. Approval of a council member’s commission appointments has traditionally been a formality in Yucca Valley, where council members normally ratify one another’s appointments with little question or fanfare.
Right off, however, Leone ran into opposition when he nominated Curt Duffy to replace Hildebrand as a member of the planning commission. Not one member of the council seconded Leone’s motion to elevate Duffy. With that issue temporarily unresolved, Leone went on nominate former councilwoman Lori Herbel to the park, recreation and cultural commission. Councilman George Huntington seconded Leone’s motion, but no vote on her appointment was taken. Leone wanted Herbel to replace Collins.
When it became clear that the council would not accept Duffy, Leone relented and nominated Hildebrand to remain on the commission for the next 19 months. That motion passed unanimously.
Councilwoman Dawn Rowe said that Leone had not given adequate consideration to the several qualified applicants for the positions and that she wanted to resist a nomination process that was pre-determined and not transparent.
Mayor Merl Abel said he wanted to avoid the specter of a backroom deal that would hang over the council if it had gone along with Leone’s nominations. Huntington suggested that Duffy had not been a resident of Yucca Valley long enough to merit appointment to the planning commission.
Whereas Rowe and Abel’s statements hinted that the balance of the council’s support of Leone’s nominations would have been improper, Leone was of the opinion that his fellow council members’ stony silence in the face of his nomination of Duffy and their collective unwillingness to support either of his preferred appointments indicated connivance on their part.
“I find it very strange that all of them were on the same page and I could not even get a second to my motion so we could at least discuss Curt Duffy’s merits,” Leone said. “I think he is a very capable and intelligent person who will make decisions on a fiscal level as well as with regard to good land use. He availed himself to the town and we did not even hold a serious discussion about his qualifications. I think George Huntington said he doesn’t live here or hasn’t lived here that long. Well, he does live here and he owns a home here. I have been on the council before and I never encountered that before. It makes you wonder if a Brown Act violation took place. I don’t know that I can go that far, to say there was some behind-the-scenes collusion that took place. I don’t want to say that and I am not saying that. I am going to have to work with the rest of the council for the next 20 months and I don’t want to accuse them. It just makes you wonder why they were suddenly very silent when I made my nomination.”
The Brown Act is California’s open meeting law which prohibits a quorum of elected officials from discussing public business or arriving at a decision outside the forum of an official public hearing.
Leone said he moved to keep Hildebrand on the planning commission when it became obvious he would not be able to get Duffy approved. He said he could live with Hildebrand remaining in place.  “He’s a nice young man,” Leone said of Hildebrand. “Why not retain him? He has grown into the position. Charles McHenry was another possible choice, but he would have been a new person on the commission and would have had to backfill a lot of information.”
In an unexpected development, Hildebrand on April 8 tendered  his resignation from the planning commission, citing his increased work schedule.
So, while Leone said he would have been comfortable with Hildebrand remaining as planning commissioner, he was not prepared to keep Collins as his appointment to the parks, recreation and cultural commission.
“A lot of negative things against me came out of her mouth during the election campaign,” Leone said. “She directly accused me of things that I know were not true. She seems to be against what I stand for. That is why I wanted Lori Herbel.”
Leone said the difficulty he is having getting his commission appointments approved is probably attributable to his problematic relationship with the town manager, Mark Nuami.
He said he believes the town council has fallen too heavily Nuami’s sway and are allowing him to set the agenda for the town rather than adhering to their elected duty of developing a vision for the community and setting policy for local governance and having the city manager execute on that vision and policy.
“I just got elected to fill out the rest of Isaac Hagerman’s term for the next 19 months,” Leone said. “I think the people want a change from what we have. Mark Nuami is a bright young man and he has a lot of pull with the council. Unfortunately, a lot of his moves are duplicating the same baggage as he had in Fontana, where he was mayor. He wants to select people for the two commissions using the power of his office. I think he is running the town into the ground. He is pulling the town in a direction people don’t want to go. The town council is going along with him. They have given him a raise to almost $300,000. That has upset a lot of people in a town where the median income is somewhere between $35,000 to $42,000. At the same time the town is cutting programs. I think people believe we are spending our money on a lot of the wrong things.”
Leone said he will work to fill the two vacant commission spots as soon as possible.
“I am accepting applications for the planning commission and the parks, recreation and cultural commission, pending printed notification in the newspaper,” Leone said.

(April 12) Bob Cable, the owner of Cable Airport in Upland, on April 8 sternly warned the Upland City Council that he is on a collision course with the city over city staff’s unwillingness to remove a long dormant lien against his property.
“We are possibly going to litigation on that,” Cable said. “I bet you don’t know. I’m here to tell you now. Upland touts itself as a business friendly city. I do not see it from where I sit. I have been working for six months to get two liens that are more than 35 years old removed. Hopefully you will end this foolishness before it costs the city a lot of money.”
