Airbnb Owners Tell Town New Rules Are 'Hostile'

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7/21/2017 Airbnb owners tell town new rules are 'hostile' - Hi-Desert Star: News Airbnb owners tell town new rules are 'hostile' By Stacy Moore, Hi-Desert Star | Posted: Thursday, July 20, 2017 2:57 pm

YUCCA VALLEY — Owners of vacation rentals asked for the town to ease up on regulations and the Town Council responded when it took action on

new rules for Airbnbs and similar properties Tuesday.

The council shortened the overnight “quiet time” hours, removed a sign requirement, allowed vacation rentals in duplexes and extended the proposed annual permit to a two-year permit at its Tuesday public hearing. “I just want to thank you for the changes you made,” Fred Castro told the council afterward. “I think the majority of Airbnb owners will agree with the changes you made tonight.” Several rental owners told the council they wanted to have more chances to change the new regulations. “I ask that staff meet with Airbnb owners to finalize this draft to make it into something workable for us,” Clint Stoker said. Town staff will change the ordinance as directed and the council will look at the revised regulations at a public hearing Sept. 19. “In the meantime, you are always encouraged to contact your council via our website,” Mayor Merl Abel said. The site is yucca-valley.org.

Owners must apply for two-year permit

The main changes the Town Council made to the proposed ordinance Tuesday night were as follows: • Rental owners will have to apply for a permit every two years, not every one year as town staff and planning commissioners had suggested. • Owners will not have to set up a temporary sign with the contact information of a responsible party when their property is being rented. The planning commission and staff hoped to help neighbors who needed to call rental owners to alert them about problems, but the Town Council agreed with the rental owners that the sign would attract criminals. • Daytime hours, when the renters can have more guests and make more noise, were extended to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. The earlier version set daytime hours at 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and prohibited extra guests and noise disturbances between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The council kept other rules suggested by the planning commission intact. The ordinance still says someone — either the property owner or a representative — must be available to respond to neighbor complaints within 30 minutes 24 hours a day. When a property owner applies for a vacation rental permit, neighbors within 300 feet will be notified, and given the owner’s telephone number so they can call if there is a problem with the guests. http://www.hidesertstar.com/news/article_74680fb8-6d96-11e7-9dfa-378212510feb.html?mode=print 1/2 7/21/2017 Airbnb owners tell town new rules are 'hostile' - Hi-Desert Star: News A renter will be required to sign a copy of the ordinance, indicating he or she has read and understands the town’s regulations. Renters will also be given “good neighbor” brochures that the town will produce. Deputy Town Manager Shane Stueckle also clarified that a requirement that rental owners must contact their arriving guests and make sure they read the town’s regulations does not mean the owners have to greet the renters in person. The contact may take place through email or text, Stueckle told the council.

Owners say vacation rentals support locals, too

Rental owners filled much of the community center’s Yucca Room for the hearing and several spoke to the council before members made their changes. “This draft ordinance feels overtly hostile to the rental market,” Dave McAdam, who owns a rental in Western Hills called Rock Reach House, told the Town Council. “I think this council also needs to know the economic boon these rentals have brought to the town,” McAdam said. “Seven years ago I hired my first housekeeper, an unemployed single mom in Yucca Valley who was not getting by. She is now working for me full-time and putting a child through college.” The council seemed to agree with some of the owners’ points, although the mayor said most of the regulations suggested by the planning commission were fine. “The majority of that ordinance was well thought-out,” Abel said. “We just needed to make a few modifications to make it user-friendly.” Abel said vacation rental owners are ambassadors for the town. “You promote our area, you get the word out on social media to come here and spend money in Yucca Valley,” he said. “I don’t want you to get the idea from my perspective that we’re trying to crack down on you. We’ve heard from several vacation home rental owners that they appreciate how we’re doing this to make sure that everyone’s on a level playing field,” he said. “We want to make this an area where people want to come here and spend money but also protect the environment.” Guests coming from the city might not understand what’s expected in the Hi-Desert, the mayor said. “We need to educate them on desert ethics and how noise and light are very precious to us and we need you to be good neighbors. We need you to have a good experience but we also need to make sure the neighborhoods are having a good experience.”

http://www.hidesertstar.com/news/article_74680fb8-6d96-11e7-9dfa-378212510feb.html?mode=print 2/2 7/21/2017 County settles jail abuse allegations for $2.5M

County settles jail abuse allegations for $2.5M

By Shea Johnson Staff Writer Follow Posted Jul 20, 2017 at 6:07 PM Updated Jul 20, 2017 at 6:07 PM The lawsuits, representing 32 plaintiffs between them, claimed that inmates at West Valley Detention Center were routinely subjected to beatings by deputies that were tantamount to torture.

Accusing law enforcement officials of widespread abuse against inmates at a Rancho Cucamonga jail, five civil lawsuits were recently settled for a total of $2.5 million, attorneys for the plaintiffs confirmed Thursday to the Daily Press.

In each case, San Bernardino County issued settlement checks July 11, according to federal court records filed three days later.

“The long and short of it: We settled our cases for $2.5 million,” said attorney Dale K. Galipo, when reached by phone and asked to speak about the settlements. “We thought, given everything we knew, it was a good settlement. The clients are happy with it. More importantly, we’re hoping they’ll make changes at the facility so this won’t continue to happen.”

Galipo was part of a four-attorney team, which also included Sharon Brunner, Jim Terrell and Stanley Hodge.

The lawsuits, representing 32 plaintiffs between them, claimed that inmates at West Valley Detention Center were routinely subjected to beatings by deputies that were tantamount to torture. Among the accusations, generally, were that

http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20170720/county-settles-jail-abuse-allegations-for-25m 1/3 7/21/2017 County settles jail abuse allegations for $2.5M

inmates were unjustly stunned with Tasers, pepper-sprayed and stripped search, while some were subjected to sleep deprivation and had shotguns placed to their head.

The first lawsuit was filed in 2014.

The complaints spurred the Sheriff’s Department to launch an internal investigation in March 2014 that led to seven deputies being fired. Around the same time, the FBI began its own investigation and sheriff’s officials have said they’ve been cooperative with the agency.

After this newspaper inquired late Thursday afternoon, Sheriff’s spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said by email that the department didn’t have “a statement to release at this time” regarding the settlements.

Sheriff John McMahon, who was named as a defendant in the suits along with the county, the jail’s commander and several deputies, has long insisted that abuse there was isolated to a small number of employees in a specific jail location and not a reflection of a larger, systemic problem.

But Galipo said it was “very difficult to believe this could have been going on without someone knowing it was happening.”

“I think it’s safe to say that anytime you have something like that happening on the scale that it was happening,” he added, “there was a culture happening at the detention center that deputies thought it was OK to do it or they were encouraged to do it.”

Attorneys also believe the settlements send a resounding message that might lead to even larger reforms.

Brunner and Terrell, who spoke with this newspaper on a conference call, reflected on their representation of two suspects in 2014, who told their attorneys they were stunned by a Taser, that spurred the deeper search into potential issues at the jail.

“I don’t think we expected it to be that widespread,” Brunner said.

http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20170720/county-settles-jail-abuse-allegations-for-25m 2/3 7/21/2017 County settles jail abuse allegations for $2.5M

Yet she said she has since seen improvements at the jail, including in the grievance process for inmates, although the two attorneys are still being contacted by inmates.

“We’re still getting boxes of letters,” she said, “and the predominant source of that is the West Valley Detention Center.”

Galipo said that attorneys planned to issue a formal statement on the settlements to media outlets Monday.

“It’s not just a wake-up call for the Sheriff’s Department there, we hope that it’s better than that,” Terrell concluded. “We also hope it’s a wake-up call for people that think law enforcement does no wrong.”

Shea Johnson can be reached at 760-955-5368 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @DP_Shea.

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http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20170720/sheriffs-department-launches-safe-return-program-to-help-residents-at-risk-of-wandering-away-from-home 2/2 7/21/2017 From China to Ontario Airport: Scheduled round-trip flights coming

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (http://www.dailybulletin.com)

From China to Ontario Airport: Scheduled round-trip flights coming

By Liset Márquez, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Thursday, July 20, 2017

ONTARIO >> For the second time this week, Ontario International Airport Authority members gathered in Terminal 2 to announce new air service.

Charter airline Dynamic International Airways announced Thursday morning it is launching scheduled service out of Ontario International Airport to China in 2018. Officials also announced its intention to develop domestic service from Ontario to major U.S. cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., said Alicia Goa, spokeswoman with Dynamic International Airways.

“This is our first service from China to Ontario but this is just the beginning,” she said. “Ontario will be our gateway and operation hub in mainland U.S., from China to mainland U.S.”

For now, Dynamic International Airways, based out of North Carolina, is operating round-trip flights from Nanchang, China, to Ontario. The inaugural service arrived Wednesday night and will run through Aug. 30. That service is targeted toward Chinese tour operators packaging group tours for Chinese customers only.

The twice-weekly round-trips depart from Nanchang Changbei International Airport Saturday and Tuesday with a stopover in Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, in Anchorage, Alaska, for refueling and U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing. Dynamic is utilizing Boeing 767-300ER aircraft configured to accommodate 235 passengers.

• Video: New flights from Ontario to China

Ken Woolley, chairman of the board of directors for Dynamic, said Thursday the first flight into the Ontario airport landed on time, at 9:05 p.m. Wednesday.

Although the company only has six airplanes in its fleet, Woolley said, Dynamic hopes to add aircraft, which will give the ability to offer nonstop flights from Ontario to Chinese cities.

“We want to thank the airport for helping us get this all started. Ontario is going to be a great hub for us,” he said. “We’re looking forward to working together with the county commissioners and various local officials, and with the airport authority and hope we can do our part to bring more economic growth here to this part of the world.”

After the seven-week summer run, regularly scheduled service is expected to begin in 2018. Woolley said he expects the demand out of Ontario airport would be to major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong.

“(China) is one of the big growth opportunities for airlines in the United States,” he said.

http://www.dailybulletin.com/business/20170720/from-china-to-ontario-airport-scheduled-round-trip-flights-coming&template=printart 1/2 7/21/2017 From China to Ontario Airport: Scheduled round-trip flights coming As a charter, Dynamic can only do the current service for three months, which is why the airline applied to become a flag carrier with the Department of Transportation, Wolley said. Once the airline gets approval from the government, the current seasonal service would become a scheduled flight.

Woolley noted that another U.S. carrier, Allegiant Air, also operated as a charter for many years before offering commercial service, he said.

Since taking over control of the airport Nov. 1, the Ontario International Airport Authority has been looking to expand international flights between the inland region and Asia, said Alan Wapner, president of the authority.

“This is a big step for us,” he said. “We’re trying to build relationships and international flights in Asia and specifically in China.”

URL: http://www.dailybulletin.com/business/20170720/from-china-to-ontario-airport-scheduled-round-trip-flights-coming

http://www.dailybulletin.com/business/20170720/from-china-to-ontario-airport-scheduled-round-trip-flights-coming&template=printart 2/2 7/21/2017 New airline is best news yet for Ontario International

San Bernardino County Sun (http://www.sbsun.com)

New airline is best news yet for Ontario International

By The Editorial Board, San Bernardino County Sun

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

A new airline is about to begin operations at Ontario International Airport — for the first time in a decade.

That Frontier Airlines will begin flying in and out of ONT is big news for an airport trying to rebound from a slump that persisted pretty much through that entire decade.

ExpressJet was the last to begin service at ONT, back in 2007, the year the airport’s annual passenger traffic peaked at 7.2 million before plunging to about 4 million, prompting Ontario city officials to begin the arduous and expensive process of taking back control of ONT from Los Angeles.

The way back requires rebuilding traffic, of course. Frontier’s announcement on Tuesday that it will begin service at ONT on Oct. 12 — just short of a year since Ontario International Airport Authority assumed control of the airport — is the best news yet.

(It’s not the only good news, though, after a disconcerting month in which one of the authority’s founding commissioners and the CEO departed with little to no explanation. The authority plans another press conference Thursday about the startup of Dynamic Airways’ charter service to Ontario from Nanchang, China, which was announced in June.)

Frontier will begin daily direct flights to Denver and thrice-a-week flights to Austin, Texas, in October, followed by daily service to Chicago in the spring. Denver is Frontier’s hub, so the daily flights there will offer connections all over the country.

The most common complaint about ONT flights is that they too often cost considerably more than the same destination from LAX. But Frontier is bringing some great fares to town. An online check this morning found a round-trip price of $97.96 to Denver Oct. 16-19.

The new ONT flights are part of Frontier’s announcement that it will introduce low fares to 21 new cities and 85 new routes. Spokeswoman Val Tyler said Frontier had its eye on ONT and was waiting to see if operating costs would decrease under local control. That factor is the one most likely to draw other new airlines and new flights to the airport.

Alan Wapner and Mark Thorpe, the airport authority’s president and interim CEO, respectively, said discussions are under way with other carriers, and more announcements can be expected.

That’s more good news.

