Democrat
Knaus Using
Republican
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At long last a Democrat vying for local office appears to be on the brink of doing what San Bernardino County’s down home Republican politicians have been doing for a generation or longer: utilizing the money provided by self-interested donors to buy her way into office in a trade-off of her future decision-making authority for the wherewithal to capture the office she is seeking.
Kim Knaus is a political neophyte who has come, essentially, out of nowhere to become the frontrunner in the race for San Bernardino Fifth Ward Council position. Her opponent is Henry Nickel, a two-term former councilman who was upset in his bid for reelection in 2020. In March, Nickel, who unsuccessfully vied for mayor in a seven-candidate primary race in 2022, made an even more determined effort at a comeback in this year’s Fifth Ward contest, challenging the man who beat him four years ago, incumbent Ben Reynoso. Also in the March primary race was Knaus; another former Fifth Ward Councilman, Chas Kelley; and Rose Ward. Once the votes were counted, Ward, with 162 or 4.18 percent of the total 3,878 votes cast; Kelley with 490 votes or 12.64 percent; and Reynoso, with 812 votes or 20.94 percent, were also-rans, finishing, respectively, fifth, fourth and third. In San Bernardino, a candidate vying for municipal office who captures a majority of the vote – at least 50 percent plus at least one additional vote – is declared the winner. If, in a contest involving more than two candidates, no competitor captures a majority of the vote, the two hopefuls with the most votes face each other in a second contest, held in that year’s general election. Nickel and Knaus, as the two top vote-getters in March, qualified for the November run-off. While Nickel had avenged his 2020 loss to Reynoso, finishing second, with 974 votes or 25.12 percent, he was bettered, by a substantial margin, by Knaus, who garnered 1,440 votes or 37.13 percent.
On the basis of Knaus’s better than 7-to-5 outpolling ratio over Nickel in the March primary alone, by the metrics applied by most political handicappers, she would appear to be the favorite going into the November race.
There are a few peculiarities in San Bernardino’s Fifth Ward and the general trend in politics throughout San Bernardino County, however, that might have evened the odds in the race.
Nickel, for starters, is a far more experienced campaigner. In addition to the two previous races in the Fifth Ward that he won and the one that he lost, he also ran for mayor and he has twice vied, albeit unsuccessfully, for the California Assembly twice.
Moreover, Nickel is a Republican, a distinction which in San Bernardino County has for decades – indeed, for more than half of a century – represented an advantage, generally, over Democrats such as Knaus. Since the mid-1960s, San Bernardino County has been a Republican County. That was the case six decades ago, at which point registered Republicans simply outnumbered registered Democrats, and it has continued to be the case since 2009, when the number of registered Democrats eclipsed the number of registered Republicans.
While throughout the Golden State overall the Democrats since the 1990s have been in ascendancy such that three out of the last five governors were Democrats and for two decades running the lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state superintendent of schools, insurance commissioner, controller and state treasure positions have been held overwhelmingly by Democrats, and the Democrats as well for nearly a decade have enjoyed supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, there are five pockets throughout the state that remain as Republican bastions. One of those is San Bernardino County. In San Bernardino County, the local Republican and local Democrat parties are controlled by their respective central committees. The central committees are composed of members that are elected every four years in voting held during the presidential primary election, with Democrats voting for their central committee members based upon residency within the Assembly Districts in the county and the Republicans voting for their central committee members based upon residency within the county’s five supervisorial districts. In addition, both central committees have what are referred to as ex-officio members, those being ones who are not elected to the central committee directly but rather those members of the respective parties who are elected to vie for state legislative office. Thus, a Republican who ran for California State Senate or the Assembly, whether he or she was successful or not, would be an ex-officio member of the Republican Central Committee for a term of, respectively, four or two years, corresponding to the length of state senate and assembly terms. Likewise, the Democrat candidates for the State Senate or the Assembly would also be honored with membership in their county central committee based upon their candidacies for the state legislature.
