I serve as Chair of the Banning Planning Commission. The City budget’s a matter for the City Council. I’m writing here in my personal capacity and don’t speak on behalf of the Planning Commission.

Saturday night, a friend from Beaumont texted me from the Banning pool for Glow Night. Neighbors there had heard it might be the last night the pool would be open, and she was trying to figure out what was happening. Her family comes to our beloved city because our Parks and Rec programs are affordable and fun. She told me these very programs and events have become a big part of their lives.

We hear all the time about Banning families driving to Beaumont and beyond for everything. Yet, here was a family from Beaumont coming here because Banning had something they valued and could actually still afford.

The proposed budget takes Parks from 4 budgeted full-time-equivalent positions to 2, Recreation from 15 to 0, and Aquatics from 13 to 0. Across the 3, that’s a 94% cut in staffing.

Parks and Rec is one of the parts of City Hall people feel in their everyday lives. We experience it as the pool in the summer, sports and classes, the park down the street, or meals and activities at the Senior Center. I grew up a city rec kid myself. A child today can swim at the Repplier Aquatic Center for $2.50. Almost 23K people went through the Aquatic Center in just last year and the Senior Center provided more than 9K meals to our elders.

Earlier this year, I went to a community meeting about the old Armory on West Nicolet. The City’s working on plans to turn it into a year-round community and climate resiliency center. A mother from the Eastside said even a few dollars for the pool, or $1 to use a basketball court, were keeping her family and other families she knew from going. Somebody responded by explaining that nothing’s free. That immediate response really bothered me. We had a mom being vulnerable about her financial situation and the response seemed to completely dismiss her struggle.

Here we are a few months later, now talking about getting rid of the very programs she was trying to tell us her family already struggled to afford. I felt that pain yesterday as the Council Chambers filled up for the budget workshop. We had neighbors from every generation, along with City employees, parents and people who use these programs pack the Council Chambers. Some spoke through tears, anger, shock. For most, it seemed even talking about cutting 94% of the staffing across Parks, Recreation and Aquatics was ludicrous. Our resilient neighbors showed up with the receipts: employees knew their departments, families knew the programs they use, and people had ideas about what could be done differently.

The City’s financial problems have been obvious for years now. The proposed General Fund only has $19,134 more coming in than going out and still ends the year about $9.72 million in the negative. I’m not going to pretend we can keep spending money we don’t have or that nothing should change.

And Parks and Rec isn’t the only department in trouble. The proposed budget cuts nearly half of the City’s General Fund staffing. About 30 filled positions could be lost, including the City’s Homeless Services Coordinator. Police, Planning, Building and Safety, Code Enforcement, Animal Control and other departments are being cut too.

What I don’t get is why a problem that took years to build now feels like something residents have a few days to absorb. The City Manager says in the budget itself that this crisis developed gradually over eight years. Back in May, the City was already identifying recreation, aquatics, park maintenance and senior programs as services vulnerable to cuts during the fiscal crisis. So none of this started Tuesday.

Perhaps there are good reasons it took until August to get to these numbers. The books needed to get caught up and the City needed to know what it was actually working with. But that shouldn’t mean residents need to be rushed through the part where we decide what disappears. And it shouldn’t be presented as the only option before we know what the real alternatives are.

If Recreation goes from 15 positions to 0 and Aquatics goes from 13 to 0, we need to know what the other options cost. Could the pool open for a shorter season? Can some recreation programs stay? What can Parks actually maintain with two people? What happens at the Senior Center? The budget itself says departments are still working through what these cuts would mean for services. We should know that before the numbers become the new normal.

There’s another City Council budget workshop tomorrow, Thursday, August 20, at 4 p.m. If these programs matter to your family, your job or your life in Banning, pull up.

Yesterday brought out neighbors from across the city and Banning’s honesty and brilliance was on full display, public comment after public comment. Residents were willing to sit there for hours and do the work. City Hall needs to match that with clear answers neighbors can actually use.

We spent years getting here. Taking a little more time to understand what we’re cutting and what the real alternatives are is the least we can do. People’s livelihoods depend on it.

To my niece, and to the Banning High School Class of 2026,

What a beautiful thing to watch Banning celebrate its own.

On Thursday, the field was full of graduates, families, flowers, photos, hugs, cheers, and all the little moments that make a day like that feel bigger than a ceremony.

My niece graduated from Banning High with you, and watching her walk made me proud in a way that’s hard to explain. Proud of her, proud of all of you, and proud of this strange, beautiful, stubborn place that raised us.

Banning isn’t always easy to explain to people who only pass through it.

They see the freeway signs, the wind, the empty lots, the old downtown buildings, and the things that haven’t been cared for the way they should’ve been.

But they don’t always see what we see.

The mountain light in the morning. The families who make a dollar stretch. The teachers who quietly advocate for you not to get suspended because you missed one too many days. The grandparents holding whole households together. The neighbors who show up when nobody asked, but everybody knew help was needed.

They don’t see the talent here until it’s standing right in front of them.

That’s what Thursday was: talent standing right in front of us.

Your class began the ceremony with a land acknowledgment. We didn’t do that when I graduated in 2012, and it made your graduation feel more grounded, more honest, like your triumph was being placed inside a larger story by honoring the original caretakers of this land.

That felt right, because every day here should be rooted in the truth of this place.

And if you’re going to carry Banning into whatever comes next, I hope you carry the whole truth of it: the beauty and the frustration, the pride and the neglect, the love and the unfinished work.

Some of you worked jobs before class, after class, or late into the night just to help keep the lights on. Some of you cared for younger siblings, grandparents, parents, or entire households while trying to finish your own assignments. Some of you carried grief, anxiety, depression, hunger, housing insecurity, family struggles, and the constant stress of not knowing how everything would work out. Some of you smiled through days when you were barely holding it together.

Most people will never know what it took for you to keep showing up.

But you did. And you made it.

I hope you leave this season proud, but not satisfied. Proud of where you’re from. Proud of the people who helped get you here. Proud of what you survived and became.

But don’t be satisfied with a world that asks so much from young people and then calls their survival inspiring. Don’t be satisfied with a city that celebrates its graduates but doesn’t always make enough room for them to come home. And don’t let anyone convince you that your neighbor is your competition.

The immigrant family isn’t your enemy. The unhoused neighbor isn’t your enemy. The worker asking for enough isn’t your enemy. The person who needs help isn’t your enemy.

When everything costs too much, you learn pretty quickly that nobody gets through alone. Sometimes help looks like a ride, a plate of food, watching someone’s kid, checking that they got home safe, or making room on the couch when life falls apart.

That’s not charity. That’s how we’ve always survived.

Build your life in a way that feels honest to you.

A lot of us were taught that success meant leaving. That if you were talented, ambitious, or serious about your future, you’d eventually outgrow this place.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Success should mean having choices.

Leave and see more of the world if that’s what you need. Stay and build a good life here without letting anyone treat that like you settled. Come home later with more experience, more questions, and a clearer sense of what needs to change.

There’s dignity in all of it.

Just don’t let anyone make you ashamed of Banning. Don’t let success make you forget the people who helped you get through. And don’t let pride become an excuse to accept less than this place deserves. If you find yourself building a future here, now or years from now, help us make this place better than the one we inherited.

Congratulations, my Sara Beara. Congratulations, Broncos.

You made it. We’re so proud of you.

And we owe you so much more than pride.

With love and obligation,

Chris Castorena
Banning High School Graduate, Class of 2012

Me postulo para el Concejo Municipal de Banning, Distrito 5, porque la gente de aquí no debería tener que salir de la ciudad para encontrar trabajo, comprar mandado, buscar oportunidades o simplemente tener una buena calidad de vida. Podemos dar más que esto. Me estoy postulando para ayudar a construir una ciudad que funcione mejor para la gente que ya vive aquí.

Imagínense a Banning dentro de unos años.