Cable later explained to the Sentinel, “We are refinancing some construction loans on hangers. Wells Fargo was doing some in-depth title research and came across two liens and an operating agreement, all three of which are over 35 years old. The operating agreement gave the city the right to run the airport if we ever failed to do so. We have consistently kept the airport operating and that agreement has been removed. One of the liens was for streetlights, sidewalks and trees along Benson Avenue near the entrance to the airport. The streetlights and sidewalks were put in long ago and the trees cannot be placed there because of how close it is to being beneath the flight path and the city has given us word that it will release that lien. The other lien applies to where decades ago we built a row of hangars within six feet of the property line and the lien called for the construction of an 800 foot-long block wall there as a separation. The lien called for it to be reviewed every five years. The block wall was never constructed and the city never said anything until we brought it up. Now the city wants us to indemnify them forever. My position is that I didn’t keep up with the terms and the city did not keep up with the terms, so neither of us should be responsible and the lien itself should be null and void. Those liens are so old they should be thrown out. Nobody kept them up for 35 years, so why is it a big deal now? I want this to go away and I made every effort to inform the city of the situation and come to a reasonable resolution. The first two issues are taken care of but when we came to the second lien, the city attorney’s attitude is ‘We’ll see you in court.”
Part of the problem, Cable said, is that the city’s paramount decision making body, the city council, “doesn’t know what is going on.”
Cable continued, “Typically city staff are the only ones who know what the situation is until the day of the council meeting or just a few days before, when the council gets the staff report. And the council almost always goes with the recommendation in the staff report. Then, if that decision is to become litigious, it becomes a closed session item from there on and they remain isolated from the information they need to make an informed decision. I went there on Monday because I was pretty sure that the council at that point had no clue as to what is going on and it looks that once again they are going to end up in a situation they do not need to be in where they spend tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.”
The problem is exacerbated, Cable said, by the city having a new city attorney who is not fully acclimated to the city, does not have a full grasp of the situation or the city’s history and is seeking to establish her place in the municipal pecking order while simultaneously generating billable hours for her law firm.
“I don’t want to get into a lawsuit,” Cable said. “I don’t think the city wants to get into a lawsuit. Those liens are so old and neglected, I think the court will just throw them out. I’m not going to back down. I went directly before the city council because they are the ones that make the ultimate decision. We’ll see in two weeks if they make the right decision and keep the city out of a lawsuit.”
Attempts to reach Upland City Manager Stephen Dunn for  comment were unsuccessful.

Chad Mayes, chief of staff for San Bernardino County Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford and a former mayor and councilman in Yucca Valley, has declared his intention of running for the California State Assembly in the 42nd District.
Yucca Valley Councilwoman and former mayor Dawn Rowe held a fundraiser for Mayes on April 7.
Calling himself a “committed Christian,” Mayes said he “will be a strong voice of pro-life legislation in Sacramento.”
Mayes made early declaration of his candidacy as part of an effort to succeed Brian Nestande, the Republican incumbent in the 42nd Assembly District, who is now serving his third term and must leave the Assembly at the end of this term because of the term limit rule that applies to current incumbents.

(April 5) Upland, which lies at the base of Mt. San Antonio and is known as the City of Gracious Living, is one of  San Bernardino County’s more upscale communities. Situated between the well-to-do college town of Claremont to the west and more modern but equally affluent Rancho Cucamonga to the east and imperiously standing uphill from Ontario and Montclair to the south, the city boasts bustling commercial corridors along its major east-west arterial, Foothill Boulevard, i.e., Old Route 66, as well as down Mountain Avenue, which Intersects Route 66. Upland’s showcase feature is Euclid Avenue, with its 65-and-one-half-foot wide median that once was the route for a trolley car that ran from Ontario up to the base of Mount San Antonio. The median, with pepper trees planted by community founder George Chaffey back in the late 1800’s, lies between the rows of impressive houses lining  the east and west sides of Euclid, seemingly  competing with one another as statements of grandeur, a number of which cross over into the category of mansions as Euclid reaches San Antonio Heights.
Nevertheless, the stately homes, the impeccably manicured lawns, and the overall veneer of gentility belies a darker and seedier reality: In Upland, the use of heroin among teenagers and young adults is running at epidemic proportions, surpassing all other cities in the county, indeed beyond that of inner city neighborhoods in the most crime ridden sections of Los Angeles.
A paradox lies at the root of the problem, one that has turned conventional wisdom upside down. Most assume drug use, and particularly hard narcotic use, to be the province of the lower classes.  The reality, however, is that the children of the well-heeled are particularly vulnerable to predatory drug dealers because their parents’ affluence in many cases enables them, at least in the primary stages of their addiction, to support their habits.