URL: http://www.sbsun.com/opinion/20170719/new-airline-is-best-news-yet-for-ontario-international http://www.sbsun.com/article/20170719/LOCAL1/170719386&template=printart 1/2 7/21/2017 New airline is best news yet for Ontario International © 2017 San Bernardino County Sun (http://www.sbsun.com)

http://www.sbsun.com/article/20170719/LOCAL1/170719386&template=printart 2/2 7/19/2017 Aircraft maker Mooney moving from Chino Airport to Texas, settlement in works with Threshold

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (http://www.dailybulletin.com)

Aircraft maker Mooney moving from Chino Airport to Texas, settlement in works with Threshold

By Neil Nisperos, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

CHINO >> Mooney International, an aircraft manufacturing company at Chino Airport, is moving to Texas.

That move has led to settlement talks between Mooney and another airport tenant, Threshold Aviation jet aircraft maintenance.

“Both public and private organizations invested time and effort, which was based on the promises that Mooney made, and to see them leave without the promised milestone (of staying for the 10-year lease), is disappointing,” said Mark DiLullo, CEO of Threshold.

In 2015, Mooney increased its facility to more than 153,000 square feet. At the time, Mooney employed about 80 people, and announced plans to increase to 150 employees. Mooney officials said at the time they chose to locate research and development at Chino Airport to better serve customer expansion in the United States and into China, executives said.

To get the additional space, Threshold Aviation, a neighboring business jet maintenance, sales and terminal business company at the airport, agreed to give up about 58,000 square feet of its own leased space, DiLullo said.

DiLullo said the move meant a sacrifice of existing clients and employment because of the loss of the space. Threshold also made improvements to the space, which Mooney ultimately removed for its own operation, DiLullo said.

Threshold was expecting Mooney to stay for its full lease period because the manufacturer had contracted Threshold to provide certain mechanical services, according to DiLullo.

“In simple terms, we’re very disappointed that we’re going to be forced to make a settlement with them to reclaim what we were expecting,” said DiLullo, who said the gross expense incurred by his company was about $3 million.

Mooney, which is headquartered in Kerrville, Texas, will still honor and pay its lease at the airport until 2025, said Felisa Cardona, a spokeswoman for San Bernardino County, which owns and operates Chino Airport. Mooney was able to find a subtenant who has been there for the past 90 days, and has assumed financial obligation to pay the lease, Cardona said.

The subtenant, SoCal MRO, LLC, could not immediately be reached for comment. Representatives for Mooney did not immediately return calls for comment.

“It’s our understanding that they’re consolidating their operation in Texas,” Cardona said. “They’re moving their (research and development) operation over there.”

http://www.dailybulletin.com/article/20170719/NEWS/170719418&template=printart 1/2 7/19/2017 Aircraft maker Mooney moving from Chino Airport to Texas, settlement in works with Threshold County officials, Cardona said, do not know when the company will vacate its tenancy. Mooney began operations at Chino Airport in 2013 and leased expanded space there in 2015. James Jenkins, director of airports for San Bernardino County, said the return on investment for new aircraft it was developing at Chino Airport was reportedly difficult to balance because of the difficulties of introducing new small aircraft.

“The Department of Airports was pleased and excited to have Mooney as a tenant during the past 4 years,” Jenkins said by email. “We have been cautiously optimistic regarding the (research and development) program at Chino. The small aircraft market (aircraft 12,500 pounds or less) is a very competitive environment.”

Mooney’s Chino operation opened the same year that the company became a subsidiary after being acquired by Soaring America Corporation, with its parent company, Meijing Group, based in Cheng Zhou, China.

Jenkins said the expansion would bring an additional revenue stream of about $440,000 a year as a result of Mooney’s leasing of the hangar and office property. Jenkins said Mooney’s leasing of space at Chino Airport would help attract other business.

Chino Airport is fully leased by tenants, which include a restaurant, two aviation museums, three avionics repair and installation business, a paint shop, two aircraft interior shops, a host of airframe and power plant repair business and aircraft charter and management businesses, Cardona said.

URL: http://www.dailybulletin.com/business/20170719/aircraft-maker-mooney-moving-from-chino-airport-to-texas-settlement-in-works-with-threshold

http://www.dailybulletin.com/article/20170719/NEWS/170719418&template=printart 2/2 7/21/2017 Apple Valley tow company scrutinized by grand jury owned by former councilman

San Bernardino County Sun (http://www.sbsun.com)

Apple Valley tow company scrutinized by grand jury owned by former councilman

By Beau Yarbrough, The Sun

and Joe Nelson, The Sun

Thursday, July 20, 2017

APPLE VALLEY >> The Apple Valley Unified School District has identified the tow company whose track record was scrutinized by the San Bernardino County Grand Jury in a recent report.

Big Apple Automotive, which has two locations in Apple Valley and one in Victorville, is owned by former Apple Valley Town Councilman Jack Collingsworth. Collingsworth served one term on the Council, from 1988 through 1992. Until recently, the company was the sole towing service employed by Apple Valley Unified.

From 2014 through 2016, Big Apple Automotive towed 727 vehicles for AVUSD police — two and a half times more than the San Bernardino City Unified School District and four times more than Fontana Unified School District.

Apple Valley Unified educates 14,370 students, according to the California Department of Education, compared, to the 53,152 educated by San Bernardino City Unified and 38,014 educated by Fontana Unified.

Some of the traffic stops resulting in the tows happened either outside the jurisdiction of the AVUSD Police Department or within its jurisdiction after hours, the grand jury concluded.

What happened to almost one third of the cars towed by Big Apple Automotive on behalf of the school district is a mystery. Big Apple Automotive could not account for roughly 30 percent, or 510 of the towed vehicles, when asked by the grand jury to produce records.

An unknown number of the vehicles were lien sold by the company for fees and towing charges accrued, and only drivers of bank-owned vehicles still being financed received notices of their right to a hearing to determine the legality of the impound, according to the grand jury’s annual report released June 30.

Collingsworth did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

AVUSD personnel were out on summer break and unavailable for comment when the grand jury released its report. District offices reopened Monday.

School district attorney Margaret Chidester wrote in an email Tuesday that she will request direction from the school board at its Aug. 3 meeting on preparing a response to the grand jury’s findings.

Why AVUSD police had so many vehicles towed, why Big Apple Automotive could not account for a majority of the seized vehicles and why some drivers of impounded vehicles were not provided notice of their right to a tow hearing still isn’t clear.

http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20170720/apple-valley-tow-company-scrutinized-by-grand-jury-owned-by-former-councilman&template=printart 1/2 7/21/2017 Apple Valley tow company scrutinized by grand jury owned by former councilman Answers to those questions may or may not be addressed in the school district’s response to the grand jury’s findings and recommendations. The school district has 90 days from the time of the release of the grand jury report on June 30 to respond.

According to district spokeswoman Kristin Hernandez, AVUSD Police Chief Cesar Molina began his career with the school district as a reserve officer in 2003. He became a school police officer in 2004, then chief of police in December 2014. Molina referred requests for comment to Hernandez.

The grand jury also determined that as the number of vehicles towed by AVUSD police steadily increased from 2014 through 2016, police interaction with students declined. In addition, in May 2015, the school board approved an increase of vehicle release fees for vehicles towed by district police from $95 to $120, which the grand jury said was illegal.

State law only allows for a city, county or state agency to authorize vehicle release fee increases, according to the grand jury, noting the AVUSD Police Department is a special district.

According to Chidester, the school district is in discussions with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department on the possibility of entering into a contract defining the jurisdiction of AVUSD police and that of the Sheriff’s Department.

“The district remains committed to ensuring the safety of students and personnel and in compliance with applicable laws,” Chidester wrote in her email.

URL: http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20170720/apple-valley-tow-company-scrutinized-by-grand-jury-owned-by-former-councilman

http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20170720/apple-valley-tow-company-scrutinized-by-grand-jury-owned-by-former-councilman&template=printart 2/2 7/21/2017 County Board of Education seeks names for new site - Highland Community News: Schools County Board of Education seeks names for new site Posted: Thursday, July 20, 2017 10:07 am

The San Bernardino County Board of Education is soliciting names for a new facility in San Bernardino that is scheduled to open later in 2017.

The facility is at 670 E. Carnegie Dr. in San Bernardino and will serve as an administrative site for Regional Occupational Program and East Valley Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) staff, a career technical education training center, house regular County Board of Education meetings and provide conference rooms for educational leadership workshops and events.

School names need to be submitted to the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools office by Aug. 15 and follow County Board of Education Policy 551. Names may be of historical or geographic significance. The board may elect to name a school or a building, such as a classroom, auditorium or office, after an educational or civic leader who has made significant contributions.

Names may be submitted to Crystal Lopez, board secretary, by mail at 601 N. E St., San Bernardino, 92415 or by e-mail to [email protected]. An online form is available at www.sbcss.net/images/Documents/comm/NameSchoolForm_17.pdf. Please use a separate form for each submission. Supporting documentation will not be considered.

The board will consider the compiled list of names and conduct a public hearing prior to naming the site at its Sept. 5 meeting.

For more information, contact Lopez at County Schools at (909) 386-2414.

http://www.highlandnews.net/news/schools/county-board-of-education-seeks-names-for-new-site/article_ecbe7f02-6d6d-11e7-bb03-cf5952f5d0d2.html… 1/1 7/21/2017 Disney, Knott’s animatronic mastermind Garner Holt honored by San Bernardino – Press Enterprise

BUSINESS Disney, Knott’s animatronic mastermind Garner Holt honored by San Bernardino

San Bernardino’s Garner Holt, an industry leader in theme park technology, will get a lifetime achievement award from his peers. His company is about to begin a major renovation of Knott’s Berry Farm’s Mine Ride.

By FIELDING BUCK | [email protected] | The Press-Enterprise PUBLISHED: July 20, 2017 at 10:29 am | UPDATED: July 20, 2017 at 4:04 pm

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San Bernardino declared Tuesday, July 25 will be Garner Holt Day at its bi- monthly City Council meeting Wednesday night.

http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/san-bernardino-declares-july-25-garner-holt-day/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter 1/3 7/21/2017 Disney, Knott’s animatronic mastermind Garner Holt honored by San Bernardino – Press Enterprise Holt is a San Bernardino native who out of his childhood love for Disneyland built a company that supplies animatronic gures to theme parks throughout the world.

He was mentored by Bob Gurr, creator of Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds, and other Disney Imagineers.

Holt’s past projects include the re-breathing dragon in Disneyland’s Fantasmic, which resumed performances this week; several of the gures Disney California Adventure’s Radiator Springs Racers ride; and Knott’s Berry Farm’s renovations of Timber Mountain Log Ride and Calico Mine Ride.

He incorporated his company, Garner Holt Productions, on July 25, 1977.

Tags: Disneyland, Top Stories OCR, Top Stories PE

FIELDING_BUCKFielding Buck Fielding Buck has been a business reporter since 2014 with a focus on logistics, supply chain and GIS. Prior experience includes extensive entertainment reporting. He loves photography and dogs and lives in San Bernardino County.  Follow Fielding Buck @pefbuck http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/san-bernardino-declares-july-25-garner-holt-day/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter 2/3 7/21/2017 Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez resigns GOP leadership post, calls out Chad Mayes – Press Enterprise

NEWSPOLITICS Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez resigns GOP leadership post, calls out Chad Mayes

File photo by Craig Shultz, The Press-Enteprise/SCNG. Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore, speaks during a Veterans Day event in Hemet in this 2015 file photo.

By JEFF HORSEMAN | [email protected] | The Press- Enterprise PUBLISHED: July 20, 2017 at 3:00 pm | UPDATED: July 21, 2017 at 6:03 am

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http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/melissa-melendez-resigns-leadership-post-calls-out-chad-mayes/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter 1/6 7/21/2017 Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez resigns GOP leadership post, calls out Chad Mayes – Press Enterprise Tensions among Sacramento Republicans surfaced Thursday, July 20, when Inland Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez quit her leadership post and accused Assembly GOP Leader Chad Mayes of “dereliction of duty.”

Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore, resigned as assistant Republican leader following a caucus meeting, her ofce announced in an aernoon news release.

“Californians are struggling to make ends meet and unfortunately, what I have witnessed by the Assembly Republican Leader is a dereliction of duty to preserve and promote the American Dream for every single Californian,” Melendez said in the release.

“Assemblyman Mayes’ actions on cap-and-trade demonstrate we no longer share the same leadership principles. I was elected by the people of my district to ght for a more affordable and decent California, a place where every Californian knows their child will have a better life than their own.

“Regrettably, I can no longer, in good conscience, serve as the assistant Republican leader.”

Reached by phone Thursday, Melendez declined to elaborate on her statement.

In an emailed response to the assemblywoman, Mayes, R-Yucca Valley, said: “I thank her for her service as assistant leader and we are now focused on moving the caucus forward.”

Melendez, a former Lake Elsinore councilwoman who served in the Navy as a translator and was one of the rst women to y aboard the EP-3 reconnaissance airplane, will remain in the Assembly, where she has served since 2012. She represents Lake Elsinore, Canyon Lake, Murrieta, Menifee, Wildomar and part of Hemet.

