Morongo Valley road improvement project cites failures due to San Bernardino County “botching the job”

In the planning stages for nearly two years, Morongo Valley’s Rawson Road Improvement project met substantial opposition by residents in January after survey cards indicated “no positive simple majority among residents” to move forward.  Yet Board members blame the County for large mistakes made in the process. Yesterday, Gabriel Hart spoke to one of the voices of its opposition Catherine Spruth, and he followed up the story today chatting with two of the non-profit’s Board members, Sally Ellis and Brad Garrett, regarding what went wrong with the project, and what they’ll do moving forward.

In the planning stages for nearly two years, Morongo Valley’s Rawson Road Improvement project met substantial opposition by residents in January after survey cards indicated “no positive simple majority among residents” to move forward.  Yet Board members blame the County for large mistakes made in the process.

In June of 2025, one year into their non-profit road improvement project, Board President Sally Ellis and Treasurer Brad Garrett said they received estimates from the San Bernardino County Special Districts representative Rudy Guerrero totaling $408.00 a year per parcel to pay for the improvements. This included the agreement to pulverize Rawson and Navajo Trail two roads in the heaviest disrepair.

“The expense on that was $27,000 to pulverize both roadways and then… it suddenly disappeared out of the estimate? We didn’t catch it for a long time until someone else pointed it out. I was all ‘Wait a minute!’ and Rudy Guerrero’s answer was ‘it’s too expensive.’ They just took it out they didn’t notify us or tell us. So then it was a bait and switch kind of thing. They made our credibility go down the toilet, ‘cause we didn’t know!” said Ellis. 

Eventually, residents from Big Morongo Canyon Road backed out of the project (claiming the higher unpaved road was “private”), which Garrett said should have decreased the overall costs by $33,600 but instead led to a huge discrepancy between the project and County.

“The County said we were losing 206 parcels without Big Morongo Canyon so that drives up the cost for everyone else, right? But when we counted it up, we only lost 105 (parcels)–that’s a huge difference,” said Garrett

“So it was a miscount from the County,” Ellis added. “After the fact, I went through the entire map. One of their employees miscounted the parcels in the first place…  and every time I emailed any kind of a hint to Rudy, he wouldn’t answer me through e-mail. He called me on the phone…”

“Because he didn’t want things in writing,” Garrett added. 

As a result, Garrett said they were giving presentations to residents at their meetings stating the costs were going to be $408 annually. Once Big Morongo Canyon Road dropped out and the County “magically removed” pulverizing Rawson and Navajo, suddenly the costs went up to $540 and higher.

“And that’s what broke this. Because we looked like we were lying to everyone. They said, ‘Well you’ve been telling us it’s this much!’ and suddenly it jumped up astronomically… And we paid them $2500 to survey the roads and we lost it. And even after we paid them, we had to go out and measure the roads. The Board drove around for two days.”

“We are gonna write a letter to the county and outline this stuff and ask for our $2500 back. That money is donations from the community. They took those donations and botched the job. And this is two years of volunteer work and now our credibility is in the dirt.”

Despite the project falling apart, Garret says there are no plans to dissolve the Road Improvement non-profit group. Since they are coming up on two years old, they will be qualified to apply for road improvement grants. And since Dawn Rowe’s office has been supportive, they plan to gauge their interest in chipping in. But moving forward, Garrett says it will be smaller, ad-hoc repairs instead of a special district. In the meantime, the group has $2500 in the bank meant for the project’s elections they plan on returning to the donors.

“I think we’ll have a public meeting twice a year and if people want to say ‘hey, we’ve got a major problem on this road,’ then we can try to raise money to solve singular problems rather than total road repairs.”