The city of Upland is not much different from most other Southern California cities in that it has its own impoverished class, with 9.1% of its families and 12% of the population living below the poverty line. Some 30,490 of the city’s total 73,732 population, or 41.4%, live in rental housing units. A significant number of those, however, live south of Foothill Boulevard. It is those households and their less impressive earning power which brings down the median Upland household income to $48,734, and the median income for a family living in Upland to $57,471. Remarkably, the use of heroin among young people is virtually unheard of among youths living in the poorer section of town.
North of Euclid is a different story. Median income there increases to $83,458 per household and $92,601 per family. Throughout the city, according to the 2010 Census, 65.6% percent of Upland’s population is categorized as white. North of Foothill, more than 80 percent of the residents fall into that category.
Among those upper middle class and even wealthy predominately Caucasian families in northern Upland, an alarming number of children of high school age have sampled or experimented with opiates of one kind or another or have been exposed to peers and classmates who have done so. In many cases, casual use has grown into addiction.
Readily available among Upland High Students are prescription opiates such as oxycodone, which is widely known by its commercial name, OxyContin;  percocet, which is also known as endocet; dextropropoxyphene, also known as Darvocet or propoxyphene; and codeine. Morphine, for reasons that are not entirely clear, does not appear to be widely distributed among teens in Upland.
Simultaneously, heroin in many forms is available. White heroin, brown heroin, black tar heroin and opium paste can be had with relative ease.
Beginners are likely to smoke heroin in their initial experience with it. Snorting, i.e., sniffing or inhaling it, is also a way neophytes acclimate themselves to the drug, which can induce nausea. Users report that the drug taken in quantity initially can prove unpleasant, with nausea and vomiting being a common side effect. Some experimenters with the drug never make it beyond that stage because of the unpleasant feeling it can initially induce in some. Those who persist with it, however, invariably find it insidiously inviting even if the nausea persists, as all opiates work on the central nervous system to block any sensation of pain by interrupting  neurotransmission.  Use of the drug can in a relatively short period result in psychological dependence, tolerance and addiction. As use continues, physiological dependence can set in to the point that ceasing use can result in withdrawal symptoms that include severe pain, nausea, intractable headache, alternating chills and heat flashes, extreme irritability and muscle, joint and bone ache.
In time, users typically gravitate to injecting the drug intravenously.
In some cases within Upland, though reportedly mostly just across the city limits, purveyors of heroin have set up shop, targeting it seems, Upland youth specifically, apparently as a consequence of their access to money to purchase the drug.  The Sentinel is informed  that “major” dealers operate out of  San Antonio Heights, the unincorporated county area just north of Upland, and Rancho Cucamonga, in particular an apartment complex there. Both San Antonio Heights and the city of Rancho Cucamonga draw their law enforcement service from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
No hard statistics about the prevalence of heroin use among Upland youth is available from any public sources. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests the problem is widespread.
Horror stories of children as young as 15 being caught in a near death grip of addiction abound. The family of one Upland  16-year-old learned of his affinity to heroin only after he was using $150 worth of the drug per day. He was taken to a clinic in Orange County, where he was subjected to treatment that mitigated but did not entirely reduce the excruciating ordeal of withdrawal. His mother, who with his father removed the boy to a private school outside of Upland to isolate him from his peers, told the Sentinel “I pray every day he will stay clean.”
Another father, who owns a business and residence in Upland, told the Sentinel he was startled to learn that both of his teenage children, students at Upland High, were smoking heroin regularly, along with opium paste when it was available. Divorced from the children’s mother, his method of dealing with the problem was to curtail both his son’s and daughter’s freedom, ensuring that they came directly to his place of business after school, where they went to work under his watchful eye.
Many Upland parents, it seems, are oblivious to their child’s or children’s use of or addiction to heroin. Some miss or fail to recognize the tell-tale signs and symptoms of heroin use. The generous monetary allowances some parents provide to their children allow the younger set to experiment with the drug and gradually fall into its clutches. With the development of a more serious habit or addiction, the monetary demand of sustaining heroin use can lead to ongoing or episodic theft, acts which can betray to parents, eventually, that something is amiss. When parents become aware of such a situation, they find themselves in a terrible quandary. Even the most resourceful parent is ill equipped to deal with a child’s drug addiction. But bringing in law enforcement or other public authorities to deal with the issue can result in criminal charges being filed against their child or children.  For that reason, many go it alone, struggling to resolutions of greater or lesser effectiveness in overcoming the challenge. Others turn to professionals, doctors or clinics offering  a specialized practice in overcoming heroin dependence, utilizing a multitude of detoxing strategies, including substituting codeine, methadone or  buprenorphine for heroin and gradually weaning the patient from those substances, which likewise have withdrawal implications, though less violent and less intense than heroin withdrawal.