Her resignation comes three days aer the Legislature voted to extend California’s cap-and-trade program to 2030. Cap-and-trade allows businesses to buy credits to emit pollution with an eye toward gradually cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Mayes joined seven other Republicans in voting for the extension and joined Democrats on the podium aer the vote to answer reporters’ questions.

“Today, we proved that Sacramento can rise above the partisan fray of our country to do right for all Californians,” Mayes said in a post-vote statement. “This plan cleans up the environment for future generations and cuts the cost of taxes, fees and regulations by $16 billion a year for ordinary Californians. Protecting the earth and protecting your paycheck is no longer an either-or decision.”

http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/melissa-melendez-resigns-leadership-post-calls-out-chad-mayes/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter 2/6 7/21/2017 Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez resigns GOP leadership post, calls out Chad Mayes – Press Enterprise Conservatives who view cap-and-trade as a burdensome, red tape-laden excuse for raising taxes were upset that GOP lawmakers voted yes.

“I am disappointed that Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes supported this tax increase and also persuaded a few others to do the same, which ultimately led to the bill’s passage,” said state Sen. Mike Morrell, R-Rancho Cucamonga.

Conservative activist Joseph Turner, who denounced Mayes in a blog post that accused the assemblyman of an extramarital affair, recommended Melendez as someone to lead the Assembly’s 25 Republicans.

“Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez has a backbone and doesn’t just claim to be a conservative,” Turner said. “She actually has a record to prove it.”

Since coming to Sacramento, Melendez has established herself as a staunch conservative, especially on social media. She appeared on-stage with then- presidential candidate Donald Trump in San Diego and took her family to attend Trump’s presidential inauguration.

The GOP leader since 2016, Mayes has expressed a willingness to work with Democrats, who hold a supermajority in Sacramento. He endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination and has tried to focus the party on ghting poverty and middle-class issues.

Tags: California politics, Echo Code, Top Stories PE

Jeff_Horseman_mugx.jpgJeff Horseman Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” Aer graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then- U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper before love and the quest for snowless winters took him in 2007 to Southern California, where he started out covering Temecula for The Press-Enterprise. Today, Jeff writes about Riverside County government and regional politics. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildres, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/melissa-melendez-resigns-leadership-post-calls-out-chad-mayes/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitterworkings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even 3/6 7/21/2017 Cap-And-Trade Deal Exemplifies Chad Mayes's Governing Philosophy, Could Cost Him His Job - capradio.org

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State Government Cap-And-Trade Deal Exemplifies Chad Mayes's Governing Philosophy, Could Cost Him His Job  Ben Adler Friday, July 21, 2017 | Sacramento, CA |  Permalink

LISTEN 3:28

It was no surprise to see California Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers take a victory lap after the cap-and-trade deal passed the state Legislature Monday night (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/07/17/live-blog-lawmakers-to-vote-on-cap-and-trade-extension/).

But then, there was this guy:

http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/07/21/cap-and-trade-deal-exemplifies-chad-mayess-governing-philosophy,-could-cost-him-his-job/ 1/11 7/21/2017 Cap-And-Trade Deal Exemplifies Chad Mayes's Governing Philosophy, Could Cost Him His Job - capradio.org

“Well, it is so good to be here,” said Assembly Minority Leader Chad Mayes, from the podium in the governor’s press conference room. After all, he added, “Republicans don’t get to stand on this stage very much.”

Mayes (R-Yucca Valley), who represents parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, declared himself “tired of partisan politics” – and proud of the seven other Republicans who voted for the deal.

“What they decided was that they were gonna put the people of California ahead of their own careers,” he said.

Asm. Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley) represents the 42nd Assembly District.

Republicans had some political cover: Business groups, manufacturers, and the agriculture and oil industries all prefer reducing greenhouse gas emissions through cap-and-trade's market-based approach, as opposed to top-down, “command and control” state regulations.

And while gas prices could jump under cap-and-trade by as much as 70 cents (http://www.lao.ca.gov/letters/2017/fong-fuels-cap-and-trade.pdf), they’d rise even more without it.

“We lowered taxes, we reduced costs, we reduced regulations, and at the same time, we’re gonna protect our environment,” Mayes said. “That’s a good deal.”

California’s cap-and-trade deal handed Brown a huge climate change victory this week, but it might never have gotten done without Mayes. And that’s placed Mayes’s leadership in jeopardy, with many Republican activists feeling betrayed (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/07/19/cap-and-trade-vote-splits-california- republicans/).

“He was so obsessed with trying to make a difference – to be at the table, to be in the big boy chair – that he didn’t step back to realize, ’Hey, I’m about to cast my vote to take billions of dollars out of the private sector and put them in the hands of the corrupt Legislature,’” said Jon Fleischman, a leading

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California conservative who publishes the Flash Report (http://www.flashreport.org) blog.

The posting of this photo on Twitter didn’t help Mayes’s image among conservatives, either.

Senator Toni Atkins Follow @SenToniAtkins

The press conference on our landmark Cap and Trade bill package -- bipartisan agreements on major state policy should be celebrated! 10:34 PM - 17 Jul 2017 6 37

A California Republican

Chad Mayes describes himself as a California Republican. He attended Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and interned for former U.S. Senator John Ashcroft. But he never endorsed President Trump (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2016/10/26/could-trump-knock-legislative-republicans-down-to-superminority/) and he talks

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about fighting poverty. Then, there’s his “bromance“ (http://www.pe.com/2017/03/10/a-top-california-democrat- has-formed-a-powerful-bromance-with-this-local-republican/) with Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon – a running joke at the state Capitol.

“So, I hate to sound like the dating game,” began a moderator at a UC Riverside event this spring with Mayes and Rendon, “but I have to ask – how did you guys first meet?”

Speaker's Lecture Series — Bipartisan Leadership i… Posted by Speaker Anthony Rendon 371 Views

During the conversation, Rendon (D-Paramount) acknowledged the two couldn’t be further apart ideologically.

“That being said, I think we both are very realistic about the world, and we want to get stuff done,” Rendon said. “That’s sort of our driving force.”

Minutes later, Mayes summed up his governing philosophy for a party that holds no statewide offices and represents just 26 percent of registered California voters.

“The world is not perfect,” he said. “Sometimes, you gotta look beyond that and be able to sit down and look to figure out ways of getting things done, even though things aren’t as pure as they could be.”

Mayes wants to bring California Republicans back to relevance by showing they can help govern – rather than simply being a “Party of No.” Even before cap-and-trade, since becoming Assembly Minority Leader in January 2016, Mayes has worked with Democrats on a key health care deal (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2016/02/29/browns-tax-on-health-plans-splits-california-gop/), mental health funding for homeless Californians (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2016/06/27/housing-homeless,-mentally-ill-initiative-receives-

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bipartisan-support/), and education incentives for welfare recipients (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/05/31/capitol-roundup-california-state-senate-approves-100-percent-renewable-energy- requirement/).

A Divided Caucus

Asm. Brian Dahle (R-Bieber), who represents rural northeastern California and opposed cap-and-trade, praises Mayes’s leadership.

“California is not like the rest of the country. We are different,” Dahle said Thursday. “People here believe a different way, and expect a different style of leadership, we’re trying to provide that, along with keeping our base.”

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But Mayes has infuriated conservatives, and many want him to resign. Several Assembly Republicans unhappy with Mayes declined interview requests for this story. One who was willing to talk is Asm. Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach), who’s running for governor.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a change in leadership,” Allen said Thursday morning. “I think that Californians demand that taxes get reduced in California. And they are going to hold any politicians accountable that are raising their taxes when they’re already among the highest in the nation.”

Late Thursday afternoon, Asm. Melissa Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore) resigned from her caucus leadership post.

“What I have witnessed by the Assembly Republican Leader is a dereliction of duty to preserve and promote the American Dream for every single Californian,” Melendez said in a statement. “Assemblyman Mayes’ actions on Cap-and-Trade demonstrate we no longer share the same leadership principles.”

But the governor said Mayes acted “in the spirit of Ronald Reagan.”

“There is a fringe group of Republicans that want to take the political terrorism of Washington and bring it to California. That's not helpful. That won't help their constituents.” Brown told Capital Public Radio in a brief interview Thursday morning.

“I'd say Chad Mayes exercised insight, courage and the members that voted with him – even some of the ones that didn't, who were quietly applauding him – he really earned the respect of a lot of people,” the governor said.

Republicans met behind closed doors Thursday morning as questions swirled over Mayes’s future as Assembly Minority Leader. But caucus members took no votes. Instead, they aired their grievances for more than an hour.

And so Mayes lived to lead another day – another month, in fact, since lawmakers then adjourned for summer recess.

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Ben Adler Follow @adlerben

.@ChadMayesCA lives to lead another day. "I'm the leader" he says as he exits @AssemblyGOP caucus. 10:45 AM - 20 Jul 2017 19 22

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http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20170720/fire-tears-through-helendale-alzheimers-care-facility 2/2 7/21/2017 Redlands horse therapy group building corral shelter for veterans, Dec. 2 survivors, first responders

San Bernardino County Sun (http://www.sbsun.com)

Redlands horse therapy group building corral shelter for veterans, Dec. 2 survivors, first responders

By Suzanne Hurt, The Press-Enterprise

Thursday, July 20, 2017

A Redlands nonprofit group that offers horse therapy is building a $2,500 tack room with a sheltering porch to be used by military veterans, Dec. 2 survivors, first responders and others with post- traumatic stress injuries, thanks to a mother’s loving donation and a Vietnam vet ranch owner’s building skills.

Arrowhead United Way in San Bernardino also committed at least $10,000 for survivors of the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino to receive equine therapy at Equus Medendi or “horse healing.”

The nonprofit group’s staff and volunteers are finishing a small wooden tack room with a porch next to the corral where short-term, one-on-one therapy sessions take place with a horse, horse expert and counselor at Buffalo Meadows Ranch in Redlands.

“We are so excited. We’re getting there,” said the group’s founder, Angie Sheer.

Riverside resident Leslie Dellaro donated $2,000 in memory of her horse-loving daughter, 30-year-old Liz Dellaro, who died in February.

After fundraising brought in half of the group’s $5,000 goal, Buffalo Meadows Ranch owner Bill Merrill offered to build the shelter with friends’ help and cut the cost in half.

Sheer’s friend, Barbara Betterley, who works at McElroy Metal in Adelanto, and husband, Jack, donated the metal roof on behalf of his father, Bill, and the William A. Betterley Western Heritage Foundation.

The tack room and porch, which will be painted barn red with white trim, will give trauma survivors a place to escape the heat, sun and rain. The interior must be insulated and deck boards finished. They hope to put up a solar panel.

Shortly after a June 24 fundraiser collected $1,000 for a veterans program, Arrowhead United Way President Doug Rowand committed $10,000 to provide horse therapy for Dec. 2 survivors.

Four are currently doing sessions. The money will fund sessions for even more and Rowand said he would find more funds if needed, Sheer said.

“We’re trying to get the word out to other survivors,” she added.

URL: http://www.sbsun.com/health/20170720/redlands-horse-therapy-group-building-corral-shelter-for-veterans-dec-2-survivors-first-responders

© 2017 San Bernardino County Sun (http://www.sbsun.com) http://www.sbsun.com/health/20170720/redlands-horse-therapy-group-building-corral-shelter-for-veterans-dec-2-survivors-first-responders&template=p… 1/2 7/21/2017 Rialto citizens come out for opening of Rialto Marketplace shopping center

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (http://www.dailybulletin.com)

Rialto citizens come out for opening of Rialto Marketplace shopping center

Friday, July 21, 2017

The Rialto community came out Thursday evening to the grand opening for the Rialto Marketplace, at the corner of San Bernardino and Riverside avenues.

The free community event honored its “Bridge to Progress” theme with presentations followed by a community celebration that included games, food, and community leaders. Both Rialto Police Chief Randy De Anda and Rialto Fire Chief Sean Grayson also participated in the fun late Thursday night.

“We are thrilled to be part of the City of Rialto,” said Sandy Sigal, president and CEO of NewMark Merrill Companies, in a news release. “We appreciate the loyalty of this community, City Council leadership and staff and commitment of our tenants to quality food, services and shopping experience. The Grand Opening of our shopping center is just the beginning of our continuing community support.”

The shopping center is the largest in Rialto, according to a news release from NewMark Merrill Companies, the development company behind the shopping center.

— From staff reports

URL: http://www.dailybulletin.com/business/20170721/rialto-citizens-come-out-for-opening-of-rialto-marketplace-shopping-center

http://www.dailybulletin.com/article/20170721/NEWS/170729926&template=printart 1/1 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise

LOCAL NEWS Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus

Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG Lydia Dreyer, 20, of Riverside, recently purchased a school bus and is currently converting it into a tiny house.

By ALICIA ROBINSON | [email protected] | The Press- Enterprise PUBLISHED: July 19, 2017 at 3:22 pm | UPDATED: July 19, 2017 at 5:02 pm

 http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/ 1/8 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise

When she’s done hammering, painting and decorating, Riverside resident Lydia Dreyer’s life will t in a school bus.

