(August 31)  Now that the law firm of Jones & Mayer is assuming the role of Upland’s city attorney, knowledgeable insiders are turning their attention to a single question: Will the new firm acquiesce in having one of the city’s leaders – lame duck councilman Ken Willis – subjected to questioning under oath?
An agreement to do just that could save city taxpayers an estimated $25 million plus close to another million dollars in legal fees. To date, however, under the guidance of previous city attorneys, the city has balked at allowing the county to take Willis’s deposition. One of the first orders of business for Jones & Mayer and the attorney with that firm, Kim Barlow, who has been designated to serve as Upland city attorney, is to decide whether to let Willis answer the questions the county wants to ask.
The Jones & Mayer firm was hired as Upland city attorney at least in part because the firm that formerly served in that capacity, Richards Watson and Gershon, was running up legal bills city officials considered excessive. A significant case being handled by Richards Watson & Gershon for the city is a lawsuit brought by the county of San Bernardino against the city, the state Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the county’s transportation agency, San Bernardino Associated Governments, known as SANBAG. That lawsuit relates to Upland’s approval of the Colonies at San Antonio residential and Colonies Crossroads commercial developments and the $102 million settlement cost the county sustained when the developer, the Colonies Partners, sued the county over flood control issues after the county built the 20th Street storm drain at Upland’s behest in conjunction with Caltrans’ extension of the 210 Freeway across property owned by the Colonies Partners. More than four years ago, the county offered to settle the case with Upland for $2 million. Richards, Watson & Gershon, on behalf of the city, declined that offer. The city has paid $4.9 million in legal fees to Richards Watson & Gershon to defend it against the suit, nearly two-and-a-half times the amount of the settlement offer.
The city has potential liability in the scores of millions of dollars because it had requested that the county flood control district build the 20th Street storm drain. Further, it was the city of Upland that had given approval to the Colonies projects, which were built on property once owned by the San Antonio Water Company and which were criss-crossed with flood control easements recorded in the 1930s. It was the county’s action in constructing the terminus of the 20th Street storm drain so that it vectored water into a flood control basin covered by one of those easements which led to the Colonies Partners’ suit against the county. At issue in the county’s suit against Upland is the city’s negligence in approving the Colonies projects without clearly demarking responsibility for the provision of infrastructure, such as flood control basins and channels, to accommodate the project.
The Colonies Settlement case must go to trial by October. In addition to the $2 million settlement offer made by the county, there have been intensive backroom negotiations between the city, its emissaries and county officials and representatives aimed at forming a settlement short of trial. According to reliable sources, an accommodation that would have brought an end to the litigation without any monetary burden on Upland has been forged by intermediaries and tentatively endorsed by both of the county supervisors whose districts cover Upland – Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford and Fourth District Supervisor Gary Ovitt – as well as county chief executive officer Greg Devereaux. The terms of that settlement would have required that Upland consent to some of its officials – most importantly city councilman Ken Willis – submit to an intensive round of questioning, including being subjected to a deposition, that is, questioning under oath. Willis was part of the city council that endorsed the Colonies projects, as well as the 20th Street Storm Drain undertaking. He was also a political ally of former Upland mayor John Pomierski. The Colonies Partners were major Pomierski backers, having made considerable monetary donations to his electioneering fund. Pomierski in return was highly supportive of the Colonies at San Antonio and Colonies Crossroads projects. In 2011 Pomierski was indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery, extortion and conspiracy charges. He pleaded guilty to bribery earlier this year and was sentenced in August to two years in federal prison.  Like Pomierski, Willis received hefty campaign contributions from the  Colonies Partners. In 2010, former county supervisor Bill Postmus was indicted by a specially-impaneled state/county grand jury on bribery and extortion charges related to his vote in 2006 to approve the county’s $102 million settlement with the Colonies Partners. In 2011 he pleaded guilty to those charges. Subsequently, Jeff Burum, one of the managing principals in the Colonies Partners, and former county supervisor Paul Biane, who voted with Postmus in 2006 to approve the $102 million settlement, were indicted by another specially-impaneled criminal grand jury and charged with involvement in the same bribery, extortion and conspiracy scheme that involved Postmus. That indictment alleged that $100,000 donations made by Burum to political action committees formed or controlled by Postmus and Biane were actually bribes made to reward them for their votes to approve the $102 million settlement. For more than two years beginning in 2004, Bill Postmus was the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. In 2007, he was succeeded by Biane as chairman of the GOP in San Bernardino County. Biane was succeeded, eventually, by Willis as chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. Burum was a major contributor to the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. Both Burum and Biane have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them contained in the indictment.
At present, Richards Watson & Gershon remains Upland’s legal representative with regard to the Colonies Settlement lawsuit, as the city is reluctant to bring in another firm, given the investment the city made in having lawyers with that firm familiarize themselves with the issues involved in the litigation.
Richards Watson & Gershon, which rejected the county’s $2 million settlement offer on the Colonies Settlement litigation more than four years ago, again rejected the more recent informal county offer to settle the suit conditional upon an agreement to have Willis subjected to questioning. Instead, the law firm made a motion to prevent a deposition of Willis from proceeding.
With the October trial date approaching and the potential for an outcome that would include a substantial judgment against the city, there is an incentive for Jones & Mayer to intervene and bring the matter to a conclusion short of trial. Willis, who has chosen not to seek reelection and whose current term will end in December, no longer possesses the leverage he once did, and the imperative to protect him at all costs that was followed by Richards Watson & Gershon and the interim city attorney that followed that firm, Jimmy Gutierrez, may not remain operative for Jones & Mayer. Instead, the new firm – represented in Upland by Kim Barlow, will have to decide whether to seek to protect the city’s taxpayers or instead accede to the wishes of the city’s elected leadership and shield one of its outgoing but still serving leaders from a round of hard-edged, embarrassing and even painful questioning.
