A three-judge panel in the Fourth Appellate District in California’s Court of Appeal has ruled in favor of San Bernardino County in American Medical Response’s contesting of the board of supervisors’ 2023 decision to end what was that ambulance company’s three-decade-long virtual monopoly on emergency transportation in the 20,105-square mile county.
The question has now become whether American Medical Response, known by its acronym and logo AMR, will roll the dice on a further appeal to the California Supreme Court.
Throughout the first six decades and well into the seventh decade of the 20th Century, competition among ambulance companies was wide open, with different providers of emergency medical transport service operating whenever and wherever they could. By the 1940s, ambulance company owners were utilizing their access to police and fire dispatch frequencies to send their vehicles to the scenes of accidents, mayhem or medical emergencies, alerted by the communications between fire stations and firefighters or police and sheriff’s stations and officers patrolling in the field. Generally speaking, those who arrived first gathered the prize of delivering the injured party to the hospital, collecting a fee for doing so.
The owners and operators of the ambulance companies sought to locate their stations and garages or to position their ambulances during the day and night at positions that would give them an advantage at arriving first at those places where they were most needed, beating the competition. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, there were thousands of incidents where one ambulance crew working of one company or another would be traveling full tilt in one direction to get to an accident or medical emergency and would pass another ambulance owned by another company going in the opposite direction to get to a different person in need of medical assistance. Continue reading →

The largest employer in the northwesternmost tip of San Bernardino County is cutting the number of its employees by more than half.
In recent months and years, Trona-based Searles Valley Minerals has been beset on all sides by financial challenges, including steeply rising operational costs including water prices, government regulation, competition in the form of foreign-government subsidized underpricing of one of its primary products by its major international competitors and California’s rising energy prices.
Searles Valley Minerals Inc. is a raw materials mining and production operating out of three distinct locations in and around Trona within Searles Valley and overseen by a corporate office in Overland Park, Kansas. Since 2008, it has been owned by the Indian company Nirma. The operations at Trona pertain at this time almost entirely to the mining of natural soda ash and extraction of boric acid, salt cake, sodium carbonate, sodium carbonate and specialty forms of borax and salt from Searles Dry Lake. The mining/extraction process consists of utilizing purified water to soak the earth in the lake to create brine, thereafter liberating the minerals from the solution.
Gold and silver prospector John Wemple Searles came across the borax in the dry lake later named for him in the 1860s and by the 1870s was mining borax under the name of the San Bernardino Borax Mining Company, conveying the product to San Pedro by mule team-pulled wagons. Searles sold his operation to Francis Smith, who owned the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
In a last-ditch effort, San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran stemmed yet further erosion in the erosion of the power and prestige she holds as the 34th municipal leader of the county seat.
Tran, the city’s one-time human resources director who left the city when she had a run-in with her predecessor as mayor and then gave up a lucrative career as a municipal administrator to return as a vanquishing heroine and occupy a position that many thought might prove a major step on her way to eventual occupancy of the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento, has learned just as literally a dozen of what were seemingly upward bound politicians before her came to know: the gavel she wields seems to be cursed.
The power that was once vested in the San Bernardino mayor and what remains of it is of a highly nuanced nature, requiring deliberate, delicate and carefully calibrated maneuvering.
For 111 years, the mayor’s influence was more, or was potentially more, administrative than it was political. Nevertheless, during that era, the post was, if held by a skillful political operator, a powerful political position. Eleven years ago, the mayor’s administrative authority was taken away, necessitating that the mayor’s political instincts and skills needed to be honed to perfection if he or she was to be an effective leader.
The City of San Bernardino came into being, more or less, in 1853 with the Mormon migration to California and the establishment of a settlement – at that time a fort – in San Bernardino. It had two mayors in the early days but when Brigham Young called the Mormon faithful back to Salt Lake City in the winter of 1857/58, civic organization was put on hold until the city officially incorporated in 1869.
San Bernardino had no mayor from 1869 to 1905 because it was incorporated as a town rather than a city during that period, governed by a board of trustees rather than a mayor. The municipality fluctuated between being unincorporated and incorporated as a town or city, formally becoming a city again in 1886 and later, with the adoption of a new charter 1905, returned to a mayoral system. Continue reading →