The bus, which Dreyer named Lorraine, is the 20-year-old college student’s bid to join the tiny house movement, an architectural craze that’s been touted as everything from a way to downsize and declutter, to an option for do-it- yourselfers and rst-time buyers to a partial solution to homelessness.

Tiny houses, which are generally smaller than 500 square feet, aren’t expected to become a signicant portion of the nation’s housing stock. They’re not practical for large families, for example.

But they’re popular enough to have inspired a ra of news articles and blogs, several home improvement shows and an annual conference. The trend was even parodied on the sketch comedy show “Portlandia.”

http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/ 2/8 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise “Every year it gets surprisingly more mainstream,” said Jay Shafer, who designs and sells tiny home plans through his Northern California business, Four Lights Tiny House Company.

“Every year someone says to me, ‘This is about as big as it can possibly get,’ and every year it gets bigger.”

Bus as home

Dreyer, who has no prior building experience, is craing her tiny home on wheels on an industrial lot on Riverside’s north end with help from her uncle, a contractor. She blogs about the experience at www.lydiaslittlehouse.com.

She started with a used school bus, bought from an Arizona rm that refurbishes and resells them.

One recent day, she showed off the wood framing that hints at how the nished home will look: a couch on the le and pull-out guest bed on the right behind the driver’s seat, a small counter with a sink that will be the kitchen, and her sleeping area — a queen-size bed with storage space under it — at the rear of the bus.

In the micro-bathroom, she’ll shower into a horse trough that will double as a washtub for her clothes, an example of how Dreyer is striving to build an environmentally friendly home.

Nearly all the materials are recycled or re-purposed, she said. Electricity will come from solar panels that charge half a dozen six-volt batteries.

Her parents, whom she lives with while earning a business degree online from the University of Michigan, “weren’t super on board with it at the beginning,” Dreyer said.

So she created a proposal to show them it could work.

Dreyer researched tiny houses online to create the layout of her 276-square-foot home and broke down the budget and construction timeline. The bus-to-house conversion should be done by September.

She’s taking a big step by spending her life savings on the project — she expects it to nish under $30,000 — but Dreyer is all in.

A few years ago, she decided to try to live a healthier, less wasteful lifestyle. Thinking about the future of the planet, her 5-year-old brother and the children she hopes to have someday, “I was like, ‘Gosh, I really need to decrease my carbon footprint because I’m not practicing what I preach,'” she said. http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/ 3/8 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise Dreyer isn’t sure what she’ll do aer college, so having her home on wheels will let her go to wherever she can nd a job.

Not the norm

The tiny house movement bucks the decades-long trend of single-family homes in the U.S. getting bigger and bigger.

The small home concept isn’t new, but before the Great Recession it had been mainly driven by environmental concerns, said Vinit Mukhija, who chairs the urban planning department at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Post-recession, a major concern was that “a lot of people were building and living in homes that were unaffordable,” he said.

Smaller homes may need custom xtures and appliances, so the cost per square foot is oen higher than in a standard home, but the overall cost is typically much lower, Mukhija said.

According to data compiled by TheTinyLife.com, a tiny home lifestyle blog, the average cost of an owner-built tiny house is $23,000, compared with $272,000 for a standard home.

There’s no ofcial, standard denition of a tiny house, though some consider 500 square feet to be an upper limit. They come in many sizes and costs and can range from a basic shed with no plumbing or electricity to a luxury dwelling with high-end nishes. Some are built by the owner; others are manufactured.

The purpose of a tiny house also varies. Some enthusiasts build them on trailer chassis so they can travel with their home. Others see them as an option to get homeless people off the streets.

Architects Soa Borges and R. Scott Mitchell, who teach at USC, helped launch a workshop about a year ago that invited students to design dorm-style, minimalist tiny homes that can be stacked and grouped into a community for the homeless with shared bathrooms and common areas.

http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/ 4/8 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise

They created the concept for Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission in northern Los Angeles County, but Borges said the homes could be adapted as student housing or second units for single-family home lots.

Changing rules

The push to build smaller homes has run into some obstacles.

In most communities, zoning rules haven’t kept up with the trend, so “They’re kind of illegal,” Mitchell said.

In Riverside, for example, the zoning code doesn’t allow tiny houses, Community and Economic Development Director Rafael Guzman said. But ofcials are looking into reducing the lot size required to add a second unit — or granny at, as they’re also called — which could help address a housing shortage, he said.

Experts say more cities are talking about how to accommodate the trend.

Shafer, the tiny home designer, said the International Code Council, which develops widely-used building safety standards, will add a special code section on small houses in 2018.

But there are still plenty of people for whom a tiny house isn’t the right t.

Dreyer’s father, Kristopher Dreyer, said he’s proud of his daughter for building a tiny home. Her example inspired him to buy a hybrid car.

But with a young child still in the house, “We can certainly downsize, but not to a single bedroom yet,” he said.

Lydia Dreyer said she had to shed most of her belongings, but now everything she needs ts into four boxes, and she likes the simplicity.

“I didn’t want to be materialistic,” she said. “I think that’s the idea with a tiny house, that you can’t really be.”

Living small

http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/ 5/8 7/21/2017 Riverside woman hops aboard tiny house trend – by living in old school bus – Press Enterprise The tiny house movement has become more popular, particularly since the recession and housing market crash in the late 2000s.

How big: There’s no strict denition of a tiny house. Some consider 400 to 500 square feet to be an upper limit; others include structures of 1,000 square feet or more.

Who likes them: People looking to downsize or reduce their environmental impact, homeless advocates hoping to create low-cost housing, and others with wanderlust who put their homes on trailers.

What they cost: Do-it-yourselfers who built their own may spend in the thousands or low tens of thousands of dollars. Manufactured or custom luxury models can run $100,000 or more.

Where they’re allowed: Many U.S. cities’ zoning rules lag behind the trend, so people try to get around regulations by building homes on wheels. Rules are starting to change as tiny houses become more popular.

Information: Blogs and websites such as the www.thetinyhouse.net and www.thetinylife.com offer plans, tips and reviews; Tiny House Magazine and specic issues of design magazines such as Country Living and Dwell also feature the trend.

Tags: architecture, housing, Top Stories PE

Alicia Robinson Alicia Robinson has been at The Press-Enterprise since 2007 and has covered Riverside and local government for most of that time, but she has also written about Norco, Corona, homeless issues, Alzheimer's disease, streetcars, butteries, horses and chickens. She grew up in the Midwest but earned Southern California native status during many hours spent in trafc.Two big questions Alicia tries to answer with stories about government are: how is it supposed to work, and how is it working?  Follow Alicia Robinson @arobinson_pe

SPONSORED CONTENT Greener Human Disposal: Water Cremation http://www.pe.com/2017/07/19/riverside-woman-hops-aboard-tiny-house-trend-by-living-in-old-school-bus/By Motherboard 6/8 7/21/2017 San Antonio Heights residents are way beyond ‘irked’: Letters

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (http://www.dailybulletin.com)

San Antonio Heights residents are way beyond ‘irked’: Letters

Thursday, July 20, 2017

San Antonio Heights residents beyond ‘irked’

Re “How San Antonio Heights tried to stop Upland fire annexation process” (July 12):

I have resided in San Antonio Heights for 47 years. I am strongly opposed to the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) action affecting our unincorporated area. I attended and spoke at last week’s meeting at Upland City Hall.

Furthermore, I object to your writer continuously using the word “irked” to describe the position of the residents affected by this action. I wonder if she really understands the meaning of that word.

Definition of the word “irked,” past tense of the word “irk”: irritate; annoy. Sample sentence: “it irks her to think of the runaround she received”; synonym: exasperate.

I am definitely not irked. I am several levels above irked. I am angry, which is a much stronger feeling. I am disgusted by the fact that the city of Upland struck a deal with the county, and LAFCO, for fire protection, and by the power of a bureaucratic decision by LAFCO, an appointed county agency, decided to throw San Antonio Heights into the deal too.

For many years, Heights residents have been served by Station 12 at the end of Euclid Ave. This protection has been included as part of our annual county property taxes.

We will now be accessed in excess of an additional $150 for less protection. Our small station will now serve a much larger area, including the city of Upland. Residents of our area were not informed or given an opportunity to object prior to this action.

I am appalled that our elected representative to the county board of supervisors, who should have been involved in the decision, was not. We are protesting to be given our legal right to cast our vote in opposition, or support, of this action, for our Heights area.

I suggest that your paper recognize the legitimate protest of the residents of the San Antonia Heights. We are way beyond “irked.”

— Linda Keagle, San Antonio Heights

http://www.dailybulletin.com/opinion/20170720/san-antonio-heights-residents-are-way-beyond-irked-letters&template=printart 1/2 7/21/2017 Sentencing for Marquez in Dec. 2-related firearms case reset for Nov. 6 – Press Enterprise

LOCAL NEWS Sentencing for Marquez in Dec. 2-related rearms case reset for Nov. 6

Enrique Marquez Jr., of Riverside, shown in a courtroom sketch at a December 2015 hearing in U.S. District Court in Riverside, is now scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 6, 2017, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and making false statements in connection with the acquisition of a firearm. Sentencing had previously been scheduled for Aug. 21, 2017. (Bill Robles, The Associated Press) ORG XMIT: RIV1702141518102284

By BRIAN ROKOS | [email protected] | The Press-Enterprise PUBLISHED: July 20, 2017 at 12:42 pm | UPDATED: July 20, 2017 at 12:44 pm



http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/sentencing-for-marquez-in-dec-2-related-firearms-case-reset-for-nov-6/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twi… 1/4 7/21/2017 Sentencing for Marquez in Dec. 2-related firearms case reset for Nov. 6 – Press Enterprise The sentencing for Enrique Marquez Jr., who pleaded guilty to charges related to the Dec. 2, 2015, San Bernardino shooting, has been postponed by more than two months.

Marquez faces up to 25 years in prison and $500,000 in nes when he is sentenced at 2 p.m. Nov. 6 in U.S. District Court, Central District for California, in Riverside. Sentencing had previously been set for Aug. 21.

Both the prosecution and defense requested additional time to prepare for sentencing, according to court documents. Marquez requested additional time to prepare a statement; prosecutors said they might include a report from an expert witness who said he couldn’t complete the report before Sept. 15.

Judge Jesus G. Bernal approved the request.

Marquez, 25, a graduate of La Sierra High in Riverside, pleaded guilty Feb. 16 to charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and making false statements in connection with the acquisition of a rearm. Marquez said on a federal rearms form that he was purchasing them for himself when in fact they were intended for Farook, a former neighbor in Riverside.

Marquez was accused of buying the rearms used by Redlands residents Syed Rizwan Farook and Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, to kill 14 people and wound 22 others at a San Bernardino County Division of Environmental Health holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.

Federal authorities have said they could nd no evidence that Marquez was involved in the IRC plot. They said Marquez purchased the rearms and provided bombmaking supplies for Farook in 2011 and 2012 as they planned attacks on the 91 Freeway and Riverside City College that were later dropped.

Farook and Malik were killed in a gun battle with police hours aer the IRC attack.

Tags: San Bernardino terror attack investigation

BRIAN_ROKOSBrian Rokos Brian Rokos writes about public safety issues such as policing, criminal justice, scams, how law affects public safety, reghting tactics and wildland re danger. He has also covered the cities of San Bernardino, Corona, http://www.pe.com/2017/07/20/sentencing-for-marquez-in-dec-2-related-firearms-case-reset-for-nov-6/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twi…Norco, Lake Elsinore, Perris, Canyon Lake and Hemet. Before that he 2/4 7/21/2017 Why California suddenly has 20 million more mosquitoes - LA Times Why California suddenly has 20 million more mosquitoes

By Abby Hamblin

JULY 17, 2017, 4:25 PM

Like 1.4K people like this. Be the first of your friends.

Trucks drive up and down streets of a town releasing millions of scientifically engineered mosquitoes during the dog days of summer?

No, this isn’t the plot of a science fiction movie. It’s what Google’s sister company “Verily Life Sciences” is up to in Fresno this July.

“Debug Fresno,” which launched Friday, is an initiative meant to “reduce the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world.”

How? The program will introduce tons of sterile male mosquitoes — which don’t bite — to mate with female mosquitoes — which do bite and spread diseases — so that the produced eggs won’t hatch. The specific target is the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which has plagued Fresno County since 2013 and is known to carry diseases like Zika, dengue and chikungunya.

The mosquitoes aren’t genetically modified, but instead infected with a naturally occurring bacteria known as Wolbachia. The company says this will be the largest U.S. release to date of such mosquitoes.

Here’s a short video explaining it all.

Introducing Debug Fresno

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/sd-mosquitoes-california-fresno-alphabet-google-020170717-htmlstory.html 1/3 7/21/2017 Why California suddenly has 20 million more mosquitoes - LA Times

Debug Fresno is a study that may be conducted starting in the summer of 2017, pending approval from state and federal regulators, to test a potential mosquito control method using ...