Barlow’s secretary at Jones & Mayer this week told the Sentinel she was not available for comment.

(August 31)  Jennifer  McBain has been appointed by the county board of supervisors to fill a two-and-a-half year running vacancy on the Twentynine Palms Public Cemetery District board. McBain participated in her first meeting of the board last night. McBain replaced Joseph Crites, who completed the term of office for his late son, Adam Crites and did not seek reappointment.

(August 31)  As was anticipated, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors on August 28 approved joining with the city of Ontario in the formation of a joint powers authority intended to take on control, management and eventual ownership of Ontario International Airport.
A week previously, on August 21, the Ontario City Council voted to enter into a joint powers arrangement with the county pertaining to the airport and involve other local governments. At that time, Ontario appointed councilmen Alan Wapner and Jim Bowman to serve as the city’s representatives on the airport joint powers authority board. This week, in acceding to the cooperative effort, the board of supervisors designated supervisor Gary Ovitt, a former mayor of Ontario in whose Fourth Supervisorial District the airport is located, as the county representative on the JPA board. That board will consist of five members.
The unstated but clear intention of the newly created agency is to wrest ownership and control over the airport back from the city of Los Angeles and its adjunct, Los Angeles World Airports, which oversees the Los Angeles Department of Airports.
In 1967 the city of Ontario transferred management of the airport to the city of Los Angeles and its airport division, a ploy which allowed the entity that owned and controlled Los Angeles International Airport to use its prestige and greater negotiating leverage to convince airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. In 1985, Ontario deeded the airport to the megalopolis for no consideration. Under Los Angeles’s direction, over $550 million in improvements were made to the airport, and passenger traffic there increased dramatically from just under 200,000 in 1966 to 7.2 million in 2007. But over the last five years, the numbers of those flying in and out of Ontario have diminished considerably, with 4.2 million passengers in 2011, and further declines are registering this year.
Ontario officials blame Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, the non-profit entity Los Angeles created to own, maintain, administer and operate Los Angeles International Airport, Van Nuys Airport, Burbank Airport, Palmdale Airport and Ontario International, for the downturn in passenger traffic through Ontario in recent years. The once-cordial relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles has suffered as Ontario officials maintain that Los Angeles through Los Angeles World Airports is purposefully mismanaging Ontario International as part of an effort to bolster the Los Angeles economy, and that the effort includes having increased enplaned passenger costs at Ontario and diminished marketing of the airport as a ploy to increase passenger traffic at Los Angeles International Airport, even as the airline industry in general has been contracting. Led by councilman Alan Wapner, Ontario officials have been pushing ever more aggressively to have Los Angeles relinquish the airport, maintaining that the entirety of the Inland Empire has seen its economy negatively impacted as a result of the loss of passengers transiting through Ontario Airport.
Los Angeles World Airports, known by the acronym LAWA, charges the airlines at Ontario International $14.50 per enplaned passenger, which is substantially more than the $11, $9.93, $5.34, $4.07 and $2.10 charged at Los Angeles International, John Wayne, Long Beach, Palm Springs and Burbank airports, respectively. Currently at Ontario, airlines are paying $144.11 per square foot for terminal space. That is up from the $134.39 they were charged in 2011, but less than the $154.63 charged in 2010.
Earlier this month, LAWA’s Jess Romo, who serves as the Ontario Airport manager, unveiled an incentive plan including the lowering of rental rates at Ontario Airport to encourage airlines to increase flight operations there. Romo said the rental discounts being offered to the airlines currently operating there or ones contemplating coming in to the aerodrome were significant, making Ontario competitive with all of the airports in the region. Ontario officials were not placated by that proposal, however, and pushed forward with the creation of the joint powers authority.
Current county chief executive officer Greg Devereaux, who was Ontario city manager when Ovitt was Ontario mayor, told the board of supervisors in a report dated August 28 that the formation of the joint powers agreement with Ontario would “provide overall direction in the maintenance, management, development, and marketing of Ontario International Airport for the benefit of the citizens of San Bernardino County, and the economic development of the Inland Empire Region.
“The Ontario International Airport (ONT) is a vital economic asset to the county of San Bernardino, the city of Ontario, the Inland Empire, and the regional air transportation system that serves Southern California,” Devereaux continued. “The successful operation of ONT results in positive economic impacts to area manufacturers, logistics companies, and creates employment for area residents and enhanced business opportunities for entities engaged in or dependent upon aviation-oriented activities. The Ontario International Airport Authority will be governed by a five-member commission consisting of elected officials and community and business leaders from the airport’s vast air service region. Two members will be from the Ontario City Council, one member will be the county supervisor representing the supervisorial district in which ONT is located, and two will be prominent community members residing within ONT’s air service market which includes seven million residents in a four-county region, including Los Angeles.”

(August 31)  The county board of supervisors has postponed utilizing eminent domain to force a property owner to sell a strip of land in Fontana to facilitate the construction of a raised median curb along Cherry Avenue.
In Fontana, the county, the county transportation agency and the city of Fontana are cooperating on the Interstate 10 at Cherry Avenue Interchange Reconstruction Project. The county has been authorized to serve as lead agency with regard to right-of-way acquisition for the undertaking, which is to include the elimination of traffic congestion and safety hazards along Cherry Avenue.