Hace calor en el Eastside, pero la parada del camión tiene sombra. Un niño sale de la escuela y puede ir por algo de comer sin cruzarse entre carros ni andar esperando que alguien frene. La banqueta sigue completa todo el camino. Su mamá sale del trabajo aquí en la ciudad y todavía alcanza a llegar a casa antes de que oscurezca, porque trabaja aquí, no porque se avienta dos horas al día manejando para ir y venir de otro lado.

Eso no debería sonar como un sueño enorme. Una ciudad del siglo 21 no es una fantasía futurista. Es una ciudad que hace bien lo básico y mejora la vida de maneras que la gente de verdad siente. Es una parada con sombra, una caminata segura a casa, trabajo aquí mismo en la ciudad y una renta que no te quite todo.

El aeropuerto siguió abierto, y los trabajos alrededor por fin se conectaron con la vida diaria. Una parte del sitio sigue siendo para aviación. Otra parte se convirtió en un centro de estudios y producción. Cerca de ahí, hay vivienda que la gente que trabaja ahí sí puede pagar, lo suficientemente cerca como para que caminar al trabajo sea normal, no un lujo de otra ciudad. El Pass ayuda a generar la energía que mueve a California, y ya es hora de que la gente que vive aquí también reciba los trabajos, la capacitación y una oportunidad real de quedarse.

A la gente joven ya no se le habla como si irse fuera el único plan serio. Pueden prepararse aquí en energía limpia, manufactura avanzada, ciberseguridad y oficios especializados que antes muchos actuaban como si solo existieran en otras partes. Un estudiante que sale de Banning High no debería tener que escoger entre amar este lugar y construir su futuro.

Se siente el cambio de cuadra en cuadra. Frente a Central Elementary, la tienda sigue ahí, pero por fin recibió la inversión que merecía. Es más fácil conseguir comida fresca, por fin hay espacio para vendedores locales, y la gente del Eastside tiene una voz real en lo que ese lugar puede ser: una tienda comunitaria de verdad. A unas cuadras, hay un centro público de bienestar con un gimnasio de verdad. En el centro, abrir algo útil ya no se siente como darse contra la pared. Hay más lugares para sentarse, reunirse y quedarse un rato, no nada más gastar dinero e irse. A los pequeños negocios se les trata como la base de una economía local real, porque eso son.

Ese es el Banning que yo puedo ver con claridad.

Y por eso cuesta todavía más aceptar lo que seguimos viviendo ahorita.

Ahorita, demasiada gente todavía tiene que salir de la ciudad para trabajar, comprar mandado, acceder a servicios básicos o tener una oportunidad decente. Demasiadas calles todavía se sienten hechas más para la velocidad que para la seguridad. Demasiado crecimiento sigue llegando con promesas y dejando a los residentes cargando con el costo. Nada de eso es inevitable, y nada de eso es nuevo.

Por eso sigo pensando en Banning’s Future Fellowship. En 2021, cuando ayudé a dirigir esa fellowship a través de A Better Banning, jóvenes pasaron todo un verano escuchando a residentes y poniendo por escrito una imagen clara de lo que la gente quiere: banquetas más seguras, comida más cerca de casa, caminos para que la juventud entre al trabajo y al servicio público, mejores parques, vivienda que sí encaje con la vida real y un gobierno municipal que de verdad se encargue de lo básico. Los vecinos no han estado pidiendo demasiado. Han estado pidiendo una oportunidad real de tener una buena vida aquí.

Yo sé lo que es que te digan que la respuesta es irte. Antes de graduarme de Banning High, me mudé diez veces, pero nunca me fui de nuestra ciudad. La escuela fue lo único constante. Después hice lo que a mucha gente de aquí le enseñan a hacer. Me fui a estudiar. Seguí preparándome, viajé y conocí más del mundo. Por un tiempo, de verdad pensé que ese era el plan. Que si querías algo más para ti, tenías que ir a buscarlo a otra parte. Pero entre más lejos llegaba, más extrañaba a la ciudad que me formó. Y entre más grande me hacía, más mal se sentía que nos enseñen a tratar el hecho de dejar atrás a nuestra comunidad como si eso fuera el éxito.

Una de las cárceles más grandes del Condado de Riverside está a unas cuadras de Banning High School, mi alma mater. He cargado con eso por años. Nuestros jóvenes no deberían tener una vista más clara del encierro que de la oportunidad. Deberían poder ver un futuro aquí.

Me estoy postulando porque no creo que la gente en Banning deba tener que organizar toda su vida alrededor de todo lo que esta ciudad todavía hace demasiado difícil. No creo que los largos tiempos de manejo, la falta de oportunidad local, lo básico regado por todos lados y las bajas expectativas sean lo mejor que podemos hacer. Yo sí creo que Banning puede funcionar mejor para la vida diaria, y creo que el City Hall debería ayudar a que eso pase.

Imagínense a Banning dentro de unos años.

Una ciudad donde la vida no tenga que ser tan difícil.

No tenemos por qué seguir conformándonos con esto.

Por eso me estoy postulando para el Concejo Municipal de Banning.

I’m running for Banning City Council, District 5, because people here shouldn’t have to leave town for work, groceries, opportunity, or basic quality of life. We can do better than that. I’m running to help build a city that works better for the people who already live here.

Imagine Banning a few years from now.

It’s hot on the Eastside, but the bus stop has shade. A kid walks over after school to get a snack without cutting across traffic and hoping somebody slows down. The sidewalk stays there the whole way. His mom gets off work in town and still makes it home before dark because she is working here, not spending two hours a day driving somewhere else and back.

That shouldn’t sound like some big dream. A 21st-century city isn’t some futuristic fantasy. It’s a city that gets the basics right and makes life better in ways people can actually feel. It’s a bus stop with shade, a safe walk home, work in town, and rent that doesn’t take everything.

The airport stayed open, and the jobs around it finally connected to the rest of life. Part of the site still serves aviation. Part of it became a studio and production hub. Nearby, there’s housing people who work there can actually afford, close enough that walking to work is normal, not some luxury from another city. The Pass helps power California, and the people who live here are finally getting the jobs, the training, and a real shot at staying.

Young people aren’t talked to like leaving is the only serious plan. They can train here for clean energy systems, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, and the skilled work people used to act like belonged somewhere else. A graduate from Banning High does not have to choose between loving this place and building a future.

You can feel the change block to block. Across from Central Elementary, the store’s still there, but it finally got the investment it deserved. Fresh food is easier to get to, local vendors finally have a place there, and people on the Eastside have a real say in what that place can be: a real community grocer. A few blocks away, there’s a public wellness center with a real gym. Downtown, opening something useful no longer feels like running into a wall. There are more places to sit, gather, and stay awhile, not just spend money and leave. Small businesses are treated like the bedrock of a real local economy, because that’s what they are.

That’s the Banning I can see clearly.

And it makes what we live with now even harder to accept.

Right now, too many people still have to leave town for work, groceries, basic services, or a decent shot at opportunity. Too many streets still feel built more for speed than safety. Too much growth still shows up with promises and leaves residents carrying the cost. None of that’s inevitable, and none of it’s new.

That’s why I still think about Banning’s Future Fellowship. Back in 2021, when I helped lead that fellowship through A Better Banning, young people spent a summer listening to residents and writing down one clear snapshot of what people want: safer sidewalks, grocery access closer to home, youth pathways into work and public service, better parks, housing that fits real life, and a city government that actually handles the basics. Neighbors haven’t been asking for the world. They’ve been asking for a real shot at one here.

I know something about being told the answer is to leave. Before I graduated from Banning High, I moved ten times, but I never left our city. School was the one steady thing. Later, I did what a lot of people here get told to do. I left for school. I got more education, traveled, and saw more of the world. For a while, I really did think that was the plan. If you wanted more for yourself, you had to go find it somewhere else. But the farther I got, the more I missed the city that raised me. The older I got, the more wrong it felt that we teach people to treat leaving their community behind like success.

One of Riverside County’s largest jail facilities sits down the street from Banning High School, my alma mater. I’ve carried that with me for years. Our kids shouldn’t have a clearer view of confinement than of opportunity. They should be able to see a future here.

