City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you, Madam Chair, and good morning. I'd like to introduce Father David Tedros, who has served as priest at St. Minacopec's Egyptian Orthodox Church in Colton for the past six months. He served for the last five years as an enterprise programmer analysis for the San Bernardino County Innovation and Technology Department. You may remember him as Sammy Tardos. His name was changed to Father David Tardos after the ordination. In February 2026, he was called by the St. Menacopic Egyptian Orthodox Church in Colton to the priesthood. a calling that he has received with gratitude, humility, and

Thank you, Supervisor Hagman. Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a couple of general items. Item number 53 is approving the Prado Regional Park Master Plan. And I just want to congratulate Beata and the whole team for all the work they did in the last couple of years. They finished the Prado new entry, the playground, which is fantastic, has a splash pad as well. RV and tent restrooms have been refurbished, the snack bar. and boat docks are complete, and the big thing is the grass is staying green, so thank you for all the hard work by the Parks Department and Real Estate Services, everybody working

I have a question. The way you presented this...

I just don't want to get ahead of themselves because I'll be very candid. I'm going to vote no on this for a variety of reasons. I've probably got more time in that damn hole than anybody in this building here. And I'll explain that later. But I'm just wondering, are we getting ahead of ourselves in having this language when we don't have at least

No, I I think I made my comments Very clear and that based upon my history. I have spent a lot of time and a lot of nights there, and I just have some reservations. I am gonna vote no. I'll be very candid with you. And before we get ahead of ourselves, maybe we need a vote whether there's a majority to go forward with this instead of making changes that won't be necessary if it's voted down.

I'm not making a motion right now. I thought that was the one that was before as proposed right now.

I am not going to support the ordinance. However, the lawyers want to propose it, I am against it.

There's a, I think you said a lot, Madam Chair, as far as the clarification, and obviously when you have this many people come out against it for different angles, there's definitely some clarity that needs to be put in there. But I'll go back to what you were saying in the previous comments. If we do nothing, kind of go through what happens.

Just like in several of us that serve at different levels of government, generally the higher level government doesn't necessarily need a lower level government to do something. So the federal government on their lands will want to give a permit for mining and we refuse, they can bypass us. Is that a clarified way to say that?

Okay, same thing in the state level. The state supersedes the county, and it's a higher level of policy. So what the state of California does, it has made an agreement with the federal government on their lands, this is gonna be the process of what we're gonna do, which combines generally NEPA and CEQA in those applications. But they're giving it to us to be that lead agency. So if we do not have a, a up-to-date ordinance, then we lose that participation potentially at all at a local level to even look at these.

So I think that's the bigger question for me is, how do we get to the point where we're still at least at the table? We may not like all the things at the table, but at least we're participating in that. And with our county being so rich in land and materials and all the sense, we're always being looked at for everything, especially in our desert. So going back to the concerns of our residents about the clarity of the CEQA and NEPA, and I think that's where the chair was kind of leading us to, is there was, when I heard the public speak, there was a lot of uncertainty of what language was in o

So the other states are, the federal government says we're giving you this permission, you go do it. And they don't have much say in it at all. Okay, so California's one of the stricter states for these mining ordinance residents. And it does give our residents, when a new project come, even though another lead agency may have done that environmental work, it does come to the county to proceed and it does allow us to notify our residents and allow those comments to come in before that. So we don't advocate that ability to do that process to another agency in this ordinance. No, we don't. So we still hold that local authority. versus us giving that authority up to a state or a federal agency.

So I'm not gonna say I'm an expert on mining ordinances. I know that there's a lot out here. I think, you know, for me, I just want the assurances that that process, if we stay as a lead agency, still has that visibility for our residents, that they come out through the planning commission, through the board meetings, to address whatever the environmental work was done by that applicant, whether that is NEPA or CEQA and all the rest of it, those standards are still there in that maybe, we clarify that in the ordinance so that gives a sense of security that these are the things that we do that

And do you feel these updates that were wanna propose to this ordinance, is it make it, I don't want to say easier or harder. I know some of the things align. We do updates on state laws all the time for county ordinances. I think we do that once a year. Every time the state passes a new law, we have to update our local ordinances. So that's more of an administrative thing. Some of those things are major changes. Some are not, more in language. On this update, do you see that things are any kind of easier for an applicant, a mining company? Or is it harder? How would you take it?

So it just references the master document, so to speak. So as that gets updated through the legislature or very infrequently the MOU change between the federal and state government, it automatically updates our ordinance so we don't have to go through this every few years is what you're saying. Correct. So I get the technical side, I get the purpose, I understand what you're doing. It goes back to is there a better way for us to be putting this out there? There's many groups that are representative. Do you feel that you had enough face time with those groups or let me rephrase that, if we were

Yeah, I'm not asking you to change the ordinance necessarily. Obviously there's a lot of questions about the ordinance and they were asking for clarifying information in the ordinance. And if we were able to have a workshop, I don't know. I don't know what we have done enough to get up here. I know it's been in the works for a long time. but to show where these critical safeguards in their minds, the NEPA and CEQA, the ability for local residents to chime in on a project, and when those stages, even though that's what we practice today, and that you're amending this ordinance that those practi

Yeah. I don't think you're gonna understand the problem on this board here until we pack up our gear and we go out there in the middle of the day at 12 noon. Unless you have been out there, you will never understand it. The desert is very unforgiving. Now, I don't know who's been out there. I've been out there more times than I want to remember. It's brutal, particularly in the summer. And any type of changes that you have there that doesn't take into consideration safety, you cannot have people wandering around there or they're going to die. And there's a long history of the number of people

I had another motion that I wanted. I don't know the problem with the procedure, how I can get that in there.

What I was going to suggest, if you guys are gutsy enough, is that we go out in the Mojave Desert at 12 noon and actually see what it's like out there. When you're there, physically there, it really makes a big difference. You don't have to stay there that long. And after the manager passes out, then we'll stop someplace and have a beer. But this way you can actually see the physical environment that we're talking about. The desert is a very, very unforgiving place. And when you make decisions on what you're gonna do out there, you better make sure you do it right. That's all I'm saying.

Well, it's starting to get cold out there. I want to go out there when it's hotter the better to understand the issue.

Why? We're not a bunch of candy asses. We can go out there and see what it's like.

Yeah, he's telling me I can continue it.