Leaders work themselves into a state over idea of secession
San Bernardino County, as you’ve no doubt heard, is talkin’ crazy talk about seceding from California to form a new state. Why? Because its leaders are tired of San Bernardino County not being taken seriously.
Uh, all right. This is how we’re going to show we’ve matured: by threatening to hold our breath until
Daddy and Mommy in Sacramento pay attention to us.
This is the brainchild of Jeff Burum, a powerhouse developer from Upland who’s best known for fighting San Bernardino County in court and winning $102 million. Burum, who tends to keep a low profile, spoke at the Board of Supervisors’ July 26 meeting, urging an advisory measure on the Nov. 8 ballot in support of secession.
Of all the luck, when the board took up the matter Aug. 3 and liked what it saw, I was on vacation. But I got home Monday night, and that meant I could attend Tuesday morning’s board meeting for the final vote, which passed
5-0.
Where was my vacation? New York. You know, the Empire State. Coincidentally, Burum’s pitch is that our new state would be named, wait for it, Empire.
San Bernardino County, it seems, wants to lay sole claim to the Inland Empire name and leave everyone else behind.
Riverside County says: “Hold my beer.”
Actually, I don’t think Burum or any of the electeds who say they’re in favor actually want to secede, which is, for all practical purposes, impossible anyway.
The wording of the ballot measure: “Do the people of San Bernardino County want San Bernardino County elected representatives to study and advocate for all options to obtain the County’s fair share of state funding, up to and including secession from the State of California?”
The gripes about funding are what’s really driving this, I think. But the whole thing seems screwy to me. Why ask voters if you should study something or if you should
seek more state funding? Instead of “yes,” voters ought to be able to check a box reading, “Yeah, whatever.”
And then why add secession to the mix? Sure, it’s spicy, but a lot of people are going to read that on their ballot, roll their eyes and vote “no.”
When I got to the board room Tuesday in San Bernardino, Acquanetta Warren, the mayor of Fontana, was in the anteroom filling out a comment card. (She saw me and told the county clerk staff: “Don’t let him in.”) We repaired to the lobby to chat.
“It’s important that we get our fair share,” Warren told me of state funding. “We have a chance for our county to come together, to research this and see, what aren’t we getting?”
I said: “You can’t be in favor of seceding, though.”
She smiled.
“The point is to get people’s attention,” Warren explained. “Sometimes you have to go big and go bold to get everyone’s attention. And boy, this got everyone’s attention.”
Just then, Burum himself walked over.
I suggested that he couldn’t be serious about secession.
“If you’re entering a card game, you have to have money on the table. There has to be risk,” Burum told me. “We have to put our chips in.”
But are a majority of
San Bernardino County residents really going to support leaving California?
“Never underestimate the will of the people, or the will of God,” said Burum, who was wearing a Jesus T-shirt under a sport jacket. “I’ve done polling. I have an overwhelming supermajority of the people who would vote for this tomorrow, and they’re not even educated yet.”
Maybe that’s the real problem: all of San Bernardino County’s uneducated people.
The meeting started with two presentations in support of the ballot measure. Various state responsibilities have been pushed down to San Bernardino County since the 1990s without enough funding to pay for them, Sheriff Shannon Dicus said.
And the state hasn’t built enough courtrooms or hired enough judges to keep up with the county’s growth in population, District Attorney Jason Anderson said. He cited a state study two years ago that said the county ought to have one-third more judges than it does.
Dicus and Anderson should have hired a violinist to play behind them.
During the public comment period, Dennis Michael, the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga, said the state took away cities’ main funding source for affordable housing, and now there’s a housing crisis. For her part, Warren told the board that more state assistance on homelessness is needed locally.
Said Warren: “We need to sit down and look at the data and ask, ‘Are we getting our fair share?’ ”
Suddenly I was reminded of Sally Brown’s famous statement of principle in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”: “All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.”
As someone who covers local government,
I’ve heard city officials cry for years about “unfunded mandates.” In the late 1990s, Upland Mayor Bob Nolan used to cite how many millions he felt his city was “owed” by the state due to various shenanigans.
I’m sympathetic, but it’s an inside-government argument, one layer of bureaucracy complaining about another layer.
I suspect every California county, even L.A., thinks it’s not getting its fair share or that one county got a bigger slice of cake or that another county is hogging the back seat. And is there a county that has too many judges? I doubt that too.
Two nongovernment people spoke during public comment, and both lampooned the ballot measure.
“California is the fifthlargest GDP in the world. The Inland Empire contributes little of that,” one said.
The other, an activist against warehousing, wonders if officials want to get out from under the state’s environmental oversight by forming their own state.
“This is some circus stuff right here, I’m tellin’ you,” she said.
I guess they don’t have an Empire state of mind.