I am running because I don’t think people in Banning should have to organize their whole lives around what this city still makes too hard. I don’t think long commutes, weak local opportunity, scattered basics, and low expectations are the best we can do. I think Banning can work better for daily life, and I think City Hall should help make that happen.

Imagine Banning a few years from now.

A city where life doesn’t have to be this hard.

We don’t have to keep settling for this.

That’s why I’m running for Banning City Council.

I used to think my family was cursed.

My grandfather was a tank commander in World War II. My father was a tank gunner in Vietnam. He was drafted at seventeen and shot in the stomach in a firefight. I became a first-generation college student.

Now my father lives with me, and almost every day he asks when he’s going home. I tell him the same thing each time: you live with me now, Pop. You’re home with me. Sometimes he seems to accept it, and sometimes he asks again ten minutes later.

He’s bedbound now, but he still tells me to let him do it himself. He says he can still walk. He complains a lot, about the food, the blanket, the timing, the way I help him. Then, out of nowhere, he’ll tell me I’m doing a good job, or that I’m good to him, and by then I’m usually too tired and too unsure of myself to know what to do with that.

Caring for my dad is a privilege. It’s hard, and some days it feels like more than I know how to carry. I still wouldn’t trade this time with him.

He’s my father, and for all that war took from him, he still came home to me. I still get to care for him and answer him when he asks me the same question again.

My father is too old for surgery now, and the risks are too high. There’s nothing gentle about watching your father change like this while part of him is still very much here. Sometimes he’s still just my dad. He’ll say something off the wall or get stubborn about nothing, and then I hear him again.

He survived Vietnam, but some part of it stayed with him. It was there in the night terrors, in the plans he canceled at the last minute more often than he kept them, and in the war movies he watched like he was still trying to understand something that never really left him alone.

People have told me my father is lucky to get some VA benefits. I know they mean well, but that word has never sat right with me. Lucky is not how I’d describe being drafted at seventeen, shot in the stomach, and followed home by nightmares that never really left.

And then there is the VA. For months, I kept hearing the same thing: it’s not this department, it’s another one. Not this person’s job, somebody else handles that. They gave me another number to call, transferred me again, and made me explain it all over again while my father kept getting worse. He was falling more. He was weaker. It was becoming clear that he was going to need far more help, and soon.

That’s the part that wears you down, not just watching someone you love decline but having to turn their suffering into paperwork, phone calls, forms, and polite explanations for people who do not seem to understand what urgency feels like when you’re living inside it.

My father always told me never to join the military. He never romanticized war. He didn’t want his Chicano son carrying the same torment, or worse, getting sent away and never coming home at all. I’m grateful he pushed me toward college instead. When I told him this country was going to war with Iran, he cried. He knew what war could take from a young person. One of the most loving things he ever did was tell me the truth about what war had done to him.

My father wanted something different for me than what this country gave him. Even in his suffering, he was still trying to protect me.

Now I help him, lift him, feed him, and answer the same question again and again. When he asks me when he’s going home, I don’t always think he means a house. I think sometimes he means a time before all this.

I can’t give him any of that back. I can only answer the part I know how to answer.

You live with me now, Pop. You’re here with me. You’re home.

On Tuesday night, the Banning City Council voted 4–1 to approve the Sunset Crossroads development, a project that could bring roughly 4.7 million square feet of warehouse space across more than 500 acres to the city’s south side.

The project also includes commercial elements, but its defining feature is still the scale of the warehouse development.

That is roughly eighty football fields of industrial buildings.

The location makes the scale even harder to ignore. Sunset Crossroads is not proposed in some empty landscape. It sits near two senior communities, which means the project’s impacts would be experienced most directly by residents living closest to it.

During public comment, I asked the council to send the project back to the Planning Commission because the proposal had changed substantially since the commission reviewed it. I also offered a simple way to think about the timeline in front of us.

The development agreement approved Tuesday night lasts thirty years.

That means the incoming freshmen at Banning High School this fall will be 48 years old when the agreement expires. I will be 62. The decisions made this week will shape Banning’s economy for most of their adult lives.

That is the scale of the decision Banning just made: immediate impacts for current residents and long-term implications for the next generation.

The real question raised by the Sunset Crossroads vote is not simply whether one warehouse project should be built, but what long-term economic strategy cities like Banning are pursuing as they grow, and whether that strategy is being shaped by long-term planning or by fiscal pressure.

In Banning, that pressure is not abstract. The city recently adopted a strategic plan that identifies fiscal sustainability as a top priority, warns that difficult budget choices may be necessary, and says Banning needs additional revenue to sustain the level of services residents expect.

That fiscal context was not implied. It was presented directly during the City Council discussion.

For many smaller cities, projects like this are not evaluated in a vacuum. They are weighed against structural limits in California’s local finance system, where municipalities are expected to provide services but have relatively few ways to grow revenue beyond development.

In that context, a project projected to generate millions in one-time public benefits and several million dollars a year in ongoing revenue can look very different to a city struggling to stabilize its budget.

But fiscal pressure is only part of the story.

What happened in Banning is not unique. Over the past two decades, the Inland Empire has become one of the largest logistics hubs in North America as goods flow from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through vast warehouse networks across Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The region now contains more than a billion square feet of warehouse space, and logistics development has become one of the most common forms of large‑scale investment many cities encounter.

That growth has brought jobs and tax revenue. It has also raised deeper questions about the long‑term economic model the region is building.

The California Jobs First plan for Inland Southern California puts that tension in plain terms. The region added nearly 145,000 logistics jobs between 2012 and 2022, but still faces a shortage of more than 500,000 quality jobs. By 2022, only about 26 percent of jobs in the region were classified as quality jobs, and roughly 40 percent of residents lived in households struggling to meet basic expenses and save for the future. Job growth alone has not guaranteed economic security.

That tension between job growth and economic opportunity is not unique to Banning, but decisions like the Sunset Crossroads vote make it visible at the local level.

Another theme that came up repeatedly Tuesday night was youth opportunity. From the dais to the podium, people talked about the importance of leaving the next generation with jobs and a future in Banning.

That is a serious question. But if young people are being invoked to justify major land-use decisions, another question deserves to be asked.

Have we meaningfully asked them what kind of economy they want to inherit?

What makes the Sunset Crossroads decision especially revealing is how many generations it touches at once. In the near term, the project sits between two senior communities whose residents would live closest to its day‑to‑day impacts. Over the long term, the thirty‑year agreement will shape the economic landscape inherited by young people who are still in school and already stepping into civic life today.

That is what makes this more than a routine land‑use vote.

It is a decision about who experiences the impacts of growth now and who lives with the long-term effects decades later.

In California’s planning system, planning commissions exist to weigh long‑term land use considerations and environmental review, while elected city councils ultimately decide whether those tradeoffs are acceptable. Tuesday night’s vote was a reminder that those two perspectives do not always land in the same place.

Decisions like the Sunset Crossroads vote are becoming defining moments for cities across the Inland Empire. Local governments are being asked to balance fiscal stability, economic opportunity, environmental health, and the long-term character of their communities, often with imperfect tools and limited revenue options.

The challenge is not just whether to approve or reject individual projects. It is whether cities can build an economic strategy that generates real opportunity, strengthens public finances, and still leaves future generations with communities they are proud to inherit.

Thirty years from now, the students entering Banning High School this fall will be approaching middle age. By then, the warehouses approved this week will simply be part of the landscape.

The question is whether the opportunity invoked in their name will be there too, and whether the future built in their name will be one they had a hand in shaping.

Disclosure: I previously worked with Inland Economic Growth & Opportunity, which helped support the regional collaboration behind the Inland Southern California California Jobs First initiative.

This one starts with something our Dean of Students told us in middle school.

When I was in 8th grade at Nicolet Middle School, my Dean of Students, Ms. Bennett, pulled us into the auditorium and said something I still hear in my head.

