Resume for the position of First District Supervisor,
County of San Bernardino

Bob Nelson
15381 Wells Fargo St
Hesperia, CA  92345

Personal Information:   My family ties to San Bernardino County are strong, going back to the 1920s.  Although I was born in Los Angeles California in 1937, from my earliest memories my grandfather’s small ranch in Summit Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains was my favorite place to go, as it is to this day. During my ten years in the United States Air Force, Rue Ranch, Summit California was my home of record.  And when I took a “mid-career” sabbatical in the late 1970s from employment in the data process field in Los Angeles, it was to the Rue Ranch in Summit Valley I returned.

I am divorced, with two adult children, one grandson, and amiable relationships with his maternal grandmother and her relatives.  I reside in Hesperia in a five-generation household, including my mother, two sisters, a niece and her husband, a great nephew and his wife and their daughter.

Military experience: In 1954, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I joined the United States Air Force.  During my ten year military career I was stationed in Texas, Washington, Germany, France, England and New Jersey.  During my three years as a Military Air Transport Service flight crew member/Flight Steward/loadmaster, I traveled to Canada, Alaska, Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan as well as the Arctic and the Caribbean. Each of my three honorable discharge DD 214 forms list the Rue Ranch in Summit Valley, California as my home address.

Education:  While in the service I did the work to receive a GED diploma. I also attended evening classes at the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Maryland extension classrooms in Paris France and Burtonwood RAF Station England, and Trenton State University in New Jersey.  Within two years of receiving my third honorable discharge from the Air Force in 1966, while working full time, I received an AA in business from El Camino Junior College in Torrance. Still working full time, I then completed another year and a half at Cal Poly Pomona towards a Bachelor of Science in Data Processing.

Regarding my education in county government affairs:  Because I remember when the road up Cajon Pass was a narrow two-lane mountain road called Route 66, Hesperia had 125 people and no paved roads, and traveling past Barstow was high adventure, it has been painful to see what the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisor’s notion of land use planning has done to this county.

Thus motivated, over the past twenty years, I have attended hundreds of county board of supervisors meetings, including stretches of regular attendance for a year and more.  Given the average 44 scheduled board meetings a year, that would be many more meetings than a county supervisor would attend during a four year term of office.  And when an agenda item caught my attention, I have also attended many other local government meetings in this county including the Mojave Water Agency, and city council meetings in San Bernardino, Redlands, Barstow, Victorville and the Hesperia. I also attended each of the nearly thirty county planning commission and board of supervisors meetings which promulgated and finally adopted the 1989 County General Plan.

My custom in addressing agenda items with limited speaking time is the prepared text, and sometimes I distributed my Ephemeral Press pamphlet at these meetings.  With rare exception, preparation including research for these meetings ran from a minimum of 2 hours to 20 hours or more. 

Work Experience:  My work experience as a teenager began with delivering the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville Mississippi and included setting pins in a bowling alley in Texas--before the coming of automated pin setters.  While in the Air Force, my duties included flight squadron operations clerk, passenger operations clerk, instructor flight traffic specialist/loadmaster, keypunch operator, tab machine operator, and computer operator.  On leaving the service, I worked for the General Electric Company’s Time Sharing service as an operations shift supervisor and trainer in Los Angeles and Cleveland, Ohio. Later I worked as a programmer, systems analyst and data processing department manager. 

At this point, I took a mid-career sabbatical on my family ranch in Summit Valley. And never went back.  Found more interesting things to do than career ladder climbing: Life.

Relevant accomplishments:  One never knows in speaking at a public meeting what effect your words have in the longer term.  Certainly if there is any value to the democratic process, my words to hundreds of public meeting agenda items in the past twenty years have had some worth.

George Orwell once wrote that for every society, “at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact."  And this is certainly true in San Bernardino County.  Sometimes just stating the obvious, which would have been politically unpalatable for an elected official, is sufficient to open worthwhile dialogue.

Two “victories” early in my work as a citizen activist rather set the worth of my labor in the establishment eye. And the establishment didn’t like it. At the Mojave Water Agency’s February 27, 1990 meeting, with my Ephemeral Press pamphleteering effort and from the rostrum I spoke hard words about the Mojave Water Agency’ chief engineer. I also read portions of a transcript of his address to an Apple Valley Chamber of Commerce luncheon where he painted a rosy picture of High Desert water resources in substantial conflict with the agency’s own water studies.  At the March 13, 1990 Mojave Water Agency meeting in Barstow, always a hostile audience for the agency, I repeated these words, and distributed more pamphlets.  At meeting’s end, the board went into executive session and fired their chief engineer Jon Edson, effective immediately, and his assistant as soon as replacements could be hired.

At the Fourth Annual California First Amendment Assembly at UC Berkeley in September of 1999, I distributed my Ephemeral Press pamphlet calling for then San Bernardino County District Attorney Dennis Stout to receive a “Black Hole Award” for dissuading the exercise of public meeting freedoms by abuse of his prosecutorial powers.  My pamphlet related the sordid history of a war against free speech being waged by county government.  During the first eight months of 2000 I submitted additional videos and letters to the California First Amendment Coalition regarding the county’s abuse of citizen activists Shirley Goodwin, Jeff Wright, Grace Lester, Marjorie Mikels, Ruth Lopez, Larry Singleton and myself.