Both the Republican Central Committee and the Democrat Central Committee are devoted to ensuring the success of the members of their respective parties during elections, those held during the gubernatorial primaries in June in California and presidential primaries in March of leap years and both the gubernatorial and presidential general elections held in in November.
By law and observed tradition in California, federal legislative, state legislative and state constitutional offices such as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and so forth are partisan, meaning political parties such as Democrats, Republicans and a whole host of others – American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom and other even more obscure parties – can hold elections during the primary restricted to just their party members to nominate members of their party to be candidates for state and federal office in the November election. On the ballot, those running for these offices are identified in terms of their party. By law and mostly observed tradition in California, local governmental offices – such as county positions such as supervisor, sheriff, district attorney, treasurer or assessor and city posts such as mayor or council member – are nonpartisan. In this way, those running for local office are not identified as members of any party, even though most have a party affiliation. Thus, in most counties in California, party affiliation is not, or is supposed to not be, a defining issue in local elections. In San Bernardino County, however, local elections are shot through-and-through with partisan political implication.
Historically, or at least over the last 50 to 60 years, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, with only the rarest of exceptions, has demonstrated itself to be much more energetic, focused, cohesive, creative, dynamic, efficient and effective than the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee.
San Bernardino County Republicans, as a rule in virtually every election cycle going back to the beginning of the latter third of the Twentieth Century, have raise more funds to support Republican candidates than San Bernardino Democrats have raised to support Democrats running for office. What is more, once the Republicans have had that money in hand, they have made a far more consistent practice than their Democrat counterparts in applying that money efficiently by conducting polls to ascertain the prevailing attitudes of voters, carrying out opposition research, formulating a message or series of messages and then executing on a campaign using billboards, television ads, radio spots, handbills, mailers and phone banks to promote their party’s candidates and producing attack ads or “hit pieces” to trash the reputations of their Democratic opponents.
Further, the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee, to the extent that it has participated in fundraising and used whatever money it has obtained to promote Democrats seeking office, it has generally drawn the line at providing that support to Democrats seeking legislative positions, either in the U.S. Congress or the State Senate or the Assembly. Rarely, meaning virtually never, has the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee involved itself in promoting the candidacies of members of the board of supervisors or district attorney or sheriff or assessor or mayor or council member or school board member or water board member. The Republican Central Committee, however, has more than held its own in matching or exceeding the Democrats while pushing the candidacies of those running for Congress or the state legislature. At the same time the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee has gone further, substantially further, in running or assisting campaigns of Republicans seeking county or municipal or local agency offices, including candidates for school board or water board or fire board. While some coordination of resources at a grace roots level takes place in which Democrats help Democrats in trying to get elected, those efforts are not ones that involve the Democratic Central Committee and its resources and machinery.
An indicator of Republicans’ ability to to hitch up all of its horses to the same side of the wagon to have them pull in unison and in the same direction and the comparative dysfunction of the local Democratic Party can be seen in looking at the county’s overall numbers in terms of voter registration and then contrasting that with who the holders of political offices in San Bernardino County are.
Over the entirety of San Bernardino County and its 1,197,840 registered voters, those who self-affiliate with the Democratic Party, 475,955 or 39.7 percent, convincingly outnumber registered Republicans, at 363,984 or 30.4 percent. Still, engaged Republicans outhustle engaged Democrats and do a far better job of convincing their less active party colleagues to get out and vote than do their Democrat rivals. Of the five positions on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, four are held by Republicans. On the 22 city and two town councils among the 24 incorporated municipalities in San Bernardino County, 17 have more Republican members than Democrats. Eighteen of the county’s 24 mayors are Republicans. While the assembly members and state senators representing San Bernardino County in the California legislature and the members of Congress representing San Bernardino County in Washington, D.C. are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, that is because several of those districts overlap into Los Angeles, Orange or Riverside counties, where the Democrats are more dominant. In San Bernardino County, the lion’s share of the votes for state and federal lawmakers go to Republicans. All of this is despite the clear advantage in sheer numbers the Democrats have over Republicans in San Bernardino County terms of registered voters.