Prior to the August 28 board of supervisors meeting, county counsel Jean-Rene Basle told the board, “As the lead agency for the project, the county seeks to acquire, through eminent domain, a small portion of property from an approximate 15.75 acre parcel located at the northwest quadrant of Cherry Avenue and the San Bernardino Freeway (I-10) in Fontana. The subject property is owned by Leader Enterprises Co., LTD (Leader). A portion of the subject property is used by and for a truck stop business known as ‘Truck Town.’ Currently, the main route for truckers to access the subject property is to exit off I-10 at Cherry Avenue, travel a short distance, and then make a left-turn onto the property. Due to traffic congestion and safety concerns, a raised median curb will be constructed along Cherry Avenue as part of the improvement project. Leader is claiming that the proposed construction constitutes a substantial impairment of access, and will result in significant severance damages and loss of goodwill. The county disputes this claim. As the parties have not resolved this issue, this matter is proceeding to trial.”
Basle requested that the board authorize the hiring of the law firm of Meyers Nave, in an amount not to exceed $100,000, for the provision of legal services in connection with the eminent domain proceeding entitled County of San Bernardino v. Texman Properties, LTD, et al.
Upon considering the matter, the board upon a motion by supervisor Neil Derry that was seconded by supervisor Gary Ovit, unanimously voted to move the item off calendar.

(August 31)  John Hennes, the contractor who aided and abetted disgraced former Upland mayor John Pomierski in schemes to extort bribes from businessmen and others with permit and project applications pending at City Hall, was sentenced on August 27 to  a split year-long sentence consisting of  six months in prison and six months under house arrest.
U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips imposed the sentence, which included a $5,000 fine and two years of post incarceration supervision, nearly nine months after Hennes entered sealed guilty pleas last December to two of the four charges against him, conspiracy to commit bribery and making false statements to federal agents. From that point on and for the next four months, he was secretly cooperating with federal authorities in constructing the criminal case against the former mayor.
Pomierski, who had been Upland mayor since 2000, began shaking down local business owners and operators and others with projects pending at City Hall and before the Upland City Council as early as 2004. Utilizing a business he owned, JP Construction, as well as a construction business owned by Hennes, Pomierski worked with two others, Jason Crebs and Anthony  Sanchez, in perpetrating extortion and pay-off schemes. Those abuses of Pomierski’s authority  targeted applicants for business, operating or construction permits in Upland who would be approached and informed that by securing the consulting services of Hennes, Crebs or Sanchez, approval of those applications could be guaranteed. Hennes was Pomierski’s appointee to the Upland Housing Appeals Board.
Upland City Hall along with the homes of Pomierski and Hennes and the Rancho Cucamonga office of Sanchez’s business were the sites of a raid by search warrant-bearing FBI and IRS agents in June 2010. In January 2011, Crebs and Sanchez were indicted by a federal grand jury for their involvement in a bribery scheme. The last week of February 2011 Pomierski resigned as Upland mayor. On March 2, 2011, Pomierski and Hennes were indicted by a federal grand jury on 11 separate counts including bribery, extortion and conspiracy.
The overt acts described in that indictment included extortion and bribery efforts relating to two businesses in Upland, the Chronic Cantina and H3 Holistic.
On April 18, 2011, Crebs entered a guilty plea to a single count of furthering a bribery conspiracy related to the Chronic Cantina as part of a revamped plea agreement by which he agreed to testify against Pomierski.
Sanchez fled to Costa Rica but returned to Los Angeles in January of this year and was arrested. He subsequently entered a guilty plea.   On April 26 of this year, Pomierski entered a guilty plea to a single count of bribery pertaining to his interaction with the owners of the Chronic Cantina between August 2009 and October 2009 carried out by Sanchez and Crebs, who acted as intermediaries.
On August 6, Phillips sentenced Pomierski to two years in federal prison, including six to eight months of alcohol dependency rehabilitation, as was arranged by Pomierski’s criminal lawyer, H. Dean Steward.
In a statement before Phillips, Hennes acknowledged having broken the law.
Sanchez and Crebs are due to be sentenced on September 10 and on October 1, respectively.

(August 31)  In November, Yucca Valley’s voters will be asked to approve a one percent municipal sales tax to provide town officials with funding to pay for a host of improvement projects, foremost of which is a sewer system being mandated on the town by the state of California.
Officially referred to as a transaction and use tax, the funding strategy must ultimately be approved by the town’s residents to be put into effect. The town council officially made the request of the county registrar of voters for the initiative, now designated as Measure U, to be put on the November general election ballot.
Ostensibly, the tax’s backers are maintaining that the proceeds will be utilized for financing the construction of the new sewer system, along with road improvements and augmentations to public safety, as well as a number of other projects  to be apprved by the town council.
As proposed, the tax will need only a simple majority – fifty percent plus one vote – to pass. It is one of the peculiarities of California law that taxes intended for a specific use must pass by a supermajority,  i.e., two thirds approval, to be levied.
The primary motivating factor behind the requested tax is the need for the Yucca Valley community to develop a sewer system.
The citified amenity of a wastewater treatment system has long eluded Yucca Valley as the entire town and its outlying area have utilized septic systems for decades. After the town incorporated as a municipality in 1991, no effort to construct a wastewater system was undertaken. Monitoring carried out by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and the United States Geological survey demonstrated that residues left in the ground that seep into the aquifer had risen to levels that presaged health threats if the matter was not addressed. Those contaminants included nitrates and other pollutants, including pharmaceuticals and salts.
By 2000, with the population having increased to 16,865, the need to transition the community from the traditional septic systems to a sewer system was growing, although residents and some officials maintained that the water level in the aquifer was deep enough to delay the need for a wastewater treatment system.