A controversy has developed over what officials with the Apple Valley Unified School District and the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools’ division of business advisory services has acknowledged was the repeated transfer of substantial amounts of money in what are otherwise the Apple Valley district’s sequestered accounts for funds earmarked for specific purposes.
In a recent opinion piece by a member of the Apple Valley Unified School District’s Board of Trustees, Renee Longshore, published by the Victorville-based Victor Valley Daily Press, note was made that the district in some of its financial documentation provided to her, other members of the board and the public, there was a discrepancy between what shown as deficit spending and decreases in the district’s reserves.
Additionally, in the opinion piece, which appeared in the paper on January 22, Longshore noted that district revenue had grown by 57 percent between fiscal year 2018/19 and 2024/25 but that the district had also seen a 39 percent increase in teacher and pupil support staff salaries and a 45 percent increase in what the district pays for books and supplies. She expressed concern that over the same six year period, the district had sustained a 90 percent increase in the cost of employing supervisors and administrators. Continue reading →

With the February 9 deadline to make a final decision approaching, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for California to use the gerrymandered congressional map Governor Gavin Newsom and his Democrat cohorts were able to get the state’s voters to approve in November which was drafted to result in five of the 12 California Congressional seats now held by Republicans being filled by Democrats following the November 2026 election.
The only change in the state’s electoral map that is likely to impact San Bernardino County consists of the possibility that Republican Congressman Ken Calvert, whose current 41st District in Riverside County was eliminated in a bid by the Democrats to end his political viability entirely, will now challenge 40th District Congresswoman Young Kim, who represents the southwesternmost portion of San Bernardino County.
At present, forty of California’s 52 Congressional seats are held by Democrats. From the outset of the gerrymander effort which began last summer, the Democrats’ intent was to thin the ranks of California’s Republican Congressional delegation even further.
That move required voter approval, which Newsom and the Democratic state legislature obtained by placing an initiative on the ballot in a specially-called election, at a cost of $282.6 million, in November.
A coalition of Republicans challenged the unusual maneuver and the elections outcome, but in a terse, one-sentence order, the justices turned down that request to have the state utilized the electoral map that was drawn in 2021 by a nonpartisan commission using data from the 2020 U.S. Census and which which was used in the last two federal election in California.
The court’s order came two months to the day after the justices, over a dissent by the court’s three Democratic appointees, granted a request from Texas to allow it to use a new map intended to allow Republicans to pick up five additional House seats in that state. Continue reading →

The musicians of the Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band and the Keith Family are proud to present a program entitled “Love Is In The Air” on Monday, February 23, 2026 at 7:30 p.m.
The concert will be held in Gardiner W. Spring Auditorium, located on the campus of Chaffey High School at 1245 N. Euclid Avenue in Ontario.
The Woodwind Celebration Ensemble will present a pre-concert recital in the auditorium lobby at 7:00 p.m. Complimentary coffee and cookies will be served in the lobby prior to the concert. The performance is free to the public.
The February concert will feature many selections related to Valentine’s Day and the spirit of love. The show will be highlighted by special guest artists vocalist Skip Cain and jazz saxophonist and vocalist Jeff Waldon. Show Band soloists will include trumpeters Steve Collins and David Grasmick and a vocal by Show Band Director Pat Arnold.
Skip Cain a becoming a regular with the Chaffey Community Show Band. His vocal repertoire includes songs of joy, romance, and love from yesteryear and today. Skip’s repertoire ranges from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Tom Jones, Lionel Richie, Tony Bennett, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Teddy Pendergrass. Skip will perform “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and the Tom Jones megahit “It’s Not Unusual.” Continue reading →