At the Fifth Annual California First Amendment Assembly at Cal State Northridge on October 14, 2000, the California First Amendment Coalition did present Black Hole Awards to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and the County Board of Supervisors for their respective parts in “the county’s extraordinary series of arrests, prosecutions, and jail sentences targeting several citizens for exceeding speaking time limits and talking out of turn or ‘off-topic’ at public meetings.”  --Agenda Item, Fifth Annual California First Amendment Assembly, Cal State Fullerton, October 14, 2000.

Political experience:  In 1980, I took out papers to run for First District Supervisor but did not finish the process because days later I was arrested for assaulting a woman with a shovel. The neighbor had twice in two days cut two fences dating back to the 1920’s on my family owned ranch in Summit Valley to provide herself with new vehicular access to a public road.  She and her teen age son had attacked me as I remained on my own property while attempted to fix the second cut fence, with her husband pointing a rifle at all three of us.   I called 911, but the responding deputy arrested me.  The DA filed charges.  At the preliminary hearing which such misdemeanors were entitled to in those days, the court, after hearing the prosecution’s case, granted my court appointed defense counsel’s motion to dismiss.

Welcome to politics, San Bernardino County style.

In 1994 I qualified as a write in candidate for the Second District supervisorial election.  I had not moved. The board of supervisors had moved the First District boundary northward sufficiently to just place my family ranch in Summit Valley in the Second District. After the election the board shifted the boundary line back to its original location, putting my family owned ranch back in the First District.

In 2004, I was on the ballot for the First District Supervisor election.  Due to lack of funds, I had no statement of candidacy on the sample ballot.  The only roadside campaign sign on my behalf, installed on a rural mountain road by a friend, was stolen. The incumbent Bill Postmus refused to debate. The media ignored my issues.

And erroneously, despite repeated complaints, both in the first days after filing for the office and in the last days before the election the Registrar of Voter’s website listed my contact phone number as “none available”. And instead of listing my name as Bob Nelson, the county website listed my name as “Robert A. Nelson”, which name only my bank uses.

My advertising budget covered one newspaper ad and three one-minute spots on a local radio station. My total campaign contributions, including funds from myself and family members, was under $1,500.  I still received over 8,136 votes, just over 15 percent of the total.  Another 35 percent of the votes and I would have been elected.

And in 2007, I was one of thirteen First District residents applying for appointment as interim First District Supervisor to complete the term of office of our elected supervisor who quit to take another job.

What you can expect from me as your county supervisor? 

The open exchange of honest opinion, wrote John Milton to the 1644 British Parliament in favor of unlicensed printing, “is knowledge in the making.”   But such open exchanges of honest opinion are not encouraged in our board of supervisors’ deliberative process.  To the contrary, the 2006-2007 County Grand Jury chastised our county supervisors for public disagreement on important county issues, including the Colonies fiasco. Worse, this Grand Jury, as their Final Report pointed out on page 4, used a questionnaire for interviewing each supervisors worded to “create a sense in each supervisor’s mind that there was a need to stop the discord.!  Yikes!

As a member of the board of supervisors I would provide the function of the thumb in the human hand: loyal opposition. For the first time since Supervisor John Joyner served as our supervisorial representative in the 1980s, the First District residents and not the housing industry would be represented on our county board of supervisors.  As Supervisor Joyner learned on being elected in 1984: “County government was controlled by a few privileged and wealthy contractors and developers who through campaign contributions guarded the doors to all important elected positions in the County.  This quote is from his autobiographical sketch in “San Bernardino County Supervisors, 1855-1999,” compiled by John C. Funk, published by San Bernardino County.  And those housing industry guards, in place long before Supervisor Joyner took office, are still in place today, as the interim supervisor’s $850,000 in campaign contributions attest.

As a retired systems analyst, my focus has been on the system by which county government makes its decisions. I have avoided rancorous debate with individual supervisors, though not the occasional rancorous comment from board members in years past.  My speaking style was once characterized by then Sun reporter Richard Brooks, who had heard me speak many times over the previous years, as that of a “soft spoken college professor.”

As your supervisorial representative, the board of supervisors would once again include a loyal opposition voice. 

Our present five county supervisors know what needs to be done. They know what is necessary to substantially improve the quality of life here in San Bernardino County. Unfortunately the fourteen county supervisors elected since John Joyner left office, including the four elected supervisors presently serving, depended on housing industry campaign contributions to get elected to office. And there is no special interest group active in this county whose goals are more hostile to the needs and goals of the community than the housing industry.

Making land use decisions is the single most important task of our board of supervisors, as measured by their direct effect on each of us in our daily lives. And as biblical wisdom pointed out millennia ago, nobody can serve two masters. They will serve the one and ignore the other.

Once consequence of the board of supervisors’ long embrace of such uncontrolled growth without identified infrastructure funding sources is our designation as the worst example of urban sprawl in the nation by a Rutgers and Cornell Universities study in 2002 referenced in a Sun story of October 26, 2002.