In San Bernardino’s Fifth Ward, Democrats hold a decided advantage over Republicans in terms of sheer numbers. Of the ward’s 17,555 registered voters 7,785 or 44.3 percent are Democrats, a number which dwarfs the district’s 4,614 Republicans, who represent just over a quarter, some 26.3 percent, of the jurisdiction’s voters. Nevertheless, Democratic voter turnout in the Fifth Ward lags significantly behind that of Republicans. In the 2020 election, 87.36 percent of the Republicans registered to vote in Ward 5 voted. In the same election, 53.47 percent of the Democrats in Ward 5 eligible to vote voted. And that turnout was an anomaly over what normally occurs in Ward 5. Reynoso, with 1,295 votes out of 5,083 cast in the six-candidate March 2020 Primary Race in Ward 5, trailed significantly behind Nickel and his 1,802 votes, at that time, placing second with 25.48 percent of the vote to the incumbent’s 35.45 percent. Reynoso, a young and upcoming political activist and relatively recent college graduate, utilized a strategy of registering college students living on campus or near campus at Cal State San Bernardino, which lies within the Fifth Ward, to make up for the difference between him and his opponent in the March 2020 Primary Race and overcome Nickel in the November 2020 General Election. This artificially boosted the Democratic turnout in that election, and contributed to Reynoso’s victory.
Knaus is herself a Cal State San Bernardino graduate, albeit one who is a half-generation older than Reynoso.
She is no less identifiable with the Democratic Party than was Reynoso, having
worked as a field representative for the one Democrat currently on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, Joe Baca Jr. She has been involved in civic engagement, including neighborhood trash cleanups, the Verdemont Revitalization Project, and efforts at promoting greater socialization within the community that extended to reviving the movie nights in the park and a monthly food festival, which had the added effect of promoting small businesses.
It is for that reason not surprising that when Knaus expressed interest in running for the Fifth Ward council post, she garnered support, including that of the unions and the Democrats, who had been put off somewhat by Reynoso’s lack of focus on political and governmental issues in the last year or so, despite his being the Ward 5 incumbent, as he has been recently abstracted into the role of being a first-time father.
Despite being a county employee, working as an analyst in San Bernardino County’s Workforce Development, which automatically enrolls him in the union representing county workers, Nickel as a politician has expressed anti-unionist sentiments. While that has made him a member in good standing within a certain wing of the Republican Party, it has also earned him the enmity of the union activists working locally. In a way that might have not been anticipated, this cut into the patchwork of support that Nickel was counting on to regain a position on the city council. As a Republican, some figured he would pick up the support of law enforcement across the board. But the police officers’ union that counted, The San Bernardino Police Officer Association, endorsed Knaus.
Also as a Republican, Nickel was half-expectant that any number of the political action committees and independent expenditure committees that have cropped up in recent years as a “special augmentation” to the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee and which have been a critical element of the Republicans being able to maintain their edge over the Democrats in the county would come to his assistance. Certainly, Nickel never expected that one of those key politica action committees would provide money to Knaus. That is, however, what happened.
The Inland Empire Business Alliance and its Political Action Committee over the last three to four election cycles established themselves as major players in San Bernardino County politics, raising money for and donating almost exclusively to Republican candidates. In those rare circumstances where the Inland Empire Business Alliance Political Action Committee did come to the assistance of a Democrat, there were either no Republicans involved in those races or the race included a Republican who had in some fashion gotten on the wrong side of the political establishment.
On February 28, just prior to the March primary election, the Inland Empire Business Alliance provided Knaus with $5,500.
Instrumental in Knaus getting that money was Michelle Sabino.
Until recently and perhaps up to the present, Sabino has been considered a rising star in the San Bernardino County Republican Party. Sabino is a member of the San Bernardino County Central Committee, in which capacity she was elevated to the position of Third District representative on the cental committee’s executive board by Republican Central Committee Chairman Phil Cothran Sr.