Meanwhile, Upland city officials have been pursuing a drug enforcement policy that was in some measure out of step with the serious inroads achieved by heroin pervaders in the community.
Between 2009 and 2012, the city expended just over $420,000 in an effort to prevent G3 Holistics, a marijuana clinic which opened in 2009, from operating in Upland. The city succeeded in temporarily closing down the G3 Collective in August 2010 after the city filed an injunction in West Valley Superior Court in Rancho Cucamonga, but that injunction was stayed by G3 owner Aaron Sandusky’s immediate appeal of the city’s blanket prohibition of medical marijuana dispensaries. On November 9, 2011 the Fourth District Court of Appeals in Riverside ruled that Upland’s banning of clinics did not contradict Proposition 215, the 1996 law that approved medical marijuana in the state, but Sandusky appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court.
Ultimately, the city’s legal efforts against the clinic failed to shutter the operation, as the matter remained unresolved in the state court system, complicated by the consideration that in 1996 California Voters legalized the provision of marijuana to medical patents in possession of a valid prescription from a licensed physician as a consequence of the passage of Proposition 215. Ultimately, Sandusky was forced to close his operation not through the effort of the city but rather through action of the federal government, in the form of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who undertook a November 2011 raid against the G3 clinic and then followed up with a prosecution of Sandusky and his associates in federal court, obtaining a conviction and prison sentence against Sandusky under the much more stringent and less ambiguous federal law.
Thus, the $420,000 legal effort against Sandusky proved to be superfluous and diverted money to the city attorney’s office that might have been provided to the police department to beef up operations devoted to dampening, if not eradicating, the contagion of heroin use among Upland’s youth.
Upland Police Chief Jeff Mendenhall, while not denying the existence of a heroin use problem among the city’s youth, offered his view that “I’m not aware that it’s limited to Upland.” He said that describing the situation as an epidemic is “not a fair” characterization. “I don’t know how much is being used in Upland on a daily basis,” he said. He expressed skepticism that the elevated use of heroin or other opiates in Upland could be attributed to the affluence of the families of those who have fallen under its sway.
With regard to whether he believed the city’s energetic and relatively well funded efforts to drive medical marijuana clinics in general and one such clinic specifically out of town squandered monetary resources that might have been better directed to intensifying enforcement efforts aimed at heroin trafficking and use as well as other hard narcotics, Mendenhall said such a question “puts me in a box I do not want to get into. Marijuana is not only a federal issue, it is a state issue and local issue. The city council sets policy. Their position was the G-3 clinic violated the zoning code and they tried to rectify that. I support them on that.”
Mendenhall said he would ask the department’s narcotics division to make recent heroin-related operations and arrest data and records available to the Sentinel, but that material was not provided by press time.
Upland’s narcotics division functions under the aegis of a joint task force with the Ontario Police Department, which is headed by a lieutenant employed by Ontario PD. There have been suggestions that with narcotics operations headquartered and supervised outside the city, those calling the shots may be less sensitive to the nuances within the Upland community than are Upland police officers who constantly work the city’s streets and are answerable under a hierarchy based within the police department.
Former Upland Police Chief Martin Thouvenell told the Sentinel that heroin is not a new law enforcement issue in the City of Gracious Living.
“When I first started with the department and was working patrol, that was a pretty big problem,” he said. “We had a lot of that on Campus (Avenue) south of Thirteenth (Street). We pretty much cleaned that up. I can’t say what geographical area they would have gone to now. “
That heroin has made a comeback does not surprise him, Thouvenell said. Nor did he believe that it was necessarily the case that heroin had become a drug of affluence in Upland, though he acknowledged sustaining such a habit was expensive.
“Drug use and the types of drugs that are prevalent are cyclical in nature,” he said. “You will see trends come and go.”
He did not jump to the conclusion that a task force based outside the city is at a disadvantage in addressing an uptick in heroin use within northern Upland.
“I can tell you that at the time I was a member, our narcotics task involved Upland and Montclair, and we pretty much spent equal time in each city. Just because a task force is based in one geographical area doesn’t mean that the effort would be slanted. They will go to the area were the problems are. Even if the task force is based in Ontario, I would think they will be responding to the trouble spots in Upland.”

(April 5) The city of San Bernardino has filled the finance department vacuum created when former finance director Jason Simpson resigned in February, this week hiring the municipal service consulting firm Urban Futures to oversee the city’s fiscal affairs.
Simpson departed nearly two months ago, leaving the bankrupt city around the same time that acting city manager Andrea Travis-Miller departed.