She pointed across the street at the Banning Justice Center going up. Tens of millions of dollars. I watched it rise while we were still kids.

Then she looked at us and said:

“That’s what they think about you.”

That they could picture your future as punishment more easily than possibility.

That you’re going to fail.
That this is the brightest your future will be.

She repeated it until it got quiet.

Then she gave us the antidote: it’s on you. Demand better. Prove them wrong.

A lot of us have been doing that ever since, not in some heroic way, just in the way people survive here. A ride when your car’s down. Someone keeping an eye on your little cousin. A plate dropped off. A neighbor checking in during a heat wave. That’s how people carry each other when the system doesn’t.

I’ve also seen city staff who care, trying to help people through messes they didn’t create.

That day taught me something else too.

If you want to know what a city really believes, look at what moves fast, and what keeps waiting.

Not what it says. What it funds. What gets approved quickly. What it makes room for. What keeps waiting.

A welcome isn’t just a feeling. It’s what the city makes easy.

Sometimes that truth shows up in the projects we celebrate. Sometimes it shows up in what keeps multiplying quietly.

In Banning, there are 29 tobacco shops and 44 places that sell alcohol. Beaumont has 29 tobacco shops too, and 55 places that sell alcohol, with nearly double the population. I first heard those numbers in a Blue Zones tobacco policy presentation at the Boys & Girls Club of the San Gorgonio Pass.

Beaumont is a bigger city. For a smaller place, the fact that the numbers are still this close tells you something about what gets approved fast here.

I’m not judging anybody for what they buy. I’m saying: if a smaller city ends up with almost the same number of places selling the stuff that can make life harder, it’s not random. Even if the exact count is off by a few, the pattern still holds. Some things get to yes quickly.

We were told the courthouse would change everything around it. I’ve learned to judge change by what shows up around a project after the ribbon cutting: sidewalks, storefronts, streetlights, the everyday stuff.

To be fair, it did make one thing easier. Most of us serve jury duty here now instead of driving all the way to Riverside. But that’s different from a project changing daily life around it.

A feeling I hear a lot from people here is simple: the things getting built don’t feel like they’re for us at all. They feel like they’re for people passing through, people investing from the outside, or somebody else entirely.

When people call something transformational, I use a simple test.

Does it make it easier to keep a small business open on a normal Tuesday.
Does it make the streets safer to cross.

If not, the transformation stayed inside the project.

Talking about transformation is easy. Pointing to what actually changed is harder.

Transformation isn’t a building. It’s what changes around it.

That matters here, because the Pass has always been a receiving place. People come here to start over, to hold on, or to rebuild after something broke somewhere else.

A lot of people live here and work somewhere else, back and forth on the 10 or the 60. It shouldn’t take a freeway commute just to hold onto stability. Growing up, the steadiest thing I had was school. Even when our address changed, my school calendar didn’t. That steadiness mattered more than I knew at the time.

This valley has held more than one kind of arrival. Some people came because they wanted to. Some came because they had to.

That includes refugee neighbors who rebuilt here after war and loss, including Hmong families who found familiar hills and more affordable housing in Banning, even while language and cultural barriers made everything harder than it needed to be.

That’s what a receiving place looks like when people keep trying anyway. At some point, a place has to do its part too.

A real welcome includes language access, clear information, and answers you don’t need insider knowledge to find.

Most staff are doing what they can. But when the system is stretched thin, one question can turn into two trips and a missed shift.

You can feel that in the city itself. Big things get built. Small basics wait. You grow up learning what’s convenient. You learn what the built environment is trying to prepare you for, and what it never quite seems to prepare you to reach.

Ramsey will feed you fast. But it won’t always feed you well. And it’s not just food.

Drive our streets and you start to notice what multiplies quickly, and what always seems to take forever. “Coming soon” starts to sound permanent.

And when you need help, it rarely comes as one simple step. It’s time off. Paperwork. Hoping you went to the right place the first time. The patience it takes to get a straight next step.

It’s not efficient if it doesn’t work for the people who have to live with it.

It shouldn’t be easier to find a quick fix than it is to find real support. That gap is not an accident and it’s not a personality trait of a city. It’s a policy choice.

Because this is where policy becomes real. Not in a report. Not in a meeting packet. On the porch. In the kitchen. In the parking lot where you take a call on your break because you can’t take it at work.

Phillips. Theodore Street three different times. George Street. Santa Rita Place.

Those Eastside streets shaped me. They taught me the same lesson Ms. Bennett did: strong communities can hold each other up for a long time, but they shouldn’t have to carry what the system keeps failing to provide.

Because “prove them wrong” works as a personal mantra. It even works as community pride.

But “prove them wrong” is a terrible public policy.

A city shouldn’t be built on the assumption that its people will spend their whole lives climbing over the gaps the city leaves in front of them.

So the question that’s followed me since that auditorium is simple: what are we building, what are we funding, and who do those choices actually serve.

When I say “care,” I mean basics.

Shade where the heat hits hardest.
Sidewalks that connect.
Lighting that makes a block feel safe.
Streets designed so people aren’t taking risks just to cross.
A City Hall where a simple question gets a simple answer.

Clear steps make life easier for residents, and work easier for staff.

City budgets are moral documents. They decide what moves fast, what keeps waiting, and who pays for the gap.

They tell kids what a city expects from them.
They tell families what kind of future is being built around them.
They tell neighborhoods what a place learns to treat as normal.

Ms. Bennett told us to prove them wrong. We did.

Now it’s our turn to prove something back.

That care can be the part a city makes possible, for everybody.

Next, I want to take this down to the map: what gets built, where it lands, and what it makes easier.

Because transformation isn’t a building. It’s what changes around it.

Cars tear down the 10
like we’re a line they can skip,
windows up, West Coast classics loud,
treating this place like the stretch before the windmills,
like an off-ramp with the outlets,
like something to pass through
without ever learning its name.

If you listen to them,
we are a gas stop and fast food row on Ramsey,
a pin on the map between L.A. and Palm Springs.
But every town gets called two different things.
The one people repeat without thinking,
and the one you only learn
by staying long enough to see the porch lights come on.

Out here, the glossy story is freeway and cheap shopping,
a sun-faded billboard still insisting
we’re California’s fastest-growing city,
true for a blink of time
and then left up anyway,
peeling beside the traffic, like it refuses to update.

But if you live here, you know better.
You know the Pass before it was branding,
the heat that makes the air shimmer,
the mornings when the mountains look close enough
to touch.

It includes the concrete building

a few minutes away from Banning High School,
a jail close enough that sirens
show up in the background of practice.

Some mornings I drop my niece off
near the curb where the buses idle.
Same reminder, every time:
“Text me when you get to class. Drink water.”

I watch her weave through a tide of students
holding Hot Cheetos and phones,
backpacks heavy with homework and worry,
futures moving past the fences
on the way to first period.

Ask someone who only knows us from the freeway,
and they will talk about Banning
like it’s a place you pass through,
not a place you raise a family.

They will not mention the way
San Gorgonio keeps watch from the north,
snow on its shoulders in January
like a quiet blessing.
They will not mention the way
the mountains close in on both sides
so the sunrise feels closer,
like it chose us on purpose.

Some nights the train horns cut through the dark
and no one can agree
if they sound more like warning or promise.
It depends on how your rent looked this month,
how many warehouses went up
where weeds used to sway,
whether the job you got in town
pays you enough to stay in town.

People don’t put this part on postcards.
The garages turned into bedrooms.
The couches that have held
three generations and one more cousin.
The neighbor who fixes cars for cash
so folks can get to graveyard shifts
in those same warehouses.
The asthma inhalers
lined up on kitchen counters like they’re part of the routine now,
just to get through another season of dust and exhaust.