She has represented herself as a passionate Republican and based upon that reputation, she was entrusted with serving the party in the role of board member of the Inland Empire Business Alliance Political Action Committee. In that organization, she is charged with ascertaining whom the political action committee will support in their electoral efforts.
For reasons that are inexplicable, when the Inland Empire Business Alliance Political Action Committee’s board got around to determining which candidate that organization would support in the Fifth Ward contest, it chose to back Knaus, the Democrat, over Nickel, the Republican.
The interpretations of what occurred are myriad.
Some figure that gone are the days when the local business community, composed primarily of Republicans, had committed itself to perpetuating in office business-friendly Republicans. Rather, it appears, members of the business community have taken a hard look at the numbers – including the number of Republicans in the state legislature vs. the number of Democrats in the state legislature – and resolved to make a transition.
Some contend that after years of fielding anemic candidates who did not understand the elective process and who were waiting upon others to formulate a winning strategy for them who never materialized, the Democrats have had an infusion of energetic young blood who are ready to head out onto the hustings and campaign, bringing to themselves support from areas the Democrats previously had not tapped into.
One theory is that the long transitional process that is taking San Bernardino County from being a thoroughly Republican-oriented region to one leaning toward the Democrats has progressed to the point that it is no longer unfashonable to embrace Democrats.
Others say that rather what has happened is that the county Republican establishment has been infiltrated by Democrat operatives – Democrats at heart who are masquerading as Republicans – and that they are awork eating away at the foundations of the county Republican Party from within.
One such Democrat sheep in Republican wool, many are saying, is Sabino.
Sabino utilized her Republican credentials to wangle an appointment to the Grand Terrace City Council in April. She beat out Ken Stewart, Ronald Perez and Vincent Rasso for the assignment of replacing Sylvia Robles, who resigned from the council earlier this year. Sabino is now vying for election to the city council position that Robles held, the term for which will elapse in December, in the November 5 election herself. She is using the power of incumbency as a boost in that electoral effort.
A contingent within the Republican Central Committee, invoking the bylaws of both the party and the central committee itself which require the expulsion of any member who assists a non-Republican in an electoral effort in which a Republican is competing, want to bounce Sabino from the Central Committee. They want Sabino to be removed from the executive board immediately and they want a inquiry and proceeding, comparable to a trial that will include the presentation of evidence, to effectuate her ouster from the committee.
One of those is Nickel. He railed against Sabino and other weak-kneed Republicans who are surrendering to the Democrats.
The creation of the political action committees and independent expenditure committees the Republicans have been successfully using against the Democrats for years were legitimately formed and abided by the disclosure rules so that anyone could see who was donating the money being used for political campaigns, Nickel said. He contrasted that with the manner in which the newest crop of independent expenditure committees and political action committees are operating. They are hiding their sources of money, Nickel said.
“These are dark money PACS [political action committees],” Nickel said. “They are filing zero records [identifying donors] with the state. They don’t report anything.”
Nickel charged that some entities, including those supporting his opponent, Knaus, are operating through a string of political action committees or independent expenditure committees in which money is passed from one to another to another to another and finally to the candidate, with several of the intervening committees being unregistered, such that it is impossible for anyone other than the recipient to determine who is behind the support effort.
“They are using shell PACs to funnel money, which is coming from questionable sources,” he said. There was a recent state law passed which prohibits a city contractor from donating to a city council member. So what this has created is these shell PACS and the candidates using that as a way to skirt the rules so that money from these contractors can be funneled to them. The enforcement of the Political Reform Act is much more robust at the level of those running for federal or state legislative office, but local candidates are almost entirely ignored.”
Concurrently, Nickel said, the Republican Party is losing its way in the face of the overwhelming dominance of the Democrats in Sacramento, where both the upper and lower legislative houses – the State Senate and the Assembly – are packed with a supermajority of Democrats, virtually drowning uut the Republican legislative voice and every state constitutional office is held by a Democrat rather than a Republican.