In multiple ways, those departures left San Bernardino in the lurch. The city, which filed for bankruptcy protection in August, is staggering under a $47 million budget deficit and has lost 535 employees through layoffs, attrition or firings since 2008.
The finance department is a crucial cog in the city’s bankruptcy bid, as multiple entities are challenging the filing. The  city’s pendency plan, which calls for stringent economies and cost and expenditure reductions, needs to be fastidiously documented to continually pass muster with the court.
Urban Futures, which is based in Orange, offers consulting services to municipalities, school districts and other governmental agencies in the areas of public finance, bond issuances, bond disclosure reporting, utilities, capital improvement planning, economic development, housing analysis and housing compliance.
The company has been doing consulting work for the city since last year, having undertaken and completed the financial report that the city council relied upon in making the decision to proceed with the city’s bankruptcy filing.
The city had not replaced Simpson, nor had it filled other vacancies in the finance department. Urban Futures had already been taking up that slack. Acting city manager Allen Parker called upon the city council this week to formalize an arrangement with the consulting firm to act as the city’s de facto finance department.
Parker had started with a more modest proposal to have an Urban Futures employee serve as finance director. As Urban Futures employees began to dig in on the backlog of finance work, including generating court-ready documents and financial statements, completing audits, making ongoing year adjustments to the budget, and preparing the 2013-14 budget, Parker was informed that the staffing requirements were greater than he had presumed.
The city council on April 1 committed the city to utilizing three Urban Futures personnel as the city’s finance director, budget manager and fiscal officer at an annual cost of $450,000. All three are to work out of offices at San Bernardino City Hall. Urban futures then prevailed upon the city to hire another Urban Futures employee to serve as the city’s contract administrator and to augment the finance department team by having the city hire two new employees to work for the city directly as accountants outside the rubric of the contract with Urban Futures.

CHINO HILLS – Chino Hills City Manager Mike Fleager last month told the California Public Utilities Commission that the city stands ready to make a financial commitment of as much as $76.7 million to mitigate Southern California Edison’s costs to ensure that a major portion of the transmission lines for the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project are placed underground.
Slightly over five miles of the 173-mile Tehachapi line, connecting what is planned as the world’s largest windfarm consisting of hundreds of electricity producing windmills in Kern County to the Los Angeles Metropolitan basin, will run through  Chino Hills. In 2009, the California Public Utilities Commission, over the city of Chino Hills’ protest, granted Southern California Edison clearance to erect a series of 197-foot high power transmission towers through the heart of 44.7-square mile Chino Hills along a long-existing power corridor easement owned by the utility.
Fearing a host of problems from the imposition of the towers, including significant negative impacts on property values in the city, the Chino Hills City Council authorized the expenditure of over $2.3 million to employ attorneys and make other efforts to contest the Public Utility Commission’s action, including a suit against Southern California Edison alleging the company had “overburdened” the power line easements. That legal effort failed when West Valley Superior Court Judge Keith D. Davis ruled the California Public Utilities Commission has exclusive jurisdiction regarding the route used by Edison, and the suit was thrown out. Chino Hills appealed Davis’s ruling to the 4th District Court of Appeal, asserting the city had the right to have the case heard by a jury, but in September 2011 the appeals court affirmed Davis’ decision.
In 2011, Edison, which has long had a 150-foot wide right-of-way for its power lines that runs for 5.8 miles from Tonner Canyon to the Riverside County line, erected 18 of the towers within Chino Hills before a city appeal to the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and Public Utilities Commission Chairman Michael Peevey in particular succeeded in a temporary halt to the towers’ construction being granted in November 2011 while a potential undergrounding alternative is explored.
On February 28, the California Public Utilities Commission directed Southern California Edison to proceed with its plans to bury its transmission lines for the Tehachapi Renewable Energy Project along a 3.5 mile portion of the five mile length the lines will run through Chino Hills. No final decision on whether the electrical cables will be undergrounded was made, with that determination now scheduled for July. In the meantime, the commission is taking testimony and considering all order of submissions from Southern California Edison, the city of Chino Hills and other interested parties related to the undergrounding issue.
In November, Southern California Edison (SCE) filed a proposal by which it would be able to recover any money it put into exploring the undergrounding options. The commission’s February 28 directive to have SCE seriously consider the undergrounding options  contained a provision for Southern California Edison to recover its costs in proceeding with the planning for undergrounding the cables in the event the commission this summer elects to remain with the already-approved game plan of utilizing an above-ground conveyance of the electricity.
Also on February 28, SCE provided the commission with a tentative contracting report relating to the undergrounding.
On March 20, Fleager, representing Chino Hills, provided testimony to the commission intended to inform its ultimate decision in July as to whether the line will be undergrounded through that 3.5 mile span within the city.