And then there is what happens when you stay,
not for an event,
just for a regular Saturday at Roosevelt Williams Park.
The court alive with squeaking sneakers,
someone’s speaker humming low,
kids racing to the swings like there is still
all the time in the world.
At a picnic table, a plastic cloth flaps in the wind,
held down by bags of oranges and cucumbers,
tubs of rice and beans,
a tray of roasted peppers and squash,
a cooler full of agua fresca,
the smell of garlic, cilantro, and grilled zucchini,
enough to feed everybody,
plus one more tía who shows up late,
and every nephew, neighbor, and friend of a friend
who shows up empty handed but not unwelcome.

Here, the real measure is not what someone posts
after driving through once.
It is who hands you a plate
when you thought you wouldn’t eat,
who saves you a spot on the bench,
who presses leftovers into your hands
“just in case.”

In side yards and alleys
we keep planting against the odds.
Tomatoes in five gallon buckets,
fig trees pushing their roots
up against chain-link,
aloe and nopales catching light
on cinderblock walls.
The soil is tired and the water bill is high,
but still something green keeps insisting
we are not done yet.

Maybe the story about us should not be
about property values
or numbers that don’t show what it feels like to live here,
argued over by people
who have never stood in line
at the panadería or KK Market on a Sunday,
who have never looked up at the Ring of Honor
next to City Hall and wondered
when our whole city gets to be remembered,
or why it doesn’t look like the people in the grocery line.

I want Banning to be known
not only for the jail and the freeway,
but as a place where your kid
can miss the bus
and three neighbors will offer a ride,
where your overdue bill
becomes the block’s quiet problem
and not just your shame.

Call us what you want from the outside.
Out here, we are building something else
one potluck, one meeting, one garden bed at a time.
It sounds like train horns and basketballs on asphalt,
like my niece slamming the car door
and saying she is going to change things,
like someone at the mic in a stuffy council chamber
starting with “Good evening, my name is…”
even though their hands are shaking.

It looks like a town where your hunger
is not just your own business,
where the dust on your shoes
matches the dust on mine,
where the roots under your house
tangle with the roots under mine
whether we like it or not.
That’s just how it is here.

If we get to choose what sticks to us,
even a little,
let it be this:
a place that was easy to overlook
until you needed somewhere to start again,
and found that here,
in this small stretch of desert and wind,
someone was already saving you a seat
and a plate made up from whatever we had,
saying, “You are here now.
That is enough to belong.”

If you’re wondering what I’m fighting for, it’s simple: safe streets where no one risks their life crossing the road, homes regular working families can afford and stay in, and good local jobs that actually pay enough to live here. City Hall should move fast for neighbors, not just for the well-connected.

These priorities didn’t start with me. They started with conversations with neighbors who love this town enough to demand better. I’ve just been listening.

January 22 has always felt like the start of the year for me. My mom hates making a big deal out of herself, so she’ll try to slide right past her birthday.

Not today, mamá. It’s your day.

One of my first memories is my mom telling bedtime stories to my brother and me. We were knights in her stories. My brother’s horse was named Lightning. Mine was Sugar. And my sister’s horse was Pinto Bean.

I didn’t have words for it back then, but I get it now. She was building us a world where we were brave, protected, and loved. And then in real life, she spent years doing the same thing, in big ways and small ones, without needing credit for any of it.

I can still see her sitting in her car waiting for me outside Banning High. Sometimes for hours.

Not because she had nothing else to do. Because coaches and adults didn’t really consider students who commuted in. They assumed everyone lived a few minutes away. They assumed you could “just stay a little longer” and then drive up the street.

But our life didn’t work like that.

And I could tell when she was upset. Not at me, at the situation. Some days practice would get extended by an hour, sometimes more than that, without anyone telling families. No heads-up. Nothing.

Later I’d check my phone and see missed calls from her while I was still stuck in practice. Just a reminder that an extra hour is nothing if you live up the street, and everything if you don’t.

I’d get in the car and feel that low, tired frustration. And she was still there. Every time.

I’d walk out into that parking lot and scan for her car.

I never wondered if she’d be there. I just looked for which spot she was in.

A lot of our time together growing up was in the car. My mom helped take care of properties, so we were always going somewhere. I’d be in the passenger seat with my Game Boy, playing Pokémon, pretty sure it was Pokémon Red, watching her handle whatever needed handling.

A quick call. A stop to drop something off. A problem solved before it could become a bigger one.

And even on hard days, if her phone rang for work, her voice would change instantly. Calm. Professional. Because she had to.

Over the years our addresses shifted. Banning, then Beaumont, up the mountain, and into the Coachella Valley. Sometimes it was cheaper. Sometimes it was just what worked at the time.

But she kept me connected to school, to our people, to the place that raised me.

And Banning Unified was still home. That district had my back. Those teachers saw me. We weren’t the kind of family that got an easy path, but we had a community that didn’t let us fall through it.

She improvised. She commuted. She made it work.

And in that car for hours, she made sure I didn’t miss my life.

I used to think that was just “being an adult.” Now I know it was discipline. It was endurance. It was love.

Mom, happy birthday. Feliz cumpleaños.

Thank you for every ride and every wait, and for always being there when practice finally finished.

I love you, mom. And yeah, January 22 is still the start of the year for me.

My mom gave me my high school senior scrapbook a few months ago. She’d held onto it all these years. It came in a little stack with DVD box sets: the Matrix trilogy, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. A time capsule from a version of life where stories still came in seasons you could hold.

I opened the scrapbook and found a page from senior year. Seventeen years old. Writing something called “My Philosophy of Life” like I had it all figured out.

The page is framed with a border of keys. I chose that on purpose. Even then, I think I was trying to name what opens doors in a place like ours. And right in the middle of it, I wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Back then, I really put him on a pedestal. I wrote about him the way a lot of us were taught: Dr. King as the hero. Dr. King as proof that one extraordinary person can change everything.

I meant it. I still do. Dr. King earned our respect.

But looking at my own words now, I can see the script I’d been handed underneath what I was trying to say.

We get taught a version of this country where change comes from a few larger-than-life heroes, and everybody else is just watching. It’s a comfortable story, and it also does damage.

Because if change only comes from a handful of people with national spotlights, regular people never have to see themselves as part of it. But the heroes are already here. They’re our neighbors. The ones who show up, translate, cook, give rides, ask the hard question, and come back again. I know those people. I’ve been carried by them.

That’s the part I couldn’t see yet. Not the heart. Not the point. Just the full picture.

I did know some things, though. I knew courage mattered. I knew failure wasn’t the end. I knew there was a way through. Those weren’t “wrong ideas.” They were lessons I really meant.

What I didn’t understand yet is that inspiration doesn’t change the rules. Organized people do. A moment doesn’t carry itself. People carry it, over and over, on regular days, in regular rooms, with regular problems.

The part you don’t see in the photos is the part that makes everything possible: planning, arguments, discipline, and the people who keep showing up when it’s not convenient. People who turn a feeling into a plan, and a plan into follow-through.

That doesn’t take anything away from Dr. King. It takes him seriously. Because what he fought for wasn’t abstract. He was fighting for people to have enough: enough pay, enough housing, enough voice to stop being told to wait.

And that question is still here. It shows up in the basics: rent, wages, safe streets, and whether regular people can navigate public systems without getting worn down, even when staff are doing their best inside rules they didn’t write. In a city, we don’t just “believe” in justice. We practice it, or we don’t. Day by day.

So MLK Day, for me, isn’t about getting the quote right. It’s about the assignment.

Are enough of us involved to move what happens next?

I don’t look at that high school page and feel embarrassed. I feel genuinely grateful, because the vibe was right, even if my understanding was still growing. And I’m grateful I’ve learned what happens when neighbors get involved.

I didn’t stop admiring Dr. King. I just stopped thinking admiration was enough.

Respect is when the rules stop landing on the same people the same way. Respect is what the budget funds. Respect is what you do after the holiday.

I used to think my job in life was to be the good one.

Good student from a small working class town.
Good kid who made it out, then came back.
Good commissioner who says the right things, shows up to meetings, and still falls short in private sometimes.

If you looked at my resume, you could probably read “good person” in the margins.

But the older I get, the more I see a harder truth: I have hurt people. Not in dramatic, movie-level ways. In slow, quiet patterns that feel normal when you grow up around stress and scarcity.

