Winter storm emergency response shapes 3rd supervisor district
The winter storms that battered the San Bernardino Mountains in February and March 2023 are shaping the March 5 primary election.
Three of the four candidates in the race for San Bernardino County Third District supervisor were at least partially motivated by the county’s widely criticized response to the winter storms. And they’re facing off with an incumbent who represented the mountain communities and was the target of much of their frustration at the time.
The sprawling 3rd District includes the cities of Barstow, Big Bear Lake, Highland, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Needles, Redlands, Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley.
If none of the four candidates gets more than 50% of the vote in the March primary election, the top two vote-getters will face off in the Nov. 5 general election.
Robert Block
A resident of Crestline, Block was frustrated by how the county handled the blizzard that buried his community for more than a week.
“It’s not every politician has the opportunity to actually display leadership or to be a leader, you know, they’re never really presented with that opportunity,” he said. “And, you know, in this instance, there was that opportunity, and, you know, (Supervisor Dawn Rowe) didn’t meet the moment.”
But it’s not just the storm response that makes Block, who works in commercial real estate, want to be supervisor.
“Politicians are getting lazier,” he said. “I view local politics as a place that should be efficient.”
Block, who has family members in law enforcement, also wants the Board of Supervisors to do more to support public safety, including looking into license plate readers or purchasing drones for the department. (As of March 2023, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department reporting having five drones, about one-sixth of the number that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department possessed.)
“You’re asked to do a job, but you’re not given the resources or anything to do it,” Block said.
He also has experience working with the logistics industry, a main economic driver in the Inland Empire. Although there’s been increasing pushback to new warehouse construction, Block says the industry is good for the region and expects to see more of it in the coming years.
“When you have the warehouses, you also have the support to go with it, right? So you have mechanics, you have forklift companies, you have commercial companies, you have temporary staffing agencies and things like that,” he said. The logistics industry is “not going to shrink, it’s only going to get bigger. And the question is, you know, who’s going to capitalize on it?”
That said, he’d like to see more restrictions on where future logistics centers could be built in the county.
“There should definitely be policies in place to prevent zoning a warehouse next to a residential area,” he said. “You shouldn’t have trucks that large driving down the street. One, because the damage it’s going to cause