In his testimony, Fleager stated, “The towers, given their mammoth nature, both in height and girth, pervade all aspects of city life. The city and its residents were taken by surprise by the enormous size and impact of the towers. It is the city’s position that an underground transmission alternative is vastly preferable to the overhead project supported by SCE. Such an alternative should allow the project to go forward absent the harmful impacts to our community and to the residents.”
Fleager told the commission that if it determined that the lines should be buried underground, the commission “would ordinarily require SCE to pay the entire cost of the underground transmission line. Chino Hills opposes any attempt by SCE to assert that the city or its residents should be directly required to pay for the transmission line. That said, however, Chino Hills was directed [by the commission] as part of its testimony to “identify, clarify and quantify any financial commitment it is prepared to make to minimize the total additional cost of an underground option. In accordance with this directive, the city has prepared a package of financial commitments that the city is prepared to make to reduce the additional cost of an underground option. In total, the commitment is in the range of $70.45 million to $76.7 million. They include real property that is necessary for the construction of an underground transmission line which the city is prepared to convey to SCE in fee; future  revenue which the city would have derived which will now be available to SCE through ownership of such properties; increased expenses that the city will incur due to its loss of the use of the contributed properties; and costs associated with the landscaping and maintenance of those properties that are located in the right-of-way.  The city of Chino Hills is proposing to incur these costs, thereby reducing the ongoing cost to SCE and other ratepayers.”
Fleager said the land he referenced included 67.2 acres for right-of-way, 46.5 acres of which the city currently owns and the remainder of which it will need to purchase from private owners, as well as a 2.77-acre parcel that will be provided to SCE to host its Western Transition Station. Fleager said the revenue the city will lose would include leases of the property to Verizon and AT&T for cell phone towers.
At one point in his testimony, Fleager appeared to provoke at least a mild degree of consternation from the commission when he expressed opposition to SCE’s underground configuration that would entail two transmission cables.
After obtaining  Fleager’s acknowledgement that the undergrounding  project will entail for SCE  considerable expense and  for Chino Hills residents  “substantial disruptions of their daily lives… road closures, increases in noise levels… huge pieces of equipment being brought into and out of their neighborhoods… major amounts of dust and dirt kicked up into the air by the construction activity,” the commission inquired why the city was averse to laying into the right-of-way a double circuit line, thus doubling the electrical carrying capacity available to SCE, creating an economy of scale and obviating the future need to tear up the right-of-way and put in another line in the future.
“The underground proposal that the city is advancing calls for the replacement of an above ground double circuit transmission structure with a single circuit below ground line, correct?” the commission asked Fleager.
“Yes, it is my understanding that even SCE has stated that a double circuit transmission line is not needed at this time.,” Fleager responded.
The city manager’s response prompted a follow-up question.  “If at a future date it is determined that a double circuit is needed, then the city would once again be subject to significant disruption during the time period that the second circuit is installed. Would not the residents rather have the second circuit constructed now, rather than suffer yet another disruption to their daily lives in the future?” the commission asked.
Fleager responded “Absolutely not. The city and its residents have one goal – removal of the 200 foot transmission structures which SCE has constructed through the city. The city believes the single circuit underground transmission alternative represents the most cost-effective means of achieving this goal. In putting forward this solution, the city, however, recognizes that it may be necessary at some time in the future for SCE to install a second circuit. If that occurs, the community understands that once again there will be disruption to their lives resulting from the construction activity associated with the installation of the second circuit. The community believes that the temporary disruption this will cause is a small price to pay to ensure the removal of the overhead transmission structures.”
In elaborating on that point, Fleager dwelled at some length over the future inconvenience installing a second line will entail for Chino Hills residents and their willingness to endure it, but made no reference to the added cost such an undertaking would represent for SCE, totaling in the scores of millions of dollars.
“City officials, including myself,” Fleager said, “have had numerous conversations with residents and leaders of the community groups advocating removal of the towers, and we are confident in stating that the community as a whole is willing to put up with the inconvenience of underground construction activity for a relatively limited period of time in order to avoid permanent installation of the overhead transmission lines.”
Indications are that the undergrounding of the lines being considered will extend over a three-and-a-half mile span through Chino Hills and that the lines will remain above ground for the 1.5 miles they will must traverse through Oak Tree Downs.
In his testimony, Fleager indicated that city expenditures in seeking to prevent the towers from being erected went well beyond the $2.3 million in lawyers’ fees expended on lawsuits and administrative petitions. Fleager said the city has spent $3.4 million to “research, investigate and document alternative transmission routes and configurations.”