My growth did not start when I found a new system or read the right book. It started the day I let myself say, “I have caused harm,” and did not run from it.

It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m thinking less about resolutions and more about patterns. The kind that show up in my calendar, my relationships, and the way I hold power. If I’m honest, the gap I’m most focused on closing isn’t between who I want to be and who I am. It’s between what I say I value and what my life actually shows.

For me it looks like saying yes too fast. Then I go MIA when I’m overwhelmed, and people end up waiting on me.

None of that will ever make a headline. But it makes people feel like they can’t count on me. And that’s not the kind of love I’m trying to live out.

I grew up moving between my parents’ homes. I spent time with my dad, a Vietnam vet, first in our small trailer in Whitewater and later in a house just across the street.

That little trailer holds a lot of our Chicano family story. It would later become the place where my nana spent her last years and where she passed away. Nothing about it was fancy, but it was full of care, meals, and memories. In my mind it lives as both modest and holy.

With my mom, life looked like making rent work, again and again, without letting me feel the weight of it all the time. My mom and I moved as many times as LeBron James has been to the NBA Finals.

In Banning we lived on W Westward Ave, W Wilson St, and Theodore St thrice. Each move was my mom doing what so many loving parents quietly do: keeping us housed, keeping food on the table, and keeping enough room for me to be a kid.

Moving that much taught me how to adapt fast, and how easy it is to confuse getting by with feeling settled.

I learned to adjust fast. I’ve been learning, little by little, that love asks for steadier than that.

Not long ago, I said yes to too many things in the same week. A meeting here, a community event there, one more call I felt I couldn’t turn down. That same weekend, someone I love had an important life event I had promised to be at.

The day came and I was wiped out. I told myself I would just lie down for a bit before driving over.

I woke up to a phone full of photos from the event I had missed. The glow of my phone in the dark and the sick feeling in my stomach told me what I didn’t want to admit.

There was no villain in that story, just my choices. It was one of those moments where I had to admit my love and my reliability weren’t the same thing.

Old me would have gone quiet from shame or sent a vague “I have been so busy” text. This time I named it:

“I overcommitted and missed it, that’s on me. I’m sorry, how do I make it right?”

Transformational justice is basically asking: how do I stop doing the same harm?

For me, it’s the difference between apologizing for being absent and building a life where I don’t disappear on the people who love me. It’s rest. It’s boundaries. It’s saying no early. It’s not making the people closest to me pay for my overcommitment.

In a small city, accountability isn’t a theory. People don’t just remember what you voted on. They remember if you called them back. They remember if you showed up when it was boring. They remember if you kept your word. In a place like this, you see the same people at the grocery store and the barbershop. Your word has a long memory around here.

So here’s what I’m practicing in 2026:

• Saying no early so I can keep the yes’s that matter

• Repairing fast: name it, own it, ask what would help, then do it

• Letting the people closest to me be the first ones to feel my integrity

If you volunteer with me, work with me, or depend on me, you’ll see this in my habits, not just my words.

If you’ve depended on me before, you deserve better than intention. You deserve consistency. This is me making my word match my calendar.

Real love isn’t just a feeling. It’s follow-through.

—

For anyone navigating rent challenges:
• CA tenant protections (DOJ)
• “Know Your Rights” tenant PDF

For most, the Pass is a brief rest stop. Gas. Fast food. A windy stretch on the 10. On the way from OC to the desert, or from Coachella back to LA.

But if you get off and spend time, you start noticing what held me here: teachers who saw us, neighbors who stepped in, and a school district that felt like home even when everything else moved.

For a long time, I couldn’t quite explain it, but I always felt Banning had an underdog story. Learning this history helped me name why. The Pass has been a refuge.

Between two mountains, this valley catches wind, freight, and families. It’s a corridor on a map and a home in real life.

I grew up knowing it through school calendars, bus routes, and teachers who didn’t flatten my last name. Getting it right felt like a kind of belonging.

Even when my family moved, I stayed with BUSD, because BUSD was the one address I refused to change.

The Pass is a receiving place. Sometimes people arrive because they want to. Sometimes because they have to.

And one of the clearest examples is east along the corridor, in Palm Springs: Section 14.

Section 14, and what “redevelopment” cost

“Redevelopment” is a word that can sound like progress until you translate it into plain language.

Section 14 was a square-mile neighborhood near downtown Palm Springs on Agua Caliente land, boxed into the federal grid and labeled “Section 14.” It became one of the few places workers could afford as the resort economy grew. Estimates suggest as many as 1,000 residents lived there before the clearances.

Then the city government labeled it “blight,” the kind of label that makes displacement sound like improvement, and treated its existence like an obstacle.

In 1951, eviction notices arrived. By 1956, the city was burning condemned homes. Some residents came home to ash.

It’s easy to say “urban renewal” and miss what that did to real families.

People lost homes. People lost community. People lost a foothold for wealth they were never allowed to build twice.

Palm Springs later apologized and approved reparations: a $5.9 million settlement for verified Section 14 survivors and descendants.

That matters. It still doesn’t undo what happened. Because the part that reaches into our valley is what came after.

What happened next is the Pass

After Section 14, many displaced residents relocated to nearby communities, including Banning. Some kept their Palm Springs jobs and commuted from here for years.

That’s the corridor in real life: not “migration” as a concept, but relocation close enough to survive.

Local history records the ripple: in the period after the evictions ended in 1966, Banning’s Black population nearly tripled.

That isn’t a metaphor. It’s how families ended up here: a longer commute, a new lease, a new school registration.

And a lot of those families are still here. They’ve built homes, raised kids, started businesses, joined churches and teams, and added to the social fabric of Banning in ways you can feel even if you don’t yet know the history.

Displacement doesn’t always announce itself. It can look like a new address, a longer commute, a kid enrolling in a new school, a family rebuilding without anyone ever putting it on a sign downtown.

That’s how the Pass became a refuge. Not as a slogan. As a pattern.

Section 14 isn’t the only thread. The Pass has held other arrivals too, including Hmong families and other refugee neighbors who rebuilt here after war and displacement, and immigrant households who built life here while carrying the extra weight of paperwork, language barriers, and uncertainty.

Different histories. Same truth: this Pass has been a place people come to make a life after something broke somewhere else.

Why this matters for how we plan now

You could treat all of this as background. A story for history units while “real” decisions focus on budgets and site plans.

Displacement is not just a past tense problem. If the Pass has been a receiving place, then we have to take the idea seriously. A receiving place has responsibilities.

It owes people stability: housing you can stay in, without kids changing schools just to keep a roof.

It owes people access: a City Hall you can reach before the vote, with help that doesn’t require taking a day off work.

It owes people recognition: a public story big enough for the people who rebuilt here, told where people actually walk.

Because the stories we inherit shape the policies we tolerate. If our loudest story is freight and stagecoaches, everybody else becomes a footnote. Footnote people are the easiest to displace again.

When we widen the story, we don’t just add history. We add dignity, and dignity changes what a city is willing to do for its people.

What we name, and what we leave unexplained

This series keeps circling back to names for a reason. Names are how a place tells the truth about itself.

I think about this at Roosevelt Williams Park, where I play basketball. The name is there. The story isn’t.

Local history documents Roosevelt Williams as “the first black city councilman and the longest serving councilman.” You can grow up playing under that name and never be told what it cost to be the first.

That’s what naming can do: honor someone without teaching why they mattered. This series is me asking for both.

We have pieces of the story all around us. We just don’t always give people the scaffolding to understand what they mean.

If you want to understand power in a small city, watch what we put in stone, and what we don’t bother to label.

That same habit shows up in planning language too: “blight,” “redevelopment,” “renewal,” words that can hide what’s really happening.

The pattern we’re living in

This kind of harm, where “redevelopment” means “leave,” wasn’t rare. It was repeated.

Here’s what it means: public decisions can break neighborhoods, and repair has to be led by the people who live with the results, not just for the length of a councilmember’s term, but for as long as it takes to make things whole.