With the water table declining through the increase in population and limited rainfall, an effort to reverse the aquifer’s depletion was made, consisting of the construction of the Morongo Basin Pipeline and the importation of state aqueduct water into Yucca Valley. Whereas previously, the groundwater level had been dropping faster than the nitrates from septic systems seeped downward, with the completion of the Morongo Basin Pipeline project and the accompanying completion and activation of recharge basins in Yucca Valley, the Hi-Desert Water District began to percolate water into the aquifer and the water table began to rise. That water came in contact with the high levels of nitrates left over from decades of septic discharge and the nitrates found their way into some of the Hi-Desert Water District’s wells. This triggered a scaling back of the Hi-Desert Water District’s recharge efforts, and the goal of reestablishing the Yucca Valley water table to the natural level present in the 1940s has not been achieved. Moreover, Yucca Valley’s water supply coming into contact with the contaminants in the soil resulted in the animation of federal and state monitoring and regulatory agencies concerned with the drinkability of water.
The United States Geological Survey determined that nitrates accumulating beneath Yucca Valley are present in ever increasing concentrations and at depths that pose a threat to the groundwater, including a calculation that 880 acre-feet of septic discharge currently reaches the groundwater every year.
In 2007, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency responsible for protecting water quality, adopted a resolution identifying the town of Yucca Valley as one of 66 communities throughout the state with groundwater threatened by the continuing overuse of septic systems. The board further declared Yucca Valley as a top priority for eliminating the use of septic systems, meaning Yucca Valley’s is one of the five most seriously threatened water supplies in the state.
With the writing on the wall and state regulators inching toward ever more prohibitive action, in 2011 the town of Yucca Valley, where the population had increased to 20,700 the previous year, forged a memorandum of agreement with the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Hi-Desert Water District to allow interim permits for new septic systems while proceeding with planning for a wastewater system. Under that memorandum’s terms, state-imposed septic discharge prohibitions are due to be triggered as of May 19, 2016. Under that mandate, phase 1 of a wastewater system must be completed or significantly on its way to completion by that date or the state will initiate enforcement action. The first phase of the project is to cover the downtown area of Yucca Valley, the area most proximate to the heart of the groundwater basin.  Similarly, phase 2 must be completed or nearly completed by May 19, 2019 and phase 3 must be completed by May 19, 2022.
If those systems are not in place by the stipulated dates, Yucca Valley property owners will receive cease and desist orders with the potential of daily fines for non-compliance. They will be ordered to discontinue the discharge from their septic systems, seal them off and pump them regularly. If they do not, the fines to be levied against them can reach $5,000 per day.
To defray the cost of constructing the sewer system, which is to consist of over 400,000 linear feet of collection pipe as well as a treatment plant and other facilities, the Hi-Desert Water District made a previous rough estimate that  each Yucca Valley parcel’s share in the debt burden will run to around $16,700, likely entailing monthly assessments on homeowners of somewhere between $20 and $40 per month. Officials  now say  that estimate is  stale.
According to town officials, upon approval, the one cent municipal sales tax will bring in at least $100 million to the town and as much as $160 million over the next 25 years to help pay for the sewer system. This would lessen, but not eliminate, officials said, the assessments to be borne by property owners. “Our analysis conservatively estimates that the contribution by the town will reduce costs by at least 35%. This amounts to approximately $20 per month of cost per equivalent dwelling unit covered by the annual contribution of the town,” said town manager Mark Nuaimi.
Anticipating passage of the measure, Hi-Desert Water District and town officials have drafted a lease agreement to provide for town subsidization of the sewer project, which will be undertaken by the district as the lead agency. The agreement provides for the water district, as the owner of the pipes, collection system and treatment facilities, to lease them to the town for $2.8 million per year beginning in 2017. The town will in turn lease the sewer system back to the water district for $1 per year. The agreement calls for the service to be rendered to the jurisdiction of the town as a whole, and is a standard arrangement between public agencies with a common interest, officials maintain. The agreement will contain a termination clause the town can unilaterally trigger at will.
In its official proposal of the transaction and use tax, the town emphasizes that proceeds from the increased sales tax will be utilized for more than just paying for the sewer system and will deliver revenue to the city that will not only reduce the wastewater treatment system assessments levied on property owners but also pay for street and road improvements and enhance police and fire service.
While some town residents decried the tax proposal as a further layer of burden placed upon citizens by government, others, including  the chamber of commerce,  hailed it as an innovative step toward reducing for town residents the cost of building the sewer system, since town businesses cater to a clientele composed of roughly  50 percent non-residents.

(August 24)   ONTARIO – The Ontario City Council on August 21 voted to join with San Bernardino County in the formation of the Ontario International Airport Authority, an entity intended to facilitate the city’s efforts to regain ownership and control of Ontario Airport.
It is anticipated that San Bernardino County will officially vote to join Ontario, the county’s fourth largest city in terms of population, as a member of the joint powers authority later this month.
In 1967 the city of Ontario transferred management of the airport to the city of Los Angeles and its department of airports, a ploy which allowed the entity that owned and controlled Los Angeles International Airport to use its prestige and greater negotiating leverage to convince airlines to fly into and out of Ontario. In 1985, Ontario deeded the airport to the megalopolis for no consideration. Under Los Angeles’s direction, over $550 million in improvements were made to the airport, and passenger traffic there increased dramatically from just under 200,000 in 1966 to 7.2 million in 2007. But over the last five years, passengers flying in and out of Ontario have dwindled considerably, with 4.2 million passengers in 2011, and further declines are registering this year.
Ontario officials blame Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports, the non-profit entity Los Angeles created to own, maintain, administer and operate its division of airports, for the downturn in passenger traffic through Ontario in recent years. The once-cordial relationship between Ontario and Los Angeles has suffered as Ontario officials maintain that Los Angeles has purposefully increased enplaned passenger costs at Ontario and diminished marketing of the airport as a ploy to increase passenger traffic at Los Angeles International Airport, even as the airline industry in general has been contracting. Led by councilman Alan Wapner, Ontario officials have been pushing ever more aggressively to have Los Angeles relinquish the airport, maintaining that the entirety of the Inland Empire has seen its economy negatively impacted as a result of the loss of passengers transiting through Ontario Airport. That effort, which included videos, and a push to have legislation passed in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. to mandate what is referred to as local control of the airport, has angered Los Angeles World Airport officials, who earlier this year offered to let Ontario take over the Ontario Airport marketing assignment.