“You should expect to see a heightened level of mosquito activity throughout the summer,” said Jacob Crawford, a scientist for Verily.

The program will target two neighborhoods over a 20-week period.

“This is only going to be temporary. Hopefully you see less and less biting females,” said Jodi Holeman, scientific-technical services director of Fresno County’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District (CMAD).

Aedes aegypti mosquitos have been detected elsewhere in California, including San Diego.

In 2016, San Diego County’s Department of Environmental Heal found that particular type of mosquito in 494 tests throughout the county. Here’s a map of where they were spotted.

Feeling creeped out?

(CMAD) created this nice little video to help you avoid mosquitoes in your area.

Help Fight the Bite!

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/sd-mosquitoes-california-fresno-alphabet-google-020170717-htmlstory.html 2/3 7/19/2017 Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t - The New York Times

https://nyti.ms/2uyukJB

U.S. Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t

By ALAN BLINDER JULY 19, 2017 DALLAS — Phillip Jones, whose job it is to court visitors to this city, spent months warning anyone who would listen: Economic pain will follow if Texas lawmakers pass laws seen as hostile to gay and transgender people.

But after Texas approved a law that critics said might keep people, on the basis of sexual orientation, from adopting children or serving as foster parents, even Mr. Jones was surprised at part of the fallout: a ban by California on taxpayer-funded travel to Texas.

“Never in a million years,” Mr. Jones, the chief executive of VisitDallas, said, weeks after California broadened its travel restrictions to include eight states. “It was not even a factor in any of our discussions that California would ban travel to Texas.”

For a handful of liberal states, bans on government travel have become political pressure points during the country’s debate about gay and transgender rights. Beyond California, officials from New York to Minnesota to Washington State have pursued the bans in response to laws in states that they contend open the door to discrimination.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/public-employee-travel.html 1/5 7/19/2017 Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t - The New York Times

Some of the banned states are pushing back. The Tennessee General Assembly easily passed a resolution to complain about the imposition of “unfounded moral judgment,” and it noted what lawmakers described as California’s “exorbitant taxes, spiraling budget deficits, runaway social welfare programs and rampant illegal immigration.”

Even though the economic tolls of restrictions that bar nonessential travel at taxpayer expense are unclear — and may not be fully realized for years — the bans have already helped both Democratic and Republican elected officials grandstand, galvanize supporters and reinforce the regional fault lines of American politics.

“Our country has made great strides in dismantling prejudicial laws that have deprived too many of our fellow Americans of their precious rights,” said Attorney General Xavier Becerra of California, whose state has most aggressively pursued the travel restrictions and has limited trips to Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.

“Sadly, that is not the case in all parts of our nation, even in the 21st century,” Mr. Becerra said in a statement.

On the other hand, a spokesman for Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin, a Republican, denounced “West Coast liberals” and “far-left ideology.” South Dakota’s governor, Dennis Daugaard, sniped that such bans are “political statements that have no discernible effect” and are “designed to generate publicity.”

Proponents of the restrictions concede part of Mr. Daugaard’s argument: They say that publicity is precisely the point of the bans, which cover nonessential travel and do not block the personal activities of state workers.

“Is this more symbolic than actually an economic driving force? Most certainly so,” said Evan Low, a California assemblyman and the sponsor of a measure, approved last year with some Republican support, that provided for his state’s travel restrictions. “But it allows the conversation to continue to occur to say, ‘Wow, these states really don’t value the basic, fundamental rights of all of its citizens?’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/public-employee-travel.html 2/5 7/19/2017 Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t - The New York Times

Despite Mr. Low’s forecast, it appears that the travel restrictions are having some effect. Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, Ky., said recently that two conventions had cited California’s restrictions when they abandoned their expected plans to visit the city.

Texas has more on the line than most places. Some 10 percent of the nation’s trade shows are held in the state, and its three largest cities — Dallas, Houston and San Antonio — are popular meeting sites. But Mr. Jones fears that California’s ban, and any others that might follow it, will force Texas to surrender some visitors and revenue to cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas or New Orleans.

About two dozen groups have already suggested that they might pass over Dallas, Mr. Jones said, especially if lawmakers, who began a special session on Tuesday, approve a measure restricting restroom access for transgender people. Groups with large numbers of public employees are warning that it will be hard to justify holding meetings here when representatives of the country’s most populous state might be excluded.

“We’re very, very fearful of what the long-term consequences are,” Mr. Jones said.

Some groups are, reluctantly, keeping their plans to meet in Dallas, including the National Communication Association, which considered moving its November convention. The group decided to stay, its president, Stephen J. Hartnett, said, for logistical reasons and because it was in the organization’s “ethical best interest to stay in Dallas and engage with Dallas and be on the ground so we could participate in those debates.”

But he cautioned that the committee that selects convention sites could bypass Texas in the future.

“They’re going to be looking at travel bans like the one California put in place,” said Mr. Hartnett, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, who noted that 8 percent of last year’s convention participants came from California.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/public-employee-travel.html 3/5 7/19/2017 Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t - The New York Times

For now, the bans have provoked a swirl of commentary and jabs on social media that could well pay political dividends for figures on both sides, campaign consultants said.

“If anything, what it does provide is a great opportunity for political types in Alabama to have new fodder for a new commercial,” said Angi Stalnaker, a Republican strategist in Alabama. “I think you’ll see words like ‘Hollywood liberal.’”

Although episodes of interstate political jousting are nothing new, the proliferation of travel bans among states seems to have little history behind it. The National Conference of State Legislatures said it knew of no similar, longstanding approach by states mired in policy disagreements with other states.

Still, supporters say the bans are roughly similar to the familiar idea of weaving nondiscrimination requirements and other mandates that reflect a government’s goals into contracts.

The moves by California and other like-minded governments have so far done little to discourage some states from advancing, or retreating from, legislation that critics call bigoted. Rather, lawmakers in states so far cited by California have typically responded with shrugs, proposals of payback and digs they did not even try to disguise.

“I think it’s nonsense,” said State Representative Dustin Burrows of Texas, where lawmakers could consider a reciprocal ban. “I think California should be free to determine its own culture, and Texas doesn’t try to influence it. This seems to be something new and different where California wants to determine our culture and our laws, and we’re not going to have it.”

Some critics of the bans, including State Senator Albert Robinson of Kentucky, said they believed California officials had misunderstood the state laws that drew rebukes.

“I have never seen it as bad or as sad as it is now that people are losing respect for God and regard for man,” said Mr. Robinson, the author of the legislation that drew California’s ire. “When one state would try to punish another one, I think it

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/public-employee-travel.html 4/5 7/19/2017 Travel to Texas? Not on California’s Dime, You Don’t - The New York Times

speaks for itself. I find it hard to believe that everybody in California believes in what this person has done.”

The restrictions include loopholes that can keep money flowing. New York’s ban on North Carolina, for instance, exempts travel that is “necessary for the enforcement of New York State law, to meet prior contractual obligations, or for the protection of public health, welfare and safety.”

But the restrictions can derail, or at least complicate, plans for intercollegiate sporting events or athletic recruiting. Last year, the University at Albany, a branch of the State University of New York, did not play a game at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo restricted travel. And the N.C.A.A. has long used some of the restricted states as sites for major events; the Final Four for men’s basketball is to be played in San Antonio next year.

The California attorney general’s office is still considering whether the state’s restrictions apply to athletic team staffs at public universities, but some in the college sports-obsessed South have already wondered and joked, maybe, about the possible consequences for California.

“I hope there’s some California team that has an amazing year, which for them means being bowl-eligible, and ends up getting the Birmingham Bowl and they can’t go,” Ms. Stalnaker said.

Manny Fernandez contributed reporting from Houston.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/public-employee-travel.html 5/5 7/21/2017 'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas - LA Times

'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas

Paul Chabot, founder of Conservative Move, outside his new home in McKinney, Texas.

By Jenny Jarvie

JULY 20, 2017, 7:30 AM | REPORTING FROM MCKINNEY, TEXAS

mails poured in from across California. E “My boys’ minds have been taken over by the liberal teachings of the schools here,” wrote a woman from Westlake Village who works in the courts. “I would like to try to save my younger son before it’s too late.”

“I for one wish to not be a part of this control and socialist environment,” said a woman from Vacaville who home-schools her children and complained that California liberals ridiculed her for praying before meals.

“I’m done,” announced a financial planner from Monrovia who complained she was struggling to find common ground with her co-workers. “I want my next chapter in life to be one where I’m in an environment where people are like-minded.”

Fed up with life in the Golden State, the emailers wanted out. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-california-conservatives-2017-story.html?12313 1/5 7/21/2017 'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas - LA Times So they turned to Paul Chabot, a 43-year-old Republican who says he’s discovered the perfect place for them: Collin County in north Texas.

He moved there late last year, bailing on his native California after a second failed run for Congress. In May, he started a company called Conservative Move, which aims to help other Republicans follow his example and escape blue states.

Its slogan is “Helping families move Right.”

Whether the company succeeds remains to be seen. The plan is to connect clients with real estate agents in red states — starting with Collin County — in return for part of the commission on home sales. So far there haven’t been any, though one is pending.

But in a sign of the country’s increasing polarization, Chabot has had no shortage of interest in his cause, having received more than 1,000 inquiries. The biggest share is from very blue California — very red Texas’ biggest political and economic rival.

“California is a train wreck,” said Chabot, who also consults for law enforcement agencies and college substance abuse programs. “If we made it out of California as a lower-middle-class family, anybody can. … People don’t have to live stuck in a rut.” “ In California, it's like liberals can do no wrong. No matter what we do, we're beating our heads against the wall. — Paul Chabot

Born and raised in San Bernardino County, Chabot said disillusionment sank in over decades as he witnessed the decline of the once-conservative, blue-collar community. Public schools deteriorated, crime rose, and more residents came to depend on welfare, he said.

The tipping point came in November, when he ran as a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith conservative Republican” in California’s 31st Congressional District on a platform of bringing back a shuttered military base to San Bernardino and cracking down on crime. A veteran of the Iraq war who remains in the Navy reserves as an intelligence officer, he lost to his Democratic opponent by more than 11% of the vote.

“In California, it’s like liberals can do no wrong,” said Chabot, who narrowly lost a race for the same congressional seat in 2014. “No matter what we do, we’re beating our heads against the wall.”

He and his wife, Brenda, moved their four children to the suburban town of McKinney, Texas, a Republican stronghold about 30 miles north of Dallas in Colin County. Dotted with new subdivisions, golf courses, artificial http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-california-conservatives-2017-story.html?12313 2/5 7/21/2017 'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas - LA Times lakes and strip malls, the area reminds him of Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s like living a dream,” he said as he steered his golf cart down his cul-de-sac on a muggy afternoon recently, past large brick homes decorated with American flags and meticulously trimmed lawns. “You don’t see graffiti. You don’t see gang members, or police helicopters circling the neighborhood.”

Texas and California — the two most populous states — have long offered competing versions of how to achieve the American dream. California has higher taxes to fund stronger social services and public universities, while Texas prides itself on lower taxes, less regulation and a more limited social safety net.

The two states have also staked out opposing positions in the nation’s culture wars.

Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a law that would allow adoption agencies to reject gay or transgender people as potential parents based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

In protest, California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra blocked state employees from traveling to Texas on official business.

Abbott’s press secretary shot back: "California may be able to stop their state employees, but they can't stop all the businesses that are fleeing over taxation and regulation and relocating to Texas.”

In a recent vow to keep Texas’ upstart liberal capital city in line with the rest of the state on issues including immigration and transgender bathroom use, Abbott made clear his feelings about California: "As your governor, I will not allow Austin, Texas, to California-ize the Lone Star State.”

To Chabot’s email correspondents, California is a liberal cesspool.

Their discontents include economic hardship, rising crime, gun restrictions, homeschooling regulations, mandatory vaccinations for children, local policies against cooperation with federal immigration authorities, steep taxes, high housing costs and declining public schools — everything they consider wrong with America.

“Even my students are spouting the liberal rhetoric of their parents,” wrote a high school teacher from Modesto.

Chabot provided a sampling of emails to The Times on the condition that names not be used without permission from the writers. They either refused or did not respond to requests for interviews.

“Conservative views here are silenced,” wrote a stay-at-home mom from the Riverside County town of Perris.

A 57-year-old man from Temecula wrote that he was struggling with the death of a close friend, a police officer who was fatally shot after responding to a traffic accident this year. He blamed “insane laws” passed by liberal legislators, because the suspect was a violent felon who had been allowed back on the streets despite a string of parole violations.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-california-conservatives-2017-story.html?12313 3/5 7/21/2017 'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas - LA Times “When I was a kid growing up, I was proud to tell people that I was from California,” he wrote. “I can't say that anymore. I don't see any hope for a bright future here in what's left of my lifetime.”

Texas, on the other hand, is a conservative utopia of jobs, cheap homes, low taxes and traditional family values — at least as Chabot presents it.

In reality, the gap between the states may not be as wide as it seems.