So when we talk about who moved here, we have to tell the truth about why, not as a guilt trip, but as an accurate story.

Where Part IV will go

Next, I want to stay with what it means to be a receiving place and talk about more arrivals, more work, and more of the systems that move people through this corridor.

Not just in essays, but in budgets and decisions. In sidewalks and permits. In language access. In whether help is reachable before crisis hits.

Because a town that has held so many people after harm deserves a story big enough to say welcome, and systems sturdy enough to mean it.

The Pass is not where the story starts. It’s where people rebuilt, on a homeland that never stopped being home.

Downtown, at the corner of East Ramsey Street and North San Gorgonio Avenue, the “Old Town Banning, Stagecoach Town U.S.A.” sign sits in stone like an heirloom. I’ve walked past it more times than I can count, sometimes without even looking up. Sometimes on purpose.

For a lot of us, it’s a kind of proof. We come from somewhere.

It’s also what I show friends and family when they visit. We usually take a picture in front of it for a keepsake, like we’re pinning a moment to the place.

I’ve watched other people do the same: stop to take photos, to point out the words to their kids, to tell a quick story before crossing the street. It’s not just branding. It’s a little public altar of memory.

When I was younger, the motto felt charming. It gave us a ready-made identity for parades and flyers. Horses. Wagons. A frontier image that fit cleanly on a board.

For a long time, I just carried that picture. I loved where I was from. I hadn’t yet learned how much any public story leaves out.

It took me even longer to ask what that wagon might mean to the first caretakers of this land.

Here in the Pass, we’re on Cahuilla and Serrano homelands, with the Morongo Indian Reservation right next to Banning, alive and governing, not a footnote. Once you name that, a lot of things read differently.

A stagecoach can mean grit, and the pride of building a life in a hard place.

It can also mean a story that starts too late, where the “old town” begins with the stagecoach, not with the people who already knew this valley, who had names for its washes and ridgelines, who tended it, traveled it, and fought to remain.

Recently I toured the Gilman Historic Ranch and Wagon Museum. The main room held a line of carefully restored stagecoaches, each with its own plaque. Along the edges sat smaller glass cases with Native baskets, photos, and documents.

What I noticed wasn’t just what we looked at. It was where we kept drifting: toward the edges. We leaned closer to the glass. We asked more questions there. We lingered, like we were trying to find the part of the room that felt less like a performance and more like a truth.

The staff and guides knew the tension. They talked about how they’re working to bring more of those threads forward, so the space feels less like one dominant story with side notes and more like the mosaic this valley actually is.

I thought about that room again at a parade downtown. Stagecoaches and classic cars rolled past the crowd. The sidewalks were packed with kids, elders, and families from every corner of Banning, cheering in English and Spanish and more. The crowd looked like the real city.

What rolled past still told an older version of us.

Not wrong. Just incomplete.

And incomplete stories don’t just shape pride. They shape habits. They shape what we point to when we teach our kids who we are. They shape what gets a plaque downtown, what gets preserved, and what never gets named.

If you want to understand power in a small city, pay attention to what we put in stone.

I get why people love the sign. I do too. I just don’t want it to be the loudest thing we ever say about ourselves.

Because we are more than a frontier postcard. We are more than a promise to investors. We are more than a brand that fits on a flyer.

We are a lived city.

A refuge and a crossroads for generations. A place where people have kept showing up, building families, building faith communities, building small businesses, building traditions, building each other, even when larger systems treated the Pass like an afterthought.

So here’s the invitation, as plainly as I can say it.

Keep the landmark. Widen the story.

Match it with markers that honor more of the people who made a home here, and more of the people who still do. Put more of the story where people can actually see it, downtown and in our neighborhoods, not only in the margins of a display case.

Banning now has a Historic Preservation Commission. That’s a real lever. If we use it well, preservation can widen the lens instead of freezing one narrow version in place. We can start downtown, do a small set of new markers well, and let it grow from there.

Let the story widen gently, the way a family photo album does over time.

What we honor in public is what we protect together.

If you want to keep pulling the thread
Here are a few good places to start.

• City of Banning Agenda Center: agendas, minutes, meetings

• Malki Museum: local Native history

• NAHC Digital Atlas (overview): California Native nations and regions

• Banning Library District local history: local history resources for Banning

If you want the bigger frame
Two pieces that helped me think about how Western stories get told.

• California State Parks, “Stage Styles: Not All Were Coaches”

• Smithsonian Magazine (via Zócalo), “The History of the American West Gets a Much-Needed Rewrite”

What if the oldest name for your hometown is not on a single sign.

Not on the freeway exit.

Not on the city website.

Not on the letterhead at City Hall.

Growing up, most of us learned the Pass as exits. For a lot of people on the 10, “Morongo” is a gas sign and the resort skyline before it is a living tribal community with sovereignty, history, and home here, long before the interstate cut across the valley.

On mornings I woke up at my dad’s place in Whitewater, the Banning Unified bus carried us past Morongo into town. I sat with cowboy-and-Indian storylines from TV in my head, not realizing they were manifest destiny propaganda that manipulated the moral compass of the West.

As a kid, I went to powwows at Morongo with family and friends. We heard songs carry across the grounds. We moved through vendor tables full of families sharing joy. I saw beautiful dances without yet understanding what they were. They were prayer. They were healing. They kept language and memory alive.

Long before anyone carved out a town here, this place already had its own names and caretakers.

A valley with older names

Before freeways and truck traffic, the Pass was home to people who named every wash and ridge.

Pass Cahuilla speakers called this stretch of valley Maalki. Serrano speakers called it Maarrkingaʼ, held between mountains they knew as Qwirriqaych (San Gorgonio) and Ayaqaych, “Gathering Mountain,” the Serrano name for San Jacinto Peak. Ayaqaych was where people gathered medicine and food, and where spiritual leaders went to learn, a high point people turned to for health and teaching.

These words do not just name a place. They carry directions about water, wind, and crossing places, knowledge you only get by being rooted in a landscape for a very long time. I did not grow up hearing them. I learned them later. And once you know them, it becomes harder to see this place only as a string of exit numbers.

Learning these words made the Pass feel less like a route and more like a relationship. My teachers planted the questions early. I kept chasing the missing chapters later.

Those older names remind us this was homeland long before it was ever a line on a county map. Today, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians still reside at the base of these same mountains. The stretch of desert many of us read now as a run of exits along the 10 is also sovereign tribal land. A place of burial, prayer, and home.

Missions, ranchos, and what followed

In school, the missions and ranchos were often taught like heritage. The violence, theft, and erasure were the quiet parts we didn’t hear.

I carry Spanish and Mexican ancestry, among other roots. My grandfather bought a house in Pico Rivera for around $12K in the 1950s. My pop bought a $40K place in Whitewater. They loved having a piece of ground to call theirs.

Out here, Cahuilla and Serrano families loved this land first.

In the 1820s, priests from Mission San Gabriel claimed grazing land in the high Pass and called it Rancho San Gorgonio. Land Native families had tended was seized and written into someone else’s records as property. Bells and fences went up on ground that had once been crossed by family routes and stories.

Many Native people were pushed into mission outposts and rancho compounds as unpaid or barely paid labor under soldiers and priests who could punish or starve them for refusing to fall in line. This was not gentle conversion. It was a system that used violence to force people away from their languages, ceremonies, and ways of life. Many historians now call this what it was: genocide.

Then it turned directly on children.

In 1890, a Catholic boarding school called St. Boniface Indian Industrial School opened in Banning, off what is now West Gilman Street. Native children from Cahuilla, Serrano, and other tribal nations were taken there. Their hair and clothes were taken. Their languages were banned. Many faced abuse and forced labor when they tried to hold on to who they were. Some children died there and were buried in the school cemetery instead of being returned to their families.

I grew up passing that part of town without knowing any of this. For me, West Gilman was just another street on the way across Banning.