Ontario officials maintained that they did not want to undertake the promotion of the airport if they did not have control over costs at the aerodrome. Los Angeles World Airports, known by its acronym LAWA, oversees Los Angeles International Airport, Van Nuys Airport, Palmdale Airport and Ontario International. Ontario officials assert that for the last five years LAWA has allowed Ontario International Airport to languish, as major improvements have been made to Los Angeles International Airport.  LAWA charges the airlines at Ontario International $14.50 per enplaned passenger, which is substantially more than the $11, $9.93, $5.34, $4.07 and $2.10 charged at Los Angeles International, John Wayne, Long Beach, Palm Springs and Burbank airports, respectively. Ontario officials have noted that Los Angeles World Airports has overstaffed Ontario Airport with Los Angeles Department of Airports personnel, artificially inflating the operating costs at Ontario Airport.  Indeed, Ontario officials maintain, LAWA is purposefully mismanaging Ontario International as part of an effort to bolster the Los Angeles economy.
In recent years, some airlines have elected to discontinue operating out of Ontario. JetBlue no longer offers a nightly red-eye flight from Ontario to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, having discontinued that option in 2008. Allegiant Air ceased flying into and out of Ontario in 2009. Both JetBlue and Allegiant cited the higher costs at Ontario in their decisions to abandon the airport.
In recent days, LAWA has unveiled an incentive plan including the lowering of rental rates at Ontario Airport to encourage airlines to increase flight operations there.
LAWA’s Jess Romo, who serves as the Ontario Airport manager, is promoting Ontario Airport by offering airlines currently operating there or ones contemplating coming in a reduction on the rent for space in the airport’s terminals.
Currently at Ontario, airlines are paying $144.11 per square foot for terminal space. That is up from the $134.39 they were charged in 2011, but less than the $154.63 charged in 2010. Romo did not specify how much of a break LAWA would be offering the airlines, but said the discounts would be significant, making Ontario competitive with all of the airports in the region. And he indicated the rents would be reduced even further for airlines that significantly increased their operations at the airport.
Ontario officials were not placated by that proposal, however, and pushed forward with the creation of the joint powers authority, designating Wapner and councilman Jim Bowman as the city’s representatives to it.
“Ontario Airport and the economic destiny of the Inland Empire should not be in the hands of the officials of a city more than 40 miles away, who are not answerable to the local electorate,” Wapner said. “Ontario Airport should be operated by an agency that is responsible and accountable to our residents for its service and performance.”
The county will have at least one representative on the authority board. Another elected official from another local city, quite possibly Rancho Cucamonga, will in time be appointed as a voting member as well. Ontario officials did not rule out the possibility of having a representative from Los Angeles or LAWA in some fashion associated with the authority.
Gina Marie Lindsey, the executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, told the Sentinel, “Our immediate focus is ensuring the long-term success of ONT.  An independent, multi-jurisdictional authority can be a good governance model for enterprises like airports.  If there were to be a change in the governance structure for ONT, an airport authority is one of many models.”
Linsey has previously  maintained the decrease in passenger traffic at Ontario International is a reflection of the struggling national, state and local economy. She indicated she did not believe Ontario’s effort to seize back ownership and operational control of the airport would reverse Ontario Airport’s decline.
“Local control, in and of itself, is not going to be a panacea,” she said. “We ought to be working together to stem the exodus now.”
Lindsey further indicated that Los Angeles was not poised to simply return the airport to Ontario, emphasizing that a considerable amount of money under the discretionary spending control of Los Angeles World Airports had been invested in Ontario Airport. “The city of Los Angeles has made an extraordinary investment in Ontario Airport,” she said. “$128 million of passenger facility charges paid by passengers at LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] came over to Ontario to help build the two terminals.”
Charges that Los Angeles is exploiting Ontario Airport are unfounded, Lindsey said. “Every dollar that was earned at the Ontario airport went back into re-investment at the Ontario airport,” she said. Criticism that LAWA is using Ontario as a dumping ground for Los Angeles Department of Airport employees is similarly inaccurate, she said, pointing out that her agency had reduced operating costs at Ontario Airport by $19 million per year. “150 of the employees that used to be at Ontario were absorbed into LAX,” she said.
The formation of the joint powers authority was widely seen as an intensification of Ontario’s recent moves to reacquire the airport. Previously, Wapner and other city officials asserted that Los Angeles should simply deed the airport back to Ontario as a public benefit transfer, maintaining that the airport had no value as marketable real estate. It was subsequently learned, however, that the city of Ontario had made a confidential offer to purchase the airport for $50 million and an assumption of all debt related to financing for improvements that had been made to the airport.
Los Angeles officials have privately said they believe the airport and its assets to be worth in excess of $450 million.

(August 24)  The Needles City Council on August 22 unanimously agreed to sell the Colorado River Medical Center to Community Healthcare Partner, Inc., a non-profit corporation owned by Bing Lum, for $2.577 million.
The deal comes seven months after the city entered into a previous arrangement with another locally-formed non-profit, Needles Hospital, Inc., to sell the hospital for $3,587,002. Ultimately, that deal fell apart when Needles Hospital, Inc. was unable to close escrow by a stipulated April 26 deadline.