Back in 1987, the state legislature passed AB 1600 authorizing local government agencies to collect Development Impact Fees from new growth to help pay for the infrastructure facilities and services new growth requires.  Our board of supervisors has consistently refused to impose such fees.  And each time the subject has come before the board as an agenda item, the housing industry, including senior officials of the Baldy Mesa Chapter of the Building Industry Association, have spoken against such fees.

Yet a Southern California Association of Governments study completed in 2003, “Destinateion 2030, Mapping Southern California’s Transportation Future”, suggested our county could raise $1.5 billion dollars by 2030 by imposing these fees.  With an average 44 meetings a year, each meeting the board delays adopting these fees, now widely imposed by other county boards of supervisors and city councils statewide, costs the county purse perhaps as much as $1.2 million dollars in foregone revenue. 

People have died for lack of these fees to build an adequate roadway transportations system in our county. Our quality of life has suffered for lack of these fees.  As a concerned citizen, I have spoken in favor of adopting these fees from the rostrum at board meetings. As First District Supervisor I would make the adoption of these fees a priority item.

Other counties and cities in our state, including Riverside County, have adopted these Development Impact Fees to good effect while growth continued.  Yet here in San Bernardino County, our board of supervisors has used general fund money to cut planning department fees by 20 percent, including a $2000 reduction in the lot split fee.  As the Sun reported on May 22, 2001, then First District Supervisor Bill Postmus, who spearheaded the reduction, said these lower fees, subsidized from the county general fund, “will encourage more growth”.

As everyone knows, we have serious problems here in the First District’s desert and mountain communities, including way too many vacant homes looking for a buyer. And so long as the housing industry continues to hold our county government captive, these problems will only get worse.

Knowing what needs to be done is not enough.  Our supervisors know what needs to be done. What they have lacked for decades is the will to put the needs and goals of the community ahead housing industry greed.

Alone on the board, I cannot, nor do I wish to stop growth.  What I wish to do is see our county’s land use policies, for the first time, consider the needs and goals of the community, and not just housing industry greed.

One more thing I would work for as your representative on the board of supervisors is to end the county’s long war on the right of the people to meaningfully participate in the public meeting process.  Our state’s Sunshine Law is violated constantly by public bodies of every stripe, as the Daily Press conceded years ago.

One consequence of this long abuse of the public meeting process is that “Dark clouds of corruption have long hovered over San Bernardino County, a place know for backroom deals and other forms of malfeasance for profit in a land ripe for development and growth.”  The quote is from Sun reporter George Watson, referenced by Steve Lambert in the paper’s January 31, 2005 edition.

I truly believe that the open exchange of honest opinion is essential to provide the light essential to improve our quality of life here in San Bernardino County.  It is long past time our county’s land use policies were guided by such sunshine instead of the sparks given off by housing industry greed.

Our board of supervisors meeting rules were promulgated in 1993 by the felon Harry Mays, then County Administrative Officer, and awash in “a longstanding, wide-ranging culture of corruption in San Bernardino County involving conflicts of interest, sweetheart deals and payoffs.”  This quote is from the felon May’s successor, the felon James Hlawek, in his statement to the FBI printed in the Sun of August 30, 2001. 

Every ill-gotten penny pocked by these corrupt officials, in one form or another, required approval of an agenda item by the board of supervisors during the public meeting process.  The board’s present meeting rules, enforced by over a hundred arrests since they were adopted fifteen years ago, were intended by the felon Mays to muzzle the public’s right to question these agenda items. And they are still being enforced today.

So blatant was this county corruption that then-County DA Dennis Stout “expressed on several occasions his concerns about honest businessmen in this County and about how they cannot compete with those who have a special relationship with a corrupt politician.  He noted that the honest businessmen don’t want to do business in this County because they don’t want to be involved in such doings”. --From the Ò”DA Internal Review” of March 26, 2001, authored by now Assistant County DA James Hackleman, summarizing transcripts of FBI wire taps on the DA’s phone.

The business community knew. The DA knew.  But our board of supervisors, and the media, knew nothing.

We have many serious problems here in the First District’s desert and mountain communities and vast open spaces. With money, wisely allocated, we can lessen these problems thus increasing the quality of life here in San Bernardino County. But candidates for public office who depend on housing industry funding are unwilling bite the hand that feeds them. And that is what it will take to improve our quality of life here in San Bernardino County.

I own no property, although I do have a 2 percent interest in my family’s 100 acre ranch in Summit Valley which has been in our family since the 1920s. I live on Social Security. My vision for our county is thus unimpeded by personal interests or big money campaign contributors.

Please, for our county’s sake, don’t vote for the housing industry’s favorite son candidate, now the interim supervisor sitting on $850,000 in campaign contributions.. Vote for Rita Vogler, a councilwoman from Hesperia, or for Bob Conaway, an attorney from Hinkley. Or vote for me, Bob Nelson, your best choice for our county’s future, in my opinion.

It would be an honor to serve you as our next county supervisor.