Other interested parties have a deadline of today to submit testimony. SCE is expected to submit rebuttal testimony on April 12, accompanied by the submittal of cross rebuttal testimony the same day. From April 22 to April 25, the commission will hold evidentiary hearings related to the Tehachapi line through Chino Hills at the State Office Building at 505 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.

YUCCA VALLEY — Less than two months after the town council upped Yucca Valley Town Manager Mark Nuaimi’s total yearly compensation package to just under $300,000, Nuami last week announced that he will lay off or accept the retirements of eight of the town’s veteran employees.
In his quest to eradicate a $400,000 budget deficit, Nuaimi on March 28 said he was laying off the town’s associate planner and Yucca Valley’s two recreation coordinators. Heading into retirement, he said, would be town clerk Jamie Anderson, community services director Jim Schooler, museum supervisor Lynn Richardson, along with a museum assistant, an animal shelter administrative assistant and a code compliance technician.
In structuring the retirements for the six, Nuaimi offered them dual incentives. The first incentive was that they could avoid involuntary pink slips by acceding to a voluntary and early retirement. All six were offered six months’ severance salary and 12 months of medical insurance for themselves and a single dependent.
Schooler oversaw the town’s recreation department. With his departure and those of the recreation coordinators, the town’s recreation activities will be substantially curtailed. Another existing employee will take over the recreation supervisor position part time.
The animal shelter administrative assistant and code compliance technicians will be replaced, likely at a pay and benefit level below what their predecessors received.
Nuaimi will not fill the recently created vacancy in the town’s roads maintenance division, brought on by an employee resignation.
Overall, the layoffs, retirements and reorganization entail a 17 percent reduction in the town’s workforce, from 41 to 34 full time employees, and will save $300,000 in the upcoming fiscal year as the retirement incentives are cashed out, and $725,000 per year thereafter.
Anderson, who started with Yucca Valley as its maiden town clerk at the time of incorporation in November 1991, will take with her a degree of institutional memory.
The Hi-Desert Nature Museum will remain open, despite having now lost its supervisor and one of its three remaining employees, and will likely function on reduced hours while relying on volunteer workers.
“I thank all the staff who opted for early retirement. In taking this incentive, they are helping the town balance its budget,” said Nuami who receives $190,000 per year in base salary and $103,339 in deferred compensation and benefits per year. His total compensation package will increase to $300,840 by 2015. His contract is guaranteed through 2016.
A town budget workshop will be held at City Hall at 9 a.m. Saturday April 6.

(April 5) Former congressional aide Sam Clauder, who lost his position in the office of then-U.S. Representative Joe Baca after he was charged with felony possession of child pornography and then endured a more than three-year legal battle to clear his name culminating in the dismissal of the charges last September, has filed a $7.5 million claim against San Bernardino County, the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office.
On March 28, attorney Tim Prince filed the claim on Clauder’s behalf, naming deputy district attorney Maryanne Choi, sheriff’s detective Michael Pelkey, and district attorney Michael Ramos.
Clauder was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography after the sheriff’s department was provided with access to Clauder’s computer by Clauder’s son, Trey Stancher. Prohibited images were found to have been downloaded onto the computer. Clauder maintained his innocence from the outset of the case, but was fired by Baca after word of the arrest became public.
The case dragged on for more than three years. In preparation for his defense, Clauder retained the services of a computer forensics expert, Sheryl Katz,  who was able to establish that the images had been downloaded during a time when Clauder did not have access to the computer, which at that point was in the possession of his son and his ex-wife, Lana Pittman.  Pittman and Stancher maintained that the computer was password protected and they had no access to it. But Katz determined, and sheriff’s department computer analysts later confirmed, that the computer had some 30,000 system events, with daily activity, between May 1 and July 7, 2008, during which time Clauder was not living with Pittman and Stancher.
After the sheriff’s High Tech Crime Unit, which had previously failed to carry out the more exacting analysis Katz performed, confirmed Katz’s findings, Stancher was interrogated by sheriff’s Sgt. Roberto Lomeli. During the course of Lomeli’s questioning, Stancher acknowledged an “uncontrollable hate” for his father and that it was he who had downloaded the child pornography onto his father’s computer.
That confession was backed by the analysis Katz had done of Clauder’s computer hard drive and confirmed by the High Tech Crime Unit, indicating the offending images downloaded onto the computer bore the tell-tale electronic signature cybernetically imprinted when they  had been obtained via peer-to-peer networking software registered to Stancher’s account.
Choi, who had previously refused to accept anything less than a guilty plea that would have subjected Clauder to at least four years in prison, requested in September that the case against Clauder be dismissed “in the interest of justice.” The Superior Court issued a finding of factual innocence in Clauder’s case in December.