Another entity controlled by Lum, A.M. Pharmacy, which operates contract pharmacies within existing hospitals, had made a competing $3 million bid for the Colorado River Medical Center last year before losing out in that go-round to Needles Hospital, Inc. Lum, a doctor of pharmacology, grew up in Needles and graduated from Needles High School with the Class of 1979.
A.M. Pharmacy is a for-profit company and as such, was at a disadvantage with regard to the takeover protocol for the hospital because Needles voters in June 2010 passed Measure Q, which called for keeping the hospital open and absolving the city of the financial burden of subsidizing the facility by having a non-profit entity selected to run the hospital.
The city of Needles took on ownership of the Colorado River Medical Center in April 2008 after Brentwood, Tennessee-based Lifepoint Hospitals, a for-profit corporation, embarked on an effort to move the institution’s equipment and personnel to Valley View Hospital, another facility it owned in Arizona, roughly 12 miles from Needles.
Because of long-running inadequate billing practices, including failures to invoice Medicare and Medi-Cal as well as insurance companies and patients in a timely fashion, the hospital has lost money while under city ownership, representing a financial liability to taxpayers.  The city created the board of trustees to oversee the hospital, and that panel, together with the city council, came to a consensus that spinning the facility off to an independent operator is the best solution for ensuring that the community has adequate medical care without soaking the taxpayers.
Lum formed Community Health Care Partner as a non-profit entity to be able to make a bid in compliance with conditions of Measure Q. Lum said Community Health Care Partner is an entity entirely distinct from AM Pharmacy, although he said he would be able to call upon the resources of AM Pharmacy and the experience he has in having run that company in operating Colorado River Medical Center. The hospital, together with the 5.71 acres upon which it is located, was covered under the purchase agreement. The city council made several amendments to the draft purchase agreement under consideration August 22 and a finalized version of the agreement will not be available until it is rewritten by city attorney John Pinkney.
Lum told the Sentinel he believes Community Healthcare Partner will be able to “close escrow by the first of the year. We are of course in a situation where the hospital is in need physically, with the building and equipment, and operationally and financially. Those things are up in the air right now and if there is an immediate dire need, I may have to work with city officials to start sooner, but right now I am anticipating getting started at the first of the year.”
Lum said he is looking forward to making the transition in ownership come about and keeping the hospital afloat.
“I want to thank the city council and the hospital board and city of Needles for their thoughtful and thorough consideration of my proposal,” he said. “I am excited by the opportunity to return to my hometown and provide health care services for the Tri-State Area.”

(August 24)  ADELANTO—A month after the Adelanto Elementary School District was forced by a court ruling to accept a parent collective’s formalized demand that Desert Trails Elementary School be radically restructured, the school board on August 17 rejected the parent’s proposal that the underperforming school be immediately transformed into a charter school as of the opening of the 2012-13 academic year this week.
In July the parents union at Desert Trails Elementary School became the first such coalition of parents and education activists to actuate the provisions of California’s Empowerment Act, which was authored by former state senator Gloria Romero and passed by the legislature in 2010 to enable a majority of parents at a school at which students score  as low-performers on state academic tests to force a district to implement significant reforms. Known by the colloquialism “parent trigger,” those reforms can range from replacing the principal and up to half the staff to reopening the school as a charter academy.
The parent trigger process at Desert Trails Elementary School, where a significant number of the students have parents whose first language is not English and at which for the last seven years students have had the lowest scores within the district on state standardized academic tests, began last year. Pursuant to the Parent Empowerment Act, a parent union was formed by  Desert Trails Elementary parents, who with the assistance of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Parent Revolution, on January 12, submitted 466 school parent signatures on petitions asking the district to undertake a set of reforms at the severely underperforming school. Those reforms included sacking the school’s principal, David Mobley, giving the school’s parents authority in hiring his successor, reducing class sizes and increasing the number of school days and instructional hours while intensifying the school’s science, history and art curriculum. The number of signatures on those petitions  was sufficient to meet the requirements of the Parent Empowerment Act, parent union members believed.  A group of parents opposed to the parent takeover of the school formed and went to work obtaining rescissions of many of the signatures on the petitions, and the parent union subsequently modified its agenda to request that the school be converted to a charter academy.
In February, the school district, to whom the parent trigger petitions had been entrusted, announced that it had validated the signatures of only 317 of the 466 signatures on the petitions. The Desert Trails Parent Union, represented by a law firm on retainer with Parent Revolution, Los Angeles-based Kirkland & Ellis, demanded a recount and reconsideration of that invalidation of the petition effort. After the district conducted that recount, the board, on March 28, voted unanimously to give a final rejection to the reconsideration of the parent trigger petitions, finding they fell 20 signatures short of the 321 signatures needed.
In response,  Mark Holscher, an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis, on April 5 filed on behalf of five of the members of the parents union – Doreen Diaz, Kathy Duncan, Teresa Rogers, Olivia Zamarripa and Bartola Del Villar – a petition for a writ of mandate and a complaint in Victorville Superior Court seeking a court order that the district verify the signatures and allow the Parent Trigger process to advance, as well as asking for the  recognition of  the educational rights of students at Desert Trails.
Holscher maintained that the district did not make an impartial tally of the signatures and “engaged in a systematic effort to invalidate the petitions” and that “the district’s teachers as well as teachers from outside the district engaged in a campaign to coerce parents to ‘rescind’ their petitions, and the district then used 97 of these purported ‘rescissions’ to block the January 12th petition.”
Judge Steve Malone, to whom the case was assigned, restored 97 of the signatures tossed out by the district, ruling that the district did not have the authority or a basis in law to discount signatures that proponents gathered and the district had abused its discretion in doing so. By his ruling Malone raised the number of qualified signatures to well above the 50 percent needed to validate the petition. He ordered the Adelanto Elementary School District to accept the petition as filed by the parent union within 30 days and seek proposals from charter school operators to take over Desert Trails.