They were the top two job creators in the country last year. Texas added 266,600, while California added 242,600, dropping unemployment in both places to just under 5%.

Median household income is higher in California — $61,818 compared to $53,207 — though the lack of state income taxes and dramatically lower housing costs make Texas more affordable. The website Zillow says the median home value in California is $500,200, compared to $167,100 in Texas.

In February, the U.S. News & World Report ranked Texas’ economy sixth overall and California’s third.

“Texas is not doing any better now than California,” said Daniel Hamermesh, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Texas in Austin who grew up in the Chicago suburbs and now teaches in London. “California costs more to live in, but for many, you get what you pay for. The California coast is a much more pleasant place to live.”

And within Texas there is growing fear that some areas are actually starting to resemble California. Austin has long been a liberal oasis, and Houston is now the most diverse metropolis in the nation. Democrats are starting to run for Congress in districts that the party had long considered lost causes. “ California costs more to live in, but for many, you get what you pay for. The California coast is a much more pleasant place to live. — Daniel Hamermesh, University of Texas professor

Even conservative Collin County is changing.

In recent months, Toyota Motor Corp. relocated its U.S. headquarters from Torrance, Calif., to Plano, a town 13 miles south of McKinney, prompting a flood of local concerns about skyrocketing housing prices, property taxes and traffic.

The area remains solidly Republican, but the speed of corporate relocations has led to an increase in the number of Democrats. President Trump won the county in November with 56% of the vote, down from the 65% Mitt Romney collected in 2012. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-california-conservatives-2017-story.html?12313 4/5 7/21/2017 'I'm done': Fed up with California, some conservatives look to Texas - LA Times “There may be a fair number of conservatives who come here and say, ‘I like this much better than California,’” said Mike Rawlins, chairman of the Collin County Democratic Party. “But that’s a drop in the bucket. Ten or 20 years from now, they’re going to find out they don’t like it as much as they do now.”

Still, there was no hesitation from Conservative Move’s first client, a 48-year-old mother from San Diego who spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her first name, Melissa.

Back in California, the only job she could find was at a fast-food restaurant, despite having bachelor’s degrees in psychology and Spanish. Her breaking point came when her daughter’s teacher assigned a young adult novel in which the narrator described smoking cigarettes and popping anxiety pills as a way to cope with stress.

“I’m so over California, I can’t see straight,” she said after a Conservative Move real estate agent led her on a tour of homes in Collin County. “You can get more land than I’ve ever seen. What was I thinking to stay as long as I did?”

Weeks later, she packed up, moved her two teenagers to Texas and put an offer on a four-bedroom, brick house in a McKinney subdivision. The sale is now pending.

The house was bigger, newer and — at $340,000 — cheaper than the San Diego home she recently sold for $500,000.

“I feel like I’ve stepped into another world,” she said.

Jarvie is a special correspondent.

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This article is related to: Housing Market, Real Estate, Donald Trump, University of Texas at Austin

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-california-conservatives-2017-story.html?12313 5/5 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

https://nyti.ms/2ttgx7o

U.S. When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand

By MIRIAM JORDAN JULY 20, 2017 FRESNO, Calif. — The police responded to a call about a loud party on East San Ramon Avenue, but it wasn’t just any party: A sheep was reportedly being slaughtered in a backyard.

“Muslim refugees were unaware that slaughtering sheep is not allowed in the city,” the police wrote afterward in their report, which also stated that those involved “were advised to clean up the blood and mess” and warned that in the future “they could be cited.”

The animal, actually a goat, was killed by a Syrian refugee who later skinned, roasted and shared it with his Syrian neighbors in the apartment complex where they all live.

Refugees are typically placed in towns and cities such as Buffalo, N.Y.; Boise, Idaho; and Fayetteville, Ark., where resettlement agencies ease their transition to life in a new country. But they are free to move about the country like anybody else, and they sometimes land in places like Fresno that are not exactly prepared for their arrival.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 1/6 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

Since late 2016, more than 200 Syrian refugees originally settled elsewhere in the United States have made a fresh start in Fresno, the largest city in California’s agricultural belt. They have been drawn there mainly by cheap housing.

But behind the low rent is a city struggling with high poverty and unemployment, making it more difficult for the refugees to secure jobs. And Fresno has no federally funded agency to help them find work, learn basics like bus routes and understand United States culture and rules, like with the practice of animal slaughter.

Syrian children turned up unexpectedly at Ahwahnee Middle School, needing vaccinations, trauma counseling, English-language instruction and academic support as a result of interrupted schooling. “It was a shock at first,” said Jose Guzman, the principal. “We never had to teach students who speak Arabic.”

He hired an Arabic-speaking teaching assistant, while some of his staff communicated with students with the aid of Google Translate.

Without notice, there also was no time to build political and community support for the new arrivals. So while they elicited gestures of kindness from some, they aroused suspicion from others. Some mosques, churches and a synagogue came to the refugees’ aid. A local car broker donated a 1999 Toyota Avalon to one of the Syrians, Abdulrazzaq Alghraibi, a father of four who now works on the de-winging line at a poultry plant.

But Muslim refugees represent a polarizing issue. Although all refugees undergo extensive screening before being approved for resettlement, some Fresnans have echoed President Trump’s concerns that the vetting isn’t good enough.

Among them is Trevor Carey, a conservative talk-show host on PowerTalk 96.7 FM.

“In my years in the valley, I’ve met some great Syrian people,” he said on the air during a segment about Muslim refugees. “Come on, our safety is at stake here. This area they are coming from is embedded with ISIS.”

That sentiment was shared by Michael Martin, a 28-year-old who works in air- conditioning maintenance. He praised Fresno’s diversity, citing its Armenian and

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 2/6 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

Hmong communities. As for the Syrians, “I think it’s a little bit scary because of what is going on” in their home country, he said over lunch at the Chicken Pie Shop, a popular local diner.

His father, Joe, was not against their presence. “Anything is fine as long as they act like us,” he said.

There is a tradition of refugees continuing to migrate once they reach the United States. In the 1990s, about a dozen evangelical Christian families from the former Soviet Union who originally settled in Oregon and Washington followed a leader to Delta Junction, Alaska, and established a community there.

Many Hmong, an ethnic group from Laos that helped the United States during the Vietnam War, left their first American homes and converged on the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, where leaders like Leng “Vang” Wong, a former interpreter for the C.I.A., had settled.

At the moment, no refugees can enter the United States for four months unless they already have a close relative here, according to a Supreme Court order that allowed part of Mr. Trump’s travel ban to proceed. But in the past two years, more than 20,000 Syrians have been admitted after fleeing civil war and the Islamic State’s ruthless grip on parts of the country.

As the Syrian flow intensified, Turlock, a town about 80 miles north of Fresno that has been receiving Christian minorities from Iraq and Iran for more than a decade, was identified as a site with “decent housing, jobs and a welcoming mayor,” said Karen Ferguson, executive director of the International Rescue Committee of Northern California.

About 250 Syrians, overwhelmingly Muslim, were sent there. But the agency could not immediately house all of them, stranding some families in hotels for several weeks or longer.

Last fall, a few members of Fresno’s 15,000-strong Muslim community — Pakistanis, Yemenis, Iranians and Palestinians, among others — offered to help.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 3/6 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

Soon, they were welcoming four Syrian families to apartments that they had found for them.

Word traveled fast to Turlock and elsewhere that rent in Fresno was a relative bargain — about $450 a month for a two-bedroom unit in some places — and that there were people ready to supply furniture, food, clothing and more.

“Helping one or two families, that’s easy,” said Reza Nekumanesh, director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno. “But soon, one family after another was arriving — from San Diego, out of state.”

“They didn’t realize rent is low here for a reason,” he said.

Abdullah Zakaria, who ran cafes in Syria, fled to Jordan with his family in 2013 after a bomb struck his house in Homs and burned his eldest child, Tasneem, now 7, whose back still bears scars. They could not find work in Turlock, so they moved to Fresno. Mr. Zakaria and his wife, Aida, are trying to start a business selling kibbehs, shawarmas and sfihas to Fresno State University students and others.

“Fresno is bigger city,” Mr. Zakaria said. “I want to open restaurant.”

In a blue-collar neighborhood once dubbed “Sin City,” more than a dozen Syrian families with up to nine members apiece are crammed into two-bedroom units in two apartment blocks on East San Ramon Avenue, where the goat roast occurred in February.

Some have found jobs, including at a carwash and a poultry plant. Nasser Alobeid, who worked as a security guard in Syria, is still jobless, and he and his wife, Neveen Alassad, get by with a $1,100 monthly welfare check, food stamps and help from the local community.

“Nasser doesn’t speak English,” Ms. Alassad, a mother of five, said in broken English while Syrian children poured into a concrete courtyard to play.

Having left a resettlement agency’s fold, the refugees no longer had access to interpreters, employment training and English classes. Many couldn’t afford the security deposit to rent an apartment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 4/6 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

Help came from across the religious spectrum. The Islamic Cultural Center began paying deposits and utility bills. Wesley United Methodist Church distributed vouchers for its thrift store. Jim Call, a member of the Mormon community, collected donations to buy dining sets and TVs. Congregants from Temple Beth Israel also stepped up.

Fresno’s new Syrians also are relying on people like Nabih Dagher, whose Dunia International Market sells halal meat, pita bread and other Middle Eastern staples. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Dagher flipped through a notebook in which each page was filled with the name of a Syrian family and the sum owed him from each visit, $56.50 to $449.64.

“I give each family $20, $50 groceries free,” said Mr. Dagher, a Syrian Christian who has been in the United States for 15 years. “After that, I said you have to pay.”

In March, the Fresno Board of Supervisors approved a $375,000 grant over four and a half years to Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Ministries, or FIRM, a local nonprofit. The money is paying for four part-time Arabic speakers but doesn’t cover the full cost of serving the newcomers, whose needs are “insane,” said Zachary Darrah, FIRM’s executive director.

Mr. Darrah, a Baptist pastor, has also made it his mission to sell Fresno on the Syrians. Last month he led a service in an upscale retirement community, where he noted that the Syrians arriving in Fresno are “moderate or secular Muslims.”

“Everyone is our neighbor, even Muslims,” he told the worshipers. “Our God said it doesn’t matter.”

Some nodded; others shook their heads. “As a Christian, I believe in what the Lord says” about welcoming strangers, said one worshiper, Doris Rahm. But she added, “I have concerns if they are not vetted properly.”

At another gathering, Mr. Darrah said, “A guy told me he had a great idea, find some land far from Fresno and send the Syrians there because they’re a danger to the community.” Mr. Darrah said he then told the man that Fresno during World War II had an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, a blemish on its past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 5/6 7/20/2017 When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand - The New York Times

But there have been no reports of anti-Muslim violence or vandalism. And Syrians keep arriving. Among them is Anas Hammad, a baker and father of two, who was originally settled in Michigan.

Mr. Alghraibi, the new owner of the old Toyota, has invited friends living in Tennessee who had been his neighbors in a refugee camp in Turkey.

“I’ve gotten calls from Indiana, Florida, Texas,” said Mr. Darrah. “We can’t stop families from coming here. ”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/fresno-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0 6/6

A Broader Sweep A day in the field with immigration enforcers in California, a state hostile to President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations.

By JENNIFER MEDINA and MIRIAM JORDAN Video by DEBORAH ACOSTA and LIGAIYA ROMEROJULY 21, 2017 RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Just after dawn, a line of officers marched to the gate outside Fidel Delgado’s home here with guns drawn, one holding a rifle. Mr. Delgado emerged barechested from his home and with a look of confusion. “¿Qué necesita?” he asked: What do you need? About 20 minutes later and 10 miles away, Anselmo Morán Lucero sensed exactly why officers had come. He spotted them as he was returning from a night out, and turned his truck around. But an unmarked S.U.V. pulled in front of him and another flashed its lights behind him, blocking his escape. They asked his name. They asked if he knew why he was being arrested. Mr. Lucero nodded. Every day around the United States, from before sunrise until late into the night, people like Mr. Delgado and Mr. Lucero are being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the front-line soldiers in President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Fidel Delgado is led away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times More than 65,000 people have been arrested by the agency since President Trump took office, a nearly 40 percent increase over the same period last year and as sure a sign as any that the United States is a tougher place today to be an undocumented immigrant. But I.C.E. is in some ways operating in enemy territory in California, home to more than two million undocumented immigrants and hostile to the idea of mass deportations. Because local law enforcement often will not turn over undocumented immigrants in their custody, I.C.E. must make most of their arrests at homes, at workplaces and out on the street, which is more complicated than simply picking people up from jails — and potentially more dangerous. So when a team of immigration agents gathered at 4:30 on one already warm morning in June, their chief, David Marin, warned them to stay away from any sign of danger. After going over notes on each of the men they were after, the team pulled off in their unmarked S.U.V.s. Eight hours later, five men would be in custody, awaiting the start of deportation proceedings. The New York Times followed the team for a day as it navigated the streets and politics of Southern California, and spoke with some of the men they arrested and the families they may soon be leaving behind. An Unplanned Arrest As the sun crept above the horizon, the officers gathered on a hill just a few yards away from Mr. Delgado’s home. But it was not Mr. Delgado they had come for; it was his son Mariano. Mariano Delgado, 24, had returned to Mexico in 2011 after he was convicted of drunken driving. Since illegally re-entering the United States, he has been arrested four times for assault with a deadly weapon. Immigrants like him are called “criminal aliens,” and there are so many of them in Southern California that Mr. Marin says it is effectively impossible to go after anyone else. But under President Trump, agents are encouraged to also arrest undocumented immigrants without serious criminal records, a break from the Obama administration’s policy of mostly leaving those immigrants alone. So here and across the country, agents now make more “collateral” arrests — undocumented people they come across while looking for someone else. That was about to happen. When officers, guns out, approached the chain-link fence surrounding the home, the dogs began barking loudly, joining the squawking chickens. Fidel Delgado emerged. The elder Mr. Delgado, 46, and his wife, María Rocha, told the officers that their son had moved to Texas months ago. They readily admitted to being in the country illegally, but added that they work. Their youngest son, 16, is an American-born citizen. When the agents shook him out of bed, he began to sob. After taking Fidel Delgado’s fingerprints, they ran them through a database. Within minutes, they learned that he had once crossed the border illegally, twice in the same day, and had been sent back to Mexico. A couple of officers debated what to do: Should they take both parents and call Child Protective Services for the boy? Did they believe that Mariano Delgado was no longer living there, even though they thought he was home as recently as the week before? “If he doesn’t give up the son, we’re going to take him,” one officer said. They left the wife behind and led Mr. Delgado to a van, where he was soon shackled. The handcuffs would leave marks.

Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times Later that morning, Ms. Rocha, 50, leaned against the chain-link fence that surrounds their home, bleary-eyed and in shock. “My husband, they had no reason to take him,” she said. “They weren’t searching for him.” The family has lived in the three-bedroom white house in a blue-collar, semirural enclave of Riverside for three years, paying $1,300 a month in rent. Ms. Rocha, who cleans offices in nearby Corona, a more upscale community, said she brings home about $1,200 a month. Her husband, who milks cows at a dairy, earns about $12 an hour. The couple married in Mexico 24 years ago, just before heading north. “We came here for a better life,” she said. In all her years in the United States, she said, she had never had problems with “la migra,” as the immigration agency is known. By the afternoon, Mr. Delgado had been released by immigration agents, who decided that he was not a threat to public safety. He was given a notice that he must comply with any orders from immigration agents and returned to work the next day. Agency Under a Microscope Before heading out to their targets for the day, the I.C.E. team gathered in the darkness in the parking lot of a small hardware store. Mr. Marin, the enforcement supervisor, quizzed his officers: What time will this man start to leave his home? Which way will that one turn when he pulls out of his driveway? When will the other one arrive back from his night shift? The officers had been watching the men they were after for days, learning their habits so they could capture them easily. Mr. Marin, 48, has worked in immigration enforcement for more than two decades, starting when the agency was called Immigration and Naturalization Services. In the 1990s, he said, officers would spend much of their time rounding up immigrants in front of home repair stores, routinely arresting people so many times that they would know them by sight. Within hours of a bus ride returning them to Mexico, Mr. Marin said, they would be on their way to the United States again. Like roughly half of the other officers, Mr. Marin began his career in the military, serving as a Marine. He amassed tattoos the way others collect shot glasses: On his left forearm is the first letter of the word “Christian” written in Arabic, commemorating his work collecting intelligence on the Taliban in Pakistan. Though he had to pass a basic Spanish course early in his career, today Mr. Marin hardly speaks a word of it. But many officers do. Nearly 40 percent of Mr. Marin’s officers are Latino, he said, and many of them hear refrains of “How can you do this to your own people.” They do not apologize. But the agency is under a microscope here. Arrests in the Los Angeles region are up only 17 percent since Mr. Trump took office, far less than in the rest of the country, according to I.C.E. statistics. Members of Congress and local officials routinely call Mr. Marin’s cellphone when they hear of arrests in their area. “People want to know if we’ve gone into schools, if we’re standing in the market, but that’s not what we do,” Mr. Marin said, driving before dawn. “We know an arrest is a traumatic event for a family. We know the impact it has, and we take it very seriously.” Luck Runs Out While Mr. Delgado was being questioned, other members of the team were waiting for Mr. Lucero, who had already been deported once. Mr. Lucero, 51, and his wife, Jamie, 47, arrived from a small village in the Mexican state of Puebla more than three decades ago. He had built a thriving landscaping business, tending to yards of homes in upscale Orange County. In 2006, Mr. Lucero was convicted in a domestic violence case and spent several months in jail, then was deported. But he had reconciled with his wife and was eager to return to her and their six children, two of them born in the United States. So he crossed the border illegally again. Immigration officials had tried to get the Orange County sheriff’s office to hold Mr. Lucero for them when he was in jail for a day on a new domestic violence charge in 2014. But the sheriff declined, according to I.C.E. Many California sheriff and police departments do not cooperate with immigration officials, saying it erodes trust in law enforcement among immigrant populations. Mr. Trump has threated to punish these so-called sanctuary cities and counties, saying they harbor lawbreakers. For several nights before the I.C.E. team showed up, Mr. Lucero said, he had dreams of immigration agents coming to get him. The night before, he and his wife tried their luck at a nearby casino, playing the slot machines until daybreak. They had won a couple of hundred dollars and left just before 6 a.m. When they began driving home, Ms. Lucero’s brother, with whom the family lives, warned them that immigration officers were near. But Mr. Lucero was unable to evade them.

Anselmo Lucero in the I.C.E. van. Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times Hours after his arrest, Jamie Lucero, her eyes red with tears, pulled out a blue folder with Mr. Lucero’s papers neatly organized, including documents showing he had completed an anger-management program and followed the rules of probation from his domestic violence case. She was planning to take the folder with her when she visited him in detention, though the papers are unlikely to have a bearing on his new deportation case.

Barbara Davidson for The New York Times Their 29-year-old son, Urie, said that the week before, four officers had come to the door holding a picture of a bald man they said they were after. They never mentioned the man’s name, and Urie Lucero said he did not recognize the man. But the officers came inside the home and looked around. The family is convinced that the visit and the picture of the bald man were ruses to try to scope out Anselmo Lucero’s whereabouts. “That’s how they are getting people,” Urie Lucero said. Jamie Lucero said the officers had told her not to bother paying for a lawyer because he faced certain deportation. By lunchtime, the agents had five immigrants in custody: three of their six targets of the day, as well as Mr. Delgado and another man they found in the home of a target. Typically, officers successfully arrest about half the people they are looking for, Mr. Marin said, so this was a good day. “Criminals off the street, that’s our goal,” he said while standing inside the San Bernardino processing center, where immigrants from the region are taken each day. The men they had arrested sat inside a small holding cell clutching their brown-bag lunch of a turkey sandwich and apple. Mr. Marin and one of his deputies headed for lunch at a small Mexican taqueria. 7/21/2017 Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’ - The New York Times

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N.Y. / REGION Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG JULY 21, 2017 Maisha Joefield thought she was getting by pretty well as a young single mother in Brooklyn, splurging on her daughter, Deja, even though money was tight. When Deja was a baby, she bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could. When her daughter got a little older, Ms. Joefield outfitted the bedroom in their apartment with a princess bed for Deja, while she slept on a pullout couch.

She had family around, too. Though she had broken up with Deja’s father, they spent holidays and vacations together for Deja’s sake. Ms. Joefield’s grandmother lived across the street, and Deja knew she could always go to her great- grandmother’s apartment in an emergency.

One night, exhausted, Ms. Joefield put Deja to bed, and plopped into a bath with her headphones on.

“By the time I come out, I’m looking, I don’t see my child,” said Ms. Joefield, who began frantically searching the building. Deja, who was 5, had indeed headed for the grandmother’s house when she couldn’t find her mother, but the next thing Ms. Joefield knew, it was a police matter.

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“I’m thinking, I’ll explain to them what happened, and I’ll get my child,” Ms. Joefield said.

For most parents, this scenario might be a panic-inducing, but hardly insurmountable, hiccup in the long trial of raising a child. Yet for Ms. Joefield and women in her circumstances — living in poor neighborhoods, with few child care options — the consequences can be severe. Police officers removed Deja from her apartment and the Administration for Children’s Services placed her in foster care. Police charged Ms. Joefield with endangering the welfare of a child.

She was caught up in what lawyers and others who represent families say is a troubling and longstanding phenomenon: the power of Children’s Services to take children from their parents on the grounds that the child’s safety is at risk, even with scant evidence.

The agency’s requests for removals filed in family court rose 40 percent in the first quarter of 2017, to 730 from 519, compared with the same period last year, according to figures obtained by The New York Times.

In interviews, dozens of lawyers working on these cases say the removals punish parents who have few resources. Their clients are predominantly poor black and Hispanic women, they say, and the criminalization of their parenting choices has led some to nickname the practice: Jane Crow.

“It takes a lot as a public defender to be shocked, but these are the kinds of cases you hear attorneys screaming about in the hall,” said Scott Hechinger, a lawyer at Brooklyn Defender Services. “There’s this judgment that these mothers don’t have the ability to make decisions about their kids, and in that, society both infantilizes them and holds them to superhuman standards. In another community, your kid’s found outside looking for you because you’re in the bathtub, it’s ‘Oh, my God’” — a story to tell later, he said. “In a poor community, it’s called endangering the welfare of your child.”

Lawyers for parents say the spikes in child removals tend to occur after high- profile failures in the system, and this could well describe the pattern now: In

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December, the agency administrator resigned after two children who were being monitored by the agency were beaten to death in separate incidents.

As a result, an independent monitor is now assessing the agency, and the new commissioner, David Hansell, has promised to reform it.

Mr. Hansell said in an interview that Children’s Services has been trying to shift from ordering removals to offering support. He supplied figures showing that emergency removals of the kind that took Deja from her mother were about the same, a little over 300, in the first two months of 2017 as during the same period in 2016.

Vivek Sankaran, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, has examined short-term placements of children in foster care. He learned that in the 2013 federal fiscal year, 25,000 children nationwide were in foster care for 30 days or fewer, about 10 percent of the total removals.

“We’ve inflicted the most devastating remedy we have on these families, then we’re basically saying, within a month, ‘Sorry, our mistake,’” he said. “And these families are left to deal with the consequences.”

After Ms. Joefield was released from jail, she had a court hearing, and Deja was returned to her after four days. Still, the case stayed open for a year, during which she had to take parenting classes, and caseworkers regularly stopped by her apartment to do things like check her cupboards for adequate food supplies and inspect Deja’s body for bruises. “They asked me if I beat her,” Ms. Joefield said. “They’re putting me in this box of bad mothers.”

“It’s a slap in your face to have someone tell you what you can and cannot do with a child that you brought into this world,” she said, wiping tears away.

“I still get nervous,” she said. “You’re afraid to parent the way you would normally parent.”

Birth and Then Shackles

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In the spring of 2015, Elizabeth Latimer, then a public defender, was working a shift at Brooklyn Criminal Court when she was told she had a new client.

The woman was in a cell in the back of court, wearing a hospital gown and bleeding heavily. Ms. Latimer’s notes about the client read, “Just gave birth Sunday.” It was Tuesday.

The woman’s medical files show that she had been in her apartment with her 6- year-old daughter when she started bleeding, and felt numbness in one leg.

Her due date was still weeks away. Frightened, she called an ambulance. Then she realized her boyfriend, who was at nearby job-placement program and didn’t have a cellphone, would have no way of knowing if she went to the hospital. So she left her phone with her daughter, told her to stay in their apartment, and walked to the boyfriend’s training site, about eight blocks away.

“I’m like, I understand I’m not supposed to leave my daughter, but it’s an emergency,” said the woman during an interview. Her lawyers asked that she not be named, because her case is still open.

Doubled over with contractions, it took her about 40 minutes to get to the site and back. When the couple returned to the apartment, it was swarming with people. Emergency workers had arrived as she’d requested; finding the daughter alone, they had called the police.

By the time the woman was taken to the hospital, her contractions were four minutes apart, medical records reviewed by The Times show. While she was in labor, police officers stood by her bedside. When a nurse explained to her that she was under arrest, she asked, “How?”

Once she had delivered, her feet were shackled and her hands cuffed to her bed, the records show. Her only reprieve: an officer agreed to take off the cuffs while she breast-fed her newborn son, she said. She was discharged from the hospital with a fever, breast pain, severe abdominal pain and instructions to take various medications. Officers took her from the hospital to criminal court, where, after waiting for hours, she was charged with endangering the welfare of her 6-year-old.

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In New York, authorities pursue child neglect cases on two tracks. The district attorney can file a criminal charge of child endangerment; separately, the Administration for Children’s Services can file a family court case, often asking that the child be removed from parental care to the home of a relative, or to foster care. Either police officers or agency workers can take a child from a home if they find imminent risk; agency workers must file a petition in family court by the next court date, at which time they must justify the removal at a hearing.