“You can see it every day,” Nickel said. “The Republicans have given up and are willing to kowtow to the Democrats by sacrificing other Republicans. You had whole sectors of the private sector and the economy Republicans could look to for support, developers, the building industry, manufactured housing producers, realtors, who are now ow are ready to collaborate with the Democrats because they are in charge, who are willing to sacrifice Republicans on this alter of the Democratic domination by throwing their support behind Democrats and Republicans in Name Only. That is where this dark money is coming from, these former major donors to the Republicans who right now don’t want to be seen as bankrolling the Democrats. The Republican Party is very fractured and disintegrating. You still have the grassroots Republicans who are very much in the fight and are as committed to conservative values and principles as before, but the party itself, which was so strong on the local level, is being damaged and the ability of the Republicans to hold together with a majority on virtually every one of the county’s city councils is eroding as more and more we are becoming answerable to Democrats and their ideas.”
It was irresponsible spending by Democrats at the local level that led to the city of San Bernardino declaring bankruptcy in 2012, Nickel noted. He said the Republican resurgence on the San Bernardino City Council about ten years ago, which included him, had made it possible for the city to structure its way out of perpetual deficit spending. But the city is heading toward Democrats becoming the dominant force on the city council, which will result in a repeat of a very sad history, Nickel said.
“I am afraid of what will happen after this election,” Nickel said, and made a suble reference to Sabino. “I blame some of our Republican leadership in being complicit in what is happening to our city. We spent seven years clawing out of bankruptcy and finally getting back into a stable position financially. Now, what I am seeing is everything we managed to do being dismantled. We are in danger of seeing the pension funding system for our police and employees being depleted. I am baffled why our police officers’ union would endorse my opponent. Her alignment with Joe Baca and other Democrats in the end is going to devastating for our community. The programs the Democrats in Sacramento have and the way the Democrats locally will apply them are not good for our city. The more homeless people you bring in, the more drug-addicted that you put up with the more impoverished that you take in and the more you create a population of uneducated and untrained and unemployed, you are moving into a downward spiral you cannot get out of. We have insufficient revenue from property tax to sustain a city operation and we are therefore relying upon sales tax as the funding for our city. We need a safe and clean community to create the confidence that will bring commercial business operations back into San Bernardino. It is that commercial sector that will generate the sales tax we are to rely on. But with the policies of the Democrats, there will be no increase in property values and we are not creating an tmosphere conducive to sales tax growth either.”
As an employee of the county’s Workforce Development Division, Nickel said, “We cannot depend on the county, either. It is incapable of generating that sort of economic growth. There is no amount of public assistance that will turn the situation in San Bernardino around. San Bernardino needs self-reliant, independent entrepreneurial determination and effort, venture capitalism and risk taking, innovation, creating jobs and opportunities for people to get ahead instead of relying on government handouts and welfare, all the things the Republican Party stands for and which the Democrats know nothing about.”
Nickel decried the local Republicans who, he said, “have surrendered to the bubble of elite of Democrats in Sacramento. They are not committed to our principles. They are all bout money. They know the Democrats are running the state and especially places like San Bernardino into the ground, but they are happy getting the crumbs the Democrats in charge of the state are leving behind for them. San Bernardino is being shafted by the Democrats running Sacramento. We do not have people in the legislature who will advocate for San Bernardino. With people like Michelle Sabino who is actually something other than what she claims she is in the county central committee working on behalf of Democrats like Kim Knaus, we are being sold out to the point where we won’t have Republicans to fight for us on the lcoal level.
San Bernardino Democrats have not denied that Sabino is one of their undercover agents. Without gloating, some noted that she had managed to work her way into the confidence of Republican Central Committee Chairman Cothran and that Cothran has not seen fit, yet, to remove her as a member of the local GOP executive committee.