By the ruling, the Desert Trails Parent Union became the first group to successfully enact California’s 2010 Parent Empowerment Act.
Board members of the Adelanto Elementary School District on August 17 voted 3 to 1 to accept the parents’ petition for the comprehensive makeover of  Desert Trails Elementary School. But that acceptance did not include signing off on the parents’ demand that the school be transformed into a charter campus.
The California Education Code provides for the formation of charter schools under the aegis of a sponsoring local school district. Charter schools function outside the normal parameters of normal schools and can offer a curriculum and educational smorgasbord unavailable in traditional public schools while meeting the requirements of both special needs students and accelerated scholars.
The school board, noting that the start of the 2012-13 academic year is imminent, concluded there was not sufficient lead time to form and initiate the operation of a charter school.
That provoked a sharp rebuke from the parents union,  Parent Revolution and Kirkland & Ellis, all of whom said the district and the board did not have the authority to override Malone’s July 18 court order to permit the parent union to undertake the formation of a charter school.
Holscher threatened further legal action, stating “We are prepared to use all available legal remedies to make sure Judge Malone’s order is followed.”
Holscher insisted Malone’s order was binding with regard to the 2012-13 school year since the district had previously asserted there was not adequate time to set up the charter school operation by the start of the school year. Despite taking that position, the district had submitted to the parent union a charter school formation plan.
When the parent union rejected the district’s charter school proposal, the district, in an assertion hotly contested by the parent union, maintained that it has final authority in determining which reform options will be applied to the school.  The school board has given superintendent Darin Brawley instructions to revamp Desert Trails’ educational mission in compliance with a plan propounded by the board, which is to entail revised curriculum, an extended teaching and instructional day, more technology, writing workshops, evaluation of teachers’ performance and the academic performance of the school’s students, and teacher support. The district is also forming a community advisory council composed of teachers, administrators, parents and civic officials to oversee the implementation of the changes.
Despite the district’s action, the parent union is continuing to consider charter applications and intends to initiate a charter school operation on the Desert Trails campus by October. The parent union succeeded in attracting four charter school proposals, including the one provided by the district.
Both the Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley and LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy in Hesperia have tendered tentative proposals and are continuing to work on finalizing those by September. The parents union, as noted, rejected out of hand the district’s overture to form a charter school on the Desert Trail campus. Another  tentative proposal was floated by   South Lake Tahoe-based Iwa Rere Educational and Technical Engagements. Soon after learning that well over 70 percent of the school’s students were performing significantly below state standards and many lacked basic communicative skill in English, Iwa Rere, which tailors at least a portion of its approach to gifted students who function well independently and in unstructured learning environments, abruptly withdrew as a candidate to run the school.
Some observers anticipated difficulty if the Lewis Center gets the parents union’s nod, given its disaffinity for test preparation-driven instruction. Lewis, while attempting to instill problem-solving skills and out-of-the-box thinking in its students, has had success to some degree but has enjoyed the advantage of working with significant numbers of students with sound basic skills. An eventual goal at Desert Trail will be to improve test performance among the students there.
The school’s students have collectively scored in the bottom 10 percent of all California elementary schools. In the school’s 2011 graduating sixth grade class 72 percent of students were not proficient with the English language and 70 percent were not proficient in math. Two-thirds of this year’s crop of graduating sixth-graders are unable to read or do math at grade level. Since 2007 Desert Trails has been classified as a failing school.
Both the Lewis Center’s and LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy’s proposals are to be submitted in full to the parent union by September 15. The parent union will then submit those proposals to the parents who signed the January petition, many of whom lack basic English and other academic skills themselves, for evaluation. They will then collectively come to a determination about which entity will be contracted with to run the Desert Trails charter school, which the union wants to open as early as October.

By Steven Ipson
(August 24)  There is an ongoing problem between the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center (which does business as the Cooper Regional History Museum) and the county board of supervisors as well as the county assessor. As an active member of the cultural center’s board of trustees for the past five years plus, I would like to present the history that has taken place and request the public’s support for this community resource. The Chaf-fey Communities Cultural Center was established in 1965 and is dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history and cultural legacy of the communities of Upland, Ontario, Montclair, Mt. Baldy, Rancho Cucamonga and San Antonio Heights.
The groundwork for the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center (CCCC) was laid in 1964 by a number of civic leaders who joined together to preserve the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, built in 1911 and located at Euclid and F Street. It was being replaced by a larger church being built on 16th Street just east of Euclid Avenue. The committee accepted the city of Upland’s offer to lease a five acre portion of Pioneer Park at $1 a year to serve as the new home to historic St Mark’s Church. In 1966, the church was cut into three sections and moved to its present location on 18th Street. In June of 1967, the CCCC held a grand opening and the church was opened to the public. The plans were to feature a history museum, art gallery, amphitheater, sculpture garden and theater.
To enhance the beauty of the church, the public became involved through residents, businesses, local organizations and service groups. There was construction of additional buildings, installation of landscaping, and the planting of a two-acre citrus grove, harking back to the origins of Upland.
Tragedy struck in 1987 as a fire destroyed a significant portion of the church and the historical artifacts collection stored there. A restoration program ensued and the cultural center transformed itself. Much repair work was done and chairs and new carpeting were added, which transformed the structure into a modern auditorium. With the addition of a new entrance, walkways, signage lighting and shrubbery, the building became more attractive and re-opened in April of 1990 for performances, lectures and concerts. This venue continued through the end of the 20th Century and continues today. In addition, weddings and funerals were added so residents could hold these important ceremonies in a landmark location. All of these events are hosted for a minimal donation, because the cultural center’s mission is to serve our communities, not generate profits. Over the years, our income from the use of the church building has just covered our maintenance and other operating expenses. The church and the Ada Cooper Museum, located downtown, are both staffed by volunteers and a director who is paid part time.
