Twelve years ago, the city of San Bernardino officially went bankrupt. Five years later, the city emerged from bankruptcy.
But today, it remains a challenged city, with a fractious City Council that is often divided on the best way to move San Bernardino forward.
On Nov. 5, voters will select new council members in wards 5 and 7. The top two vote-getters in the March primary election advanced to the November runoff. Councilmember Juan Figueroa and newcomer Mario Flores won outright in wards 3 and 6, respectively, in the March primary.
In both wards 5 and 7, the Nov. 5 election pits one candidate who has never held elected office in San Bernardino against a former elected official who served during the city’s bankruptcy era.
And whoever’s elected, they’ll face major challenges that the public is demanding action on.
Homelessness
(Editor’s note: The interviews for this story took place before San Bernardino announced its new measures to combat homelessness following the lifting of an injunction that prevented officials from removing or displacing unhoused residents and their belongings while a lawsuit brought by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California worked its way through the legal system. The city and ACLU announced a settlement Monday, Sept. 30.)
About one- third of San Bernardino County’s homeless residents live within San Bernardino’s city limits, according to the county’s 2024 Point in Time Count, an annual survey of those without permanent shelter.
“When I was city attorney, we didn’t have homeless camps,” said Ward 7 candidate James F. Penman, who served 26 years as San Bernardino’s elected city attorney before he was recalled in 2013, about a year after the city declared bankruptcy.
“Redlands (had camps). Rancho did. Riverside did,” he continued. “We didn’t, because we had city attorney investigators who were retired city cops and (sheriff’s deputies) and we kept it under control. As soon as they popped up, we shut them down.”
City staff would move people from encampments into motels for two weeks and pay for the first month’s rent and security deposit for those interested in permanent housing. But those repeatedly violating the city’s anti-camping ordinance were taken to West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga and told to walk back to San Bernardino if they wanted to, Penman said. Most of them eventually went elsewhere, he said.
As for where the city would get the money to fund these efforts — the city attorney’s investigators were let go after Penman was recalled — he has an easy answer.
“The city is wasting millions of dollars every year on nonprofits that we hired to handle the homeless. It obviously hasn’t worked,” he said.
His opponent, Ward 7 candidate Treasure Ortiz, who teaches public administration at Cal State San Bernardino, is equally frustrated.
In 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom approved turning unused portions of Patton State Hospital into housing for homeless residents. Since then, Ortiz said, the project doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
“It was a minute and 30 second clip online and no conversation (on it) since then,” she said. “So, I wanna make sure I bring that back.”
Ortiz also said the city isn’t working closely enough with San Bernardino City Unified on the problem. The district, which teaches about 49,000 students had about 4,400 students experiencing homelessness in the 2022-23 school year, according to the California Department of Education.
“That’s crazy,” Ortiz said.
But everyone agrees that effective action needs to be taken.
“In four years, if the homeless are still there, (residents) will be furious at me,” Penman said.
City finances, revitalizing downtown
San Bernardino is out of bankruptcy, but lacks the funds to do much of what residents — and officials — want to do, including making an effectively abandoned City Hall earthquake-safe, replacing the now-demolished Carousel Mall with something to attract new business to downtown and more.
“Carousel Mall, the revitalization of our downtown, is strategically vital to the survival of our city,” said Ward 5 candidate Henry Nickel, who served two terms on the council before losing his bid for reelection by 600 votes in 2020. “And I think some people don’t understand that and they’re wanting to play politics.”
He’d like to see the process of revitalizing downtown San Bernardino “professionalized,” based on similar efforts in Detroit and Boulder, Colorado.
To that end, Nickel said he would create an independent commission to lead downtown revitalization efforts with a 10-year term.
“Your job is to only focus on the downtown,” he said. “I can’t remove you once you’re in place, and it’s only collectively by supermajority of the council that we can replace or or put anybody new on that commission.”
But this sort of downtown revitalization requires money. A lot of it.