A political operative affiliated with James Ramos, arguably the most powerful Democrat at the state level within San Bernardino County, said that those like Nickel who complain about the Democrats having adopted creative means of using independent expenditure committees and political action committees to ensure the election of members of their party to local positions were “crybabies and bellyachers” who are merely voicing complaints about tactics that Republicans have been utilizing for decades being turned on them.
The legions of homeless being cast out of San Bernardino’ parks and removed from the city’s sidewalks and alleyways are tossing a Hail Mary pass they are hoping will stave off their removal from the county seat or their incarceration in the county jail.
That strategy, worked out by the equivalent of jailhouse lawyers – two of the more literate denizens of Perris Hill Park – calls for the destitute to dispense with the tents they have been using as makeshift quarters, in many cases for the last two, three, four or five years.
In 2015, the point-in-time count of the region’s subpopulation conducted by San Bernardino County, the county’s Department of Behavioral Health, the San Bernardino County Homeless Partnership, the Office of Homeless Services and Institute for Urban Initiatives, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development indicated that there were 767 homeless in San Bernardino. The following year, that number was reduced to 564, and in 2017, the number dropped to 491. In 2018, however, the number began to creep back up, with those on the streets, sidewalks, parks, alleyways, in abandoned buildings, in the beds and on the shore of Lytle Creek and the Santa Ana River, ensconced in the landscaping near freeways and beneath freeway overpasses and under railway trestles having reached 646. In 2019, the number grew to 890 homeless and and in 2020 reached 1,056. In 2021, because of the COVID pandemic, the count was canceled. In 2022, there were 1,350 homeless counted in San Bernardino; in 2023 the county seat held 1,502 destitute; and in 2014, there were 1,417 total homeless in the city.
By 2017, many homeless were congregating by day at 44-acre Seccombe Lake Park, just east of downtown. Then, first one, then nearly a half dozen and soon a dozen or more and thereafter two or three score tested the city’s policy of closing the park at dusk, staying there overnight. Similarly, a handful of individuals were camping out overnight at Meadowbrook Park, in the downtown area adjacent to the 11-story San Bernardino Justice Center, as well as at Perris Hill Park, in the northeast quadrant of the city. When city officials did not act with sufficient alacrity to discourage the congregation of more and more overnight campers at Seccombe Lake Park, more and more people were attracted to that location. Soon, a sizeable contingent of the dispossessed were remaining there around the clock.
Over the years, there had been a range of efforts employed both by city officials and city residents to get them to leave San Bernardino altogether, ranging from having sheriff’s deputies and police officers beat them, using police dogs to tear through their belongings, seizing their bedding or tents or otherwise throwing their sleeping bags, tents, ground cover and padding, clothes or other possessions in the trash and assaulting and/or arresting them if they objected, transporting them to jail, specifically the 20-mile distant West Valley Detention Center upon their arrests and leaving them on their own to walk or find a ride back to San Bernardino, along with providing them with poisoned or contaminated food, all in an effort to drive them out or convince them to leave of their own volition.
Despite both these official and unofficial best efforts, the destitute proved resilient and off and on some do-gooders, including attorneys, intervened on their behalf, challenging the legality of the tactics being used against them.
When brought into court, the city found itself at a disadvantage because of the U.S. Constitution, certain laws and case law. In particular, the 1962 case of Robinson v. California and the 2018 case of Martin v. Boise made dealing with the homeless a thorny issue. In Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits criminalization of a status, as opposed to criminalizing criminal acts, in striking down a California law that criminalized being addicted to narcotics. By extension, this applied to being homeless, such that it made applying traditional vagrancy laws difficult, problematic or even impossible. In this way, from that point on, at least until very recently, an individual could not be prosecuted for being homeless. In Martin v. Boise, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that city officials in Boise, Idaho, could not enforce an anti-camping ordinance whenever its homeless population exceeds the number of available beds in its homeless shelters. Since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to this case in 2019, it became binding precedent within the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit includes the nine western states and all of the Pacific Islands.