Many of the larger artifacts that are displayed in our shed at the back of the 18th Street property were exhibited to the many school children that came for yearly visits and received a better understanding of the early citrus industries and how the citrus groves looked when they dominated the area for over 60 years.
In 2005, the city of Upland entered into a business transaction at our 18th Street Property that spawned our dispute with the county assessor. The city sold the property consisting of Pioneer Park, including the portion that had been leased to Chaffey Communities Cultural Center to a builder, who deeded back 1.25 acres to CCCC, which consisted of the church, a small garage, which holds historical artifacts and documents, a shed to hold the larger artifacts, and a caretaker’s house that is rented out to provide security and minor maintenance.
In 2009, we were advised by the county assessor that the center was responsible for property tax in the amount of approximately $14,000 per year. We explained that the center was a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and, thus, was exempt from property taxes. The definition of a non-profit organization is one that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather then distribute them as profit or dividends and that is precisely the kind of operation we have. During the dialog we had with the assessor’s office, we were advised by the assessor’s staff that we would qualify if we made specific changes. We first revised our articles of incorporation and had them approved by the Secretary of State of California and then notified the assessor’s office of the changes. The Secretary of State, in addition, issued us a certificate of welfare from the Board of Equalization, which the assessor’s office stated qualified us as eligible for a 100% exemption. We then responded to their request that we modify the appearance of the 18th Street location by distributing our farm implements over the entire property with the implied statement that this adjustment would qualify us. Following this, we provided photos of the 18th Street location to the assessor’s office to confirm that we had complied with their request. After taking all these steps, we were confident that we had satisfied the county assessor that we were a non-profit institution and, therefore, would not be liable for property tax.
The assessor’s office re-evaluated our property and allowed CCCC a 19% discount against our property tax. This lowered our property tax to approximately $10,400 a year. When questioned about the amount, we were told that we employed companies for profit and that disqualified us. We questioned the irreasoning behind this decision. There are no offices on the property. People conducting weddings and funerals contact our president by phone to arrange for time slots for their ceremonies. They make a small contribution to utilize the historic 18th Street Church. The monies garnered from these ceremonies are used exclusively for our standard operating costs (insurance, gas, electricity, cleanup, security, and phone). There is no connection between any of the organizations or individuals that utilize our facilities and the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center. Facing a property tax amount that would exhaust our limited resources, and force us to close our doors within five years, we sought legal help. Research showed that similar non-profit organizations had encountered the same type of problem, but they had the resources to take their battle to court. In each case, these organizations, which closely resemble the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center, demonstrated that the revenues they received were used to further the charitable purposes of the associations and did not inure to private benefit.
We elected to take our appeal to the county board of supervisors, feeling a review of these legal precedents and a better understanding of how we operated out of the 18th Street location would result in a favorable decision by the supervisors. We met with and thoroughly briefed our two supervisors, Janice Rutherford, representing the 18th Street location, and Gary Ovitt representing our downtown Upland location. We were informed that our appeal was on the agenda for the May meeting.
Prior to the meeting with the board of supervisors, we heard comments from knowledgeable people that, “You won’t get one government agency to overrule another government agency,” and “The county needs the money more than you.” Nevertheless, we went into the meeting confident we would get a fair hearing and would prevail based upon our operation and previous court decisions. We utilize our courtyard in downtown Upland for the same kind of events for companies and organizations that donate a fee, and we have 100% property tax exemption there. Other 501(c)3 organizations operate in the same manner we do. Our president, Dave Stevens, our lawyer Sam Crowe and I addressed the board of supervisors. Unfortunately, both of the supervisors representing us did not appear at the board meeting and did not have the item postponed. The remaining three supervisors present voted to deny our appeal to give the entire property tax exempt status. Instead they voted to enforce the county assessor’s decision to apply a property tax to the cultural center on that portion of the property that does not have an exemption.
We continue to accommodate residents’ requests to tour the 18th Street Church and grounds, see the artifacts and to utilize our upgraded garage areas as a research area, focusing on local history. The library preserves books and maps of the area, clipping files, scrap books, historic home research tools, and a growing genealogy and family history. I personally have taken a number of guests through the church so they can appreciate the beauty and workmanship of a 100-year-old historic structure.
Faced with a property tax bill of $10,400 a year, and combined with a struggling economy which restricts our fundraising ability, the prospect of closing our doors within the next five years is steadily becoming a reality. We believe that the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center not only preserves the history of the local area, but also educates our local school children about roots in the community in which they live, and introduces both longtime and new residents to the unique and rich history of the valley. You are invited to come down to the Cooper Museum at 217 East ‘A” Street (across from the downtown Upland Metrolink) and see the museum. Admission is free and it is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. till 5 p.m. and can be reached at (909) 982-8010. If you believe that we are genuinely a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the community, that we are not trying to circumvent the law but rather apply the law in a fair and consistent manner, you are invited to pick up a postcard preaddressed to your county supervisor. This postcard will voice your support for our position that the 18th Street property should be totally tax exempt. This postcard only requires your signature and a stamp to let our supervisors know how the community feels. If you are an organization, group, school, church or other entity and want to get your people involved, let us know and we will supply you with the amount of postcards required. If our supervisors hear from enough of our citizens asking them to reconsider their position, the community will come out a winner.
You can also view us at our website at www.coopermuseum.org.  Our 18 Street property location is open from 10 a.m. till 2 p.m. on Thursdays and upon request.

Steven Ipson is the secretary for the Board of Trustees of the Chaffey Communities Cultural Center.