What is past is prologue: Where's the money?

In New York City, the residents are still awaiting the grand jury's decision on the fatal officer-involved shooting of Sean Bell. Apparently, a new witness has emerged and it's being discussed about whether or not this new witness should be allowed to testify here.




Here in Riverside, there was an interesting discussion this morning at the Group meeting held at the Coffee Depot in downtown Riverside about the priorities of the city government in terms of how it spends its money.

When the city council passed its five-year Riverside Renaissance plan, they reassured city residents that the city was flush with money to finance a project with a budget that will exceed tens of millions of dollars. Yet if that's true, then why is the city not providing adequate funding including supplemental amounts towards the operations of the city departments which provide major services in this city?

Last autumn, the city council took 25 new police officer positions off the table after it negotiated a new contract with the Riverside Police Officers' Association. Tit for tat, most likely for the union for not settling for the somewhat modest contract that City Manager Brad Hudson and Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis had put on the table. How else could Hudson have said that the positions that had been important earlier in the year were less important now and weren't needed because the city was doing better than had previously been thought?

Five positions for entry police officer positions were reinstated, but the remaining 20 were not included in the supplemental appropriations proposed for the mid-year budget that was set in January. In addition, equipment requested by the police department had not been included in this readjusted budget either, according to RPOA president Det. Ken Tutwiler and board member, Det. Randy Ryder who attended the meeting.

Also impacted is any new training programs that the police department may have hoped to implement to teach its officers and supervisors how to address new situations if and when they arise. New training that is vital to enabling the police department to modernize into a new century. Without it, the department becomes stagnated in its evolution.

The three basic elements, personnel, equipment and training, all met challenges this past year in terms of being provided and all met resistance by the city council which seems hesitant to push Hudson away from focusing on development projects and towards addressing the responsibilities of the department's five-year Strategic Plan.

Why bring the Strategic Plan up?

Because within this document are goals and objectives which are to be satisfied by the city and department by 2009. What is clear to anyone who reads this Plan is that in order to achieve the majority of these goals, there needs to be great care taken to ensure that the staffing of personnel in both the sworn and civilian positions is increased accordingly and that equipment needed is to be purchased. Training that is to be implemented, whether it's currently in place or it's newly developed, is to be funded.

The problem is that the city council and the city manager's office apparently believed that their responsibility to adequately fund the police department in these areas ended with the dissolution of the stipulated judgement. What both entities need to do is to go back and read the original writ mandamus in the case of The People of the State of California v the City of Riverside and count how many references were made by then State Attorney General Bill Lockyer about the inadequate staffing in the Riverside Police Department.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of the same actions or rather inaction that is happening right now. In other words, history is repeating itself after the city's apparent failure to learn the lessons that it spent $22 million and counting learning. It may be a new city council, a new city manager and so forth but they're apparently following the same program that greatly assisted in bringing both the federal and state agencies to the police department's doorstep.

In 2007, there are staffing issues in the sworn workforce and apparently, in the civilian workforce as well. There has been a couple of reports of nonsworn employees leaving the police department and not being replaced or having those job positions frozen. If the money previously being spent to fill these positions and employ these people is not being used to do so, then what is it paying for instead? Is it like some have said, going back into redevelopment projects?

These are questions that should be asked of the city's finance committee which is chaired by Councilman Art Gage and lists Councilmen Frank Schiavone and Andrew Melendrez as its members. They will be discussing the budget allocations for the 2007-08 fiscal year in a couple of months and hopefully, the issues pertaining to the police department will be addressed. Melendrez did appear concerned at the Group meeting this morning.

Development is an important part of any city's future, but it has to be met with the same efforts and interests in ensuring that the city's infrastructure grows with increases in both surface area and city population. It has to enable the city to keep pace with the upcoming growth. In Riverside even as the city is facing everything from annexations to immigration from neighboring counties, this is not what is happening.

Councilman Dom Betro boasted at the last city council meeting about his trip to the League of California Cities event in Washington, D.C. He said that he had been in an economic development seminar and listened as city after city spoke about the challenges of implementing one to two development projects and thought that Riverside was "way ahead of the curve" because it was handling closer to 30 different new projects.

Another way to look at this situation besides more being better is that perhaps these cities are simply playing it smart and pacing their growth. Perhaps they are funding their city services to keep pace with any anticipated population growth. But Riverside apparently is in a different class, its elected officials might argue and it doesn't have to do these things. Given Riverside's history, its current leadership should know better.

This certainly wasn't what was happening in the 1990s either. In fact as has been stated here and said by others, what you see now is fairly similar in many ways to what was seen then in terms of the police department being left to gather dust on the shelf after a five-year reform process, while the city government focuses on a new shiny toy called Riverside Renaissance.

It's all been done before and we all know how that turned out.







Columnist Dan Bernstein from the Press Enterprise wrote a column about his visit to the Robert Presley Hall of Justice. He addressed the issue of overcrowding in the Riverside County Superior Court system and how it's almost impossible for lawyers to find courtrooms for their clients to take their criminal cases to trial. As for civil trials, what are those again?


I visited these courtrooms -- variously called "The Zoo" or the "Cattle Herd" or worse -- at the suggestion of veteran Riverside lawyers whose blood pressure shoots higher than the number of felons awaiting trial when the subject turns to the "courtroom crunch."

In their own way, the judges in 61 and 33 seek justice. But here's what they're really, desperately seeking: courtrooms. They have to find places to send all the suits -- orange and pinstripe -- that have packed the house.


The current situation has been blamed by prosecutors on failures of the judges to streamline their operations. The defense attorneys have pointed their fingers at the Riverside County District Attorney's office for changing its plea bargain policy while fully understanding that it was dealing with an already overwhelmed criminal court system. Riverside County will be receiving more judicial positions in the next two years from Sacramento but it's a drop in the bucket as far as all the branches of the court system are concerned.

Bernstein wasn't the only person who visited Dept. 33 recently. I sat outside that courtroom earlier this week for an hour awaiting to hear whether a criminal misdemeanor case would be assigned to a courtroom that day. The lawyer finally came out and said that the case would return back to the same courtroom next week and if it was not assigned by a courtroom by the end of next week, it would be dropped. He appeared to hope that wouldn't happen as he was eagerly awaiting trial.


And at City Hall, council members and the mayor may not have been too happy after reading the Press Enterprise's letter section this morning which featured this letter by Eva Mayer on the recent behavior shown by elected officials at city council meetings.

(excerpt)


I was astonished at one particular neighborhood meeting regarding the La Sierra-Arizona property development to hear my City Council representative, who was seated next to me, actually say that we don't know what's good for us. I spoke up for the constituency, and the council member continued to discount our collective concerns. At the very least, members of the City Council need to be reminded that they work for us.

Mayer, you're right, often the city government and its elected officials do need to be reminded that its constituents are the residents who live within the city's limits, not the development firms who often come from outside those limits.