Both Robinson v. California and Martin v. Boise had the practical effect of preventing government in general and local governments in particular from declaring open warfare on the homeless.
In San Bernardino County, government officials appeared to be divided on the issue of homelessness. Some showed empathy and compassion toward those who had fallen into such a state, and were against, generally, utilizing the power of the law to prohibit them from inhabiting public space or attempting to criminalize them. Other officials took a much harder line and favored a less sympathetic, even brutal approach in which subjecting the homeless to psychological duress or hurting them physically were considered justifiable tactics to protect “decent” people from having to interact with the unhoused and to maintain the quality of life that those who owned property or who could at least rent a roof over their heads were entitled to.
In an effort to reclaim Seccombe Lake Park from the 200 or more denizens of the shantytown that had come to exist there, the city again, in 2020, began efforts to enforce the night curfew and, when a good number of those living there left, the city shuttered that facility entirely to undertake what it termed a “deep cleaning,” one that was preparatory toward the park’s makeover, which was to include developing a portion of the park’s acreage into an affordable housing project.
When the city tried to further that creative approach toward making San Bernardino inhospitable to the homeless, it ran into a roadblock.
In February 2023, the city council declared homelessness a local emergency, using that declaration as a dictum calling for relocating the homeless off of public property.
In May 2023, the city closed down Meadowbrook Park, which is adjacent to the 11-story courthouse, known as the San Bernardino Justice Center, in downtown San Bernardino. The shuttering of Meadowbrook Park was done, the city claimed, for maintenance. City officials told those living in the park that they would offer them some alternative but never did.
In reaction, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on behalf of the social action group SoCal Trash Army and two individuals – Lenka John and James Tyson – who were down and out and living in Meadowbrook Park and Noel Harner, who had left Meadowbrook Park and was living in Perris Hill Park.
In the suit, John, James Tyson and Noel Harner alleged the city violated their constitutional rights and destroyed or jettisoned their personal property, including medicine, vital documents medical equipment and tents. Harner, who is confined to a wheelchair, maintained in the suit that he was given a one-week voucher to stay at a motel upon being kicked out of Perris Hill Park, but was given no assistance in transiting to the motel or conveying his belongings there.
In January of this year, Federal Judge Terry Hatter Jr. issued a preliminary injunction preventing the City of San Bernardino from removing unsheltered people living in its parks and on the city’s sidewalks and public area. Judge Hatter’s ruling was made
In his ruling, Judge Hatter made a finding that the city discarded and/or destroyed the displaced homeless residents’ belongings, did not accommodate their needs and “likely” engaged in a violation of their constitutional rights as well as those under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Judge Hatter barred the city from removing or displacing unhoused residents and their belongings pending further judicial review of the matter. He said the court would consider vacating the order if the city could formulate a binding policy by which it replaces homeless encampments with housing options for those to be displaced.
The atmosphere under which Judge Hatter’s decision was made underwent a radical change this summer, however.
On June 28, 2024, The U.S. Supreme Court entered a ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which pretty much erased the protections under the law that the homeless enjoyed which stemmed from both the Martin v Boise or the Robinson v. California.
In 2013, the Grants Pass City Council, enacted a series of anti-camping, anti-sleeping, and parking exclusion ordinances, which were augmented with civil fines ranging from $295 to $537.60 if unpaid, along with imposing criminal penalties of trespassing on repeat violators who continued to reside on public land. The Oregon Law Center filed suit against Grants Pass on behalf of three homeless individuals in the U.S. District Court in Oregon, challenging the ordinances. The district court and The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, relying on Martin v. Boise, rejected the city government’s assertion it its defense of its ordinances preventing the city from enforcing its anti-camping ordinance against homeless people. The U.S. Supreme Court took up a review of the Ninth Circuit ruling, finding, ultimately, the punishments of fines, temporary bans from entering public property, and one-month jail sentences were neither cruel nor unusual; that the Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances were neutrally applied against both the homeless and those who are not homeless; that it was not established that the homeless had no place other than parks or parking lots in which to sleep; that local and state officials and courts are free to determine whether the homeless by violating anti-camping were conscious of their guilt by violating anti-camping ordinances and that remedies to the homeless issue throughout the United States are too complex to be addressed by unelected members of the federal judiciary. The upshot was that the Supreme Court held that local governments can ban the homeless from public areas.