In May, the city’s former director of finance and management services, Barbara Whitehorn, told the council she had been fired for telling then-city manager Charles Montoya that renovating City Hall wouldn’t cost $80 million, the number that had been floated publicly, but closer to $120 million. And the debt on such a project would cost the city at least $10 million a year for 30 years. The council fired Montoya a week later.
Regardless, the current council was too eager to spend money on fixing City Hall without knowing how much it would cost to do so, Ortiz said.
“We were about ready to take a $330 million debt out on the city over the course of 30 years for something that we don’t know whether will cost $60 million or $120 million,” she added.
“The reality is we don’t have the money,” said Ward 5 candidate Kim Knaus, chief operating officer of the Youth Action Project. She also worked to preserve the Verdemont Community Center and was the co-creator of SB Food Fest.
“So when we talk about these big projects, when we talk about reopening City Hall, realistically, we talk about we want it, but how do we do it?” she asked.
The current council doesn’t seem sufficiently concerned about being cost-conscious, according to this year’s candidates.
“In the last four years, we’re sort of slipping back into some of the old behaviors that I think got us into bankruptcy to begin with,” Nickel said.
His opponent agrees.
“We’ve just passed an unbalanced budget,” Knaus said. “Our city budget has been in dire straits, even beyond the bankruptcy.”
So instead of tackling the big projects first, Ortiz said, maybe the council should start smaller.
“We’re Fred Flintstone and everybody wants to think like George Jetson,” she said. “We’re not in the sky yet; we can’t even pave the roads.”
City government culture
Ultimately, the candidates said, a lot of the city’s problems come down to what’s happening in local government, both among elected officials and city staff.
In the past 12 months, the council has hired and fired a city manager, costing the city $325,000 in severance pay, along with an equal amount in his salary for the year.
“We’ve had the worst succession of city managers of any city I’ve ever seen,” Penman said. “I can’t believe it.”
And it’s not just the top city job that San Bernardino has found difficult to keep filled.
“We’ve had turnover after turnover in directors, city managers,” Knaus said. “We will not really achieve any of those things that I hope to do if you don’t have some sort of continuity within City Hall.”
And that reflects a broader cultural issue with the City Council, according to Ortiz.
“They treat this like this is a prom court, or homecoming, that this is somehow about popularity and cliques, when truly this is about the best interest of 223,000-plus people,” Ortiz said. “If we’re all working towards the same goal — which is what we tell people when we’re trying to get elected, ‘I want to make sure that you have the best quality of life in this city’ — if that’s all we’re discussing, then what are we fighting about?”
All four candidates on the ballot stressed their ability to get along with the existing council members not on the ballot this November — Ward 1’s Theodore Sanchez, Ward 2’s Sandra Ibarra, Ward 3’s Juan Figueroa, Ward 4’s Fred Shorett and Mayor Helen Tran — and said that an end to the drama is an essential part of getting San Bernardino back on track.
“I think for years, we’ve been victims of our our own inability to to work together,” Nickel said.
And if nothing changes with that, the candidates said, then nothing will change for the city.
“Failure and (mediocrity) is a standard of which we’ve become accustomed to, and we tell our residents, ‘this is what you’re gonna get, this is the best you can do,’” Ortiz said.
More about San Bernardino
San Bernardino officially out of bankruptcy
San Bernardino City Hall plans to be vacated over earthquake risk
‘Nobody had their eye on that ball’ when San Bernardino went bankrupt 10 years ago
Everything you need to know about San Bernardino’s Carousel Mall
Newsom approves housing homeless at San Bernardino County’s Patton State Hospital
San Bernardino hires Charles Montoya as city manager
Here’s who won the March primary election in San Bernardino County
San Bernardino finance director says she was fired for raising concerns
San Bernardino City Manager Charles Montoya is fired
Fired San Bernardino city manager will get $325,000 in severance pay
Lawsuit settlement ensures protections for San Bernardino’s homeless community
San Bernardino to clear out homeless encampments in parks, open new shelters