According to Prince, Clauder was the victim of a “malicious and selective prosecution” by the district attorney’s office, which is headed up by a Republican, Mike Ramos. Clauder, a Democrat, was active in several party causes, including being, according to Prince, “on opposite sides of a long-term major political battle to determine the use of the El Toro Marine Base in Orange County” with David Ellis, Ramos’ campaign manager.
Prince alleges that the malicious prosecution was made possible by the actions of Pelkey, who, according to Prince “harbored personal animosity towards Clauder” because of Clauder’s work as a journalist that included articles that threw of a rape case  investigation carried out by  Pelkey and his colleagues at the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station into a bad light.
“The false charges were instigated by deputy Pelkey,” the claim states. “The county also deliberately refused to examine the family desktop computer, or three other computers Clauder used, to determine whether Clauder downloaded the images upon which the felony charges were based.  Deputy district attorney Marianne Choi took over the case and prosecuted it with malice under orders from, and with the approval of, district attorney Michael Ramos. The only alleged evidence to support these serious felony charges were the county’s failed polygraphs of Clauder’s estranged wife and 24-year-old son containing lies generated from a contentious divorce. Although both subjects failed their polygraph exams, San Bernardino County Sheriff Deputy M. Pelkey covered it up by referring to them as ‘witnesses’ and hiding the fact that no evidence supported the charges.”
Clauder spent a total of 56 days in jail due to the arrest and felony charges against him.
A claim is a precursor to a lawsuit. Only upon the rejection of such a claim, as in this case by the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, can the allegedly damaged party proceed with a lawsuit.

(April 5) HESPERIA—Recent allegations of financial malfeasance at Oak Hills High School have elements in common with an incident more than three years ago at Sultana High School which eventually played a part in the dismissal of the district superintendent.
After what was believed to be a substantial amount of money went missing at Oak Hills High, the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools invited state auditors to examine the high school’s financial ledgers.
An audit performed by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) of the  bookkeeping and accounting practices of the Oak Hills High School’s Associated Student Body  found not only undeniably inadequate financial accountability but an apparent incident, or perhaps repeated incidents, of fraud and embezzlement.
According to auditors, $130,000 in student funds is missing and the matter is being sent to the district attorney’s office for further determination and perhaps prosecution.
FCMAT’s findings are that the student body’s books are rife with “fraudulent financial statements” together with evidence of “asset misappropriation.
Interim Hesperia Unified School District Superintendent David McLaughlin, said “I can confirm that the district intends to cooperate fully with the proper authorities,” indicating the district will “seek punitive action if, and where, criminal activity took place.”
McLaughlin’s quick move to punt the matter to the district attorney contrasts with the way in which a matter that also involved the disappearance or embezzlement of student funds at Sultana High in 2009 was handled by McLaughlin’s predecessor as superintendent, Mark McKinney.
Both Oak Hills and Sultana are high schools in the Hesperia Unified School District. The 2009 Sultana case involved a somewhat less substantial sum than the one currently involving Oak Hills. McKinney elected to handle that matter administratively rather than allowing the Hesperia School District police force to carry out a full-fledged investigation.
Later, as financial problems beset the district and McKinney moved to shed personnel through a downsizing and layoff process that touched on the function and personnel of the district police force, McKinney in 2011 found himself accused by several district police officers, including the district police chief Mike Graham, of having covered up the embezzlement. A protracted war of words between McKinney and Graham ensued, with Graham being accused of insubordination and then suffering an unceremonious termination. Graham appealed that suspension, but McKinney was backed up by board president Chris Bentley and board members Eric Swanson and Niccole Childs, who sustained Graham’s firing.
Thereafter, Graham sued the district for wrongful termination and Bentley was defeated for reelection last November. In December, a new ruling coalition on the school board formed, including Hardy Black, who had supported Graham against Bentley, Swanson and Childs. Black, with the two board members elected in November, Cody Gregg and Ella Rogers,  fired McKinney in December. Last month, Superior Court Judge John P Vander Feer ruled in Graham’s favor in his wrongful termination suit and ordered him restored as district police chief with back pay.
The documentation of the wrongdoing in the Oak Hills High case was significantly more advanced than in the matter at Sultana High. That documentation was accrued because in 2011 McKinney responded to the Oak Hills case more aggressively than he had at Sultana. The district brought in an independent auditor, who tracked several anomalies in the student body fund account, which consisted of money accrued by the high school’s clubs and organizations. Among the financial irregularities were  late and delinquent deposits and unjustified and undocumented balance write-offs.
The district put a bookkeeper on administrative leave and reassigned the ASB adviser. Upon returning from that administrative leave, the bookkeeper resigned according to FCMAT. The replacement bookkeeper subsequently found negative balances and overall insufficient cash balances for several of the clubs, together with multiple past due bills. At that point, the county superintendent of schools was contacted.