Shortly thereafter, Governor Gavin Newsom, during whose tenure as governor the state, between 2019 and 2021 spent $9.6 billion trying to alleviate homelessness and from 2020 onward spent another $3.7 billion on Project Homekey, a plan to fund local governments in their efforts to combat homelessness, grew acutely frustrated and impatient with the lack of progress in solving the homelessness crisis. He was going to cut off any further state homeless program funding to cities which had not shut down encampments and moved those in them to indoor shelters.
Within a fortnight, San Bernardino city officials who for years had been themselves frustrated in being unable to clear the homeless out of both high-profile and low-profile public places, felt as if the constraints on dealing with the city’s homeless population had been removed.
The formality of dealing with Judge Hatter’s ruling remained, but in relatively short order, on August 2, after discussion between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union, a joint stipulation to dismiss the case brought by SoCal Trash Army, John, Tyson and Harner was filed. On September 25 Judge Hatter granted that motion for dismissal.
On Wednesday, October 2, at a press conference held at the San Bernardino City Hall on Wednesday, before a large gathering of media, local officials, and community members, San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran, flanked by members of the city council said, “The lifting of the injunction gives us options for addressing unhoused individuals and their property compassionately as we clean up our parks.”
“We have been able to codify and clarify many of our encampment cleanup policies to protect our homeless, their belongings, as well as city staff and contractors,” said San Bernardino Acting City Manager Rochelle Clayton.
“The lifting of the injunction gives us the opportunity to clean up our parks,” said Councilman Fred Shorett.
While the City of San Bernardino has committed nearly $60 million in local, state, federal, and grant funding to address homelessness, including the construction of two full service, comprehensive homeless housing facilities, the creation of a homeless outreach team, and funds for hotel vouchers to be issued to augment local shelters while the new facilities are being built, those with no place to call home in San Bernardino see the writing on the wall. The city now has the leverage to evict them. And until a 140-bed interim housing facility the city is building at 1354 G Street in partnership with the nonprofits Lutheran Social Services of Southern California and Dignity Moves is completed in December, they will not be able to move there.
Similarly, a new homeless navigation center at a former school site at 796 Sixth Street which the city is beginning preparations for will not come online for another 12 to 13 months.
Thus, it seems, the homeless will need to get gone and get gone soon.
Two of those who subsist at Perris Hill Park nevertheless believe that the homeless population there can prolong the delay in its exodus by a stratagem hatched elsewhere, in San Francisco, which has its own homeless challenges. There, where Newsom was once mayor, those living in that city’s parks and public spaces are being similarly pressured to get out. Some of those people, however, sought to slide out from under the directive to leave by simply de-erecting their tents, sleeping now on the open ground. This means, they assert, they are not camping. Given that the Grants Pass decision pertains to “encampments” and the governor’s directive was to break up “encampments,” the voluntary discontinuation of the pitching of tents by those who can now say they are simply
sleeping in the parks offers a means – actual or rhetorical – for the homeless to maintain they are complying with the law and the governor’s mandate.
In recent days, several of those yet hanging on to their living space in Perris Hill Park have acceded to the direction of their fellow park residents that they dispense with the tents.
Whether this approach, dreamt up, after all, by what are tantamount to jailhouse lawyers, will work is yet to be determined.
City officials have indicated that the homeless will be leaving very soon, whether they are spending the night inside a tent or under the stars.
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“The city expects to resume encampment cleanups in the coming weeks,” San Bernardino Spokesman Jeff Kraus said.