During her criminal arraignment, the woman sat slumped in a chair, unable to stand.

“I was in pain, I was in badly pain, ready to pass out,” she said.

She found out then that Children’s Services had put her daughter in foster care, but the woman didn’t know where. Because she had tested positive for marijuana, and because of the child endangerment case involving her daughter, she was not allowed to take her newborn son home.

Released from court, she walked 30 minutes each way to the hospital to nurse the baby twice a day. Her breasts became overfull. “I was walking like this on the street,” she said, folding her arms over her chest.

As soon as he was medically cleared to leave the hospital, her newborn son was placed in foster care.

After the woman filed an emergency petition, both children were returned to her after 30 days.

Her criminal case was to be dismissed if she attended parenting classes, while her family court case had no such stipulation. Confused by the conflicting requirements, the woman didn’t attend classes. Three months ago, she was arrested on a warrant for not taking the parenting classes; her case remains open.

Her daughter, interviewed at their apartment, said that she was “sad” when she was sent to the foster home.

Back home, she said, she was “happy.”

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She pulled at some Silly Putty. “I get to spend time with my mommy,” she said.

A Lasting Effect

Even short-term removals that are reversed can have lasting effects on vulnerable children. It “poses a pretty big threat to their development,” said Kristin Bernard, an assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. A brief stay in foster care like that of Ms. Joefield’s daughter, Deja, can profoundly upset family life.

Mr. Hansell, the commissioner, said the agency was trying to steer away from removing children from the home.

“With increasing frequency over the past six months or so,” he said, “the outcome of our involvement with family court has not been removal of children but court-ordered supervision, under which families are required to participate in services to address the risks that we’ve identified.”

As Ms. Joefield, 32, talked in her Brooklyn apartment, the living room was filled with happy familial chaos. Her toddler shook a box of cereal, her cat’s collar bell tinkled, and Deja, now 13, climbed on the couch, trying to get the cat’s attention.

According to court records from Ms. Joefield’s case, a passer-by found Deja, who was then 5, out on the sidewalk at midnight. The records noted that Deja appeared well looked after. Deja told interviewers that she attended school daily and usually ate pancakes for breakfast.

Deja’s pediatrician told the agency that “Ms. Joefield is very attentive” and that “Deja is a smart kid.” Administrators at Deja’s school said they had no concerns. And Children’s Services, in a report on the family, noted that Ms. Joefield was in college; Deja’s father, who lived nearby, was employed and involved; Deja was “very intelligent for her age”; and there was plenty of family support.

Still, the agency pushed for Deja to be removed, though records show the great- grandmother called the agency asking that Deja be sent to her. Deja’s father was also available.

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“This is my opinion: they factored in my age” — she was 25 at the time — “where I lived, and they put me in a box,” Ms. Joefield said.

In Ms. Joefield’s case, a judge decided that “the risk of emotional harm in removal” outweighed the risk of neglect. Deja was returned to her mother.

The Administration for Children’s Services declined to comment on specific cases.

But those four days in 2010, Ms. Joefield said, had produced long-lasting effects.

First, her name remained on a state registry of child abusers for years, preventing Ms. Joefield, a former day care worker, from working with children. Most important, she said, speaking of Deja, the experience had “changed her.”

When her daughter came home, she said, “she was always second-guessing if she did something wrong, if I was mad at her,” she said.

Research backs up what Ms. Joefield noticed. Removal is traumatic for children, even if home life is stressful.

Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, used statistical methods to analyze the effect of foster care placement in so-called marginal cases — those in which a strict investigator might put a child in foster care, but a more lenient investigator might not. Over time, the children sent to foster care had higher delinquency rates, higher teen birthrates, lower earnings and a higher likelihood of going to prison as an adult.

Months after Deja’s removal, a caseworker with Children’s Services asked an administrator at Deja’s charter school about the girl. The administrator said, according to agency records, that while she had no concerns about Ms. Joefield’s care, Deja was “not doing as well as she used to before she was removed from her home.”

Living Conditions

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The threat of the agency removing children has become a weapon landlords use to force out lower paying tenants. According to dozens of public defenders and housing lawyers, some parents face a stark choice: leave their apartments or lose their kids.

Bernadette Charles found this out when her apartment, in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, experienced problem after problem. A sluice of brown water came through the ceiling, ruining the suede couch she had just purchased on credit. Large rats took over the kitchen.

While her husband spent his days driving a school bus, she spent hers worrying about how each new hazard would affect her four sons. At first she kept quiet. She felt fortunate to have a place where her family could meet the rent. One day she walked into the bathroom to find black mold sprouting in paisley patterns on the walls. For Ms. Charles, that was the breaking point.

Ms. Charles said that when her landlord learned she had complained to 311 about conditions, he punished her by calling Children’s Services. The agency worker arrived days later. The worker cited unsafe conditions, including roaches and dirty dishes in the sink. Despite noting that the couple’s four children were “clean and healthy,” the worker said they could not stay and removed the children. Ms. Charles remembers her youngest, who was 3 at the time, wailing as he was taken from the apartment.

“He didn’t want to give us any chance,” Ms. Charles said of the Children’s Services agent. Three days later, a judge ordered that the family be reunited.

Vanished Months

One December night in 2011, Colyssa Stapleton ran out of formula for her 7- month-old, Nevaeh, and texted Nevaeh’s father, who lived nearby, asking him to buy some. When he texted back that he was en route and she should come downstairs, Ms. Stapleton dashed to the yard of her Brooklyn apartment building to wait for him.

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Unfortunately for Ms. Stapleton, the police were patrolling the area and her aunt was in the yard smoking marijuana. Ms. Stapleton says she was not smoking and the police report noted that only one joint was found and that Ms. Stapleton’s aunt was seen throwing it to the ground. But both women were charged with marijuana possession.

Ms. Stapleton protested that her infant daughter was upstairs by herself. The police officers accused Ms. Stapleton of endangering the welfare of a child.

They took Nevaeh to the hospital, where she was found to be “in great condition.” Even so, Children’s Services placed Nevaeh with her father for six months and Ms. Stapleton was forbidden contact.

“I thought of where I could’ve tried and done something better, but taking her all the way downstairs and all the way upstairs — I didn’t think of it as something that would get you into trouble,” said Ms. Stapleton, now 24.

When she saw Nevaeh after several months, in the hallway of family court, the girl cried. “Her dad was like, ‘Now you don’t know nothing about her,’ and he was right,” she said.

Without her daughter to take care of, Ms. Stapleton sank into depression. “It came to a point where I’d shut myself into a room and not come out, not eat,” she said.

After a year and a variety of parenting classes taken during 2012, the criminal charges were functionally dismissed, and she regained full custody of Nevaeh, but Ms. Stapleton said she is aware of what she lost.

“She didn’t take her first steps around me, so I missed that. Her first tooth, I didn’t get to see that,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should be robbed of those things unless they really deserved it.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2017, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Foster Care as Punishment.

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BUSINESS DAY Factories or Runways? Municipal Airports Face Economic Pressure Square Feet

By STEVE FRIESS JULY 18, 2017

DETROIT — Coleman Young International Airport was once one of the nation’s busiest airports and a thriving piece of Detroit’s economy. But like so much else in the city, it festered for decades after the action moved to the suburbs.

Now local officials want to reinvigorate the 264-acre plot. The question is whether that means it will survive as an airport or be remade for other purposes.

The City Council this month is expected to select a firm to start studying options for the site, including using the land for a half-dozen new factories or other industrial uses. Unless the city uses the site for an economic development purpose, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration says, Detroit will soon run out of wide-open, city-owned spaces that can be offered to companies looking to build manufacturing or other commercial facilities here.

Many council members, however, have said that the city should reinvest in the airport, saying it could be an economic engine as well.

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The debate in Detroit is not unusual. Cities across the nation are reconsidering the value of municipal airports in the era of superjumbo jets and budget cuts. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association estimated the nation loses 50 public-use airports a year.

Almost all are general-aviation airports, ones that cater primarily to owners of private planes, and most have operating deficits that the cities must make up for in their budgets. Detroit, for instance, faces a $1.3 million operating loss in the 2017 fiscal year for Coleman Young, which averages just 30 landings a day. The main airport for the region is Detroit Metropolitan, a Delta Air Lines hub about 20 miles west of the city limits.

Jed Howbert, the director of Mr. Duggan’s team overseeing jobs and the economy, said Coleman Young’s location, close to numerous freeways and a railroad spur, makes the site particularly appealing.

“We may certainly figure out that it’s worth keeping as an airport and investing more in the airport,” he said, “or we may decide there’s better opportunity and might have a better impact on Detroit as a manufacturing and logistics center or some other thing we just haven’t thought about.”

Closing it presents real risk. In other cities, the anticipated development has yet to occur, as with Bader Field in Atlantic City and Meigs Field in Chicago. That is partly because decommissioning airports with the Federal Aviation Administration is an expensive, yearslong process, and political and economic winds shift quickly in the interim.

Plans to redevelop Bader Field, located within walking distance of Atlantic City’s casino district, faltered when the city’s economy collapsed at the onset of the most recent recession. In the process, tourist-dependent Atlantic City lost a key transportation amenity just as it desperately needed more visitors.

“Any pilot who flies over Bader Field just kind of looks at it wistfully like, ‘I wish I could land there but I can’t,’” said Paul Freeman, a private pilot and aerospace engineer who manages a website tracking the history of more than 2,000 former airfields in the United States.

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He said there were many cases of airports being closed “and then some municipal bonds didn’t happen or some business venture didn’t happen and the end result is, 10 years later, the property’s still there, the airport’s still not running, it’s deteriorating and it ends up benefiting nobody.”

There are success stories, though. Austin, Tex., and Denver are examples of how a region can reap decades’ worth of benefits from the redevelopment of former airports. Both cities shut theirs down in the 1990s and replaced them with modern suburban facilities, and both have realized billions of dollars in mixed-use, master- planned development on the old sites that continues to unfurl.

Closing the Austin airport “magically released land in the center city,” said Pam Hefner, redevelopment project manager for Austin. “That doesn’t happen. It’s so rare and it’s such an incredibly valuable resource.”

Many communities salivate over just that opportunity. In Kennewick, Wash., for instance, the tiny and money-losing Vista Field closed in 2013, and the regional planning agency is in the process of finishing a master plan for the now-vacant 103 acres.

The community of about 210,000 residents along the Columbia River in southeastern Washington has struggled to keep its young people from leaving to pursue careers elsewhere. Skip Novakovich, president of the Port of Kennewick Commission, a three-person panel that oversees the area, said the commission was planning a new core with walkable neighborhoods and a mix of residential and commercial spaces.

“It’s been expensive, but it’ll put $400 million on tax rolls,” said Mr. Novakovich, referring to the project, which will require an investment of about $500 million. “It’s probably the largest economic development project ever for this region. The only thing I’m nervous about is if we develop it to what the public said they wanted and they say, ‘Nope that’s not what we wanted.’”

Advocates for revitalizing old airfields rather than closing them say they empathize with the communities looking for new economic development. Still, they worry that the reduction of airfields will hurt the overall American aviation system,

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which is built partly for travel but also to ensure ubiquitous landing sites in the event of national security events or natural disasters.

“I’ve always believed that each of the individual institutions that own and operate these airports are making reasonable and genuinely rational decisions in terms of what affects them locally,” said Thomas Thatcher, an architect and planner who wrote a 2011 report sponsored by the F.A.A. called “A Guidebook for the Preservation of Public-Use Airports.” “But when you take all of those individual good-faith decisions and accumulate them over a 10- or 20- or 30-year period across the nation, we might realize, Oh dear. On a collective basis, it created a terrible problem.”

In Detroit, the fact that many City Council members began the study process disposed toward keeping Coleman Young bodes well for preservationists.

Scott Benson, a councilman who represents the district that contains the airport and is a city planner by trade, views the property as an untapped gem whose value will only rise in this era of drones and internet shopping deliveries. Closing the airport, Mr. Benson argued, is a one-way street because shuttered airfields will not reopen and cities rarely find other sites that are as convenient. A new airport would also have to go through the rigors of passing environmental and community requirements, which are more stringent than when the original airports were founded.

“Having a 260-acre international airport within the borders of a large city is an extremely unusual asset to have,” Mr. Benson said. “You can’t just drop a city airport anywhere in the country. I have a really hard time thinking that the airline industry, the logistics industry, the aerospace industry is not salivating over the opportunity to get in there and invest.”

With tens of thousands of abandoned homes being taken over and bulldozed by the city, many are baffled by the contention of the mayor’s administration that there is no other land available for new industrial facilities.

But Mr. Howbert, the city official, noted that those vacancies were a patchwork, not a large contiguous piece of land. For that, he said, Detroit has just one option

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right now for the areas — 30 contiguous acres or more — needed for factories.

“This began,’’ Mr. Howbert said, “when we realized we’re essentially out of large-scale parcels that are suitable for manufacturing or other large job-creating, industrial-type investments.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2017, on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: For Cities Seeking Economic Boost, Tarmac Is Tempting.

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