For Native families, it is a place tied to both deep harm and deep survival and a place where they continue to honor their languages, stories, and ceremonies.

What survived, and what is being rebuilt

The Morongo Reservation still anchors the mouth of the Pass. Families there trace their roots through Cahuilla, Serrano, and other Native lines that long predate the City of Banning. Tribal government, cultural programs, and environmental work move on that land every day. A corridor that once tried to control Native labor is now governed by a sovereign tribal nation that refuses to be pushed off its own ground.

In downtown Banning, the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center carries another part of that strength. High school students walk past it every day as they move up and down San Gorgonio, often without knowing it is one of the most important cultural landmarks in our valley. Dorothy Ramon, a Serrano elder, was remembered as the last primary speaker of her language. Instead of letting that be the end of the story, she spent years recording, teaching, and sharing what she knew so it could live beyond her lifetime.

I was taught, rightly, to be proud of speaking Spanish. I was also taught that Cahuilla and Serrano languages belong to this place, long before English or Spanish did. What I did not understand then was how hard people fought to keep those languages alive through centuries of attempted erasure. That survival is not an accident. It is the fruit of unwavering resolve.

Why this matters for how we plan today

You could treat all of this as background. Something for plaques and history units while “real” decisions focus on budgets and site plans.

But history is not decoration. It is the ground under our feet.

If we say we care about housing, jobs, and belonging here, we have to be honest about what we are standing on. The same dirt we pave for trucks and warehouses is where kids wait for school buses, where elders are buried on both city and tribal land, and where people who were pushed out of other places have tried to build something steady.

That matters when we decide where big projects go, when we call land “open” or “underutilized,” and when tribal leaders say, “this land is sacred to us.” When I vote on projects, the question cannot only be, “Is this parcel inside city limits, and does the project pencil out.” It also has to be, “Whose homeland is this, and how do the people rooted here help shape what happens next, from City Hall to their own doorsteps.”

In a region built around moving cargo, planning is not neutral. It either pays attention to that history or helps repeat it.

Where Part III will go

The next part will move to another chapter that rarely makes it onto our signs.

I learned this history late, and it changed how I understood the Pass.

It starts with Section 14 in Palm Springs, where Black and Brown neighborhoods were burned and bulldozed in the name of redevelopment. We will follow the families who moved up the Pass to Banning, Beaumont, and nearby communities to rebuild their lives, alongside others shaped by displacement and work.

Before we talk about who moved here, we have to remember who never left.

The first time I heard the word “Banning” in two languages, I was five years old, sitting in a dual immersion classroom in Banning Unified.

In English, it was just the town on our bus route.

In Spanish, it sat next to other names my teachers insisted we remember. Names of peoples and places that almost disappeared from the official story.

I was only the second class to go all the way through Banning Unified’s dual immersion program, kindergarten through high school. My teachers were intentional in a way I did not fully understand then. They made sure we learned:

• Histories that usually show up as one line in a textbook

• Cultures that were nearly erased or treated as “extras”

• That speaking Spanish, or any language other than English, was something to be proud of

I still remember a lesson where we learned the names of local Native nations and ranchos before we ever talked about “Banning” in a California history unit. It planted a small question in my mind that has only grown louder as I got older, left, and came back home.

Then there was the joke everyone made when they heard where I was from.

“What are you banning?”

As a kid, I laughed it off. As an adult who helps decide what gets built and where, that joke has started to feel like a real question.

What have we banned, intentionally or not, in the story we tell about this place and who belongs here?

And deeper still: is the name “Banning” big enough to hold our full, diverse, layered history, or does it still mostly honor one man and one version of the past?

I write this as one resident, in a personal capacity, because I love this place and I think our story is richer than our signs admit.

How We Got the Name “Banning”

Our city did not start as Banning, and this valley certainly did not start as a rail town.

Long before any streets were called Moore City or Banning, this pass was Cahuilla and Serrano land, stewarded by Native nations who still call this region home, including what is now the Morongo Band of Mission Indians in the San Gorgonio Pass.

As an American townsite, it began in the 1870s as Moore City, named after Ransom B. Moore, a rancher who laid out a settlement near the new Southern Pacific rail line in the Pass. Within a few months, the settlement was renamed for Phineas Banning, a stagecoach operator, freight entrepreneur, and later state senator who ran lines through the San Gorgonio Pass.

Phineas Banning is better known on the coast as the “Father of the Port of Los Angeles,” his name tied to stagecoaches, freight, and early infrastructure that moved goods across Southern California.

So our city name comes from:

• A 19th century white businessman and politician
• Stagecoaches and freight
• An era that prioritized moving goods across long distances, and that priority still shapes the Inland Empire’s warehouse corridors today

That is a real chapter of our history. It is not the only one.

When you grow up in a dual immersion classroom learning Indigenous nations, ranchos, and migration stories alongside the word “Banning,” it is hard to pretend the name is neutral. You feel the gap between:

• The single surname on the map

• The many communities that actually built and rebuilt this place

That small question from elementary school has stayed with me:

If Banning is named for a man who moved freight, what would it look like for the name to also carry the people who moved here, were pushed here, and chose to stay?

Where This Series Is Going

This is the first part of a series about what sits behind the name “Banning.”

In the next parts, I want to:

• Go back before the freight lines and talk about the Indigenous and rancho names for this valley

• Look at how stories and people moved up the pass from places like Palm Springs and Section 14

• Talk honestly about who lives here now and what it means to carry a name that also means “to ban” in a city that talks about opportunity

• Sketch out what it would look like to widen the story behind “Banning” without changing a single letter on the city limit sign

For now, I am starting where I first heard the name in two languages, in a classroom where my teachers insisted that our history was bigger than one man, one wagon, or one era.

Part II will start before there was a “Banning” at all, with the peoples and names that were here long before a stagecoach ever rolled through the Pass.

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Who I am and why I’m here

I grew up in Banning, California, and for a long time the message was clear: if you wanted to “make it,” you got out. Adults told me success lived somewhere past these hills, so I left.

Traveling and working in other places was supposed to be the escape route. Instead, it made something else obvious: all the promise my city ever needed was us. People who stayed, or came back, and refused to accept that where we’re from can’t also be where our dreams live. Banning didn’t need to be “escaped.” It needed people willing to stay, fight, stay curious, and demand a city where basic necessities and beyond could actually be met.

So I came home.

Most of the people I love are still here. A lot of what I care about now comes from watching how this place has treated them over time.

I currently serve as a Planning Commissioner in Banning and stay involved in local policy and community work. A lot of my life is spent thinking about zoning, housing, transportation, and what actually gets built in a small city with big needs and not enough resources. I’m also in a weird in-between season work-wise, which mostly means more time to pay attention, listen, and write.

Everything here is in a personal capacity as a neighbor trying to make sense of it all, not on behalf of my hometown or any organization.

I’m starting this Substack because too many conversations about power, planning, and opportunity happen far away from the people who live with the consequences. I want to document what it looks like to push for affordable, walkable, dignified communities from inside a small, working class city in the Inland Empire.

This is for anyone who cares about how their city grows, whether you’re deep in policy or just trying to understand why your neighborhood feels the way it does.

What to expect here

This space is part diary, part notebook, part plain-English/Spanglish policy.

• Poems and personal writing
  Home, leaving and coming back, love, grief, faith, and what it means to stay rooted in one place.

• Life in a small city
  Snapshots from Banning and the Pass: people, places, small moments, and the texture of everyday life here.

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  Zoning, housing, transit, budgets, and “economic development” translated into real-world terms instead of government jargon.

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I’m aiming for 1–2 posts a week, so it feels like an ongoing conversation, not homework.

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If you:

• Live in a small or mid sized city and need better words for what you’re seeing

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…then you’re who I’m writing for.

I’m trying to make sense of this place in public. Subscribing means you’re in that conversation with me. You’ll get new posts straight to your inbox and it tells me this kind of slow, local work is worth continuing.

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Thanks for being here at the start. Hit subscribe, stick around, and let’s see what we can build together from my hometown to yours.